To browse Academia. The coincidence between the smart city and logistics implies a certain foreclosure of its possibilities and virtual futures. Many accounts of smart cities recognise the historical coincidence of cybernetic control and neoliberal capital. Even where it is machines which process the vast amounts of data produced by the city so much so that the ruling and managerial classes disappear from view, it is usually the logic of capital that steers the flows of data, people and things.
Yet what other futures of the city may be possible within the smart city, what collective intel ligence may it bring forth? Can one fathom the possible others of the logistical city e. What other historical or contemporary examples of resistances to or alternative visions of ubiquitous computing in city could one draw on? This thesis undertakes a historical materialist analysis of the smart city. Though the smart city does not yet exist in any real way, the precepts which give rise to it have already been in effect.
The smart city is embedded in the capitalist world-system. The dream of intelligent life has long been elaborated over decades by urbanists, demagogues, corporations, luminaries, science fiction writers, sociologists, futurists, and technologists; this process has resulted in a slapdash concept which nevertheless presents itself as a seamless, universal utopia of glass and wire. This thesis approaches the smart city not as an object, but a nascent ideological expression of institutionalized ruling class desire.
My analysis focuses on spatial, economic, and political contexts, arriving at an understanding of the city as a dialectical tendency, not as a foregone artifact-to-come; as a contradictory abstraction, and not as a simplistic technological intensification of urbanity. When we begin to look at the constitution of selves and places in the city and the relation of global to local and subject to collective, we have to first put the matter of space under the microscope.
This paper begins the task of investigating the implications of understanding the subject in a new spaceno longer the objectivized Cartesian space which makes of the city and the world a singularity, but the 'objectively subjectivized' space of the event that makes of the world a vital and self-organizing multiplicity. In this novel, Philip K. The novel uses a speculative fictional narrative to question essential aspects of what it means to be human in a technology-dominated world, by placing empathy -opposed to technology- at the centre of humanity.
