Coded Jaywalkers and Performativity of Traffic-lights

Description

William Mitchell (1996) was arguably the first person to imagine a smart city as a complex place where citizen choices will ever more be liberated by information-sharing. In his vision, the city can continually be changed and enrichened in meanings, just as does the flow of information. However, instead the smart technologies are used to describe, analyse, produce knowledge of everyday life, and predict certain patterns of behaviour. Hence, they manipulate, discipline, and control life by reshaping how people and objects interact in time and space (Gabrys, 2016). In this paper, I follow the mundane ways in which smartness matters in everyday life and the meanings they create through the work we delegate to smart objects to resolve the everyday issues.
In doing so, I investigate the smartification of pedestrian traffic lights in Vienna. This technology recognises pedestrians’ intention to cross a street and automatically manages waiting time for them, therefore preventing jaywalking, and providing better flows of urban traffic. Through a multi-sited ethnography, my analysis starts with focusing on justifications for developing such a technology. Then I study the computational programming and the design process which led to exclusion of the visually impaired citizens. Finally, I visit five sites where the smart traffic lights are implemented as testbeds. Drawing on Lefebvre and Miyazaki, I conduct what I call AlgoRhythmic Analysis to analyse how the temporality of the city based on different mobilities is understood and reshaped by smart infrastructures. In the end, I invite the audience to walk with me in an imaginative crosswalk, where I propose seeing and visibility as the basis of smart design.

Period	11 Mar 2022
Event title	The Smartification of Everything
Event type	Conference
Location	Ottawa, Canada, OntarioShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International