Category: urbanism

Platform City People

Finally published! I have a chapter, ‘Platform City People’, out in this fully *open access* book, Being Human in the Digital World, edited by Val Steeves and Beate Roessler, from Cambridge. Please read everything in it.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/being-human-in-the-digital-world/platform-city-people/00049338349668A16F48038DDCC42769

It’s a piece about how the developers and promoters of what we might call post-smart cities, platform cities or AI cities see the putative inhabitants of these exclusive and exclusionary places. I wrote this quite a while ago now, and in a deliberately accessible style, and more than a little bit polemical, satirical and sarcastic in its tone. I think it still stands up well.

The whole book is here, and it also includes great things from the likes of Frank Pasquale, Julie Cohen and Azadeh Akbari amongst many others…

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/being-human-in-the-digital-world/D8CC33CF026507F324AF00CEEC7C894C

Ambient Government Revisited

A few years ago I was talking around the place about surveillance, security and “ambient government” (or “ambient governance”), but it turned out that so were plenty of other people and no one person really has a claim on this phrase or others like it. It was, somewhat appropriate, in the academic air at the time… and it still should be!

Looking back on it, I don’t think I’ve bettered how I discussed this back then, and I never fully published what I was talking about. So here is the vastly underwatched talk I gave in Victoria back in 2014. If you have 45 minutes to spare, I think it’s worth a watch. Plus, I look so young!

Global Governance of Post-Smart Cities workshop

I am decompressing after our Global Governance of Post-Smart Cities workshop last week: a fabulous few days of discussion at the intersection of space, cities, political economy, history, media and technology. There was no audience, no preconceived outcome, just some of my favourite scholars brought together for a few gorgeous autumn days in Ottawa to talk about ideas. This is what academia should be about but very rarely is.

The concept of the “post-smart city” is a deliberately provocative term, which I and several others have proposed, and which I am exploring in my current research. What I am trying to capture here is the plethora of different things that seems to be emerging out of the concept of the smart city, e.g. Platform Cities, AI Cities, Super Cities, Cognitive Cities, right through to weirdness like the Network State, and the bringing then together with libertarian and national projects for new cities as permanent experiments. I am thinking of “post-” very much in the sense of “post-modern” or “post-structural” in which the “post-” doesn’t indicate that the thing has been superseded but that it includes and builds on it taking it in new directions. However, I am also thinking of Latour’s critique that “we have never been modern.” Maybe we are in a post-smart situation, but have never really been smart… In any case, as a provocation for discussion, it worked really well in this context.

The main sessions were as follows:

  • “Zones of Interest” – Neoliberal Cities
  • “My Own Private Idaho” – Libertarian Cities
  • “From the Internet, Up” – Platform and Media Cities
  • “Fitter, Happier, More Productive…” – From Smart to AI Cities
  • “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss” – (Post-)Colonial Cities
  • “Cleaner, Greener, Meaner…” – (Un)Sustainable Cities
  • “A New Life Awaits You in the Offworld Colonies” – Extraplanetary Cities

I originally gave a prompt for each and encouraged the leaders of each session to do what they wanted with the subject. In the end, most adopted a fairly conventional presentation and discussion format, and the discussion was great but I am wondering how to do things even more differently next time:

There was a also a public event, on the first evening of the workshop, Rethinking our Futures in an Age of Crisis, featuring Quinn Slobodian, Ayona Datta, Orit Halphen and Nick Couldry in conversation with me. There will be further reflections and eventually a full report published by CIGI Online.

An enormous thank-you to…

My co-organizers: Vincent Mirza and Azadeh Akbari.

Those who accepted our curious invitation: Rowland Atkinson, Ilia Antenucci, Yung Au, Kelly Bronson, Nick Couldry, Raymond Craib, Federico Cugurullo, Ayona Datta, Mehdi Ghassemi, Orit Halpern, Olivier Jutel, Roger Keil, Casey Lynch, Tim Maughan, Kevin McMillan, Carolyn Prouse, Renée Sieber, Isabelle Simpson, Quinn Slobodian, Alina Utrata, Niloufar Vadiati, Catherine Vandermeulen, Dwayne Winseck, Liam Cole Young.

CSS/Lab and CLTS grads and postdocs: Jennie Day, David Eliot, Zimo Meng, Claire Wang, Aiden Bradley and Gabriella di Biaggi.

Those who wanted to be here but were unable to come because of inequitable visa and immigration systems and the climate of fear: Hend Ali and Ahmed M Eleish.

Our funders: SSHRC-CRSH Connection Grants, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), and the Research Center for the Future of Cities, and the Centre for Law, Technology and Society (CLTS), both at the University of Ottawa.

Post-Smart Cities as Digital Authoritarian Polities

I have a short piece out in the excellent new journal, Dialogues on Digital Society, which takes a brief look at the right-wing politics of the Praxis Network State initiative…

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29768640251377168

My piece is fully open access and free to read, download etc.

This is part of an excellent special issue of almost 50 short pieces on digital authoritarianism by lots of excellent folks, which are being published online first as they are finished. Read them all!

Canada Postdoctoral Research Award 2025 Opportunity

I’m looking for an outstanding near complete or complete PhD, to apply for a prestigious Canada Postdoctoral Research Award to work with me in CSS/Lab at the uOttawa. The Award is worth up to $70,000 CAD for 2 years, and you would start in the second half of 2026, if successful.

Candidates would be working on a project of their choice within one of three broad areas:

1. Surveillance, security and post-smart cities – looking at plans for and development of AI-driven private cities and special zones.

2. Hired hackers and private spies – working on the proliferation of private surveillance companies worldwide.

3. Surveillance and the planetary polycrisis – looking at the surveillance implications and issues in global environmental management

Candidates should either already be working in one of these areas and be familiar with the literature.

uOttawa particularly encourages candidates from under-represented and equity-seeking groups.

The successful candidate would be able to be associated with

Please see the details of the program here:

https://sshrc-crsh.canada.ca/en/funding/opportunities/canada-postdoctoral-research-award-program.aspx

The deadline for the full application is 11 September 2025, so I need expressions of interest, including a letter and CV sent to me by the end of July (July 31st 2025), so that I can work with the chosen candidate during August.

to: david.mw [at] uottawa [dot] ca

High tech class control

Watch this video from The Guardian on Camden, NJ. It’s ostensibly about police surveillance, and I was expecting to be outraged (once again…) at the use of over-the-top high technology – visual and audio surveillance – to deal with everyday crime.

But instead, what struck me was not so much the ostensible subject but the backdrop: the place itself. The areas patrolled by the officers in this film look almost post-apocalyptic. I’ve seen favelas in Rio de Janeiro that are in better shape, and many certainly seem to have more hope than this. Poverty and inequality in the USA, grounded in a history and present of racial and class exploitation, have become extreme. There’s no other way to put it.

And yet, outside of these places, which are everywhere across the USA, and ironically given the investment in technologies of visibility, the reality is invisible. The use of surveillance here is just a recognition of the lack of anything that amounts to a conception of a decent and fair society in practise, while people are still blinded by the noble goals of the USA as expressed in its constitution. This constitution means little to millions of Americans forced to live in these conditions, while being treated all the time as not even ‘potential criminals’ but simply ‘future criminals’, who will commit a crime at some point, and are destined for nothing more than to be churned through a carceral system that is in itself now a profitable and perhaps even essential component of American capitalism. However, this seems to have escaped the notice and concern of those who actually vote in elections and make decisions, whether they class themselves as liberals or conservatives, most of whom are so far removed from these conditions, physically and emotionally that they could not possibly understand.

This makes it even more bitterly ironic that The Guardian choses to title this report as ‘Minority Report meets The Wire‘, as if the only way to understand this is through fiction – that, somehow, it can’t be real. Yet here it is.

 

$100 to anyone who can find a ‘privacy-compliant camera’ in Canada

Actually, the headline (from the Toronto Metro free paper) is a little misleading as what my friend and colleague Andrew Clement is actually betting on here is that no-one can find a video surveillance system in Canada that is fully compliant with Canadian privacy law. Which of course may of may not be the same as ‘privacy’ in any other terms. But it’s an interesting challenge – that is largely to do with signage. Prof Clement and his team at the iSchool at UofT have been monitoring the way in which video surveillance systems in Canada are signed for quite some time. As their website, surveillancerights.ca (which is also where you can try to claim your $100…) says

“Signs should at a minimum clearly tell you:

  • who is operating the camera
  • who you can contact if you have questions
  • the purpose(s) of the surveillance”

The signs should also in themselves be clearly visible, not hidden away somewhere. There’s more detailed information about requirments here.

So, who’s going to take up this bet?

(Thanks to Matthias Vermeulen for the story and Aaron Martin for noticing the difference between privacy and privacy law.)

Anti-surveillance architecture

2-0763561030Architecture seems increasing implicated in the generation of a ubiquitous surveillance society, not simply in the relatively longstanding modernist obsession with glass and visibility, but with security increasingly considered not as option but as infrastructure. It was nice to see at least some people concerned with creating anti-surveillance architectures. Two great examples are Deborah Natsios, and Eyal Weizman, and another I recently came across (via The Verge), is Asher J. Kohn, whose Shura City project, aims to create a living environment in an Islamic cultural context, that is protected from drone surveillance. As Kohn states:

“Shura City is constructed to be livable. It is built according to local logic, using local materials, and amenable to local needs. It is meantto be alien – but not hostile – from the outside while homey and familiar from the inside. It is meant to confuse the machines and their distant operators while creating a safe zone forpeople whose lives are being rended by war. Shura City is not about judgment on the survivors or destruction of their persecutors. Shura City is about using architecture to create a space for humanity in an increasingly inhuman sphere.”

Surveillant Landscapes

There is a fascinating little piece on Bldg Blog about ‘security geotextiles’ and other actual and speculative surveillance systems that are built in to, underlie or encompass whole landscapes. The argument seems to support what I have been writing and speaking about recently on ‘vanishing surveillance’ (I’ll be speaking about it again in Copenhagen a the first Negotiating (In)visibilities conference in February): the way in which, as surveillance spreads and becomes more intense, moving towards ubiquitous, pervasive or ambient surveillance, that its material manifestations have a tendency to disappear.

There is a standards kind of alarmism that the piece starts with and the assumption that such things are malevolent does strike one as an initial impression, perhaps not surprising given that the piece is inspired by yet another security tech developement – this time a concealed perimeter surveillance system from Israeli firm, GMax. Perhaps if it had begun with urban ubiquitous sensory systems in a universal design context, it might have taken a very different direction. However, what’s particularly interesting about the piece is that it doesn’t stop there, but highlights the possibilities for resistance and subversion using the very same ubiquitous technologies.

But whether hegemonic or subversive, the overall trajectory that post outlines of a move towards a machine-readable world, indeed a world reconfigured for machines, is pretty much indisputable…

A buried and ultimately invisible magnetic passive perimeter security system, from Israeli security company, G-Max.

(Thanks to Torin Monahan for alerting me to this)

Negotiating (In)visibilities

There’s an interesting new research network called ‘Negotiating (In)visibilies‘, one of those fascinating interdisciplinary collaborations (or collisions) that spans architcture, urban studies, cultural studies, arts and information (and probably). I’ve been asked to be an advisor and will also be giving one of the keynotes at what looks to be a really great opening confererence in Copenhagen, February 1-2 2012. Should be fun!