Date:
Location:
"Cities, Technologies and Political Imaginaries: From the Networked Metropolis to the Smart Cities"
Speaker:
Antoine Picon, G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Wednesday 4/22/15.
Contact:
Shana Rabinowich
shana_rabinowich@hks.harvard.edu
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Abstract:
Urban infrastructures do not only provide practical services. They are inseparable from collective representations and imaginaries. At the time of the first industrial revolution, a crucial notion such as network appeared precisely at the articulation of this practical dimension and collective representations and imaginaries. An urban network has to do both with physical organization and a series of images regarding how technology and society function together. Networks possess by the same token a political content.
Urban infrastructures are currently being transformed under the influence of digital technology. The smart city perspective embodies this transition. Like its immediate predecessor, the networked metropolis, the emergent smart city appears simultaneously as a practical and an imaginary entity. It is inextricably technological and political.
Starting from nineteenth-century urban networks, the lecture will propose an interpretation of the relations between cities, technologies and political imaginaries. Turning to the present, it will present hypotheses regarding what is currently at stake in terms of technology and political imaginary in the rise of the smart city.
Biography:
Antoine Picon, is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has published numerous books and articles dealing with engineering history, with the relations between technology and utopia, and with the complementary histories of cities, architecture and technology. He is among others the author of French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988), L'Invention de L'ingénieur moderne (1992), La Ville territoire des cyborgs (1998), Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire, et Utopie (2003), Digital Culture in Architecture (2010), Ornament: the Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (2013).
In a forthcoming book, Smart Cities: A Spatialized Intelligence, Picon proposes a comprehensive interpretation of the rise of the smart city both as a new urban ideal and as a concrete process of transformation.
