Why We Need a Poetics of Data to Move Beyond Surveillance Cities
By Hubert Beroche, Founder at Urban AI
Smart cameras, beacons, fine particle detectors… cities are home to more and more sensors. These serve as infrastructures for Smart Cities, collecting data from which urban environments can be analyzed and optimized. Shenzhen, considered one of the smartest cities in the world, has more than 1 929 600 cameras, most of them equipped with computer vision software.
In theory, collected data should be used to create more sustainable, livable, and inclusive cities. In practice, Smart City projects struggle to fulfill their promises. Worse still, they often end up being nothing more than “Safe Cities”. In other words, cities that use surveillance technologies to promote security and streamline urban spaces.
However, the Safe City is just an expression of an urban ideal, and surveillance cities are not the inevitable outcome of urban technology development. Artificial Intelligence, connected devices, and digital technologies can also serve urban complexity, social cohesion, and freedoms.
From Sensors to Panopticon
The surveillance nature of Safe Cities primarily lies in the design of the supporting sensors. Discreet, almost invisible, they “see without being seen”. Their functions operate silently while the data they transmit is imperceptible. In this sense, the urban sensor is a panopticon.
It is interesting to note that sensors’ invisibility results from a techno-economic imperative. Economically, their decreasing size over the years has been driven by the law of minimal cost. Becoming increasingly minimalist, the average production cost of a sensor was only $0.29 in 2020, compared to $0.67 in 2011. Furthermore, invisibility also reflects a certain ideal of technology embodied in the famous words of the computer scientist Mark Weiser: ‘“A good tool is an invisible tool”.
Several experts have already observed that the invisibility of digital infrastructures contributes to creating surveillance cities. That is why Helpful Places, an international non-profit organization, has developed DTPR, an open-source communication standard to indicate the presence of sensors in public spaces, the nature of the data they collect, and the type of organizations with which they are affiliated. The goal of DTPR is to address sensors’ opacity and enhance transparency in data collection. The project is currently being tested, notably in collaboration with several cities including the City of Boston, Angers Loire Metropole, and Washington DC.
From Data Signage to Data Poetics
Based on invisible sensors the Smart City becomes, by design, a surveillance one. This architecture underscores the need to associate physical interfaces with digital infrastructures. Interfaces act as points of convergence between two systems and platforms for interactions among agents. To interface data is to make it intelligible and accessible.
It is customary to envision screens or smartphones when discussing interfaces. However, the latter has the disadvantage of isolating users from their urban environments, creating ‘smombies’ (a portmanteau of zombie and smartphone, referring to city dwellers with their eyes glued to their phones). Yet, the smartphone screen represents just one way of interfacing bits. Information can be conveyed through other mediums than rare metals (such as wood, water, light…) and engage senses beyond sight (touch, hearing, smell…). We could speak of “sensible interfaces” to characterize these screenless, low-tech, multi-sensory information media. Unlike smartphones which concentrate the digital in the palm of our hands, sensible interfaces embody information and distribute it in our environment. In addition to materializing data, they (re)create the city as a space for encounters where urban dialogue thrives.
This effort to embody the intelligible (here, a dataset or information), this alignment between sensitivity and an idea, is, according to Hegel, what defines Art. Sculpting or composing urban data to make it immediately accessible is thus a form of poetics. This poetics complements the signage proposed by Helpful Places. While one combats the opacity of sensors, the other redistributes the data they have collected.
This poetics of data emphasizes that sensors should not remain merely techno-economic objects. They can also become social materials and urbanity catalysts. Associating sensible interfaces with infrastructures is, therefore, proposing an alternative model to surveillance cities. It is also about re-enchanting cities and recalling that “poetically, humans dwell upon the earth” (Hölderlin).
