Practicing science, performing urban futures?

The rise of the 21st-century city is accompanied by the increasing availability and use of big data and artificial intelligence in the planning and governance of urban processes. This is reflected both in the introduction of novel urban technologies such as autonomous cars, environmental sensors or operations rooms and in scientific attempts to know the city more intimately. In other words, urban digitalization involves the emergence of both new technologies and new knowledge-making practices. This research project studies urban digitalization by interrogating urban digital twins as key knowledge-making infrastructures of the 21st-century city. The overarching goal of this study is to investigate the relationship between scientific analysis and urban planning by interrogating urban digital twins as anticipatory assemblages that represent ‘new urban science’ as an emerging mode of anticipatory governance.

Context

The history of urban planning is a history of control. It constitutes persistent attempts to manage urban complexity through the mobilization of science and technology. Starting from early planning pioneers such as Patrick Geddes and his notion of ‘civics’¹ and Le Corbusier and his belief in scientific management,² up until the late 20^th century there was a widely shared conviction among planning professionals that scientific methods could be used to develop a more objective understanding of how cities functioned and that this knowledge could be used to improve them. In recent years, urban scholars have promoted a ‘new urban science’ that promises to develop a better understanding of how cities emerge and change over time. New urban science denotes ‘a computational modelling and simulation approach to understanding, explaining and predicting city processes’.³ Building on the vast expansion in the range, volume, and granularity of urban big data, new urban science promises to derive new insights from millions and billions of data points, translate them into novel urban theories, and support evidence-based policy-making. Contrary to traditional urban studies, which conceives of cities as constellations of places, uses quantitative and qualitative methods on small data, and adopts a more contextual approach with respect to politics, culture, and history, new urban science aims to conduct extensive analysis of systems and seeks to develop a synoptic and integrative science of cities.

Aims

This research project investigates the relationship between science and the city by studying scientific knowledge production of the urban in the urban. By doing so, it asks: How does scientific anticipation develop (through) the urban landscape? The framing of this question highlights the co-constitutive relationship between science and the city. It points to the scientization of the city (How does scientific anticipation develop the urban landscape?) – as urban governance is expected to be guided by scientific methods – as well as the urbanization of science (How does scientific anticipation develop through the urban landscape?) – as scientific knowledge production increasingly takes place in the urban environment.

Research design

The study explores how urban futures are enacted through the practice of new urban science across three research sites in three different cities: City Science Lab in Hamburg, Germany; MIT Senseable City Lab in Boston, USA; and IIIT Hyderabad’s Smart City Research Centre in Hyderabad, India. This study adopts a two-stage comparative design: First, city case studies are produced to analyse scientific knowledge-making practices across three socio-material contexts; second, the results are compared across cities. The first research stage of the study will be particularly attentive to the individual components of scientific knowledge-making assemblages. The second stage, more analytic and evaluative, will tease out the commonalities and differences in the resources, discourses, and (spatial) practices brought to bear on the construction of desirable urban futures. Engaging with the underlying intellectual puzzle, this study and the research questions that guide it, requires answers that are rich and in-depth. This calls for methods that elicit context, multi-dimensionality, and complexity rather than a broad understanding of surface patterns.⁴ This research project contributes to the increasing relevance of constructionist, interpretative, and culturalist approaches in STS and urban studies by triangulating in-depth interviews, documents, and participant observations.

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