Ola Söderström — POLITICS OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX IN SOUTH AFRICAN AND INDIAN URBANISM

Ola Söderström in conversation with Daniella Zetti and Jörg Stollman

CONCEPT AND REALISATION
Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture
Prof. Milica Topalovic


in collaboration with
Assistant Professor of Urban Design, Harvard GSD
Prof. Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes


The event is part of the lecture series
SESSIONS ON TERRITORY­—URBANISM BEYOND TECHNOFIX


SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. In the name of efficiency and productivity, technology transforms spatial practices and impacts the built and natural environment, propelling us into the ongoing Anthropocene era. The seminar aims to reflect on how machines and systems of modern material culture such as AI and automation can be critically discussed in the design field—beyond techno-fix, toward a constructive response.
Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.

The Sessions on Territory are curated by Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes for Milica Topalovic.

30.03.2020
POLITICS OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX IN SOUTH AFRICAN AND INDIAN URBANISM
Ola Söderström in conversation with Daniella Zetti and Jörg Stollman
This talk draws on an on-going research project on the provincialisation of the smart city narrative in South Africa and India. The aim of this research is to move beyond the rehearsed critique of the smart city as a ‘technological-fix-narrative’ to urban problems. If this critique remains largely valid when confronted to actually existing smart cities, it also largely simplifies the ‘smart city effect’, especially in cities of the Global South. The talk will first show how smart city narratives have been rolled out and taken up by South African and Indian municipalities during the past fifteen years. It will then show how this apparently powerful and highly mobile policy also works as a throw-away ‘lexical glue’ to designate widely different urban initiatives such as road improvements or slum upgrading. Finally, this talk will focus on and discuss various relational forms of ‘techno-fixes’ emerging in the interplay between municipalities, NGOs and urban activists. The conclusion of the talk and its cross-cutting argument is that struggle over data-power and legitimate knowledge as well as politics of technological fix are central processes in present forms of smart urbanism on the ground.