Frankenstein Urbanism

Eco, Smart and Autonomous Cities, Artificial Intelligence and the End of the City

Federico Cugurullo

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317313625
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Economics
• Sous-sujet: Economic History

This book tells the story of visionary urban experiments, shedding light on the theories that preceded their development and on the monsters that followed and might be the end of our cities. The narrative is threefold and delves first into the eco-city, second the smart city and third the autonomous city intended as a place where existing smart technologies are evolving into artificial intelligences that are taking the management of the city out of the hands of humans.

The book empirically explores Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong to provide a critical analysis of eco and smart city experiments and their sustainability, and it draws on numerous real-life examples to illustrate the rise of urban artificial intelligences across different geographical spaces and scales. Theoretically, the book traverses philosophy, urban studies and planning theory to explain the passage from eco and smart cities to the autonomous city, and to reflect on the meaning and purpose of cities in a time when human and non-biological intelligences are irreversibly colliding in the built environment.

Iconoclastic and prophetic, Frankenstein Urbanism is both an examination of the evolution of urban experimentation through the lens of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and a warning about an urbanism whose product resembles Frankenstein's monster: a fragmented entity which escapes human control and human understanding. Academics, students and practitioners will find in this book the knowledge that is necessary to comprehend and engage with the many urban experiments that are now alive, ready to leave the laboratory and enter our cities.

1

Prologue

Of cities and monsters

Introduction

The narrative of this book follows Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Stripped down of their technicalities and embellishments, the two books are essentially about the perennial tension between ideas, theories and visions on one side, and facts, practises and results on the other. They both focus on how what is believed to be unsustainable can, in theory, become sustainable, and on the monsters that the reckless pursuit of a development ideal can in practise generate. In Mary Shelley’s book, the protagonist is a doctor named Victor Frankenstein. Victor strongly believes that the human being is not sustainable. Humans, he argues, are fragile creatures. They are vulnerable and prone to diseases. The human being was born to die. Whether through illness, injury or simply ageing, the human body will eventually decay and, for this reason, the human condition is one of unsustainability. These adamant beliefs which Victor keeps inside, are rooted in what is a tragic past. His mother died of scarlet fever when he was 17: an event which pushed him to embark on a quest for the creation of the ideal and perfect being, immune to death and to all the calamities in the world.

While Mary Shelley’s novel explores the human equation or, in other words, the formula for the creation and enhancement of the human being, the present book deals with the urban equation. A plethora of cities are showing evidence of unsustainability. As first pointed out by Aristotle in ancient Greece, the city was originally created by humans to support human life. However, many cities seem to have now become dangerous places where people die prematurely and live a life of misery. Numerous academics, policy-makers, architects and planners have, like Victor Frankenstein, dark feelings about the past and the present, but see hope in the future. There is a growing awareness of the unsustainability of cities, followed by the realization that a formula for urban sustainability has to be found, and by the conviction (or perhaps the illusion) that such formula can be found. This mysterious formula is what the book calls the urban equation. It is a method meant to identify the core elements of a city which combined in a given proportion are supposed to produce sustainable cities. How urban equations are being formulated nowadays, and the extent to which they are actually capable of achieving urban sustainability, will be recurring points of critical analysis throughout the book.

The words of Mary Shelley tell the story of a desperate scientist with the soul of a philosopher, who seeks to reshape the human fabric in search of perfection but, instead, ends up creating a monster. It is a story of intellectual inquiry, experiments and tragic revelations. This book tells the story of urban experiments. It is a story of visionary urban projects, of the theories that preceded their development and of the monsters that followed, and might radically alter cities to the point of ending them. The narrative is threefold and delves first into the eco-city, second the smart city and third the autonomous city intended as a place where existing smart technologies are evolving into artificial intelligences which are taking the management of the city out of the hands of humans. On these terms, Frankenstein urbanism means both a way of narrating the evolution of urban experimentation from eco- and smart-city experiments to autonomous cities, by using Shelley’s Frankenstein as a framework, and an urbanism whose product resembles Frankenstein’s monster: a fragmented entity which escapes human control and human understanding.

The urban equation

Victor Frankenstein’s quest is ambitious not simply because its goal, creating the perfect human being, is enormously challenging from a scientific perspective. Victor’s quest deals with nebulous concepts and questions which, despite many attempts, have never been fully answered. What the source of human life is and, above all, what the essence of being human is, are questions which have been puzzling scientists and philosophers alike for millennia (Scruton, 2017). It is therefore incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to develop the formula for the ideal human being, when the meaning of human is unclear in the first place. One might say that Victor has already failed even before embarking on his quest. The experiment attempted by the young scientist is flawed due to a lack of conceptual clarity. Victor cannot create what he does not fully understand.

The same problem can be seen in the context of urban sustainability. Creating a formula for sustainable urban spaces is not simply a scientific endeavour. Like the concept of being human, the notion of urban escapes a universal definition and its understanding is often ambiguous. The meanings of being urban, being a city and, more generally, urbanization, are not self-evident and not necessarily interchangeable. Rather than being solid like the stones of a city, the urban is a labyrinth made of mist, whose exploration can lead anywhere and nowhere. The term urban comes from the Latin word urbanus meaning belonging to or of the urbe which in turn means city. However, as repeatedly pointed out in the field of urban theory, what constitutes a city is hard to define, and this is where the academic debate tends to begin (Harding and Blokland, 2014; Iossifova et al., 2018; Jayne and Ward, 2016; McNeill, 2016). Here the philosophy of Aristotle can be both a door to enter the labyrinthine debate over the urban equation, and a lantern to shed light on it. The remainder of this section draws upon Aristotelian philosophy to identify and discuss the core dimensions of urban settlements. Aristotle’s thinking will be combined with insights from contemporary urban theory not to provide an absolute definition of the terms city, urban and urbanization, but to clarify how these notions are interpreted specifically in this book in relation to the study of eco-cities, smart cities and cities populated by artificial intelligences. In so doing, the chapter introduces a series of fundamental concepts which will be examined in more detail later in the book.

For Aristotle (2000), the city is the ultimate form of a human community. The emphasis on the words ‘ultimate’ and ‘human community’ is meant to highlight two key aspects that constitute a city. First, the city is not the only typology of human community. Being the ultimate one implies that a city is part of a process of development and, as such, it does not appear out of nothing: it comes from something. From an Aristotelian perspective, in order to understand where the city comes from, the focus is directed towards the evolution of human communities. For the Greek philosopher, a community (koinonia) has three forms. Each one representing a stage of human development. The first form is the family; the second is the village which unites different families; the third is the city which brings together different villages. It is important to note that underpinning the philosophy of Aristotle is the concept of teleology: the idea that everything has an inner potential or a final cause which can be reached through a process of development (Aristotle, 1996). What constitutes a city, therefore, does not manifest itself only in the city. The seeds of the urban are in the family living an isolated life. Urban seeds then grow into a small village. It is only through the evolution of families and villages that the urban flourishes and becomes evident in the city.

In his studies, Aristotle discusses the qualities that characterize human communities, including cities (Aristotle, 2000, 2004). According to his philosophy, the city is not only physical, and it goes beyond the built environment: it is also social and political. To explore this key point in-depth, semantic clarity needs to come before conceptual clarity. Aristotle uses three distinct terms in The Politics whose wording in ancient Greek can be found in copies of the classical text (see, for instance, Dreizehnter, 1970; Ross, 1957). These three words are oikos (οἶκος), core (κώμη) and polis (πόλις), and they represent the threefold evolution of human communities from families to villages and ultimately to cities. The oikos has three interconnected meanings. First, as a form of koinonia (community) it has a social meaning. In this sense, the term oikos signifies family. As mentioned above, for Aristotle, the family is the basic and earliest form of community or, in other words, social organization. The oikos, however, in the standard society of ancient Greece, does not comprise only two parents and their children, but also the slaves and the animals which serve the family. For this reason, translators like Sinclair and Lord prefer to use the word household, instead of family (see Aristotle, 1992, 2013). Second, the oikos has a political meaning, since the household requires a form of government in order to function. For Aristotle, the different relationships within the household are regulated in a patriarchal way. The oikos is run by the husband and then, from a hierarchical point of view, comes the son, the wife, the slave and the animal. At the time of Aristotle, there were of course other typologies of domestic governance which prove the complexity and necessity of the political dimension of the oikos. In Sparta, for example, women had a stronger control over the household since men were often at war, away from home, or living in barracks (Blundell, 1995). Third, the household has a physical dimension and, as such, it has a physical location and a physical shape or, in architectural terms, a built environment. On these terms, oikos can be translated as house. Before the formation of villages and cities, the oikos extended beyond the house intended as an independent building, and included pieces of land used by the family for agriculture (Carr Rider, 2014; Morachiello, 2004). It was therefore an extended environment comprising the spaces necessary to obtain the resources needed by the family.

These three qualities (the social, the political and the physical) repeat themselves, like DNA strands, in the remaining categories of human community identified by Aristotle, core and polis, but they become more complex in terms of size and organization. The village, as the sum of different households comprises members of different families and, thus, requires a more sophisticated type of political organization, in order to function in a harmonious way. It also requires more space, a larger built environment, as well as more resources. The polis (whose matrix is the oikos) shares the same characteristics of the household and the village. The polis is first a social entity, since it unites numerous people originally from different villages or born in the city itself. Second, the polis is political because of the government that is required to coordinate all the activities that underpin its life and economy. Finally, it has a tangible physical quality, due to the many buildings, infrastructures and vast territory that its population needs to prosper (Aristotle, 2000). For these physical and socio-political dimensions, in the literature the term polis has been translated as bot...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Prologue: Of cities and monsters
• PART I: The literature
• PART II: The experiment
• PART III: The apocalypse
• Index