Fourteenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

I argue that one function of the infrastructure of smart cities is the delimitation of the production of new forms of sociability and the ensuing curtailment of the articulation of new forms of identity. One feature of the smart city has been the limitation of the process of informality (Breslow, 2021; Roy, 2011). One aspect of the containment of informality is the limitation of the dialectical interplay between strategies of the production of place, which channel and discipline movement and behaviour, and the motive tactics of space, which contest the politics of the production of place (de Certeau, 1984). The dialectical interplay that underpins informality is productive of heterotopic spaces, which exist in an existential relationship between the informal and the heterotopic, and which are sites where new forms of sociability, subjectivity, and identity are emergent phenomena of the informal. Smart cities, in their discipline and containment of the informal also delimit the existence of the heterotopic, and thus the articulation of new forms of sociability, subjectivity, and identity. I argue that we see informality through the dialectical interplay described by de Certeau as the spatial resistance to, and contestation of, the strategies of space within the context of globalisation. Globalization, has enabled an unprecedented flow of people around the world, thus engendering the production of informal practices and heterotopic spaces that disrupt the production of what have heretofore been understood as “traditional” regimes of sociability and forms of identity.