Crisis, by its very nature, requires decisive intervention. However, important questions can be obscured by the very immediacy of the crisis condition. What is the nature of the crisis? How it is defined (and by whom)? And, subsequently, what forms of knowledge are deemed legitimate and authoritative for informing interventions? As we see in the current pandemic, there is a desire for immediate answers and solutions during periods of uncertainty. Policymakers and publics grasp for techno-scientific solutions, as though the technical nature of the crisis is self-evident. What is often obscured by this impulse is the contingent, conjunctural and ultimately social nature of these crises. The danger here is that by focussing on immediate technical goals, unanticipated secondary effects are produced. These either exacerbate the existing crisis or else produce subsequent further crises. Equally, these technical goals can conceal the varied, and often unjust, distribution of risk exposure and resources and capacities for mitigation present within and between societies. These socio-political factors all have important functions in determining the effectiveness of interventions. As with climate change, the unfolding response to the COVID-19 pandemic underscores the importance of broadening the knowledge base beyond technical considerations. Only by including social scientific knowledge is it possible to understand the social nature of the crises we face. Only then is it possible to develop effective, just and legitimate responses.
What role should social science play in the work for transforming society towards sustainability? The background for this question is that despite massive investments in environmental research and the accumulation of data on the human impact on the environment, action remains insufficient. The severity of the current situation has led to the conclusion that moderate change is not enough; there is a need for a fundamental transformative change of society. How social science expertise should contribute to this is a fundamental epistemic and normative question and is the point of departure for this paper. This paper aims to develop a theory of social scientific environmental expertise. It first gives a broad account of expertise and its current landscape. It then develops a pluralistic approach, where expertise can take many forms, but should be reflexive, critical, and constructive. Finally, it stresses the crucial role that social science expertise has to play in the work for transformative change, not least to broaden environmental problems and their complexities, so that society is better equipped to undergo sustainable transformation.
The smart city encompasses a broad range of technological innovations which might be applied to any city for a wide variety of reasons. In this article, I make a distinction between local efforts to reshape the urban landscape, and a global smart city imaginary which those efforts draw upon and help sustain. While attention has been given to the malleability of the smart city concept at this global scale, there remains little effort to interrogate the way that the future is used to sanction specific solutions. Through a critical engagement with smart city marketing materials, industry documents, and consultancy reports, I explore how the future is recruited, rearranged, and represented as a rationalization for technological intervention in the present. This is performed amidst three recurring crises: massive demographic shifts and subsequent resource pressures, global climate change, and the conflicting demands of fiscal austerity that motivate the desire of so many cities to attract foreign direct investment and highly skilled workers. In revealing how crises are pre-empted, precautioned, and prepared for, I argue that the smart city imaginary normalizes a style and scale of response deemed appropriate under liberal capitalism.
This chapter introduces the concept of data threads, used them to follow the material and discursive construction of infant mortality data in Toronto, and explores theoretical positions that underlie them. It illustrates the data threads approach through a story of infant mortality statistics. The chapter compares data threads to data journeys in terms of materiality and spatiality. As data are translated and put to work in various settings, the chapter suggests that Star and Lampland risk becoming further disentangled from the phenomena they are intended to represent. It concludes by reflecting briefly on the ethical and political work that data threads perform in revealing the invisibilities of infrastructure. Data threads promise a way to draw attention to the bracketing-off of the materiality and material practices that bring about data, as well as the discursive and ideological regimes that allow them to take form.
In a paper published within the Debates section of City last year, Schindler and Marvin laid out an agenda for the study of city standards, which they argued impose a universal logic of control. While they described three published standards and situated city standards within the context of smart cities, their failure to consider the institutional setting of the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) led them to overemphasise the coherence and unity with which city standards are actually developed. In this response piece, I correct this omission by excavating the origins of TC 268, the technical committee dedicated to city standards. This reveals not a universal logic of control, but a body of expertise in contentious and contingent emergence. While ultimately, I agree with Schindler and Marvin that city standards are deserving of greater attention from critical urban scholars, I argue for a more situated response to their politics that leaves open the possibility of them having positive effects on urban equity and social change.
This paper proposes a site-based methodology for the study of standards and standardisation. Rather than consider standards as a global phenomenon, or theorise them as a network of relations, their spatiality is rethought as an outcome of their ongoing enactment. Both the moment of a standard’s implementation and its supporting apparatus are opened up to genealogical analysis using the work of feminist philosopher Karen Barad. In particular, her concepts of ‘apparatus’ and ‘iteration’ forge a link between the particularity of ‘site’, and the circulation and materialisation of standards. By following such an approach, a multitude of heterogeneous agencies are revealed, and with them, the potential for change.
This short response does two things. First, it argues that urban benchmarks have specific and structural limits not identified in the principal essay in this intervention, which curtail the kinds of constructive and critical work such benchmarks might be expected to perform. ISO 37120 is discussed as an example. Second, it proposes a pluralistic approach to engagement and offers six suggestions for how academics might take urban benchmarks and their makers seriously without becoming fully embedded in their business. These are: ethnography, discourse analysis, self-reflexive critique, critical urban benchmarking, alternative publication channels and scholarly debate.
Much has been written about the risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI). This article is interested not only in what is known about these risks, but what remains unknown and how that unknowing is and should be approached. By reviewing and expanding on the scientific literature, it explores how social knowledge contributes to the understanding of AI and its regulatory challenges. The analysis is conducted in three steps. First, the article investigates risks associated with AI and shows how social scientists have challenged technically-oriented approaches that treat the social instrumentally. It then identifies the invisible and visible characteristics of AI, and argues that not only is it hard for outsiders to comprehend risks attached to the technology, but also for developers and researchers. Finally, it asserts the need to better recognise ignorance of AI, and explores what this means for how their risks are handled. The article concludes by stressing that proper regulation demands not only independent social knowledge about the pervasiveness, economic embeddedness and fragmented regulation of AI, but a social non-knowledge that is attuned to its complexity, and inhuman and incomprehensible behaviour. In properly allowing for ignorance of its social implications, the regulation of AI can proceed in a more modest, situated, plural and ultimately robust manner.
In recent years, the global environmental science-policy interface has come to include a greater variety of knowledge. Social scientists have joined natural scientists at the policy table, and Indigenous and local knowledge is being taken ever more seriously. But this pluralisation raises political, normative, and epistemic challenges for environmental expert organisations, including with respect to how knowledge is managed, how it is judged to be valid, how it is made policy-relevant, and how it is presented to policy-makers and decision-takers. Based on an interview study of experts involved in the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), we identify three broad approaches to these challenges: the integrationist logic, which seeks to combine all knowledge into a single ontology; the parallelist, which looks for similarities and connections between irreconcilable ontologies; and the pragmatist, which strives to apply knowledge when and where it will have the greatest positive impact. Rather than champion any one of these approaches, the paper explores their origins and how they negotiate paralyses to the timeliness of work. In avoiding ultimate formalisation of how value and knowledge pluralism are to be handled, IPBES allow more contextually sensitive practices to come to the fore. The paper concludes by discussing implications for environmental expertise more broadly.