Animals of the Smart City
The secret life of animals in the blind spot of the connected urban landscape
As an emblematic figure of Innovation, the Smart City crystallises many fantasies, strongly influenced by long-standing, but persistent, myths of security and efficiency. These beliefs have now been revived in light of digital technologies interwoven into the urban fabric.
Among the many frictions and uncertainties surrounding the Smart City, animals occupy a blind spot and remain largely unconsidered. The various smart city initiatives fail to account for the presence of both wildlife and domestic animals in their development programmes. So, what could issues arise from the presence of animals in a smart city? How might this presence impact the urban infrastructure, on the one hand, and the behaviour of animals, both domestic and wild, on the other?
Our long-term research-fiction project, Animals of the Smart City, reimagines the fable of the ‘bug’– the insect trapped in the transistors of early computers that supposedly caused the first computer error – on the scale of a city. As a guideline for extrapolations, the exploration frames on particular question: how does animality, with its own instinct, manifest in this controlled space, saturated with so-called predictive technologies?
↑ The Falcon Punch is a guild of thieves mastering falconry to hijack delivery drones and steal their package.
↑ In the hyperconnected city of Athens, ‘The Sons of Kyôn’ are a supportive community of refugees who have formed an alliance with the thousands of stray dogs in the city to evade the smart surveillance of the authorities pursuing them.
The speculative scenarios that shape Animals of the Smart City explore the complex relationships between fauna, digital infrastructure, and connected inhabitants. From custom-designed domestic animals, based on urban data, to drone hijacking through the ancient art of falconry, the various fictional products, services, and practices evoked by these narratives are rooted in archetypes drawn from smart city rhetoric. In these stories, animals (re)emerge as unexpected inhabitants and users of the connected city, highlighting its technical and ethical limitations.
↑ The first speculation matrix used to classify the initial speculative scenario ideas, identify missing avenues of exploration, and coherently organise the fictions into broader narrative families.
↑ A glimpse of the speculative framework tested to develop the scenarios for Animals of the Smart City.
