‘Anyway, the dashboard is dead’: On trying to build urban informatics

How do the idealised promises and purposes of urban informatics compare to the material politics and practices of their implementation? To answer this question, I ethnographically trace the development of two data dashboards by strategic planners in an Australian city over the course of 2 years. By studying this techno-political process from its origins onward, I uncovered an interesting story of obdurate institutions, bureaucratic momentum, unexpected troubles, and, ultimately, frustration and failure. These kinds of stories, which often go untold in the annals of innovation, contrast starkly with more common framings of technological triumph and transformation. They also, I argue, reveal much more about how techno-political systems are actualised in the world.

Material Politics of Micro Urban Housing

This thesis investigates various socio-material trends that influence housing culture within increasingly intensified urban conditions. These trends indicate emerging societal values relating to affordability, the sharing economy and the reterritorialization of both domestic and urban environments. Design research contemplates how these values align with emerging theories related to material politics and how the design of our built environment can inform society’s perception of a greater affective density. These theories describe the interrelationships between architecture, our shared consumption of energy and resources, material agency, and designed flexibility of urban and domestic space. These interrelationships define a set of objective comparators that are used in the evaluation of various housing types that are familiar to western cultures. An analysis of this evaluation describes a morphology of domestic architecture that guides the design process of creating a micro housing model located in Toronto’s urban core.

Material Politics of Micro Urban Housing

This thesis investigates various socio-material trends that influence housing culture within increasingly intensified urban conditions. These trends indicate emerging societal values relating to affordability, the sharing economy and the reterritorialization of both domestic and urban environments. Design research contemplates how these values align with emerging theories related to material politics and how the design of our built environment can inform society’s perception of a greater affective density. These theories describe the interrelationships between architecture, our shared consumption of energy and resources, material agency, and designed flexibility of urban and domestic space. These interrelationships define a set of objective comparators that are used in the evaluation of various housing types that are familiar to western cultures. An analysis of this evaluation describes a morphology of domestic architecture that guides the design process of creating a micro housing model located in Toronto’s urban core.

The People's Paving Stones: The Material Politics of International Human Rights in the Baldosas por la Memoria of Buenos Aires

Baldosas por la memoria are memorial paving stones handcrafted by loosely networked activists. Produced continuously from 2006 to an informally established protocol, they memorialize “the disappeared” and others murdered by the state terrorism of the Argentinian dictatorship (1976–1983). As a synecdoche of the “down and dirty” everyday pavements, they function as a metonym for democratic struggle and popular sovereignty. Aesthetically, they work against the “forgetting” and kitschification to which conventional memorials become subject. Through remediation into books and a DVD documentary, they participate in controversies within the international politics of human rights. Using a “material turn” within visual analysis, yet distinct from the “new materialism,” this article explains how they function within familiar genres of memorialization but in wholly novel ways. Baldosas create ethical complexity and moral ambiguity by troubling collective memory. Thus, we examine their relation to guilt, complicity, trauma, and affect.

The Material Politics of Finance: The Ticker Tape and the London Stock Exchange, 1860s–1890s

When the ticker tape was first invented in the 1860s, it promised a revolution in financial markets. Pricing information was now no longer solely the domain of the trading floor but was relayed continuously and simultaneously to ticker tapes long distances away from the stock exchange. Both nineteenth-century financiers, and the modern scholars who study them, have been enamored with the ticker tape and how it changed the way financial markets were perceived and experienced. However, a focus on how nineteenth-century financiers read and responded to the ticker tape has missed the real reordering of power that the ticker helped usher in. This article argues that between the 1860s and 1890s the London Stock Exchange and the Exchange Telegraph Company powerfully centralized their control over the distribution and transmission of financial information through the mundane infrastructures that underpinned the ticker tape system. Seeming technicalities, like the placement of batteries, the construction of electrical circuits, and the laying of wires and cables, were leveraged by these institutions to create a ticker tape system that distributed financial information unequally to financiers and investors throughout Britain. By the end of the nineteenth century, social and political questions about who should have access to financial information and markets, and on what terms, became helplessly intertwined with the mundane technicalities of the material infrastructures of modern finance.

The Material Politics of Infrastructure Networks Infrastructure Design and Territorial Transformation in Belgium, 1830–40s

This article delves into the processes of territorial transformation by foregrounding the material dimension of infrastructure. The entry of the research is infrastructure network design and planning. We will trace the concepts of territorial transformation inscribed into the material layout of large technical systems by analyzing the discourse of engineers and policy makers involved in the conception of infrastructure networks. In so doing, the material politics of infrastructure networks will be studied: How did engineers and policy makers design infrastructure to generate a specific territorial transformation? Moreover, how did technological plans hold the idea that one could influence modernization processes by means of a territorial transformation instigated by infrastructure? The neutral status of technology is thus fundamentally challenged by showing that engineers, in association with policy makers, were essential actors in the planned transformation of the territory as they organized infrastructure networks according to specific ideas relating spatial and societal transformation. The article focuses on two decades after the independence of Belgium (1831), when engineers conceived comprehensive networks of rails, waterways, and roads. The material politics of two major public works initiatives will be analyzed: (1) the centrally positioned railway network that connected all industrial centers within the territory as well as with the markets of neighboring countries, positioning Belgium into Europe as international turntable, and (2) a network of roads and canals in peripheral, so-called unproductive, regions that had to integrate these regions within national borders, and indeed extend these borders, as well as buffer and govern the side-effects and risks generated by the accelerating industrialization in the central parts of the nation.