Culture | Smart City Provocations #1: Negotiating the Smart City
Negotiating the Smart City
The city is a set of dynamic relationships that are established and developed on a daily basis; old relationships are re-established, and new ones are forged, and are at times altered, heightened and redefined. 'Negotiations' are the bedrock of a healthy living environment; Negotiating ownership and commons, space, objects and environments, as well as symbols and imaginations, are crucial to the life of a city.
The pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have indicated our poor understanding of social relationships and how 'strangers' share and negotiate 'living together', which is the basis of city life.Technocratic approaches to organizing the city often result in superimposing a city fabric with the burden of being 'smart' rather than moving towards shared social and cultural development.
This dialogue will iterate the importance of developing the art of 'living together' rather than just the smartness of resolving all possible crisis, that is often the focus of governance and policy. Spatial and visual organization of cities should be much more about the cultural and social negotiations, not just resolving towards an abstract set of efficiencies and ideal resolutions.By looking at the histories of “smart” and inclusive infrastructure and community building and mediated smart technologies of the present, the discussion will build on the notion of the city as a place of change, connection and aspiration, and how communities negotiate belonging in urban places.
Date: Thursday, 11 Nov 2021
Time: 8:00 PM - 9:00 PM SGT (5:30 PM - 6:30 PM IST)
Watch the recording here:
About the Speakers
Kaiwan Mehta is a theorist and critic in the fields of visual culture, architecture, and city studies. Mehta has studied Architecture (B. Arch), Literature (MA), Indian Aesthetics (PGDip) and Cultural Studies (PhD). In 2017 he completed his doctoral studies at the Center for the Study of Culture and Society, Bengaluru, under the aegis of Manipal University. Since March 2012 he has been the Managing Editor of Domus India (Spenta Multimedia). He was the Charles Correa Chair professor at the Goa College of Architecture under the aegis of the Department of Art and Culture, Government of Goa for the academic year 2017-2018.He is currently working on other architecture biographies - the works of Architect Sen Kapadia, as well as Architect Jeetendra Mistry. He has been curating the Urban Design and Architecture section of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Mumbai since 2016.
Jane M. Jacobs (BA (Hons), MA, PhD, CFBA) is Professor of Urban Studies and the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor, Yale-NUS College. Her specialist area is social and cultural geography and she has published on postcolonial geographies, architecture and society, high-rise urbanism, and the politics of heritage. She is author of Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (1996), Cities of Difference (1998), Uncanny Australia (1998), and Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (2014).Prof Jacobs manages the pleasant confusion of sharing her name with the influential, but now deceased, urbanist Jane Jacobs. Because of this, she has become an expert in professional disambiguation.
About the Series
Culture | Smart City Provocations is a series of live virtual dialogues and events exploring what could and should be the role of urban cultural transformation in the future smart city. It will bring together a transregional range of experts from arts practitioners, urban planners to thought leaders and researchers to share insights and offer fresh perspectives on how culture and cities are evolving before our eyes.
The first dialogue features urban researcher Kaiwan Mehta in conversation with Professor Jane Jacobs.