Frankenstein Urbanism through the lens of feminist technoscience

Introduction: Frankenstein Urbanism through the lens of feminist technoscience

Federico Cugurullo’s Frankenstein Urbanism (2021) traces the evolution of sustainable models of urbanism from eco-cities through smart-cities to autonomous and artificially intelligent cities. The book posits that the rise of smart cities results in automated urban environments mediated by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). It goes on to note that the discursive and technological shift towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) sees sentient cities as the next step in urban evolution, leading to pressing questions around what kinds of urban futures are at stake. The issue of urban AI is critical and will potentially define multiple debates in urban studies in the coming years, as Cugurullo’s book predicts. However, Sophia Maalsen’s review of the book nudges the need to bring in, “the work of feminist thinking on technologies, nature, and more-than-human worlds, particularly in matters of care” (Maalsen, 2023, p. 22) to the debate around urban AI. To think with feminist technoscience means to make space for small-scale theorizing and take time to pause and wrestle with difficult questions. In other words, to think about matters of care requires space and time. This book forum provides a platform for reviewers to reflect on urban AI from a feminist perspective.

Frankenstein Urbanism narrates the evolution of cities in juxtaposition with the story of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which the eponymous scientist creates an artificial man out of human remains. Cugurullo’s interdisciplinary approach, bringing together literature, philosophy and history along with contemporary debates in urban studies opens up a new reading of modern urban development. The parallels between the “modern Prometheus” and the evolution of urban agendas worldwide provide helpful ways to problematize urban development. In particular, the story of Frankenstein seems to have resonated with fears around artificial intelligence 200 years since its publication. Present-day discussion around AI is predominantly about the fear of AI taking over human jobs or even exterminating the human race altogether (Cox, 2023; Roose, 2023). In the story, Victor Frankenstein is horrified by his creation and abandons it. Frankenstein’s artificial man learns about human society on his own. Despite the artificial man’s best intentions, he is perceived as a monster and harassed by humans eventually leading to him despising and killing human beings. A parallel thread in the story of Frankenstein is that of Robert Walton who sets out on a scientific exploration to the North Pole, exploring a dangerous terrain that could lead to the death of his whole crew. The connection between the two stories is a warning to the continuous striving of humans towards technological and scientific progress without adequate attention paid to dangerous consequences. The figures of Frankenstein and his technoscientific invention were used by Bruno Latour to make a similar case for caring for monsters (Latour, Citation2011). In the issue of environmental pollution, Latour pits the figure of the angry environmentalist against the “monster” that is the pollution-causing SUV. He argues that the monstrosity of the SUV is constructed via the fundamentalist left-wing perspective of the environmentalist. Instead, he makes a case for mindful mediation, allowing to take into consideration other concerns attached to the SUV, including that of the SUV owner, in order to move towards a fruitful resolution (Latour, 2005).

While this is one manifestation of care as a mediating force, feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) critiques how “respect for concerns and the call for care become arguments to moderate a critical standpoint” (p. 91). The anger of the environmentalist is an affection: an emotionally charged attachment to the issue of SUVs polluting the environment. Puig de la Bellacasa warns against reducing minoritized viewpoints as radical. Instead, a feminist technoscientific inquiry would then encourage us to include in our analysis things that make us uncomfortable, to continue to stay “true to the laughter” (Verran, 1999, p. 132). Helen Verran’s staying true to the laughter refers to her response to encountering different ways of counting and measuring in a Yoruba classroom. It is the moment of disconcertment that she chooses to follow that lead her to explore the Yoruba system of counting that had been forbidden to be taught in the post-colonial classroom and her own entanglement with histories of colonialism. Staying with the laughter means staying with the difference, instead of allowing differences to be, “forgotten or explained away” (Kenney, 2015, p. 754). In an age of climate change and mass extinction, Donna Haraway urges a similar non-innocent stance of “staying with the trouble” and acknowledging our entanglement in causing climate change but facing the challenges head-on (Haraway, 2016). This also means decentering humans from the story of climate change as we acknowledge our existence is only made possible in association with a variety of non-human kin (Haraway, 2016).

What does a feminist technoscientific inquiry mean? Feminist approaches to studying knowledge production and technological development are more than a binary gendered approach focusing on “women’s issues.” A feminist approach to technoscientific inquiry draws attention to underrepresented voices in knowledge production (Haraway, 1988). Extending the argument, this means including “neglected things” (p. 81) – such as affect and emotion – in the study of knowledge production as opposed to an objective, view from nowhere (de la Bellacasa, 2011). Feminist technoscience critiques the “god trick” (Haraway, 1988, p. 581) and urges a situated standpoint from which to understand science and technology, reminding us that knowledge production is always contextual and always power-laden (Harding, 1986). While these concepts have gained widespread acknowledgement in academic discussion, in practice the production of scientific texts continue to follow a Mertonian vision of science as disinterested and universal (Merton, 1973). Therefore, this book forum reads Cugurullo’s Frankenstein Urbanism through the lens of feminist technoscience.

The methodological approach of diffraction offers an interesting possibility to think with difference (Barad, 2007). STS has historically pointed out the purification work required to tease out pure science from the impure social activities that interfere with and affect the world (Latour, 1991/1993). All research, including social scientific research, engages in purification work to present data in a scientifically acceptable way. However, to read diffractively is, “a means for social researchers to make explicit these entanglements and differences, via analytic techniques that read data ‘through’ other texts, personal experiences, or other data” (Barad, 2011; p. 445 in Fox & Alldred, 2023, p. 94). Karen Barad, building upon work by Donna Haraway and Trinh T. Minh-ha, develops the concept of feminist diffraction (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1996; Minh-ha, 1996). The term diffraction refers to the “physical phenomenon that comes into being when a multitude of waves encounter an obstacle upon their path, and/or when these waves themselves overlap” (Geerts & van der Tuin, 2016, online). The metaphor of diffraction is drawn in opposition to reflection, acknowledging that any study of the real world is not an accurate reflection of the world that can be uncovered through objective epistemological tools (Fox & Alldred, 2023). A diffractive reading offers the possibility to make a visible difference and “re-read different kinds of texts, insights, memories, body-minded experiences and historical contexts through each other as well as besides and together with each other” (Magnusson, 2021, p. 185). Therefore, by diffracting Frankenstein Urbanism through other texts and empirical material, contributors, answer the following questions surrounding artificial intelligence in urban environments: Who cares and what is cared for when we talk about artificial intelligence in cities? How are variegated human values embedded in urban AIs?

The mundane maintenance of automated and autonomous cities

In my own diffractive reading of Frankenstein Urbanism, I read the book alongside Puig de la Bellacasa’s text on matters of care in technoscience (2011) and my personal experience of visiting Masdar City, the eco-city described in the book. Two things stood out to me in my reading of the book. One was the host of characters that were missing in the running of Masdar City and the other was the global nature of empirical investigation and the rather local nature of philosophical and historical inquiry that told the story of the evolution of cities. These resonate with the question of who performs the labor of caring for AI in cities and questions the need for more situated theoretical and historical perspectives to understand the proliferation of urban AI across diverse geographical contexts.

Masdar City, as Cugurullo details, is a newly built district in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, a few miles outside the city of Abu Dhabi. Cugurullo’s research is a fascinating insight into a society that is relatively little researched. The United Arab Emirates is a desert nation that achieved rapid infrastructural progress over the past decades, financed to a large extent through oil wealth. The need to diversify energy and revenue sources for the future, leads to them building an experimental city-district. However, in Masdar City, the key aim of proto-typing new technologies is more about making commercially viable alternative technologies than purely about achieving environmental goals. This focus is similar to critiques of other “eco-modernist” sustainable technologies, such as those sold by Sweden (Holgersen & Malm, 2015). Cugurullo sketches out the unique characteristics of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in which Masdar City is located. Abu Dhabi is part of the United Arab Emirates, a welfare-led state whose citizens are well provided for by the government. However, the citizens of the United Arab Emirates are estimated to be about 11% (World Bank, 2022), while the remaining is constituted by foreigners, many of whom come from South and East Asia (Chowdhury & Rajan, 2018). In most of Masdar’s marketing material there is little representation of these populations. Unsurprisingly, when I visited Masdar City in late 2022, most inhabitants and workers of the city were part of the UAE’s temporary working population. This reminds us of Puig de la Bellacasa question of, “who or what is or is not counted or assembled here and why?” (2011, p. 93).

I took a trip on the self-driving bus that transported people between key points in Masdar City. The bus was controlled by a South Asian man who explained the technology to passengers and selected the destinations on a touch-panel. I could only speculate why the bus could not be operated by its passengers when the objective of automation seemed to be to reduce the number of human workers involved. However, I found interesting the human-machine collaboration that made possible this “unmanned” bus journey. The not-driver of the bus represented both the erasure of human intermediaries that were essential to the running of cutting-edge autonomous cities and the erasure of “temporary people” (Unnikrishnan, 2017) in media representations of Masdar. The security staff, cleaning staff, workers at the café and supermarket and many of the residents of Masdar were also part of UAE’s large temporary foreign worker population. The erasures of this set of maintainers from marketing material speak to the desirability of who is invited to live in these utopian cities which nevertheless require human labor to keep them running.

Even on a global scale, AI seems unable to do without human labor resulting in the use of precariously employed Kenyan workers to train AI to be “less toxic” by parsing through disturbing content (Perrigo, 2023). Parallelly, another kind of smart urbanism – an app-driven economy of 30-minute grocery and food delivery – coexists in cities around the world where the push-button convenience of modern cities is driven by temporary and unstable employment that exacerbates existing social divisions (Sadowski, 2020). However, in her study of the attempts to “Uberize” domestic work in Delhi, India, Kavita Dattani (2021) shows how the “techno-masculinist logics” (p. 376) of the platform economy does not capture the gendered and class-based relationship to technology and mobility in the city faced by the women who perform domestic work. Here, the platformization of labor fails due to the lack of access to mobile phones, lack of digital literacy and the lack of independent mobility within the city for the lower class, lower caste women. This indicates that studies of automated and autonomous cities require situated theory making.

In the transition between the first two parts of the book – “Part 1: The Literature” and “Part 2: The Experiment” – Cugurullo shifts the focus from “the realm of ideas to the physical world” (p. 67). The empirical examples that he brings in to elucidate real-world examples of eco- and smart-cities are located in Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong. The distances between these cities emphasized how truly global the automated (and autonomous) cities were. However, the “realm of ideas” in the book seemed to be rather firmly situated in the Western European epistemic tradition. Cugurullo acknowledges that the “academic accounts” of smoky cities of the Industrial Revolution tend to be “Eurocentric” (p. 28). Despite this acknowledgement, the history of both the ecological city and the modernist planning it opposes are dominated by names such as Le Corbusier, Richard Register and Patrick Geddes. Similarly, the smart city is rooted in Francis Bacon’s utopian conceptualization of New Atlantis, and the present-day manifestations of technologically advanced cities are elaborated upon using thinkers such as Manuel Castells and Marshall Berman. However, the reason why the most cutting-edge urban solutions are implemented in cities like Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong are also intertwined with histories of colonialism and imperialism. The extravagant urban experiments in cities in Asia are perhaps less invested in carrying forward an evolving lineage of cities than in nation-building and the desire for nation-states to display their cities on the world stage, often at the expense of disadvantaged sections of these cities’ residents. (Roy & Ong, 2011). This rift between the realm of ideas and the realm of experimentation indicates that emerging discussions around technology and cities could benefit from more diverse theoretical strands rather than a unifying global evolutionary narrative.

In the following contributions, Morgan Campbell highlights the need to think with the humanities beyond the “end of the city” to instead see the death of the creator as an opportunity for new readings and possibilities for the city. Mariana Fried focuses on the labor involved in the symbolic production of smart and AI-mediated futures, asking who has the time to envision these futures and what does it mean to care for someone else’s vision. Anna Jackman brings Cugurullo’s book into conversation with feminist geopolitics to diversify the interrogation of how urban artificial intelligences manifest in the city and the more-than-human nature of urban AI entanglements. Casey Lynch problematizes the notion of autonomy in urban AI, shifting the idea of autonomy as embodied within an individual subject to autonomy as a power-laden socio-material assemblage. In different ways, a feminist approach calls for an inquiry that is always situated and always aware of the politics of knowledge production. This forum suggests that thinking with difference and asking questions of “who cares” and “what is cared for” will lead to new directions of inquiry in urban AI.

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