More-than-Human Futures: Connected Urbanism and Cohabitation in the Smart City

Abstract:

The “smart city” agenda is about installing ubiquitous computing infrastructure and IoT devices to drive efficiency and productivity through big data analytics, automation, and optimisation. Yet, what evidence is there to suggest that the smart city can provide genuine answers to the climate emergency and the prospect of a planetary ecocide?

While the smart city agenda has started to move beyond the technology and data hype and come to terms with social and environmental issues, the challenges are vast. Climate change already has a great impact on cities with a notable increase in adverse weather events and insurance and rebuilding costs, and some thought leaders actively seek to reconcile the smart city with the resilient city. This talk ponders the question whether the human-centric focus is in fact worth rethinking in order to imagine the post-anthropocentric city in ‘more-than-human futures.’ With society’s current limited perspective that centres around humans, we risk to forget how we are entangled with and connected to other living beings, the environment, and the wider ecosystem that keeps us alive. Can we reconceptualise the smart city as a place where people and place meet to make a climate-positive contribution to the world?

This presentation will draw on examples from the new book, “Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities: Beyond Sustainability, Towards Cohabitation,” edited by Sara Heitlinger, Marcus Foth and Rachel Clarke published by Oxford University Press, 2024.

Speaker's Bio:
Marcus Foth is a Professor of Urban Informatics in the School of Design and a Chief Investigator in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), Faculty of Creative Industries, Education, and Social Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. For more than two decades, Marcus has led ubiquitous computing and interaction design research into interactive digital media, screen, mobile and smart city applications. Marcus founded the Urban Informatics Research Lab in 2006. He is a member of the QUT More-than-Human Futures research group. Marcus has published more than 280 peer-reviewed publications. He is a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society and the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Distinguished Member of the international Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and currently serves on Australia’s national College of Experts.