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What happens when the sensor-imbued city acquires the ability to see – almost as if it had eyes? Ahead of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section at UABB 2019 to set up a discussion on how new technologies - and Artificial Intelligence in particular - might impact architecture and urban life. Here you can read the “Eyes of the City” curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti, Politecnico di Torino, and SCUT. If you are interested in taking part in the exhibition at UABB 2019, submit your proposal to the “Eyes of the City” open call until May 31st, 2019: www.eyesofthecity.net
Comparisons, transpositions and metaphors can be misleading if one does not unpack carefully their point of departure. The notion that the digital age introduces us to a new regime of "eyes on the street", an expression famously coined by Jane Jacobs, requires understanding exactly what the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities implied when she used it. For Jane Jacobs, the active presence of city dwellers in the street, their unconscious or conscious monitoring of what was going on in their immediate surroundings was the best way to ensure public safety. "The public peace — the sidewalk and the street peace— of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves," wrote Jane Jacobs.
When trying to transpose this intuition to the digital age, one should probably keep in mind a few important things. First and foremost, the surveillance exerted by citizens is irreducible to the top-down monitoring of the police of any other overarching authority. The risk with a formula such as "the eyes of the city" is precisely to imply the intervention of such an authority. How not to be reminded on this matter of the last film of Austrian-German-American director Fritz Lang, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse? In this 1960 movie, Lang imagines a place that enables the evil Doctor Mabuse to spy on everybody. A dystopian take on "the eyes of the city" would be to imagine a universal surveillance through the use of sensors, meters and geolocation, which would be detrimental to individual freedom. From such a perspective, the control or operations room that fascinates so many of advocates of the "smart city" would appear as the inheritor of the hidden room from which Mabuse watches everything that is going on. Nothing could be actually further from what Jane Jacobs was referring to: a decentralized and spontaneous watchfulness. No Big Brother effect, rather a swarm condition, this "intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards" that constitutes the foundation of true citizenship.
