Media Architecture And Its Futures Implied: Volume Magazine

“Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centered vision”, The Guardian headlined on March 12, 2021. For years, the tech giant had attempted to gain a foothold in smart city development, via its ‘urban intelligence’ spinoff Sidewalk Labs. Due to mounting criticism, the municipality of Toronto backed away from the futuristic tech-driven plans for Toronto’s Quayside. According to The Guardian, this move is a reaction to growing skepticism over technology’s role in urban development and reflects a renewed search for public values underpinning urban futures: “Canada’s largest city is moving towards a new vision of the future, in which affordability, sustainability and environmentally friendly design are prioritized over the trappings of new and often untested technologies.”1
This recent example shows how urban development – as well as the experience of already existing cities – is increasingly shaped by a range of digital media technologies, like mobile devices, urban screens, interactive installations, ‘sharing’ platforms, surveillance devices, data trackers, embedded sensors, and so on. While these are often marketed as neutral tools that simply make cities better, more efficient, or safer, they are increasingly questioned from a value-based perspective: Better for whom?; more efficient for whom and what?; to what goals and underlying logic exactly?; and safer, at the cost of exclusion of or bias against whom?