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1 .2.3 Can advanced cities rethink democracy?

Jordi Vivaldi Piera

Can advanced cities rethink democracy?

Buckminster Fuller used to affirm more than 4 decades ago that “humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons”. A reflection that nowadays is especially relevant: in the rising of the Third Industrial Revolution, no one doubts that the way in which we inhabit the world is changing, although what is imperative, in Buckminster Fuller’s words, is to be able to formulate the following question: What are the values that we want to add to our society?

The new paradigm of “advanced city” (Figure 1), driven by the new technologies of the 21st century, is not far away from this reflection. A new city model that is characterized for being self-sufficient, participative, productive, decentralized, interactive and informational (real time data). Its urban operative is based in the urbiotics and characterized by its constant and intensive connection with the rest of the cities. It involves, indeed, something very different from what currently happens: nowadays we inhabit a city model that entrusts its production to what is happening beyond its urban borders and that has concentrated its ability to build networks, infrastructures, services and knowledge around a few corporative groups.

In this scenario, people’s power – democracy - is the big injured. Movements like the 15M or uprisings like the Arab Spring, are nothing but the claim of democratic values that nowadays are understood as insufficient. However, the last technological progresses have the potential of offering us a very different panorama. While the urbanism of the 19th century added value to the rural territory transforming it into urban territory, the urban regeneration of the 21st century through the advanced city should add value to the territory transforming it into a democratic one. It is necessary to alter the oligarchic structure of power that governs nowadays, and with respect to this, the new technologies applied to the city must strike us, above all, with the following question: How can advanced cities help us to reformulate the democratic practice?

Return to the “polis”: the cosmo-polis

However, before facing the previous question is necessary to clarify what follows: why is the city the adequate instrument to rethink democracy? In order to answer this question, it should be assumed that the Nation-State system has become obsolete. On the one hand it is too limited to manage the global problems caused by ecology, migratory movements, energy, economy… but on the other hand it is too extensive for a democratic participation understood as significant and stimulant by the citizen.

Under these circumstances, cities offer the best alternative for a government 2

that besides being effective is democratic. Why cities? Firstly, cities concentrate most of the world economic flows. Secondly, cities house more than half of the global population. Also, cities are the main source of cultural, social and political assets that mold our society. And finally, cities are not worn and limited by issues related to sovereignty and nationalism that muddy the interaction among the current Nation-States. But, above all, cities allow citizens to perceive and apply the values of participation, collaboration and community with results that are much closer and significant than what they can achieve in the Nation-State.

Therefore, and after moving from the greek “polis” of Pericles to the NationState of the Westfalian treaty, there is a return to the “polis” as the main democratic institution. However, the “polis” of the 21st century must not be, as in the Ancient Greece, a range of monads, but a net of cosmo-polis. A city of cities. A tissue of poles of urban activity that constantly interact in order to answer to a migratory, touristic, economic, energetic and business system that nowadays, besides being multiscalar, is rhizomatic and transversal. For that, we already count on institutions such as UCLG (United Cities and Local Government) which provides an institutional infrastructure in order to seat agreements, treaties and interurban projects.

Cities have a central position in the political, financial, cultural and demographic landscape, and therefore, any alteration in its functioning has the potential to offer deep transformations. A huge opportunity to redefine our political landscape, transcending a technocracy that, in many cases, seems to stumble blindly without really knowing where it should focus its brand new devices.

Figure 1 - Senseable City Lab, MIT

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Advanced city and democracy: intersections

In this context, the advanced city proposes several urban notions related to a range of different fields, but in particular underlines two concepts that are susceptible to increase the democratic quality of our metropolis: interaction and self-sufficiency.

The idea of “interaction” is crucial in order to develop a democratic system.

That is because “to interact” means, above all, “to empathize” in the sense of recognizing the existence of the “other”, who is able to, at least, receive, process and send information. It involves something really basic in any democratic system, given that it consists in prioritizing the community will instead of the own individual will. In this respect, new technologies have broadened the “quantity” of possible interaction, especially through a change in data processing: from “accumulation of data” we have moved to “real time data”. This allows, firstly, to increase the quantity of available information, and secondly, to immediately react to it, an ability that increases the value of this information and has consequences in many fields, especially in those related to aspects like urbiotic.

Nevertheless, the true challenge consists in taking advantage of the “real time systems” not only to increase the “quantity” of urban interaction, but also to alter its “quality”, to modify its “kind”. The reason is that not every type of interaction among subjects is equally valid in a democracy: in order to qualify it as democratic, it must be produced under certain conditions. In this respect, “the ideal speech situation” defined by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas could be helpful. An interaction amongst subjects can be considerate democratically valid if and only if every single interactor 1) has the same opportunities to participate, 2)holds an equally considerated opinion, 3)has the power to act without any kind of coactions, and 4) expresses himself in a truly, intelligible and correct way. Any interaction that doesn’t fulfill these requirements is not interesting for us, and in this sense, the key question is the following one: How can new technologies applied to the city promote a democratic interaction as the one just defined above? Because it is not about digitalizing already existing participative processes (digital city, e-democracy or democracy 4.0). 21st century’s technologies must allow us to create new participative mechanisms in the interactive conditions previously described in order to let the citizens themselves assume a leadership position to define how should be the day to day of our city (Figure 2). It should be in the use of the public space through digital applications where emerges the strongest advances emerges: there are already several available applications that allow to decide what kind of activities are more interesting for a particular day in a particular public space, or what events, trajectories or places are the most frequented ones by Figure 2 - “Interaction”, Archive

the users and, therefore, require the greatest attention from the city council.

It involves free applications, easily accessible for anyone, that enable the clarity and intelligibility of the received and sent information and that, above all, are developed in a flat hierarchy, that’s to say, without prioritizing any kind of individuals above others. On the other side, the possibility of offering the anonymity offers a more free and sincere participation, given that let the separation of any coactions or threats that could condition our decision.

It is therefore about a neighborhood scale participation, that doesn’t pretend to draw big guidelines in the long run, but that allows the citizen to have a direct implication with his day to day in the public space. An action that would be framed in contemporaneous political initiatives that propose a daily microscale democracy, decentralized and agile. These characteristics, typical of the Athens democracy of the 5th century b.C, rise up the paradox of the crucial role of the most advanced informational technologies of the 21st century in

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order to recover some of the most ancient democratic qualities.

However, the advanced city adds another value to the traditional city that - despite working in another dimension - is essential in order to increase the quality of our democracy: the urban self-sufficiency. To convert cities in self-sufficient cities has a democratic sense because in this way these ones can be more resilient against possible global conflicts, and the local communities acquire power to decide its own future in relation to the big world enterprises (Figure 3). But, on which foundation seats the urban selfsufficiency? On its ability to produce food, energy and goods on a local scale.

But it is not just about reindustrialize the cities following a “post-fordian” or “toyotist” paradigm, that’s to say, it is not about sprinkling cities with the same industrial model that inhabits the periphery. The urban self-sufficiency must be nourished from initiatives such as the Fablab and FabCity, the urban agriculture and the energetically self-sufficient buildings. Nowadays this

technology already exists, and it wouldn’t be a dementia to get closer in the next decades to the targets of what is considered as a self-sufficient city: at least a 50% of goods locally produced, a 100% of energy locally produced and a 50% of food regionally produced.

Otherwise, we must face the following paradox: how can we establish a true democracy if we depend for our material subsistence on a few business groups? A clear example of this issue can be found in the dwellings production: Nowadays, a 50% of the existing dwellings are built by less than 10 corporations, which are obviously designed imposing lucrative criteria rather than social or cultural criteria. Facing this scenario, initiatives like the wikihouse, using technologies that we can find in any FabLab, enable the design and fabrication of dwellings to any person, without the need of depending on any entity.

The political, technological and urban focus of the 21th century: the concept of link

Both the concepts of interaction and self-sufficiency, emphasize an idea that is strongly present in our contemporaneous politic and social thinking: the idea of links. As we have previously seen, the advanced city increases the links among citizens, the links with our society, the links with our production and the links with our environment. New technologies are moving in the same direction: internet, urbiotic, open code, smartphone, renewable energies…

(Figure 4) The same happens with new economic concepts, like the case of the crowdfunding and other platforms as Kickstarter: instead of going to the closer bank to ask for a 100.000 euros loan for a project in exchange for some interests (top-down), it is possible to find funding through 1 euro from 100.000 people online who feel any kind of link –affective, cultural, professional…- with the project (bottom-up). Something that is closely related to democratic quality and that allows what Tapscot and Willilams define as the power of the many: “As people individually and collectively program the Web, they’re increasingly in command. They not only have an abundance of choices, they can increasingly rely on themselves. This is the new consumer power. It’s not just the ability to swap suppliers at the click of a mouse, or the prerogative to customize their purchased goods (that was the last century). It’s the power to become their own supplier - in effect to become an economy into themselves.

No matter where one looks these days there is a powerful new economy of sharing and mass collaboration emerging where peers produce their own goods and services.”

Figure 3 - World Internet Traces, Archive Figure 4 - Trope: From Natural to Directed, Sofoklis Giannakopoulos, Stefanos Levidis, Niccolò Marini, Georgios Soutos.

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But the concept of links goes even beyond: in the present day, it occupies a central position in the third generation of human rights. If the first generation was focused on the value of individual freedom value –being materialized during the 50s in the bourgeois revolutions against the “Ancien Regime” of the end of the 18th century-, the second generation was articulated around the concept of equality –being concretized during the 50s in the Welfare State through thinkers like Keynes- today the human rights of the third generation underline the idea of links. Links that can be intrasocials or related to the non-human nature, and that are the base of social movements as contemporaries as the 15M for the real democracy, the environmentalism, the pacifism, the indigenism or the recognition of discriminated collectives such as gays and lesbians.

Movements that, unlike the one from the early 19th century, are interclass, decentralized, identitary and pacific, and their success is based on the opportunities offered by the new technologies of the information, especially for their communicational bidirectionality, flat hierarchy, open accessibility and network functioning, values similar to the contents they pretend to promote (Figure 5).

Risks and threats: obstacles

While it is true that new technologies have the potential to deeply alter the current centralized structures, the advanced city presents many risks that threaten to reduce the democratic quality of the cities. Amongst them, three perils stand out, each one damaging one of the characteristics mentioned earlier: either they reduce the quantity of interaction, they alter the kind of interaction, or they reduce the self-sufficiency level.

First, the use of smartphones in the city can encourage a new kind of individualism that would reduce the amount of interaction in public space.

According to the publication of a research group from the Tel Aviv University (UTA), the users of public spaces, such as squares and parks, are more and more absorbed by their devices, and less by their immediate environment.

Researchers affirm that smartphones create the illusion of living in private “bubbles”. According to them, this implies a different use of the public spaces, based on ignoring the “other” present. Facts that have even lead some urbanists to establish a material distinction in the public space amongst users and no-users of smartphones, as it happens in the private spaces amongst smokers and no-smokers.

On the other side, it is well known that the bidirectional decentralization of the information produced by Internet lets bottom up systems of knowledge flourish, such as blogs, real time databases or Wikipedia. However, the greatest danger is the reliability that this information can held, given the facility to, on one hand, spread this information and, on the other hand, to hack this information. As a result, the democratic kind of interaction that we are interested in becomes threatered because it cannot always fulfill the aforementioned condition of veracity Nevertheless, this phenomena can be mitigated, as Kevin Keely claims in “The bottom is not enough”, introducing a small percentage of top-down filtering in order to assure the reliability of the information, although in this case the problem is moved to the “top-down” filter.

Finally, the ability of the established power to appropriate strategies that were originally built against it is historical. Nowadays, there are many corporations -like Nike or Motorola - adding elements from the “Maker” speech in their Figure 5 - Student demonstration in Germany, 2007 10

vocabulary and communicative resources. Their products are advertised with very similar aesthetics and a lexicon, although it has obviously nothing to do with any kind of self-production meaning. A trick that complicates the proliferation of self-sufficient mechanisms that keep us depending on a centralized power structure and even worse, that makes us feel falsely revolutionary. Something similar happens with the companies that fabricate the needed technology for the urbiotica: if we carefully observe who is behind the sensors, smartphones, antennas etc that allow the urbiotic development required by the advanced city, we realize that it is about, again, an extremely oligarchic pattern always composed of the same corporations.

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Towards a new democracy: perspectives

Above all, in order to implement a democratic revival through the new technologies of information applied to the city, we need to fulfill mainly two requirements: to have a politic horizon in our citizen conscience and to be malleable enough to alter our most primary domesticity.

It is clear that, even if the advanced city is an extraordinary powerful tool, it is required, first, that citizens act keeping in his horizon certain political values to implement. On the contrary, the advanced city is still no more than a set of daydreaming and self-righteous technological acrobatics, transformed yet again into a puppet of the establishment. It seems to be relatively an issue, but in the present day we are still far, pretty far, from being a politically active citizenship, able to use up all the possibilities that our current poor democracy offer us.

There is a crisis of critic, reflexive and political mobilization capacity and without involving these fields in our day to day life, the newest technological advances will be completely useless. However, nowadays, the biggest problem does not consist anymore in being technologically far or close from the desired advanced city model – unlike the technological, almost comic, utopism of the 60’s Archigram’s urbanisms. It consists in being normatively close or far. That is to say, the problem consists in spreading and laying down the concept of advanced city in our urban imaginary, and that anyone with any preparation is willing to change several of the habits and prejudices that conform their domesticity in order to include them in their day to day life (Figure 6). Therefore, the issue here is related to what is socially accepted with the citizenship, something that conforms us since we are aware of our basic relationship code with the city and that, given the inertia that possess it, it is not easy at all to change, especially in a massive way.

But in this respect, Buckminster Fuller also warned us: “we are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common”. A reflexion that, again, is extremely contemporary, and underlines the need to react, in front of problems and issues that threaten the whole world, with global answers elaborated by the entire citizenship of the planet.

Figure 6 - London Data Table, 2012

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