Visions of future cityscapes pervade the discourse and development of computing and media technologies. This paper addresses the growth of what has been called ‘design fiction’ in relation to the smart cities agenda. Designers and researchers formulate speculative worlds around the applications and systems they propose and design. In turn, these ‘worlds’ become a descriptive language and grammar for the articulation of both agendas and technical systems in the present. In this way, futures are apparently brought into the present. A technological imaginary for future urban life might therefore be foreclosed by glossy corporate imagery. A wealth of ‘design fictions’ for smart cities have been offered by large technology companies. However, with the growth in availability of the means of video production, alternative design fictions are being offered online. This paper discusses the role of ‘design fiction’ in the propagation of the future oriented discourses of smart cities. In conclusion, I argue we can accordingly chart a politics of anticipation in the speculative practices that significantly aid in the construction of ‘smart city’ discourses.
Discover the world's research
20+ million members 135+ million publications 700k+ research projects Join for free
A preview of the PDF is not available
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.
The aim of this work is to think about and write about the ways in which automation gets imagined – the sorts of cultural, economic and social forms of imagination that are drawn upon and generated
when discussing how automation works and the kinds of future that may come as a result. The aim here is not to validate/invalidate particular narratives of automation – but instead to think about how they are produced and what they tell us about how we tell stories about what it means to be 'human', who/what has agency and what this may mean for how we think poltically. ... [more] View project This project addresses the ways in which particular forms of spatial imagination are enacted to attempt to anticipate or bring about particular kinds of future in the R&D practices of ubiquitous co
mputing researchers located in corporate institutions in Silicon Valley. ... [more] View project The aim of the project was to investigate the ways digital scholarship might be better recognised within academic/institutional contexts of research monitoring and reward and recognition.
View project June 2009
The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) has developed a versatile hydrographic geospatial standard S-100 to incorporate the requirements of S-57 for electronic navigation charts (ENC) and for electronic chart display and information systems (ECDIS) with a wider range of digital products. The standard will support imagery and griddled data, 3D and time-varying data and new applications
... [Show full abstract] beyond the scope of traditional hydrography. The S-100 is compiled and managed as an ISO-conforming registry on the IHO Web site and a part of ISO 19100 series of geographic information standards. The standard will help to encourage greater use of applications at lower costs, and also enable user to define applications and product specifications with the combination of elements. Also the stakeholder involvement will play an important role in the development of S-100 and its subordinate standards and derived product specifications, and are suitable for the widest possible user community. Read more January 1998 · Journal of Coastal Research
Detailed early chartmaking by the British East India Company and the Royal Navy in India and present-day Bangladesh provide one of the most accurate databases available to track the evolution of a major delta front over the last 200 years. Digital databases of shoreline position and shallow bathymetry of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta front were constructed using geo-referenced and
... [Show full abstract] projection-corrected early and modern charts, and using LANDSAT imagery. In contrast with earlier published studies, these databases indicate the Ganges-Brahmaputra has an actively prograding subaerial delta: an average of approximately 7.0 km'/yr of new land have accreted in the river mouth region since 1792. Digitate shoals, forming in association with accretion of elongate islands in the river mouth region, are coalescing in 8-15 m water depth to form a relatively coarse-grained lobate feature that is prograding over the muddy, subaqueous delta on the inner shelf. The morphology of shoal growth suggests the Ganges-Brahmaputra mouth has evolved eastward over the late Holocene as a series of digitate shoal-channel complexes. West of the active river mouth in historical times, the delta front is sediment starved and is undergoing retreat at rates of about 1.9 kmVyr. Read more Article
Full-text available
Helicopter-borne sensors have been used since the early 1990s to monitor ice properties in support of winter marine transportation along the east coast of Canada. The observations are used in ice chart production and to validate ice hazard identification algorithms using satellite SAR imagery. In this manuscript we describe the sensors' additional capability to monitor the fresh water plume
... [Show full abstract] characteristic beneath the land-fast ice. During the Canadian Arctic Shelf Exchange Study (CASES), data were collected over the Mackenzie Delta in the southern Beaufort Sea where a buoyant river plume exists. Results show that the electromagnetic-laser system can describe the horizontal distribution of the freshwater plume depths that shallow stepwise offshore while the flow of the buoyant plume is restricted by a series of ridge-rubble fields running parallel to the coast. Relative to the 2m mean ice thickness, the plume layer depth varied from zero under mobile offshore pack ice to 3m inshore of the third set of ridge-rubble fields. Further validation of the plume distribution with Salinity-Temperature profiles is planned for the International Polar Year survey in the spring of 2008. View full-text January 2007 · Journal of the Early Republic
In the 1830s, antislavery advocates used highly sexualized language to recruit Northerners into the growing immediatist movement. The "voyeuristic abolitionism" they developed in speeches, pamphlets and periodicals served to shock and mobilize men and especially women, who were urged to identify with the enslaved of their own sex, and then to act to save these victims. Engaging women in such
... [Show full abstract] explicit discussions and encouraging female efforts to strike against slavery challenged established gender norms. Yet as the antislavery movement evolved beyond moral suasion into a political strategy, most abolitionists curtailed their use of sexualized imagery, and women's participation in the antislavery movement took its own form. The rise and fall of the rhetoric of "voyeuristic abolitionism" can be charted by studying the vocabulary used in magazines and other popular publications of the era, now searchable electronically through the American Periodical Series. The explosive potential of this language can also be seen in the ways in which it was employed -and avoided-in the U.S. Congress. By the 1850s, some Americans-among them African American authors and antislavery women, including most notably Harriet Beecher Stowe--found ways to reference the moral evils of slavery without invoking explicitly sexual language. In the end, attacks on slavery framed in political terms prevailed over the voyeuristic abolitionism that had first drawn women into the antislavery coalition. Read more Last Updated: 05 Jul 2022
Discover the world's research
Join ResearchGate to find the people and research you need to help your work.
