Cities on Demand? Unboxing Urban Un_Certainties from Amazon’s Algorithmic Architectures and Forecasted Futures

Projekt: Dissertationsprojekt

Projektbeteiligte

Beschreibung

In today’s technocapitalist cities, big tech companies have become neighbors, employers, and even critical public infrastructure providers – a standard in modern urban life. Though their technologies promise to make austerity-ridden cities ‘smarter’ and to improve administrative efficiency, tech monopolists are really battling over who will control and profit from shaping future urban narratives. They achieve this by experimenting with and gradually taking over urban environments, increasingly eliminating uncertainty and securing outcomes that serve their interests.

One of these ‘future-makers’ is the tech company Amazon. Often only perceived as ‘virtual warehouse’, the corporation has long been extending its power: in addition to being a retail giant, Amazon is increasingly organizing (smart) cities around its last mile logistics and running hugely profitable data centers as a partner to public governments. By lobbying for and providing certain services, Amazon has now become rather infrastructural. On its second biggest market, Germany, it offers future disaster relief and private substitutions of welfare goods. In other words, Amazon uses current uncertainties as powerful governing strategy. Its security gadgets only feed further insecurities of its customers, thus establishing a profitable pipeline of predictable behavior to reign over spaces, capital, and futures. But what kind of ‘cities of certainties’ result from these manufactured uncertainties, who are they for, and what kind of future do they represent?

In my Ph.D. research project, I am interested in the tense negotiations around the design of (public) infrastructures between private tech actors like Amazon; local administrations; and urbanites. Drawing on three ethnographic case studies – from Amazon’s smart home devices, its delivery infrastructure, to its cloud services – the project empirically explores how uncertainties of our time are politically instrumentalized by tech companies to fit their business and design defaults and enclose the potential of diverse digitized cities. Critically and creatively ‘unboxing’ future-making practices, my research asks how the public sector and citizens are questioning, resisting, and perhaps even sabotaging the current ‘city-on-demand’-culture of Big Tech. How can they regain power about public discourses around futures in the race to care for democracy and a broken planet?
KurztitelCities on Demand?
StatusLaufend
Zeitraum01.04.22 → …

Projektverknüpfungen

Verknüpfte Aktivitäten

Zuletzt angesehen

Publikationen

  1. Learner pragmatics at the discourse level: Staying “on topic” in a telecollaborative eTandem task
  2. Dealing with inclusion–teachers’ assessment of internal and external resources
  3. Long-term population dynamics of Dactylorhiza incarnata (L.) Soo after abandonment and re-introduction of mowing
  4. TANGO: A reliable, open-source, browser-based task to assess individual differences in gaze understanding in 3 to 5-year-old children and adults
  5. Comment on “Stretching intervention can prevent muscle injuries: a systematic review and meta-analysis”
  6. When, Where, and How Nature Matters for Ecosystem Services
  7. Why EU asylum standards exceed the lowest common denominator
  8. Structural Adaptation Triggers in the CAP
  9. An Ecosystem Architecture Meta-Model for Supporting Ultra-Large Scale Digital Transformations
  10. Requests for reasoning in geometrical textbook tasks for primary-level students
  11. Leveraging the macro-level environment to balance work and life
  12. Effect of erbium modification on the microstructure, mechanical and corrosion characteristics of binary Mg-Al alloys
  13. Scattered trees are keystone structures - Implications for conservation
  14. No Concept of form within Sight Can System Theory help us?
  15. Assessing the Bonding Interface Characteristics and Mechanical Properties of Bobbin Tool Friction Stir Welded Dissimilar Aluminum Alloy Joints
  16. The shooter bias: Replicating the classic effect and introducing a novel paradigm
  17. Was fehlt in der EVS?
  18. New and Rapid Fully Automated Method for Determination of Tazobactam and Piperacillin in Fatty Tissue and Serum by Column-Switching Liquid Chromatography
  19. Demarcating transdisciplinary research in sustainability science—Five clusters of research modes based on evidence from 59 research projects
  20. Elastomeric Prepregs for Soft Robotics Applications
  21. A Study on the Impact of Intradomain Finetuning of Deep Language Models for Legal Named Entity Recognition in Portuguese
  22. Managing Multiple Logics: The Role of Performance Measurement Systems in Social Enterprises
  23. Functions of Constitutions
  24. Comparison of Panel Cointegration Tests