Radical Planning Speaker Series – Radical Technology Panel

Even as digital technologies promise to transform urban planning and urban governance, they entrench structural inequities and discriminatory practices. To ensure that contemporary and emerging urban technologies are beneficial to urban communities — historically marginalized communities as well as communities exponentially impacted by innovations in AI, surveillance technologies, and automation — we must understand the ways that digital urban technologies reproduce extractive power dynamics, but also produce new cultural artifacts, practices, and ways of knowing and being urban. Communication and media studies scholars have explored the concept of algorithmic reparation (Davis, Williams, and Yang 2021), which uses digital systems to analyze and repair historical harms. What would a reparative approach to smart cities and urban technologies look like? How can an ethics of repair be used to confront wicked urban problems and move beyond reducing harm within our current conditions toward more equitable futures.

Special thanks to the CEW+ Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund for sponsoring this event.