Urban Futures

Heteropolis

Published by Adaptive Actions

Even if cities are becoming heterogeneous, homogeneous sectors persist, multiply and last. In this context, is Heteropolis something that exists or is it a project to carry out, a city to make?

Via this concept, AA (Adaptive Actions) questions what kinds of actions might open spaces up to indeterminacy, facilitate the hybridization of what already exists, and simultaneously value difference and mobilize new forms of urban relations, exchange, and diversity. AA also questions how heterogeneous spaces and actions might create common ground, that is to say how they might reveal radical intersections that continually reinvent the relational fabric that binds people, places, and things together. Heterogeneous spaces go beyond the representation of diversity and the collection of isolated fragments. By creating possibilities for indeterminacy these spaces act as triggers for creativity. Actions that create heterogeneity reveal the possibility of common ground through urban interventions and cultural tensions that might be identified as queer, native, ethnic, generational, economic, industrial, ecological, and so on.

Publication committee:
Marie-Pier Boucher, Jean-Maxime Dufresne, Gema Melgar & Jean-François Prost

Design: Feed

Book produced with the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Montréal) and donors.

With contributions by:
Gean Moreno (Miami), Scapegoat (Hong Kong), Nuria Carton de Grammont Lara (Mexico, D.F.), Michael Hardt, Alexandra Tigchelaar (Toronto), Kyong Park (off the coast of Myanmar), Ana Rewakowicz (Ghent), Estudio Teddy Cruz (Tijuana / San Diego), Pia Ednie-Brown, Laurence Bonvin (Cape Town), Charlie Hailey, Folie Culture (Quebec), Robin Simpson (Toronto), Tue Greenfort (Koln), Jaime del Val (Madrid  / Santiago), Sophie Le-Phat Ho (Montreal), Spurse, Javiera Ovalle Sazie (Valparaiso), Ctrl +Z, D1618, El Narval & Todo por la Praxis (San Pe ro Garza Garcia), Never Lopez (Montreal), Rolan  Tasho (Tirana), Elisabeth Mercier (Montréal), Douglas Scholes (London), Marie-France Daigneault & Anne-Marie Proulx (Montréal), Nurri Kim (Helsinki / Gyeonggi), Gina Badger (Mississauga), Ernesto Oroza (La Habana), Tercerunquinto (Monterrey), Jean-Pierre Aubé (Istanbul / Mumbai), Roy Meuwissen (Newcastle / Vancouver), Broken City Lab (Windsor / Detroit), Cog•nate collective (Tijuana), Erik Torven, Patrice Loubier (Montréal), Cyrille Wanji Simplice (Douala), Martin Désilets (Montréal), Adaptive Actions (Tijuana), Alyse Emdur (carceral spaces), François Deck (Grenoble / Shanghai), Gesche Wurfel (New York City), Cohabitation Strategies (Guelph), Darine Choueiri, Giulia Fiocca, Jean-Francois Pirson & Lama Sfeir (Beirut), Rae Rosenberg (carceral spaces), Claude Boullevraye  de Passillé (East River, New York City), Alex Wolkowicz & Jon Barraclough (New York City), All Saints Church / The Exposure Project (Toronto), Pedro Lasch (London), SYN- (Montréal / Dakar), Sophie Handler, Alexander Heilner (Cairo), The Electronic Disturbance Theatre 2.0 / b.a.n.g. lab (Tijuana / San Diego), André Éric Létourneau (London), Swim Gym / Tacolcy Belafonte Center (Miami)

Cette contribution présente de manière synthétique le contenu du livre « Le vivant en ville, nouvelles émergences : recherches et publication de synthèse » paru fin 2016, et les activités menées par la Métropole de Lyon ainsi que par Vétagro-Sup et l'Université de Lyon sur la nature et le bien-être en ville. Elle suit les quatre grandes thématiques abordées par ces recherches : 1. l'articulation entre gouvernance et vivant en ville ; 2. les réponses envisagées face aux enjeux de l'intensité urbaine ; 3. la place et l'enjeu de l'agriculture urbaine ; 4. la question de l'animalité et du bien-être en ville.

AI developments on smart cities, if not critical, risk making a flawed urban model more efficient. Instead, we suggest that AI should challenge the mainstream techno-optimistic approach to solving urban problems by dialoguing with other academic fields, questioning the dominant urban paradigm, and creating transformative solutions. We claim that doing differently, rather than doing better, may be smarter for cities and the common good.

Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becoming mediated, augmented and anticipated by location-sensitive technologies and services that generate and utilise big, personal, locative data. The production of these data has prompted the development of exploratory data-driven computing experiments that seek to find ways to extract value and insight from them. These projects often start from the data, rather than from a question or theory, and try to imagine and identify their potential utility. In this paper, we explore the desires and mechanics of data-driven computing experiments. We demonstrate how both locative media data and computing experiments are 'staged' to create new values and computing techniques, which in turn are used to try and derive possible futures that are ridden with unintended consequences. We argue that using computing experiments to imagine potential urban futures produces effects that often have little to do with creating new urban practices. Instead, these experiments promote Big Data science and the prospect that data produced for one purpose can be recast for another and act as alternative mechanisms of envisioning urban futures.

Imagine a city with more than 400 underground facilities, tunnels that span over hundreds of kilometres and 10 million cubic meters of space carved into old Precambrian bedrock. In Helsinki, there is more going on beneath our feet than we think. And the network keeps expanding. To ponder their excavation potential, an array of kallioresurssit (rock resources) found across this urbanized region was recently surveyed in the city’s Underground Masterplan. During a three-month residency with the HIAP - Helsinki International Artist Programme, the raw condition of bedrock becomes a conceptual hotbed for experimentation: a matter charged with speculative and unforeseen potential in respect to future ecologies, adaptive reuse of shelters, urban climatology or Cold War revival.

Essay published in the HIAP Yearbook 2016, available for download here:
http://hiaphelsinki.tumblr.com/post/162113301421/hiap-yearbook-2016