ABSTRACT
The twenty-firstcentury has so far seen responsive sensing technology, digitally networked infrastructure, and ubiquitous computing increasingly presented as the solution to the myriad problems facing both the contemporary and future city. The networked environment is posited as a means of averting environmental crisis and coping with projected population swells and their attendant fallout– notions of urban crisis that are invoked to convey the urgency with which the city must be reimagined and optimised through emerging digital technologies.
What such technological critiques typically fail to address are differentiated notions of what it means to be seen, heard, and in turn, sensed. Questions around data and sensing in the built environment are necessarily complicated by the fact that those outside of dominant social classes often struggle to be visible at all, or are at times made hyper-visible. I will discuss these multiple dimensions of visibility within the context of sex work, examining how complex and differentiated notions of visibility might play out within a digitally integrated urbanism. My intent is to illustrate that the implications of such scenarios are not universal. Yet rather than adopt a positivist view of the so-called sentient city, this paper seeks to frame a question that has yet to be fully articulated in the discourses of architecture and urbanism – what do these “smart” urban imaginaries mean for the visibility of the subaltern body?
