ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author takes the concepts of AI imaginaries and urban experimentation as an entry point to deepen the debate about the political culture of AI experimental practices. This study interrogates firstly, how power is exercised to rationalize the imagined AI futures into a given society’s socioeconomic and political practices and secondly, how these are materialized through urban experiments. Methodologically, this research grounds AI imaginaries in China and adopts an in-depth empirical case study approach to scrutinizing the place-specific intelligent and green urban visions and their performativity expressed in (im)material forms in Xiong’an New Area, a radical exemplar of the nation’s emerging AI imaginaries spatially performed onto a bounded mega-urban space. The findings strongly point to the imaginaries’ performative power in not only representing projections of an alternative AI-enable future but also generating certain material social lock-ins. What is more important is that the imaginaries’ performativity, epistemologically, blurs the boundary between visions and actualities, and “what is” and “what might be.”.
