ABSTRACT
Smart cities, spaces, and devices can be understood as infrastructures for simulation and pre-emption: they extend the range and reach of data collection across space, constantly expanding the range of information collection to incorporate new senses and capabilities. This chapter focuses on the Foucauldian conception of environmentality (Foucault, 2008), arguing that this mode of governance shifts its attention away from the regulation of causes to that of effects. The chapter also characterizes the smart city as “operational” in the sense outlined by Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen, since automation displaces representational communication with data whose primary attribute is that it is “part of an operation” (Farocki 2004). Machines can sort through articles and email messages for key words and word clusters, but they can’t tell us what they mean. They can, however, correlate this information with behavior to predict future responses and actions. The fantasy of operationalism is the subtraction of the moment of human judgment: thus, for example, lethal autonomous weapons, smart cars, and similar technologies anticipate what might be described as automated justice: life-changing decisions made without human intervention. The operational city envisions a framework for environmental-scale governance that enables comprehensive data capture and the real-time modulation of the urban environment to influence behavior.
