Lecture: Can we experiment towards a better city?

Over the last couple of months, Matthew Claudel (PhD researcher MIT) has been doing research in Amsterdam, both at the CTO office and AMS Institute. Amsterdam is the last of the 3 cities Matthew researched (next to Boston and Montreal). Accompanied by farewell drinks and a small snack he will present some of his early findings. Please let us know you’re coming by accepting this invitation.

Matthew’s research focusses on urban experimentation as a new site for the design and governance of urban technology.

New technologies are digging into cities, mining and distributing their value in new ways; assets are fractionalized, monopolies are formed, the immaterial is ungovernable. In sum, the established frameworks for creating and governing the value of cities is no longer effective.

Municipal governments, technologists, and organizations around the world are using experiments to move forward in this unknown. As an emerging urban practice, experimentation can be a way of answering questions about technology and collective futures. Experiments are an open terrain for the design, diffusion, deliberation, and regulation of new technology, where power and governance are being reconfigured.

But how open are they? How are urban experiments being structured, used, and abused? What are their outcomes? What can we learn from experiments in various cities… and can we experiment towards a better city? In this talk, I show a typology of urban experiments, articulate a critique of contemporary practice, and offer four key interventions that can sharpen the emerging practices of experimentation.

EVENT DETAILS

• Date: December 11th, 2019
• Time: 16.30 – 18.00h
• Location: AMS Institute, Kattenburgerstraat 5, Building 027W, 3rd Floor, Amsterdam
• Language: English
• RSVP: maud.kaan@ams-institute.org