After Cybernetics: Treatise for Future Urbanisms
Orit Halpern
Cybernetic architecture is not a revolution. It is an EVOLUTION.
--ZHVR Group 2021
Since 2014, Zaha Hadid Virtual Reality Group, part of Hadid Partners Architecture Firm, has had a focus on cybernetic architecture. This architecture involves what they label the ‘metaverse’. The metaverse integrates physical with digital worlds seamlessly. In industry parlance it is a world populated by what are euphemistically titled ‘cyber-physical’ assets.
ZHVR performs fancy simulations of this possibility. Their aesthetics only reveal what many cities already aspire to do—mainly to assetize their infrastructures and built environments through augmented reality and smart technologies. Planners aspire to making the city more dynamic, interactive, responsive to its citizens while simultaneously improving profits without taxation. As ZHVR announces, the new machine-driven feedback architecture will evolve. Such architectures will no longer serve the political function of providing space for representation of the demos (revolution), but rather will generate self-organizing and adaptive cities (biological evolution).
One pioneering proposal from ZHVR is Liberland Metaverse. This is an idea taken from a disputed land known as the Free Republic of Liberland - a micronation claimed by the Czech right-libertarian politician and activist Vít Jedlička that covers a supposedly uninhabited piece of disputed land on the western bank of the Danube, between Croatia and Serbia(News, 2022). This metaverse presents an extreme vision of smartness; a city absolutely virtual and no longer managed by a national government. Liberland Metaverse embodies many of the latent and unspoken aspirations for smart cities. Ubiquitous computing will liberate society from the shackles of government, producing ‘free’ spaces predicated on the abnegation of differences between the virtual and the ‘real’ and the porousness of materials. What makes this metaverse fantasy unique is ZHVR’s insistence on the language of cybernetics. These architects thus make explicit the often latent and repressed political promise of smartness; mainly that ‘freedom’ and growth (both biological and economic) may be achieved through AI and ubiquitous computing technology.
Imagined by neo-libertarian architects, none of this, has yet come to pass. But it could, and perhaps in certain senses already has. The fantasy of a nation governed only by machine oligarchs sans voting is prevalent in contemporary alt-right politics.
This cybernetic haunting of our present reminds us that technology determines nothing without an imaginary. What then was the cybernetic city that we might wish to re-imagine it for the future? And what are the contesting possible futures of smartness and cybernetics currently shaping urbanism?
To begin interrogating the political impact of smart cities, it is worth, therefore investigating a longer genealogy of urbanism’s relationship to computation, communication, and control. To ask this question we might wish to delve (briefly) into the past.
The original term “cybernetics” was coined in the late 1940s to describe the application of communications engineering, mathematical logic, and physics to the study and control of human, animal, and machine systems. In the two decades after World War II, cybernetics inflamed the imaginations of politicians, architecture, biologists, ecologists, psychologists, and, of course, nascent computer scientists. The idea that minds, machines, and even entire ecosystems could all be modelled as communication systems seemingly offered utopian promise for a post-war world.
From the start, cybernetics also held political promise. The very language comes from the Greek term ‘Kubernetes’ for “steersman” or “governor”; the root of ‘govern’ and ‘government’. Cybernetics was concerned with managing the future through controlling communication.
This concern with governing the future, emerged from the wartime milieu. Researchers in mathematics, physiology, and engineering working jointly on antiaircraft defense research at MIT came to realize that, under the stress of being targeted by missiles, human beings (pilots) act repetitively in a manner amenable to mathematical modeling and prediction. In recognizing that individual behavior could be turned into logical and statistical patterns, early cyberneticians articulated a new belief that both machines and humans could speak the same language of mathematics, and that therefore both could be treated equivalently and that their behavior could be predicted (Galison, 1994; Edwards, 1997; Hayles, 1999).
This wartime research also brought another discovery: the concept of feedback. These researchers recognized that the problem of shooting down planes was not about guns or pilots, but about the interaction between the gun and the plane’s pilot. It was a statistical relationship of probabilities. What the pilot does in the cockpit has to be transmitted back to the antiaircraft gun, in order to predict where the plane will be. The gun and the plane are communicating. These two ideas—behaviorism and feedback—have since set the stage for our contemporary modes of social networking and our data-driven lives. If today we take as seemingly natural the seamless integration of our bodies, attentions, and economies with machines, it is in the legacy of this moment (Halpern, 2005). From the beginning, cybernetics heralded a challenge to anthropocentrism, but also to politics. The very language was associated with government, but applied to machines and animals; the human and the more than human.
After the war, cybernetics in its many forms spread like wildfire to many fields far away from engineering or computing. Cybernetics birthed cognitive psychology, reformulated the life and human sciences (including the reformulation of genetics as “code” in DNA), and transformed many disciplines in terms of system and networks in fields ranging from ethology to ecology to urban planning and architecture. Artists, architects, engineers, and scientists turned to cybernetic ideas to describe a world comprised of communicative exchanges between agents, rather than one made up of static objects. (Martin, 2003; Halpern, 2015; Deleuze, 1992).
Architects of course were amongst those most influenced by the new communication paradigm. American designer and polymath, Buckminster Fuller, imagined the Earth as a cybernetic machine. He drew cities enclosed within geodesic domes that could control the environment through the perfect measurement and calibration of energy, metabolism, and human behavior.
© Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao
He fantasized an earth that could be technically engineered to optimize the use of resources, energy, and waste. This was a world controlled through science and machines. Cities came to be understood as spaces of information circulation (for example, data on toxins, air quality, economy) that could be contained and managed through feedback loops.
Later Fuller would label the whole planet as a closed cybernetic space, a ‘spaceship earth’. Like NASA spaceships of the time, managed through their computational and machine systems, the same would be true of the planet. The planet imagined as a computational design problem to be solved.
Fuller’s imaginary anticipated the famous report titled ‘Limits to Growth’; the first computer model of planetary human impacts on the environment. Limits inaugurated the contemporary environmental movement and redefining climate as a medium for engineering. Today, geo-engineering, space colonization, and green design can all find their roots in this past (Höhler, 2015; Anker, 2010).
Others took more whimsical and critical approaches. Walking cities, disposable landscapes, megastructures, floating cities. For example, in the 1960’s the cybernetically inspired British Group Archigram imagined walking cities bringing their workers to different locales. This was an ironic but prophetic take on contemporary migration, mechanization, and globalization. For them, the new machines of computation and information were also about global networks and disposable goods. They took cybernetics to an extreme making visible the contemporary workings of capital and labor.
Archigram, Ron Herron ‘Walking Cities’ 1966. Also available at from MoMA collection.
At the same time, the Japanese architectural movement, Metabolism, foregrounded the optimization of “metabolic” processes of metropolitanism such as energy circulation, infrastructural growth, and economic prosperity, perhaps anticipated the current investment in self-regulating, sentient, smart cities (Furuhata, 2022). Metabolists were deeply influenced by cybernetic ideas of systems circulating information, energy, and materials. ‘Marine City’, for example, proposed by Kiyonari Kikutake suggested a “new human community in the sea,” an answer to the limitations of land and political instability emerging from post-war scarcity in Japan. These megastructures were imagined as capable of remaking the geographies and perhaps the national boundaries and resource constraints that were the excuses for the War through a new relationship between the urban and rural, and the polis and nature, imagined through inspiration from cybernetics.
© Marine City Megastructure / Kiyonari Kikutake
The French art group, the Situationists, imagined psycho-geographies, expanding the networks of intelligence to the environment, and envisaging utopias where machines would do all the work allowing humans to indulge in other activities. Cybernetics for them was a new image of automation that might lead to mass liberation.
Whatever the fantasy—Marxist, Utopian, Neo-Liberal-- the cybernetic city never truly was. It was a world to come grounded in a fantasy of machines that were only beginning to exist. But one thing that always haunted the dreams of machines intimately networked into human life was the question of government. The MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, who coined the label ‘cybernetics’ was opposed to McCarthyism and embedded in the Cold War. Wiener worried that this new paradigm for machines and animals might create slaves through automation. At the edge of this concern was an unspoken question of whether the cybernetic paradigm in de-centering the liberal human might pose terminal threats to liberal democracy and freedom (Wiener, 1967). Paranoia and authoritarianism appeared as capable of using information as democracies.
In our present even the memory of government is erased. The language of Cybernetics and its direct and explicit relationship to governors and government to politics had been repressed or entirely suppressed. Smartness and Artificial Intelligence have replaced cybernetics in the urban imaginary and in our language. Many cities around the world aspire to this computationally enabled intelligence— Berlin, Dubai, Singapore, New York, Nanjing, Eko Atlantic. There is a regularly repeated protocol to these speculations usually carried out by planners, policy makers, large developers, and tech corporations. Making a city smart usually involves constructing a dense net of sensors, often embedded in and around more traditional infrastructures throughout the urban environment, such as transportation systems, electrical grids and water systems. The city also solicits the distributed input of its inhabitants through active technological means, such as smartphone apps. Finally, high-end computing, AI, and learning algorithms are deployed to analyze the resulting data, with the goal of optimizing urban technical, social and political processes.
Preceding all of this usually comes speculative capital, generated through advanced marketing campaigns, and, of course, the arcane mechanisms of real-estate development. These mechanisms include zoning. Smartness happens in zones—special economic zones, innovation zones, tax free and regulatory free zones. These zones demand capital and they enjoy “extra-statecraft”, not the absence of the state, but the exception to its laws—and its voters (Easterling, 2012).
Not all these imagined intelligent settlements are envisioned for oligarchs, but they are often still techno-determined and financialized. Bjark Ingels Group imagines floating cities to provide haven and refuge for urban denizens afflicted by climate change. Scape studios imagined oyster sea-beds defending New York City after Hurricane Sandy from sea level rise while enjoyably being eaten by citizens. They labelled it ‘oystertecture’. And there are many others that have emerged over the past decade.
Cities have, of course, long been central to politics, technology, and ideas of human subjectivity and agency. The very term city in English derives from the Latin civitas. The city in Western tradition was imagined as the seat of the demos and the polis where humans were separated from nature. This separation is central to the concept of the political as realm of human action, and the city as the site in which human agency and politics are enacted.
Smartness rests on the fundamental assumption that such ideas of human agency and spatial containment are now obsolete. The central idea in artificial intelligence is that humans can no longer exercise agency autonomously without a new form of nature—mainly technology. We might then assume smart cities will not replicate earlier concepts of the urban.
It is perhaps a marker of this new form of territory that, perhaps counter-intuitively, a smart city is not synonymous with a utopian—or even a specific—’form’ of the city. The smart city has no stable ideal form for the foreseeable future. The smart city is constantly evolving through data, and therefore capable of speciation and mutation. The smart city is now modelled as ‘natural’ extending into the seas, integrating local wetlands, becoming ‘planetary’ to use the term in trespassing the boundaries between species, materials, and technical and biological systems. There is no endpoint to the smart city, it is infinitely extendable and changeable.
In this sense, the smart city is quite unlike utopian cities as they were imagined in recent modernity, when it was presumed that a specific form—such as Le Corbusier’s ‘Radiant City’ or the concentric circles of Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities or the modernism of Brasília—would enable a specific goal, such as integration of humans into natural processes, or colonial domination, or economic growth, or an increase in collective happiness, or democratic political participation. Even the cybernetic cities had forms—round towers, geodesic domes, megastructures. Ideal forms that should be replicated. These forms might have expanded over the surface of the earth, but they imagined an earth and gave it figurative and spatial forms and limits.
Rather, a city is ‘smart’ when it achieves the capacity to adjust to any new and unexpected threats and possibilities that may emerge from the city’s ecological, political, social and economic environments (a capacity that is generally referred to in planning documents with the term ‘resilience’ ). In short, a smart city is a site of perpetual learning, and a city is smart when it achieves the capacity to engage in perpetual learning. In the smart city fantasies of directed and agential political revolution are replaced by responsive evolution.
As the smart city constantly adapts, the people who live in it also have to adjust. The inhabitants of a smart city necessarily become perpetual learners. A new language has emerged. People must become ‘innovative’ and ‘resilient’; capable of evolving and adapting to crisis constantly. Resilience is a term taken from ecology, it is about the new nature of technical systems. This nature is put there to withstand catastrophes, mainly those of politics and climate. Cities also must be resilient.
Smartness and AI guarantee this resilience by managing sea walls, measuring flows of water, people, and resources, and always optimizing—turning limits in resources, environments, and health into frontiers for computing. New organisms possess capacities to compute; i.e fungal networks, bacteria, and bio-materials. Technology has become the new nature, and the smart or intelligent city is now the engine of evolution, not revolution. Societies and political agency do not figure in this vision for capital. Nor does equity or difference.
However, the smart city’s smartness is not supposed to be imposed upon its urban inhabitants from above. Rather, this smartness is supposed to result from the combination of the inhabitants’ unique individual perspectives and choices. Smartness presumes that these acts of combination cannot be accomplished by humans alone, but require the assistance of computing (and now biological) processes—or, more specifically, algorithms that teach the smart city (and its inhabitants) new ways in which to learn. Very much like “the market” of neoliberal economic theory, smartness optimizes processes by combining multiple perspectives in ways that cannot be achieved by any group of human planners. For some of its advocates, the ability of smartness to automate the combination of an enormous number of individual perspectives makes it possible to imagine that politics—that messy realm of self-interest, which often only seems fully open to a select few—can be replaced by technological processes, ones that can actually achieve what democracy only promises.
Smartness is then predicated on the assumption that humans have incomplete information and need the guidance of the market—now social network—or perhaps the state. In smart neoliberal regimes, such networks are assumed to be self-organizing and “free,” but never planned (and certainly not by the government). Others are inverse mirrors, perhaps guided by bureaucratic policy, but still emerging from population-level data through networks. Each instantiation is unique, but all share the premise that that technology manages what the liberal nation-state could not or never did.
Smartness therefore means participation, but not necessarily representation or power. Denizens of a city can offer their data and opinion, but not necessarily control the networks to which they speak. Utopia can never be reached, only versioned. This dream of smartness as a route to freedom (or sovereignty) through surveillance and perpetual learning is the marker of contemporary political economies (platforms), geopolitics, and individual self-fashioning alike.
But learning also offers smartness a faint hope. Such systems might also produce new relations between life and technology. The original cybernetic precept that we only learn in relationship to others might forge possibilities for new relations and networks between humans, geographies, and more-than-human entities.
At the start of the cybernetic revolution, Norbert Wiener raised a concern—what did it mean to learn? In a famous book ‘I am a Mathematician’ written in 1956 at the start of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States of America, Wiener wrote that already at age eleven he had recognized the limits to the idea that mathematical logic might be able to represent the world, and that the systematic and systemic application of rules might equate with education. Education is of course beyond learning, it’s an institutional and social practice, ‘man’s engagement with his environment’ to quote Wiener (Wiener, 1956: 323-325).
Wiener only repeated a statement made two years before concerning Brown vs. the Board of Education that ‘separate’ education cannot be ‘equal’. The case put before the courts was that the very institutional and structural separation of black children from white produced a sense of inferiority, and deprived black students of their potential to become part of the demos; to enact political will and to become full citizens. This reduction of learning to rules, it can be deduced, forestalled the possibility of the United States realizing its potential as a diverse democracy. Simply learning the same thing in a different (and impoverished) institutional setting would not result in the same future.
These concerns appear distant from our present, but they are not. The myth of technocratic solutions to political and social challenges obscures the social context—i.e. histories, ideologies, aesthetics, and institutions—that shape what is learned, how, for whom, and to what ends. To return consciousness to learning—that is to say history, knowledge, difference, and above all an idea of futurity—is the only thing that might also enable equity and democracy. There is no discussion of artificial general intelligence that includes the question of where and how one learns, or that understands learning beyond the ability to adapt to change to an existing condition. There is no concept of smartness that includes projection; the ability to imagine counterfactual and alternative realities. There is no possibility within our technical imaginary of a machine learning that can envision political possibility. The discourse of smartness has merged technical and bio-determinism and replaced the language of education with that of adaptation and evolution. The idea of change is now in the language of self-organizing systems.
Cybernetics, in turn, made governance explicit. The cybernetic city of the future should be one that does not automate the social, but reflexively seeks to experiment and consciously reflect upon the political. Ultimately, the challenge we face is how to learn in new ways, beyond the parameters of our own conditioning, to envision new forms of connection to the machines, humans, and animals that we share our world with.
Literature
Anker P (2010) From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Deleuze G (1992) Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59: 3-7.
Easterling K (2012) Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft. Places.
Edwards PN (1997) The closed world computers and the politics of discourse in cold war america. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.
Furuhata Y (2022) Climactic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmopsheric Control. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.
Galison P (1994) The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision. Critical Inquiry 21: 228-266.
Halpern O (2005) Dreams for Our Perceptual Present: Temporality, Storage, and Interactivity in Cybernetics. Configurations 13(2): 36.
Halpern O (2015) Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hayles NK (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Höhler S (2015) Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960–1990. London: Pickering and Chatto Publishers.
Martin R (2003) The organizational complex : architecture, media, and corporate space. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.
News UKA (2022) Zaha Hadid Architects reveals its "cyber-urban" metaverse city. Available at: https://worldarchitecture.org/architecture-news/enhmn/zaha-hadid-architects-reveals-its-cyber-urban-metaverse-city.html (accessed May 11).
Wiener N (1956) I am a mathematician, the later life of a prodigy; an autobiographical account of the mature years and career of Norbert Wiener and a continuation of the account of his childhood in Ex-prodigy. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday.
Wiener N (1967) The human use of human beings : cybernetics and society. New York: New York : Avon Books.
Orit Halpern is Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. She directs the Against Catastrophe project. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard. She has held numerous visiting scholar positions including at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, IKKM Weimar, and at Duke University. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of intelligence and evolution; the second project examines extreme infrastructures and the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering. She has also published widely in many venues including Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, Journal of Visual Culture, and E-Flux. Her first book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason(Duke UP 2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and governmentality. Her current book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press 2023) is titled the Smartness Mandate. She is also one of the Primary Investigators of the Governing through Design Research Group and a P.I. on the AUDACE FQRSC project Reclaiming the Planet, both which sponsor this project.