10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17551
application/pdf
2038-3460
17551
2
en
Claudio Coletta
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Federico Cugurullo, Frankenstein Urbanism. Eco, Smart, and Autonomous Cities. Artificial Intelligence and the End of the City, Routledge, 2021
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
12
Book Reviews
2022-03-26
2023-06-30
2022-03-26
2023-10-23
221-223
TS
Claudio Coletta
2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17551
221
University of Bologna
2038-3460
2
en
223
Federico Cugurullo, Frankenstein Urbanism. Eco, Smart, and Autonomous Cities. Artificial Intelligence and the End of the City, Routledge, 2021
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17551/16399
12
Book Review                                                                 221
     Federico Cugurullo
Frankenstein Urbanism. Eco, Smart, and Autonomous Cities. Artificial In-
telligence and the End of the City, London and New York, Routledge,
2021, pp. 228

Claudio Coletta University of Bologna

    It is a fascinating journey the one that Federico Cugurullo invites us to
take on the trails of an urbanized Dr. Frankenstein and his awkward crea-
tures. The book adopts Mary Shelley’s notorious character as a guiding
metaphor to observe the contemporary urban experimentations across the
development of contemporary eco-cities, smart cities and autonomous cit-
ies in seek of the perfect urban equation. As pointed out by the author, Dr.
Frankenstein has at least one good point: cities are unjust, unequal, unsus-
tainable. They overconsume resources and represent one of the major
sources of global carbon emissions. They must be changed for better and
that requires experimentation. The how, where, to which ends, by and for
whom of these experimentations are precisely the matter of the book.
    The quest for building the ideal city has ancient roots, and, in the first
section of the book, the author proposes a genealogy of ideas underpinning
the notions of “ecological” and “smart city”. The common starting point is
the Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia and the idea of the city as a place
built by humans to realize human potential in harmony and happiness. The
book then describes how the “eudaimonic city” has been reinterpreted by
thinkers, urbanists, and activists across centuries (including Bacon, Spi-
noza, Geddes, Le Corbusier, Wright, Register), connecting the tradition of
environmental philosophy, planning theory, urban design, and geography
with the current debate on smart, sustainable, and experimental urbanism.
In this sense, the eco, smart, autonomous city labels become the latest ex-
pressions of an endless attempt to transform a fragile ecosystem made by
complex social, political, economic, and cultural processes.
    The empirical focus offers a documented and critical analysis of two
case studies: Masdar, a city built from scratch in the Abu-Dhabi metropol-
itan area, and the portions of the Special Administrative Region (SAR),
where the Hong Kong smart city vision is implemented. In so doing, the
book contributes to move the attention from a literature mainly centered
on European and North American cases towards some of the world largest
urban projects taking place in the Middle and Far East, where the levels of
investment and political-economic integration have impressively upscaled
in the last decades.
    Given the title, it will not be a spoiler to say that the book tells a story
of failures, whose hubris consists in pursuing grandiose projects that are
prematurely abandoned to their destiny and turned into monsters, as they
do not fit with the expectations. The “Frankenstein urbanism” introduced
222                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
by the author features a radical incompleteness and fragmentation, where
projects are more instrumental to exploitation and profitability than to im-
provement and sustainability, and where technocratic solutionism pro-
duces a chaotic and patchy urban landscape which lacks a regulating vi-
sion.
    While it does not directly engage with STS, the core of the book ac-
counts for a very well-documented political, technological, and financial
entanglement that will be appreciated by the STS readership. An exercise
of translation could thus suggest a possible STS version of the cases ex-
plored. Networks of human and non-human actors including ICT corpo-
rations, policy-makers, global engineering and design studios, energetic re-
sources and their carbon emissions are shaped by conflicting and converg-
ing agendas. Urban design and planning are adapted to the research and
development strategies of specific actor alliances, producing uneven social
conditions that recalls the debate on artefacts and their politics. Living labs
and test-bedding sites are used to produce, showcase, and exploit techno-
logical solutions to be sold to other cities, similarly to the dynamics de-
scribed by laboratory and innovation studies (with the laboratory being the
world). City master plans emerge as an uncertain and provisional result of
different programs of action. For example, the development of the Hong
Kong Science and Technology Park area (HKSTP) turns into a way to
boost specific economic sectors such as ICT, artificial intelligence, and bi-
otechnology instead of offering a smart environment for the potential in-
habitants. Likewise, in Masdar the mobility project based on Personal
Rapid Transit (PRT) is interrupted to accommodate the development of
self-driving vehicles by one of the corporate partners. Within this context,
the narratives set by the Hong Kong Smart City Blueprint and the Abu
Dhabi Vision 2030 reveal insufficient to steer the eco and smart develop-
ment in a coherent way. To the STS audience, the Masdar case will cer-
tainly evoke Bruno Latour’s Aramis (1996), the cold case investigation on
the automated train system developed in Paris. The ghost of Victor Frank-
enstein appears several times when Latour accounts for the mysterious kill-
ing of such a technologically advanced and long-lasting project. As hap-
pening in the Masdar PRT case, we assist to a collective assassination, as
the technological endeavor is distributed across crowds of actors able to
sew the stitches of the creature as much as to kill it.
    The final part of the book introduces the concept of transurbanism,
which indicates a shift from the urban management supported by ITC au-
tomation to an autonomous control by Artificial Intelligence (AI) without
human oversight. The focus is on Alibaba’s “City Brain” tested in the
HKSTP area, a ubiquitous artificial intelligence able to monitor the envi-
ronment and make decisions across multiple domains in an unsupervised
manner. As remarked by the author, here the Dr. Frankenstein metaphor
starts to teeter, since the creature overtakes in power its creator, and the
city “as we know it” moves into another mode of existence. For this reason,
Book Review                                                             223
in this part of the book, the new urban condition challenges the limits of
the critical and philosophical analysis and seems to require new tools for
interpretation.
    The author reflects on the ethical concerns arising from the increasing
deployment of AI in cities, both in terms of environmental and social sus-
tainability: a world performed by machine could likely diverge from the
human common good; plus, the AI development depends in the extraction
of rare-Earth elements, and this is already producing planetary exploitation
and inequalities. To understand the implications of transurbanism, the au-
thor proposes a further theoretical step where Horkheimer’s “Eclipse of
Reason” takes over Aristotle’s eudaimonia as the guiding concept. Follow-
ing the Frankfurt School thinker, the author describes how the subjective
reason and the individual fulfillment through technological empowerment
is increasingly dominant over the objective reason and the pursuing of
higher values such as justice, democracy, and sustainability. However, the
author does not endorse an apocalyptic vision and refers to apocalypse in
its original meaning, as a “revelation” of a new phenomenon that we are
just beginning to understand. An eclipse of reason by technology could
have started but is hardly complete, the author argues, as AI should be
situated in different geographical contexts, mediated by multiple and het-
erogeneous social and urban processes, with diverse and unpredictable
outcomes.
    To conclude, “Frankenstein Urbanism” digs critically into the shiny
surface of eco, smart, and autonomous cities. It offers an original and
clearly written contribution to understand the digital and ecological trans-
formations of the urban environment and the possible urban futures. Plus,
the concept of transurbanism and its philosophical roots offer an innova-
tive lens for scholars interested in the current debate on platform urban-
ism. Finally, the rich empirical ground and the analytical toolkit open up
an interzone of dialogue for STS, with more to investigate into the material
and infrastructural dimension of ecologic and digital urban transitions, and
their glitchy and fragile existences.

References
Latour, B. (1996) Aramis, or the Love of Technology, Cambridge, MA, Harvard
       University Press.

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