10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17386
application/pdf
2038-3460
17386
2
en
Susann Wagenknecht
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Markus Krajewski, Jasmin Meerhoff and Stephan Trüby (eds.), Architectures of Subservience. Between Back-Corridors and Ambient Intelligence, Wasmuth, 2017 + Andreas Meier and Edy Portmann (eds.), Smart City. Strategy, Governance and Projects, Springer Vieweg, 2016
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
8
Book Reviews
2018-01-29
2023-06-25
2018-01-29
2023-08-24
233-236
TS
Susann Wagenknecht
2017
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17386
233
Siegen University
2038-3460
2
en
236
Markus Krajewski, Jasmin Meerhoff and Stephan Trüby (eds.), Architectures of Subservience. Between Back-Corridors and Ambient Intelligence, Wasmuth, 2017 + Andreas Meier and Edy Portmann (eds.), Smart City. Strategy, Governance and Projects, Springer Vieweg, 2016
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17386/16246
8
Book Review                                                                   233
part of the current discourse on science and technology. Whereas by itself
it offers a provocative and engaging read. To me its the propositional ap-
proach Gabrys follows, in combination with the rich empirical accounts
on societally pressing issues, that makes it helpful in challenging the oth-
erwise settled rules and roles of science and technology.

References
Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene,
      Durham, Duke University Press.
Hayles, N.K. (2009) RFID: Human agency and meaning in information-intensive
       environments, in “Theory, Culture & Society”, 26 (2-3), pp. 47–72.
Irwin, A. Wynne, B. (2003) Misunderstanding science?: the public reconstruction
        of science and technology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Jasanoff, S. (2004) The idiom of co-production, in S. Jasanoff (ed.), States of
       knowledge: the co-production of science and social order, London,
       Routledge, pp. 1–12.
Kitchin, R. and Dodge, M. (2011) Code/space: Software and everyday life, Cam-
       bridge, MA, MIT Press.
Law, J., Lien, M.E. (2013) Slippery: Field notes in empirical ontology, in “Social
        Studies of Science”, 43 (3), pp. 363–378.



                                       ***

     Markus Krajewski, Jasmin Meerhoff and Stephan Trüby
(eds.)
Dienstbarkeitsarchitekturen. Zwischen Service-Korridor und Ambient In-
telligence [Architectures of Subservience. Between Back-Corridors and
Ambient Intelligence], Tübingen-Berlin, Wasmuth, 2017, pp. 462

   Andreas Meier and Edy Portmann (eds.)
Smart City. Strategie, Governance und Projekte [Smart City. Strategy,
Governance and Projects], Wiesbaden, Springer Vieweg, 2016, pp.
346
Susann Wagenknecht Siegen University

    Smart cities, talk of the town. But are we about to construct a new ur-
ban architecture indeed – an architecture that will serve the needs of our
cities better, in more efficient, more sustainable and more participatory
234                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

ways? These new architectures are hard to see; they are difficult to exam-
ine in detail, with nuance and without being blinded by a firework of
promises. This is not because there are few “real” smart cities but be-
cause they are elusive, half vision and half practice, both municipal poli-
tics and global business, sometimes promotional façade, sometimes bland
bureaucratic initiative, lauded as transparent while criticized as black box.
    A special trick, hence, is needed to get a better picture. This trick, I
propose, consists in reviewing two recent, rather distinct book in German
language at the same time, reading them against one another. Smart City,
edited by Andreas Meier and Edy Portmann, is, according to its back
cover, a book for city planners, politicians, citizens and researchers in in-
formation systems. Smart City is full of advice, some of it premonitory, on
how to put digital media to use on an urban scale and for urban concerns.
The book proposes concepts, models and evaluation strategies in seven
chapters: Smart Governance, Smart Participation, Smart Living, Smart
Education, Smart Mobility, Smart Energy and Smart Economy – 16 con-
tributions in total.
    The second book, Dienstbarkeitsarchitekturen, edited by Markus
Krajewski, Jasmin Meerhoff and Stephan Trüby, does not counsel but
hijack its readers, taking them on a tour through the staff entrance, along
the service hallway, beyond hidden doors and to the kitchen wing. With
13 contributions ranging from art history and cultural studies to sociology
and media studies, the book explores architectures of subservience
(German: Dienstbarkeit) – i.e., the carefully installed mechanisms, so-
phisticated yet unobtrusive, through which service has been achieved in
the past and is achieved today. Anna Mader-Kratky (pp. 88-117), for in-
stance, carefully examines the intricate architectural design and the prac-
tices of spatial coordination that ensured imperial service at the Hofburg,
the Austrian Emperor’s palace in the centre of Vienna. These practices
increasingly (and in increasingly elaborate ways) isolated lifeworlds at
court. Today, however, not emperors but customers rule. Marcus
Termeer, in another chapter of Dienstbarkeitsarchitekturen, shows how
“concierge living” and a renaissance of exclusive, door-manned housing
complexes accommodate contemporary notions of service with the help
of sensor and surveillance technologies.
    The two books complement one another in standpoint and expertise.
Smart City offers an abundance of technological expertise; it is pragmatic
and affirmative, seeking to put emancipatory visions of smart city into
practice. Smart City is best read as a compendium of infrastructural ex-
periments in urban governance. Its chapter on Smart Participation, for
example, contains three articles each of which approaches the challenges
of civic participation in municipal management from a different angle.
Martina Löw and Lea Rothmann (pp. 73-101) show how smart city initia-
tives such as electric car sharing are blurring conventional boundaries be-
tween private and public space, boundaries constitutive for Western no-
Book Review                                                               235
tions of ‘good’ society. Since public/private spatial relations in smart cit-
ies are likely to change, Löw and Rothmann call for more civic education
and participation, buttressed by legal regulation. Jan Fivaz and Daniel
Schwarz (pp. 103-129) respond to calls for more civic participation by
outlining how smart cities, understood as techno-political laboratories,
can use data to strengthen municipal democracy. Finally, Susanne Robra-
Bissantz and colleagues (pp. 131-150) report from their experiences with
an interactive platform for urban development that uses mapping and vir-
tual reality technologies for “hands-on” participation.
     Issues of civic participation get particularly salient once smart cities
are managed in public private partnership (PPP). As Evgeny Morozov
(2017) predicts, companies such as Alphabet are soon taking over vital
urban services, a phenomenon he calls “Google Urbanism.” Through
PPP, smart cities will be equipped with an elaborate integration of sen-
sors, data, Civic needs and services – “smart services” such as personal-
ized public transport or discreet, affordable 24/7 assistance for the elder-
ly. It comes in handy, thus, that Smart Cities outlines a way to account for
the role of PPPs in models of smart city governance (Walser and Haller,
pp. 19-46) while keeping smart cities “open” in terms of data access and
participation (Habenstein et al., 47-71). However, browsing through the
book’s screen shots, diagrams, tables and flow charts raises the suspicion
that the social, political and cultural implications of these smart urban
service architectures are not yet understood. Dienstbarkeitsarchitekturen
inspires to explore and frame such suspicions in terms of Kafka’s imagery
(Balke, 198-226), the imagery of architecture that is supposed to serve
(the citizen, the king) but is gradually, and painfully, revealed to be a trap
beyond anyone’s control.
     Dienstbarkeitsarchitekturen conveys a historical perspective, includ-
ing a chapter about the ubiquitous domestic presence of slavery in the
Roman Empire (Eigler and Lämmle, 50-85). The contributions in the
book take a distanced stance, highlighting the ambivalent and intricate
relations between master and servant, between power and its premises.
Stateroom and kitchen wing may be worlds apart, and yet they form part
of the same regime of power. Many of the contributions in the book,
then, search for the viewpoint from which the fragility—the powerless-
ness—of power becomes visible. In their analysis of ancient architecture
and the domestic life of Roman masters and their slaves, Eigler and
Lämmle (71) resort to Hotel California, the 1977 Eagles rock song: “Mir-
rors on the ceiling, the pink champagne on ice / And she said, ‘We are all
just prisoners here of our own device’.”
     Dienstbarkeitsarchitekturen stubbornly returns to these oscillations
between technology-mediated service and automated domination (also in
Schürer, 288-329). Unflinchingly, Dienstbarkeitsarchitekturen focuses
upon the power of infrastructures and infrastructures of power, unearth-
ing their – sometimes conflicting (Potthast, 230-266) – regimes of control,
236                                                             Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

visibility and worship. Smart City, in contrast, is so attuned to questioned
of municipal governance that it largely leaves aside broader issues of gov-
ernmentality and power. The book has not yet found a vocabulary rich
enough to put ambivalence and critique into practice. In Smart City, con-
cern is most clearly voiced on the first page of its preface, written by An-
dreas Flückinger, chief of staff of technology of the city of St. Gallen:
“The city of the future must not become the playground of IT-loving ur-
ban hipsters, neither a fully-surveilled paradise of leisure and consump-
tion. The city must remain living space for everyone… The city is a com-
munity, not a consumer good” (Flückinger, ix). Flückinger seems to sense
that well-meaning visions and neatly designed systems, in all their ele-
gance and technical refinement, can go awry. Dienstbarkeitsarchi-
tekturen, in turn, illustrates how technological visions and systems have
taken effect in past and present, offering ample illustration of both the
comfort and the constraint, the warmth as well as the cold discipline that
‘subservient’ technologies add to our lives—particularly well demonstrat-
ed in a chapter on Allan Wexler, an artist whose installations question the
functionalism of modern architecture (Ruhl, 369-420).
    No book shop, no library will stack these two books next to one an-
other. No algorithm will recommend the one when you are about to pur-
chase the other. But while both books are a good read for their intended
audiences, taken together they offer a truly fascinating glimpse of what
future research into digitalized urbanity and its infrastructures may look
like. Future research will have to navigate the “gap between affirmative
and activist” perspectives upon smart cities (Brauriedl and Strüver 2017),
a task that requires it all: enthusiasm for heterogeneous cooperation, the
willingness to embrace technological futures and the capacity to recog-
nize its shifting, oscillating ambivalences.

References
Brauriedl, S. and Strüver, A. (2017) Smarte Städte. Digitalisierte urbane Infra-
       strukturen und ihre Subjekte als Themenfeld kritischer Stadtforschung, in
       “sub\urban, Zeitschrift für kritische Stadtforschung”, 5 (1/2), pp. 87-104
Morozov, E. (2017) Google’s plan to revolutionise cities is a takeover in all but
      name. Parent company Alphabet would provide services in response to
      data harvested, in “The Guardian”, October 22.




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