The question concerning technology

Martin Heidegger's lecture The question concerning technology was first delivered in Germany in 1953; in it, Heidegger asserts that modern technology transforms humanity into its own standing-reserve, that is, technology asks of nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such. The philosopher argues we must respond by investigating technology in order to prepare us to relate to it, think about it, and imagine it in relation to the city. For Heidegger, while the windmill creates energy in real time, the hydroelectric dam seeks to make it and store it, thus turning the river into an energy resource. This modern technology changes the way we think of nature and each other, turning us into resources. The creation and storage of electrical energy therefore makes the source of the processes that produce this energy — in this case, the Rhine river — appear to be something we can command. The saving power of technology, therefore, lies only with our ability to listen, reflect and witness. The problems of ecological and economic crisis, overcrowding, pollution, ambient noise and light must all be managed.

Heidegger's lecture befits the problematic of the 2012 Urban Age Electric Cities conference, which took place in London last 6 and 7 December. Organised by the LSE Cities and the Alfred Herrhausen Society of Deutsche Bank, and supported by the Mayor of London, this was the latest in a series of conferences initiated in 2005, focusing on the social and spatial elements of cities as well as their sustainable development. In this case, the conference format entailed short talks by keynote speakers followed by pithy presentations and a roundtable discussion. The format enabled a great diversity of opinion and compact data, with lots of detail in the various expert approaches from technologists, academics, analysts and politicians, as well as questions from delegates, working together to foment new ideas.

Conference speakers answered the vexed question of how we can use technology to solve problems and improve lives and how it has failed us in various ways, following themes such as optimization, trust, and scale of technology in the city. With an optimistic point of view, LSE professors Ricky Burdett and Philipp Rode quoted Cedric Price saying "Technology is the answer. But what is the question?", inferring a kind of promise or hope that could be entailed in the use of technology to solve social and urban problems, so long as it is regulated. The variation in critical or encouraging approaches seemed to be entailed in their scale. In his keynote The stupefying smart city, Richard Sennett argued that discussion of the city as a "smart city" is too optimistic, as the smarter the network often the dumber the people connected to it. On the other hand, ideas that were implemented on a smaller scale seemed to be more effective, with encouraging results.

Several speakers emphasised the importance of the "genius of the city", casual, informal social processes which become a source of innovation economically and a foundation of social life. This so called serendipity is a result of complexity. Lancaster University's John Urry noted how innovation is a matter of particularly unplanned synchronization across social, political and economic entities in unplanned but not uncoordinated ways. And according to MIT's Carlo Ratti, the technical, communication and information possibilities created by the web 2.0 provide the right circumstances for hands on involvement of articulate citizens and companies in formulating sustainability and local environmental policies.

The genesis of trust is transparency, Columbia University's Saskia Sassen said, and all of our computerised systems should become transparent. Since our walls are pregnant with soft and hardware they and other intelligent systems should be visible. So far the smart city, and technical solutions imposed in decontextualised ways, have entailed a form of distrust. This is important on cross-demographic national issues like climate change, which in turn have been less successful. LSE Emeritus Professor Antony Giddens warned, citing the failure of the intergovernmental panel on Climate Change, that most of the more fantastic visions of technology endow us with individualistic solutions while enabling irreparable collective damage. So we extend the issue of trust to implement effective technical solutions: they will only work insomuch as we trust each other. For Fabrica's CEO Dan Hill, this is why we need adaptive decision-making structures.

Of course who to trust can be a confusing issue. Antony Giddens argued for increased trust in science, while CISCO representative Wim Elfrink argued for continued trust in technical solutions. Elfrink pointed out that CISCO systems are enabling the work to travel to the worker, for example with the Amsterdam Smart Work initiative, a collaboration of private and public stakeholders, rendering office and working hours obsolete with a results oriented approach. Obviously it takes a fair amount of trust in your worker to enable this kind of innovation. LSE and the British Government seem to be in accord with this kind of dislocated collaboration, using the conference opening to announce a plan for a £50m development on Silicon Roundabout, a Tech City which should be the largest civic space in Europe to host freelance software designers, support start-ups and digital entrepreneurs of the access economy.

Whilst very successfully engaging with these issues of scale, trust and optimisation of technology, a couple of issues could have been better addressed. For a conference on the Electric City, there could have been more discussion of how cities can be generative of energy as well as how the consume it, and are increasingly managed by it, with only passing references to the London Array Offshore Wind Farm. LSE's Judy Wajcman raised the point that the needs of the private sphere, from appliances to different forms of households, had been largely omitted from discourse. While the range of point of views was diverse it is fair to say that there was a predominance of male speakers, sometimes making up every voice. Despite the over representation of men in technology business, this could be an issue addressed at the next Urban Age Conference which will be held in 2013 in São Paulo. The issue of how technology may be harnessed to manage or transform migration flows between cities was also largely off the agenda, despite the potentially crucial role digital communications technology could play in regeneration of small to medium cities, and keeping the larger cities to scale.

The one theme that united all participants of this conference, however, was change. How it would be managed, for what objective and with whose interests in mind were the major points of debate. If modern technology for Heidegger is a revelation then this conference served its purpose as well as the purpose of technology, that is, to reveal by challenging. Bringing together such diverse points of view in a structured format allowed people to think about solutions that could encapsulate more than their own agenda, stimulating the minor mutations and shifts that result in innovation. As Heidegger would have it, whether we experience modern technology as a threat seems to lie with humans' ability to listen and debate. Naturally these human are themselves a variety of viewpoints, and must engage each other in their understanding of technology and its uses. Philippa Nicole Barr