Professor Saskia Sassen works toward ‘urbanizing technology’

Most Columbians spend hours a day interacting with the sounds, sidewalks, and buildings of the city, as well as with the smart technology of an iPhone or Droid or tablet—often simultaneously. But how many actively consider the interface between that urban environment and technology? Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology Saskia Sassen, for one, is not only thinking about this relationship but pioneering how it will be perceived going forward.

For her “passionate advocacy of an urban-based society,” Sassen was awarded the number 43 spot on Foreign Policy Magazine’s 2011 list of “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” announced Nov. 28. Sharing the honor with Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, Sassen comes in 32 rankings after President Barack Obama and is one of the few non-diplomats on the list. This announcement comes just a couple of weeks after Audi launched its Urban Future Initiative, which will fund Sassen on a new project called “Urbanizing Technologies: The Mobility Complex.”

“The aim is not practical applications, though these might develop,” Sassen said of the project, corresponding by email between flights around Australia. “Nor is it science fiction. One way of describing it is the articulation, the marriage of a range of mobility capacities with a range of spaces not usually associated with those capacities. The particular angle I want to explore is how we can urbanize those capacities—so the spaces are urban spaces.” Sassen will solicit experimental engineers and technologists to help in this research.

To further explain, Sassen discussed a concrete problem her team could work to address. “Cars made for speed and distance that can handle all kinds of terrains, come to a crawl in the dense central city,” she said. “In a way, the city is hacking the car—it is unsettling the engineers’ design.” Tailoring cars to better handle sitting in rush hour would be one way to urbanize them.

But that is just one example in a much larger matrix of issues. “From there then, is this notion of mobility spaces, rather than just mobility devices, like the car,” Sassen said.

Sassen’s ultimate focus is on the “global city,” a term she coined.

Others imagine advanced urban environments as playgrounds of intelligent buildings—pre-fabricated structures outfitted with interactive technology. To bring the scale down a size, imagine a Columbia campus filled with such buildings: photovoltaic roofing panels replace old copper ones, energy consumption is tracked in real time within each hall, dorm rooms have multitasking devices that allow students to simultaneously make toast, print out a paper, and video chat their mom, and stack lights in Butler turn on automatically—or better yet, the book in question is automatically found for you. Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and Songdo International Business District in Seoul are examples of intelligent cities currently being built from scratch, at a price of $30 to $60 billion.

Sassen warns against getting caught up in the magic of such places, though. According to her, they create the “potential for making whole buildings obsolete when the technology itself becomes obsolete.”

To envision Sassen’s point, remember the iPod Mini. Think of how sleek it looked in the seventh grade—and how bulkily primitive it would seem now. “There is no way that obsolescence can be avoided in a world where you have battalions of brilliant engineers and ICT [Information and Communications Technology] experts continuously pushing the development of intelligent systems,” Sassen said.

If so-called intelligent buildings can’t make intelligent cities, then what can? Sassen looks to a concept called “Open Source Urbanism.” “This is something that goes well beyond the elementary notion that ‘interactive’ means you have (pre-established!) choices,” she said. “It is about active interactions where ‘choices’ or preferences or needs translate into the making of those options.” She tries to explain the notion through the subculture of open sourcing—also called crowdsourcing or “design by democracy”—which refers to voluntary mass collaboration on a task normally completed by a specific individual.

“Urbanizing … technology means unsettling the narrowness of a technical system, forcing it to recognize the end of incompleteness,” Sassen said. While points like this may seem wholly conceptual, students can perhaps start to get at what Sassen is saying by reflecting on that iPhone or Droid or tablet—on how its options liberalize, but more importantly constrict, daily functioning.