TY - JOUR
T1 - Technical democracy as a challenge to urban studies
T2 - Introduction
AU - Farías, Ignacio
AU - Blok, Anders
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2016/7/3
Y1 - 2016/7/3
N2 - What is technical democracy? And why does it matter for urban studies? As an introduction to this special feature, we address these questions by reflecting on To Our Friends, the 2014 manifesto of the Invisible Committee. We engage in particular its provocative diagnosis of the current situation: power no longer resides in the modern institutions of representative democracy and the market economy; instead, power has become a matter of logistics, infrastructures and expertise. This diagnosis, we suggest, brings into view the challenge of technical democracy, that is, the democratization of techno-scientific expertise and the instauration of forms of lasting collaboration among experts and laypeople. Urban politics, we claim, increasingly turns around socio-technical controversies and it is in terms of the politics of expertise that we should analyse and engage it. Building on Science and Technology Studies (STS), we conclude by pointing to four key conceptual dimensions of technical democracy—shared uncertainty, material politics, collective experimentation and fragile democratization—and provide examples taken from the papers included in this special feature.
AB - What is technical democracy? And why does it matter for urban studies? As an introduction to this special feature, we address these questions by reflecting on To Our Friends, the 2014 manifesto of the Invisible Committee. We engage in particular its provocative diagnosis of the current situation: power no longer resides in the modern institutions of representative democracy and the market economy; instead, power has become a matter of logistics, infrastructures and expertise. This diagnosis, we suggest, brings into view the challenge of technical democracy, that is, the democratization of techno-scientific expertise and the instauration of forms of lasting collaboration among experts and laypeople. Urban politics, we claim, increasingly turns around socio-technical controversies and it is in terms of the politics of expertise that we should analyse and engage it. Building on Science and Technology Studies (STS), we conclude by pointing to four key conceptual dimensions of technical democracy—shared uncertainty, material politics, collective experimentation and fragile democratization—and provide examples taken from the papers included in this special feature.
KW - politics of expertise
KW - right to the city
KW - sociotechnical controversies
KW - technical democracy
KW - urban infrastructures
KW - urban politics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84988023608&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/13604813.2016.1192418
DO - 10.1080/13604813.2016.1192418
M3 - Editorial
AN - SCOPUS:84988023608
SN - 1360-4813
VL - 20
SP - 539
EP - 548
JO - City
JF - City
IS - 4
ER -