May 6
8am-10am (EDT/Boston Time)
The Red Skies Project: Redrawing the Urban Social Contract in the Cities of the Future
Towards a new shore
Many light years away in space
There I will wait for you
Where human feet have never trodden
Where human eyes have never gazed
I will build a world of abstract dreams
And I’ll wait
In the realm of tomorrow
We will take the helm
Of a new ship
As the crack of a whip
We will suddenly be on the road
And traveling at the speed of light
Towards a new shore
Sun Ra
Background
The UN predicts that by 2050, around 68% of the world's population will live in urban areas. At the same time, we are experiencing a rapid digital transformation where the adoption of digital technologies are transforming all aspects of our lives from education, labor, our relation to Government and the exercise of our fundamental rights. Privacy, digital inequality, data governance and the increased power of Tech Companies are some of the issues that arise as a result of the digital transformation. These two forces (digitization and urbanization) and the structural changes and challenges they represent converge in the City. Cities are diverse places, where social and economic problems are most palpable. Trust in City Institutions remain high and they are at times better equipped to deal with policy issues where National Politics fails. In other words, the City is where ‘the rubber meets the road’ in terms of policy given that “social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate level consistent with their most adequate resolution.”
Moreover, these transformations affect core elements of our urban social contract; a Citys’ duty to guarantee security to its citizens. Governments, cities, and the private sector have turned to digital, biometric and physical surveillance of its citizens in the name of national and metropolitan security. We believe that to face these challenges we must redraw our Urban Social Contract and critically rethink our relationship with our cities and digital technologies.
In this session we want to unleash the power of art, literature and imagery to imagine the Urban Social Contract of the future. As a backdrop we want to take the current and future space exploration and the possibility of establishing human settlements in other planets to creatively think about the urban/digital challenges that we would face in a city built outside Earth. We will hear from an expert in architecture and urbanism to learn how we used to think about the future of cities and the cities of the future and how city surveillance and power of control has evolved over time. We will then hear from an ecological and space ethicist concerned about the moral and ethical frameworks of space exploration and multiplanetary terrestrial life.
Pre-session Materials
The Ethical Dark Side of the New Space Age by Andrea Owe
Governing in the Planetary Age (Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman)
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas ( U. Le Guin)
The Edgelands Institute Glossary
Recommended
Space Traders by Derrick Bell. This short story by Harvard legal scholar Derrick Bell poses an interesting (and damning) question about self-determination, what it means, who has it, and brings us right back to Jenny Korn's question about what are our boundaries of "us".
Space Traders (33 minutes; YouTube)
8:00am: Introduction to Edgelands Institute and to Special Session 2 - Yves Daccord
8:10am: Urbanist and Architectural perspectives on the evolution of Cities - Juan Diego Ardila
8:20am: Philosophy and Ethics of Space Exploration - Andrea Owe
8:30am: The Red Skies Project Part 1: Policy Teams (Breakout Rooms 1)
8:55am: Break
9:00am: The Red Skies Project Part 2: Terms of Service (Breakout Rooms 2)
9:25am: The Red Skies Project Part 3: Blue Skies Recommendations (Breakout Rooms 2)
9:35am: Report back:
Each group has 3 minutes to report back and share discussion from the first break out session.
9:50am: Reflection/Debrief
Resources referenced in this session
Young, Andrew, Stefaan G. Verhulst, Nadiya Safonova, and Andrew J. Zahuranec. “The Data Assembly Responsible Data Re-Use Framework.” The GovLab, November 2020. https://thedataassembly.org/files/nyc-data-assembly-report.pdf
Zahuranec, Andrew J., Andrew Young, and Stefaan G. Verhulst. “How can stakeholder engagement and mini-publics better inform the use of data for pandemic response?” OECD Participo. February 19, 2021. https://medium.com/participo/how-can-stakeholder-engagement-and-mini-publics-better-inform-the-use-of-data-for-pandemic-response-ea1cc5b1ee68
Verhulst, Stefaan G., “Raw data won't solve our problems — asking the right questions will” Apolitical, September 2019. https://apolitical.co/en/solution_article/raw-data-wont-solve-our-problems-asking-the-right-questions-will
Brown, Jeffrey, and Stefaan G. Verhulst. “10 Questions That Will Determine the Future of Work” Brink. March 2021. https://www.brinknews.com/ten-questions-that-will-determine-the-future-of-work-coronavirus/
For the final session, we actually want you to play an important role! Here is the current agenda for next week:
8:00am: Welcome & Greetings
8:05am: Session Highlights by Participants
8:15am: Showcase of Participant Artifacts
8:35am: Open Reflective Discuss
8:50am: The ISUR Research Sprint on Digital Self-Determination
9:00am-9:05am: Break
9:05am: Introduction to second half
9:10am: Video sharing
9:25am: Roger’s comments
9:45am: Comments & Questions
There are 2 places where we have prepared input from participants (8:05am and 8:20am) and we are also looking for more videos for the final session. The requests in full and signs ups can be found here and we definitely are going to need these by Tuesday, May 11 by 4pm (EST/Boston time) so we can have everything ready for Thursday. Please take a look and sign up where appropriate.
By now, you should be near a strong draft in the Wikipedia article; if you haven't done peer-reviewing yet, make sure you spend time reviewing and giving feedback on other sections besides the one you looked at. By early next week, you will be getting some feedback that I will be sharing from people on the program committee to provide any additional insight. That will come as email to the entire group. Until then, feel free to continue working on it.
One additional update you might want to consider is what might be the right-panel table consist of. Many entries in Wikipedia have a right-hand table of links and high-level information (See other entries that have been identified as similar type entries). Create a new section and identify what might go into that.
By the middle or end of next week, we will share a plan on transporting what you have currently created into a sandbox entry. One thing to keep in mind (and plan for if possible) is how to transfer all the content over in a way that includes everyone doing something so that everyone's username is represented in the final document. We will be coming up with a plan for that but your insights or internal discussions about how to do that equitably is always welcome.
Juan Diego Ardila: Lecturer and expert in Computational Architecture and Digital Fabrication at Universidad Piloto de Colombia. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Architecture from Universidad de los Andes and a Masters of Advanced Architecture from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain). Juan Diego has academic and teaching experience as well as industry, construction and fabrication processes. His work focuses on digital fabrication processes applied to architecture, computer-aided design and parametric design architecture.
Andrea Owe: Research Associate at the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, Andrea holds an M.Phil in Development, Environment and Cultural Change from the University of Oslo, and a BA in Fine Arts. Her research focuses on the ethics of the socio-environmental crisis, global catastrophic and existential risks, human moral progress, the prospect of making terrestrial life multiplanetary, and how AI may benefit holistically in the world.