IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Locality 93
seminar in the United Kingdom, ‘‘Urban Vulnerability and Infrastructure,’’
featured the Montreal ice storm, the Auckland power blackout, the gas attack
on the Tokyo underground, the Sydney drought, the California energy
crisis, the Chicago heat wave, the failure of Hong Kong airport’s freight system,
the September 11 attacks, and the Lovebug virus. Said the organizers:
As seamless and 24 hour flows and connections become ever-more critical for capitalist
urbanism, so massive political, discursive and material resources are being devoted
to try and reduce the supposed vulnerabilities that these systems exhibit to collapse,
malfunctioning, or attack. Huge resources and efforts are now being devoted by
States, infrastructure corporations, the military, urban infrastructure agencies, and
corporate capital to reducing the supposed vulnerability of telecommunications,
transport, logistics, transaction, electricity, and utilities systems to technical failure,
sabotage, natural disasters or the failures caused by the reduced built in back-up that
often comes with liberalised markets. The glaring fragility, and low reliability, of
many computer-mediated communications and infrastructure systems is a particular
focus of concern. 54
The danger with control mania is that it precludes bottom-up social innovation.
Openness is vital if we are to answer an important question:
When traditional industries disappear from a locality, what is to take their
place? In Spark! 55 I helped multidisciplinary design teams from five countries,
together with local officials and citizens, conduct design scenario
workshops in five very different European locations: Narva-Joessu in Estonia,
Cray Valley in London, Forssa in Finland, Valdambra in Italy, and
Nexo in Denmark. In these five locations, groups of twenty to thirty people
would do a crash investigation. Mapping and notation of local knowledge
would record what kinds of value reside in the locality. Technical types
would explore what roles new communications technologies such as wireless
and GPS play in new services for these places and would debate how to
understand boundaries between devices and networks, infrastructure, content,
equipment, software, space, and place. But content questions were uppermost
among all the disciplines involved. Nexo, on Bornholm in the
Baltic Sea, for example, is one of dozens of Baltic and European fishing
ports in which industrial fishing has become unsustainable. Our multidisciplinary
team decided that the Bornholm Rooster, a superior kind of
chicken, should be a star product on what it christened ‘‘Food Island’’—
along with the legendary white salmon, a ghostly creature that passes quietly
by this misplaced Danish island (it sits between Sweden and Poland)
only in the winter months. (This desolate but fertile spot was the location
for the final workshop at the Spark! conference.)