Right to the Creative City: Urban Technopolitics

This is an Archive of a Past Event

The “creativity” in the “creative city” is often understood as an outcome of the “innovative,” “disruptive,” or “change-making” capacity of technological solutions to urban problems. And yet, these innovations, disruptions, and changes tend to unfold within existing political, economic, and social contexts: consumer marketplaces, neoliberal economies, and democratic governments, from the liberal to the authoritarian, are taken as fixed givens rather than targets of technological exploration and transformation. How can technology be brought to bear on problems of urban exclusion, inequality, and injustice? How can rifts between technologists, the communities they seek to serve, and other communities of expertise be bridged? What are the common points of engagement between new technology and communities whose survival is threatened? Could indigenous, subaltern, decolonizing, or anti-capitalist forms of creativity reanimate and transform the creativity of technology? What do activists demand in this space of contestation?

Participants
Tiffany Andrews, Code for America
Leslie Dreyer, Artist and Anti-Eviction Organizer
Stefano Funk, Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
Eric Rogers, Embassy Network, respondent
Preeti Talwi, Google X

The Right to the Creative City is a series of public discussions exploring the politics of urban futures co-organized by Andrew Herscher and Johanna Taylor, Creative Cities fellows at the Stanford Arts Institute. Drawing on political, aesthetic, and technological perspectives, each discussion brings work on the creative city into relation with struggles for the right to the city.

Image Credit: Sunset Haircut Booth (Xudong Yu, Yanming Li, Huansong Wu, Yuliang He), Untitled, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.