Black Futures Conference: Reconfiguring community led smart city design through the Black Quantum Futurist framework

I was really honoured to be part of the Black Futures conference held on 31st May 2019. The following is a transcript of my talk on smart city design.

Description

As the infrastructure for the smart city of the future is being laid, is it possible to combine insights from community led and indigenous design approaches to counter the examples of historic and contemporary architectural racism and thus provide a strategy for survival in massively connected networks?

Created by Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips, the Black Quantum Futurist (BQF) framework provides a means to collapse linear time, bringing futurities to the present through communally generated artefacts. In this talk, we will explore how using the BQF framework to incorporate communally generated environmental memory and requirements-space into the design process can be a method for generating equitable and robust futurities of the built environment.

Transcript

The city has always been at the heart of futurist speculation. Throughout human history, as evidenced through literature, song and myth, there is nothing that seems to better depict the sum of all humanity — our ingenuity, our strange relations with the natural environment, our social violences, greed, corruption, our love of the novel and our fear of the Other.

As a hyper-enabler of social evolution, the city has also been the locus of broader anxieties, whether about social revolution or the environment; child labour and real estate speculation. There is no physical site that best demonstrates disparities within the broader society, the flows of commerce and labour that enable wider economies to work. All of humanity’s technologies be they social — such as law, religion — or material — agricultural, extractive — combine at the place of the city, delicately balanced and self-evolving with the influx of new cultures, perspectives and material that mingle and transform.

Currently, over half of all humanity lives in cities, with 54% of the global population in 2015 according to the United Nations department of Economic and Social Affairs. By 2050 this is estimated to rise to 66% with the majority of that growth being due to increased urbanisation in Africa and Asia[1].

How this intersects with predictions in future migratory patterns remains to be seen as more countries in what’s called the Global South experience the ravages of climate chaos with the ensuing political, social and material shifts. However, over 70% of the population in ‘developed’ countries currently live in cities. The fact that this is expected to increase by over 20% in the next 3 decades gives food for thought given that it is this very demographic currently using the majority of the world’s resources and whilst less susceptible to the environmental impact of climate chaos, will still be dealing with its symptoms; this demographic is also amongst those experiencing the most rapidly decreasing birth rates.

In the face of these challenges coming in the not too distant future, the enthusiasm around smart cities is understandable. ‘Smart’ with it’s implication of the automated, clever, clean and sophisticated without being difficult, somehow manages to remain exciting in the urban context, despite the fact the sheen of the smart, particularly as solver of all our problems, has somewhat dulled in light of its real cost: extraction processes that poison the earth and leech resources and wealth from recently colonised nations; commercial processes that drive addiction and social disenfranchisement for the profit of a few major companies; data exploitation that widens divisions and puts societies and whole nations at risk from the very platforms that have been made indispensable to them.

Central to the concept of the smart city — hard as it is to properly define — is a physical site of hyperconnectivity, where services share data to enable improved efficiencies in terms of delivery but also innovation within those services. Every aspect of city living can be impacted, from food production as in the examples we see in Rotterdam, to transportation.

But as usually happens, the ‘smartness’ is a veneer that diminishes the complex and hard work of making it possible. Smart cities require physical infrastructure to make the connectivity possible. The internet isn’t magic — it requires very physical cables to be dug up, twisted and relain.

They also require improved service infrastructure. Data is key to making a smart city possible so every single process within a council or local authority needs to transform the information that is passed through it from the communities they ward into formats that are digestible by the systems that will ultimately connect all of these services. Examples such as the Windrush scandal give us warnings as to the fallout from top-down efficiencies that do not account for shifts in government policy and existing cracks in the facade of society.

As we redesign the communication channels that make a city possible, it’s crucial that resilience against the unpredictabilities of national funding, social change and now climate is built in. One way of doing this is taking a communal approach to system design, wherein the people who will need to live with the systems being created — such as online tax statements, school registry etc. — are part of the design process. Community led design is already being pioneered by organisations such as Glasshouse and in many ways represents an initial decolonising of design which we can think of, to quote Rolando Vazquez, as ‘modernity’s worlding of the world’. In this case, the upsetting of modernity’s colonial understanding of design, comes when the designer realises they are not the objective craftsperson, but a component of a system which intersects with others.

However, even this practice is subject to racial and class disparities as can be seen in the simple question of who gets approached or who has access to local strategy to know that they can be a part of such projects. Furthermore, is simply being part of the process enough?

The Black British experience of urbanity is an interesting one. In many ways it’s seen as a fundamental part of the Black British identity — it’s how our music and fashion are labelled. In spite of the fact the Black British experience is as much rooted in the grand houses of the gentry as it is in the streets, the black person has often been castigated by this assumed ur-identity. Yet, it is as urban subjects that Black people have evidenced the tensions of multi-cultural identity in a barely post-colonial context and tangibly experienced the various facets of white supremacist violence, whether legislative or physical.

In order to design an urban futurism that the Black person can survive and thrive in, required that the Black person must become the Black Maker, one who is as much designer, craftsperson, production manager even quality assurance tester as they are consumer.

This transformation requires a methodology that can draw on the Black genius and the Black Experience as part of the design practice. Black Quantum Futurism, a practice developed by Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips of the AfroFuturist Affair in Philadelphia, USA, draws on Africanist notions of time and space to enable the practitioner to escape linear models of the Universe. To quote Mother Moor Goddess, it ‘provides creatives with the framework to apply metaphysics and the science of colour and sound along with the theories of quantum physics yo recall future and past memories’[2]. From a design perspective, these memories are fundamental to the process we call requirements gathering, where we try and understand the range of experiences that inform what it is our clients need in order to provide the best potential solution. If we are designing the smart city for Black people, it is these memories which encode ‘successful models of healing and transformation’ that are crucial to eke out as a part of communal practice so it not only informs the design but most importantly reaffirms the client/participant, the community.

As an approach, its ‘manipulation of space-time… to see into possible futures and collapse space-time into a desired future to bring [it] into reality’[3], goes beyond ideating a solution for a problem of the now, but perhaps also a means to reconfigure what the problems actually are e.g. is a problem of the now also going to be a problem of the tomorrow and if not, perhaps there are different ways to deal with it, accommodate, even live with it than create false solutions.

The radical potential is that in adopting it, we are enabling the designed object to travel through time, incorporating the cycles of survival and thriving, of destruction and rebuilding. Some of these practices I have incorporated in masquerade making workshops where I draw inspiration from the sacred — and very hidden — practice of Igbo mmanwu to start helping people reconfigure their communal futures by embodying past and future into physical masquerades that can act as interventions as a particular space-time configuration.

I have also found this technique to increase awareness and understanding of the shared Africanist heritage, which I think is vital as we consider the realities of how future Black people may experience the smart cities they have encountered as hopeful refuge from the outcomes of climate chaos.

Conclusion

There are a range of futurities we can look to and yet, due to various disenfranchisements they can often seem difficult to reach. It can feel we solve one problem when another comes up and then the old problem comes back again.

Black Quantum Futurism is a practice that tackles this cyclicity head on by drawing on the cyclicity of our thriving, of our transforming music, words, dance, electricity and hardware into new realities for our communities.

References?

[1] PrepCom III in Surabaya: Finding a joint position on the New Urban Agenda

[2] Forethought, Black Quantum Futurism, Theory & Practice

[3] Constructing a Theory and Practice of Black Quantum Futurism, Black Quantum Futurism, Theory & Practice