Location F

Desire for a smart city is often told in a way that imagines a city as a computer, a continuously processing machine that is fed data. Streets, apartment buildings, districts, gardens, the way people move through the city, birth rates, deaths, all are registered, indexed and processed. Weather is sensed, bicycle journeys counted, domestic animals chipped and garbage segregated. For life in the smart city to be managed and organised requires that it becomes a data flow, where each interaction becomes a source for a number or coordinate. Counting feeds into statistics that becomes a formal narrative of the real.

But life goes on. It happens, and continues even if not captured in a database, or defined with a number. It is part of bodies and their memories that occupy the city in buildings, on the streets and in parks. In rivers contained within concrete banks and hiding electric scooters and bikes abandoned on a rowdy night. On the shores of the city beach where the sea brings jellyfish every summer. The experience of the stinging tentacles on the swimming body are part of this city life too.