Big data, smart systems, machine learning—it is inevitable that these new technologies will change the way we study, build and manage our cities. At the same time resurgent interest in consensus and contributive action seems to oppose an exclusively data-driven urbanism. Is the opposition of machine intelligence and democracy inevitable, or are shared trajectories possible?
Politicians, social scientists, urbanists, and architects find their working methods and disciplinary knowledge challenged by insights derived from big data, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). As both citizens and experts in the many respective fields, our mission must be to bring in our disciplinary knowledge and civic engagement to support the appropriate development and discussion of data-driven tools, to consider both their biases and potentials, and to promote broader social literacy and criticality. Ultimately, it is a question of both decanting the technical quality of these new instruments of design, management and decision making, as well as enhancing democratic control over them. How do we do this? Do our disciplines currently lack adequate strategies to understand, let alone critique or exploit the knowledge-products of machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data?
The International Deep City Latsis Symposium will present an innovative conference concept where the digital and the physical will join to create a global dialogical field connecting different cities and time zones, augmenting the physical experience through the digital and augmenting the digital through a unique approach to the physical. The Rolex Learning Center at EPFL in Lausanne and partner sites Singapore (in collaboration with SUTD Singapore University of Technology and Design) and Hong Kong (in collaboration with Hong Kong University), will host a series of keynotes and paper presentations, as well as workshops, political debates, exhibitions and guided tours from March 24 to 27, 2021.
To ground and foster meaningful exchange, we launch a call for submissions ranging from projects and operational practices to speculative and theoretical questionings which might be written, built, coded, drawn, figured, imagined, filmed, modelled or conveyed in any other way. Proposals are to be submitted with a 300-word abstract. Accepted submissions will be presented in the distributed assembly of projects, imaginaries, theoretical challenges and multimedia offerings that will take place during the event, as well as on a subsequent publication.