Special report Behind the mostly fake “battle” about driverless cars (conventional versus autonomous is the one that captures all the headlines), there are several much more important scraps. One is over the future of the city: will a city be built around machines or people? How much will pedestrians have to sacrifice for the driverless car to succeed?
The battle over the design and control of urban infrastructure pits two distinct ideas against each other. One narrative of “networked urbanism” envisages the city driven by data analytics and networks controlled in part by machines. In this “smart city”, technological solutionism is rampant, with everything connected and automated. This is Googleville: a posthuman urban laboratory.