IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cityxx/v20y2016i4p539-548.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Technical democracy as a challenge to urban studies

Author

Listed:
  • Ignacio Farías
  • Anders Blok

Abstract

What is technical democracy? And why does it matter for urban studies? As an introduction to this special feature, we address these questions by reflecting on To Our Friends, the 2014 manifesto of the Invisible Committee. We engage in particular its provocative diagnosis of the current situation: power no longer resides in the modern institutions of representative democracy and the market economy; instead, power has become a matter of logistics, infrastructures and expertise. This diagnosis, we suggest, brings into view the challenge of technical democracy, that is, the democratization of techno-scientific expertise and the instauration of forms of lasting collaboration among experts and laypeople. Urban politics, we claim, increasingly turns around socio-technical controversies and it is in terms of the politics of expertise that we should analyse and engage it. Building on Science and Technology Studies (STS), we conclude by pointing to four key conceptual dimensions of technical democracy—shared uncertainty, material politics, collective experimentation and fragile democratization—and provide examples taken from the papers included in this special feature.

Suggested Citation

  • Ignacio Farías & Anders Blok, 2016. "Technical democracy as a challenge to urban studies," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(4), pages 539-548, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:20:y:2016:i:4:p:539-548
    DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2016.1192418
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2016.1192418
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13604813.2016.1192418?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lily Kong & Orlando Woods, 2018. "The ideological alignment of smart urbanism in Singapore: Critical reflections on a political paradox," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 55(4), pages 679-701, March.
    2. Heaphy, Liam James, 2018. "Interfaces and divisions in the Dublin Docklands 'Smart District'," SocArXiv z2afc, Center for Open Science.
    3. Heaphy, Liam James, 2018. "Interfaces and divisions in the Dublin Docklands 'Smart District'," OSF Preprints xbrgt, Center for Open Science.
    4. Ross King, 2022. "Networked insurgence and an anti-electoral democracy: Bangkok space 2014–2020," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 40(4), pages 895-912, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:20:y:2016:i:4:p:539-548. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CCIT20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.