How do control rooms enable today’s networked urban life? And how are events grasped and handled from within control rooms as cities become known in new ways? The paper will hone in on how the events that interrupt urban life in the global north – the traffic accident, the delayed train, the power outage – are governed through control rooms; control rooms that are increasingly integrating an array of ‘smart’ technologies.

1. Events and Urban Control
Rachel Gordon and Ben Anderson

2. What is control and how is control
achieved today?
in the midst of events and the
problematisation of delay

3. Control and Modalities of Power
Control Rooms and the promise of control
… and contemporary anxieties about control
in the midst of complex systems and new
events.

4. e.g. War room

5. e.g. Industrial Control Rooms

6. Control and Sovereign Power

8. What happens to control?
Centred, Hierarchical, Urban Control →
Distributed, Networked, Urban Control →
Doubled Re-Centring of Control +
Distributed ‘Everyware’

10. Alternative Starting Points
1. No such thing as the exemplar control
room – but differences as infrastructures.
2. Control rooms function as
sites/operations.
3. Control rooms as part of, and distinctive,
from specific sphere of operations – and
thus limited to that sphere of operations.

12. How data is gathered, processed, rendered
actionable?
Electricity
Control Room
Distributed sensors; alerts for directed monitoring (status of
equipment); alarms which prompt investigation; demand forecasting,
wind forecasting, long-term trend analysis for energy market
participation
Emergency
Operations
Centre
Information rich from verbal, video and electronic communications; use
of National Incident Management System (NIMS) (or similar) to
classify, locate and record information; mapping, modelling and
forecasting activity to assess current and future priorities
Road
Transport
Control Room
Algorithmic processing of MIDAS, TMU and ANPR data to produce
traffic/congestion alerts on Control Office Based System (COBS);
emergency calls from public, monitoring of CCTV feeds
Emergency
Services
Control Room
999 calls from members of the public and structured questioning to
obtain additional information to inform subsequent action; CCTV use
where available
Rail Network
Control Room
SCADA or similar (track switches, signal and crossing lights, weather
and track sensors, electronic signs); GPS tracking of trains

13. Control Rooms and the Logic of
Response –
concerned with multiple ‘intervals’
between event and action

14. Scene 1: A flood and intermittent,
exceptional, event specific control

16. The Event as Emergent, Almost -
Unpredictable, Movement of Effects

17. Scene 2. A quasi-event and continuous,
normal, control across different system
states.

18. Understanding what is happening
• Verbal communications (via telephone, cab secure
radio, mobile telephone) with mobile personnel
(drivers, customer service advisors, engineers) and
other stakeholders (e.g. emergency services, public)
• Distributed sensors (power system, ticketing and
gating system, life and escalators etc) and associated
alarm software (SCADA)
• Electronic fault reporting (e.g. FASSI system on trains
• CCTV
• Train describer system (system mimic)
• Positive train identification (PTI) system
• Incident/fault logs (compass, maximo)

19. Diagnostic Work
“Tuesday morning. The system controller has
just spoken to a driver on the radio; he turns to
his colleague – they suspect a rheostatic fault
on the train. They discuss whether to run the
train or not, and if they attempt running, how
far to run it. If there is a spare driver, they
could run a train down. ‘”I’ll get on to the
deport. See what they say”
(Ethnographic notes – RG)

20. The event as normal, but
unpredictable, disruption that
happens as part of the normal state of
the system

21. Concluding Comments
1. Tied to shifts in what an event/quasi-event
is – and a logic of response that
problematizes ‘intervals’ of action.
2. Control rooms as sites/processes
constantly dealing with different types of
uncertainty about what is happening.
3. Control as a certain type of relation
involving the asymmetrical capacity to
achieve effects, or promise to.