Smart Metropolia 2014, AmberExpo Gdańsk

1. Allan Cochrane, The Open University
Presentation to Smart
Metropolis Conference,
Gdansk, 24-25th October 2014

2.  Traditionally cities viewed as ‘hard’
spaces, spaces of alienation
 Often framed either as places
within which individuals are
homogenised and disciplined (Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis)
 Or as places of threat, of crime,
poverty and insecurity, segregated
and divided (Dickensian London)

3.  Generally framed in terms of the
opportunities arising from the
mobilisation of information and
communications technologies
 big data
 tailored information
 personalised interaction and individual
empowerment
 But also recognition that about
social capital, human capital –
smart people

4.  Move beyond framing in terms of
technology or even smart people
 Thinking of the city itself as a social
organism, as itself possibly ‘smart’
 Urbanism as a way of life that is
‘smart’, rather than one that is
necessarily alienating or divisive

5.  Cities bring together (juxtapose)
people from different classes and
different cultural backgrounds as
well as combining a wide range of
activity spaces. According to
writers such as Jane Jacobs, it is
precisely this that gives them their
strength as sources of innovation
and dynamism (their ‘smartness’)
 ‘Although it is hard to believe,
while looking at dull grey areas or
at housing projects or at civic
centres, the fact is that big cities
are natural generators of diversity
and prolific incubators of new
enterprises and ideas of all kinds’.

6.  ‘The diversity, of whatever kind,
that is generated by cities rests on
the fact that in cities so many
people are so close together, and
among them contain so many
different tastes, skills, needs,
supplies, and bees in their
bonnets’
 A sidewalk symphony or ‘an
intricate ballet in which the
individual dancers and ensembles
all have distinctive parts which
miraculously reinforce each other
and compose an orderly whole’

7.  City as a ‘difference machine’
(Engin Isin), where groups form,
orienting ‘for and against each
other, inventing and assembling
strategies and technologies,
mobilizing various forms of capital,
and making claims to…‘the city’’
 Place where claims and counter-claims
are traded, temporary
coalitions formed, and differences
negotiated. The placement of
different cultures, actors, needs
and demands in close proximity
produces a distinctive kind of place
politics (Ash Amin)

8.  The urban represents a distinctive
nodal formation around which sets
of relationships overlap, settle and
come together
 A space of connectivity; one that
registers its presence through the
intersection of relationships drawn
from far and wide, yet which
combine and settle in cities in very
specific ways
 Cities provide ‘the opportunity for
citizens to become something else
and for mutuality to be
strengthened‘ (Amin and Thrift)

9.  Cities can also provide ways of
reinforcing and developing forms
of segregation and division
 Urban spaces become sites across
which conflicts take place, and
cities can become defined by what
Mike Davis has called an ‘ecology
of fear’, in which a range of
protected enclaves is constructed
by the middle classes to exclude
those who may challenge their
security
 ‘Physical proximity’ may
increasingly co-exist with
‘relational difference’. In other
words, the connected live
alongside the disconnected – the
favelas and shantytowns and
informal living survive and develop
alongside the gated homes of the
rich

10.  The search for the ‘good’ city has
been a recurrent theme of debates
about cities
 Cities have been the focus of a
great deal of dystopian and
utopian thinking, which has
incorporated different
understandings of the ways in
which cities are constituted.
 Howard (1902/1965) and Le Corbusier
(1929/1987) emphasize the extent to
which cities are unruly places that need to
be managed;
 Jacobs (1961) and Sennett (1990) stress
the importance of fluidity, uncertainty
and mixing as defining the urban
condition
 The challenge of urban governance
is to capture both aspects of the
urban experience, in ways that
permit the expression of vitality,
while allowing for forms of popular
control of urban development.

11.  Turn to think about the everyday
experience with the help of
evidence from a project focused on
three distinctive urban areas in
England
 Two year ESRC funded project to
examine how difference is lived
and managed in practice – three
places (Hackney, Oadby, Milton
Keynes) - and different sites of
social life within them
 Over 100 individual and group
interviews and over 600 hours of
participant observation with
diverse groups of participants.

12.  Start from the recognition that
England’s 21st century urban
environments are increasingly,
complexly diverse – no longer
question of multicultarism but
instead the ordinary is (Census
2011)
 Multiculture in England has
become increasingly complex over
the last decade
 emergent geographies of ethnic diversity
are increasingly dispersed
 new, different migrations have continued
and because established migrant
populations have fragmented along socio-economic
axes
 in some urban areas it became possible to
talk of super-diversity
 and the experience went far beyond the
traditional urban centres, incorporating
suburban and rural areas

13.  Focus of the project has been on
unpanicked, even competent,
micro social interaction –
conviviality and civil inattention
 Look at how people live and
negotiate their lives together in the
quotidian contexts of multiculture
as a, more or less taken for
granted, routine and everyday
experience
 Recognise continuing divisions and
racialised forms of inequality and
exclusion, but also identifying and
recognising the spaces within
which day-to-day negotiation takes
place

14.  Three cases: Hackney in London,
Milton Keynes on edge of London
city region, Oadby suburban town
in England’s East Midlands
 Hackney – defined through waves
of migration and very mixed (most
recent migrations from Central and
Eastern Europe, but also
gentrification)
 Milton Keynes – new town,
recently multicultural (relatively
large population identifying as
Black African)
 Oadby – town on the edge of
Leicester changing as a result of
moves of South Asian middle class
form the city

15.  Urban parks
 Chain cafes
 Costa in Oadby; McDonalds in Milton
Keynes; Nandos in Hackney
 Social-leisure groups
 Tennis club and wome’s group in Oadby;
football club and gardening club in Milton
Keynes; writers’ group and running group
in Hackney Colleges for young people (16-
18)
 Local policy makers and
community actors

16.  Walking down the slope of the main park,
meandering around a bit, the range of people, by
ethnicity, age, class and activity, seemed very
broad. […] People were using the same space but
not paying much attention to one another, other
than the group they were in – though many of
the groups of friends or family were of mixed
ethnicities. […] At the bottom of the hill, more
mixtures of people playing in the kids' play area
and the tennis courts (Hackney fieldnote)
 Grace: it's such a diverse community. It's not,
you know... people - just Afro-Caribbean. If you
look around, there's everybody in the park. Do
you know what I mean? Using the
park…strolling through the park….Yeah. Even my
community, [and] the Jewish community that I
live in, and even the non-Jewish community
members that are on my street - we're all in the
park…(African Caribbean woman, middle aged,
Hackney)
 Lucy: We’re in Stamford Hill so it’s the Orthodox
Jewish area and they’re known for keeping
themselves to themselves but they’re walking
through this park as well which is nice to see […]
You usually see them walking in the street and
you don’t get much interaction […] but at least in
the park you feel like you’re kind of interacting
even if you’re not speaking with them directly,
but you’re sharing the space together…you’ve
both come to the park to enjoy what it is .(Anglo-
Indonesian woman, young, Hackney)

17.  In the middle of the restaurant next to the
drinks refill station was a white woman by
herself eating sweetcorn and reading The
Guardian, a young South Asian woman
working on a laptop and a black (African-
Caribbean) mother with two young sons
who kept on getting up to get another
drinks refill. Another woman – Turkish, I
guessed – came in by herself and seemed
to know the staff, going straight up and
ordering without a menu and saying, ‘I’ll
sit wherever you want me’ (Hackney
fieldnote)
 The background music was a mixture of
Christmas and contemporary pop music.
John Lennon’s ‘So This Is Christmas’ was
followed by a Moby song. It was much
quieter in Costa’s at that time, compared
to later in the morning when it really
starts to fill up with parents and babies
and pensioners. The staff were chatting
and laughing loudly behind the counter.
They were talking to a young South Asian
girl in front of me in the queue, who I
think I’ve seen working there before. ‘I’m
not Greek’, I heard her say, laughing. ‘I’m
Asian! You’ve got the wrong continent!’
(Oadby fieldnote)

18.  Michael: I think it’s when you are getting
to know people, like you meet new people
I guess. I don’t know, I can’t really say
why that is, it is just something, ever since
I have been here, I have noticed that, it’s
just like everyone is mixed together
(student, Milton Keynes)
 Ethan: Yes, they are some groups that
have been friends and will always be
friends in that group, but I don’t find that,
I wouldn’t want to be part of that,
because they’re, kind of, only friends with
each other, and then that’s it, that’s, they
don’t, kind of, look anywhere else. I’m one
of the people who, I don’t really have a
group which is my group, I’m just friends
with a lot, with loads of different groups
and like, if I was standing at break time
and one group wasn’t there, I could easily
just go over to another group and just be
with them and not feel out place (student,
Oadby)
 Mandisa: Yeah. That area over there,
that’s called the bad man corner, where all
the Asians sit. And then round there
there’s a mixture. And here there’s like
sometimes the geeks and that, but yeah
(student, Oadby)

19.  “We’re set the same task [and] I think what is
really magical about it, is because we are such a
huge mix of people, with the same task we take
it in SO many different directions […] we’ve all
got very different life experiences that we bring
to the same task and that creates really
interesting conversations and things…” Kathleen
(writers group)
 The social groups were places in which the rapid
social change in all the localities was recognised,
discussed and collectively reflected.
Gentrification was a focus for Hackney;
increasing multiculture a area of discussion for
Milton Keynes and a growing South Asian middle
class settlement in Oadby: “I’m scared about
how Hackney’s changing: I feel kind of left
behind sometimes, I don’t know why exactly…it
kind of feels its almost moving too fast, not
exactly for its own good – its really exciting living
here and I think Hackney’s got loads to offer and
I’d REALLY miss it if I didn’t live here.”
 “Okay, I might get dirty looks. I might get people
crossing the street holding their handbags and
what-not (murmurs of agreement) but there was
that one really nice Jewish man that helped me
push my car on the day when I wanted to cry and
that’s like a really nice thing and it kind of helps
you to not see just, erm, a group of people who
are unfriendly” (Jake Writers Group)

20.  Ethnically mixed populations
routinely and differentially share,
experience and negotiate places
intended and used for convivial,
recreational, festive, relaxing,
leisure, quiet and lingering time
 Shared space implies connection,
living side by side, but not
necessarily interaction
 Complex interactions between
material environments, banal
social practices
 The easy-uneasy negotiations of
everyday urban multiculture

21.  The ‘smartness’ of everyday urban
life
 The importance of ‘bringing
together’ spaces for routine ‘being
together’ of super-diverse,
complexly differentiated and
rapidly changing urban populations
 Tension of public spaces as
democratic and elective (places
people choose to be) as well as
governed and regulated (formal
and informal rules of behaviour)
 Local policy recognition of the
importance of resourcing public
spaces and facilitating informal
capacities

22.  This presentation draws on
research undertaken as part of a
research team including Sarah Neal
(University of Surrey); Katy Bennett
(University of Leicester) and Giles
Mohan (Open University) as part of
a project funded by the UK
Economic and Social Research
Council - Living Multiculture: the
new geographies of ethnic diversity
and the changing formations of
multiculture in England
(ES/J007676/1)