More than Urban

Abstract

AbstractIn his cult 1953 novel More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon portraits the genesis of Homo Gestalt, an organic entity envisioned as the next step in humankind evolution. Sturgeon’s novel has recently regained interest as a metaphor for alternative ways of envisioning sustainability, less focused on humans alone, aiming to include a broader and more diverse group of actors. Despite being a step forward towards more sustainable urban futures, such approaches, however, often remain substantialist. Following Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation (Simondon in L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, Jérôme Millon, Grenoble, 2013) and Lucy Suchman’s concept of situated actions (Suchman in Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication. Xerox Park Research Center, Palo Alto, 1985) this chapter argues that focusing on diversity is not enough; that achieving a more-than-urban condition requires not only diversity but also, and importantly, entanglement. And that entanglement does not happen randomly, but instead, emerges through processes of individuation supported by concrete forms that enable integration and synergy between discrete components. Entanglement requires starting from pre-individual urban potentialities rather than constituted individuals; which is to say, to shift the focus from ‘data as information’ to ‘data as tension’.KeywordsDataDesignSmart cityIndividuationEntanglement