The Internet of politicised ‘things’: urbanisation, citizenship, and the hacking of New York ‘innovation’ City

Abstract

Though many critical of urbanism and its corollaries have resigned themselves to abject defeatism (Morton, 2013; Dark Mountain Project, 2015), philosophers Jean Luc Nancy, Henri Lefebvre and Bruno Latour, while critical of the terminal tendencies of techno-capitalist urbanisation, each maintain faith in the capacity to reimagine the urban as a locus of resistance. With their theoretical underpinning, this paper undertakes a site-specific analysis of the Applied Sciences New York (ASNY) civic innovation initiative, arguing this new mutation of the state-academy-industry triple-helix offers opportunities from which an anti-teleological open-ended ‘world forming’ or mondialisation can occur. This possibility is argued herein to be one predicated on Latour’s reconceptualisation of Realpolitik as instead a Dingpolitik or ‘politic of things’.