Of Technologies, Cities and Politics

In disciplinary geographic thought environmental determinism has been a bad word for over half a century. Fairly common   in the early decades of the 20th century, the view known as environmental determinism essentially held that the physical environment had a causal relationship to   culture. For example, in hot weather people rest more often. In temperate weather people feel more energetic. For environmental determinists that would indicate that   societies in Africa are more indolent. Societies in Europe are more productive. Thanks to concerted assaults by a number of critical scholars, by mid century, environmental determinism became quite unacceptable. However, a toned down version of it – environmental possibilism did survive for some more decades. Environmental possibilists held that the physical environment presents a set of possible trajectories from which socieities choose.  It was not until late 20th century that geographers completely abandoned looking for causal links between physical environment and culture, although traces of it have been reemerging in new forms in recent years.

There is something appealing about determinist and possibilist logics. They allow us to reduce reality to schematic representations, enable us to predict outcomes and give us a simple set of choices. They pervade our thinking about just about everything. Take for example our understanding of technology. For some, technology is something that comes out of the blue and changes the way we live. For some, technology presents us a set of choices and we can choose which route we want to take. So governments promise that IT and biotech will transform us from poor to rich. Corporations promise that GM foods will remove hunger. Activists proclaim that IT and biotech exacerbate social inequalities and GM foods will destroy our crops. And the debates go on about which technology to choose.

But is technology all that powerful in reality ? It certainly does not come out of the clear blue sky. It comes out of innovation, hard work and gets shaped by all sorts of conflicts. Even when it is presented as a ‘prefabricated whole’ that can be imported and introduced into unsuspecting populations, it goes through all sorts of negotiations, reworkings, local innovation and accidents. Even when people start using these ‘technologies’ all sorts of new uses are invented and they get embroiled in all sorts of new conflicts. I mean you put a dozen internet enabled terminals in a village for farmers to find out the latest market prices and bingo before you know it becomes the hub of a new youth culture in the village. You sell mobile phones for people to talk to each other and it becomes an important prop for unemployed but ambitious men to construct an image of being well connected. Technologies should be understood as both the hardware and the software, that is, the numerous shifting and changing routines that develop around hardware props ranging from the ball point pen to the tablet PC, the placebo to the ECG machine, the washing machine to the dredger. Technologies are what the world around us is made of.

Let me just illustrate this a little further before making clear where I am heading with all this. In 2005, I was in Hyderabad for a few months. My work required me to meet with a lot of people. Hyderabad as anyone who lived there for some years used to be notorious for people being vague about appointments – when they said 10am it meant anything from 8 am to 12 noon was acceptable. It was alright because people were not terribly mobile. You knew where to find your contact– if he was not in his office, he would be at the irani café or at the paan shop. Not so in 2005. People did give appointments. But they asked immediately for your mobile phone number. As I discovered soon, this was because people were actually way more mobile in the city. If you had to meet someone at 10 AM on Tuesday morning, you would have to call them around 9.45AM and ask where they were at that point and head there on your 100cc or your car. Having decided on a whim that I will not use a mobile or a motorcycle, I found the experience of chasing people around the city very instructive. Often I would start pretty early, as I would need time to find an autorickshaw, and be able to stop every now and then at a wayside phone booth to make contact. Some times I missed appointments and some times I got stranded with nothing to do but kill time on the road. And soon I began to realize that the city was actually filled with all sorts of stranded people. Some for a few minutes or hours like me. Some like out of station relatives of poor patients in hospitals were stranded for days. Many, who got pushed out of villages and found no work or friends in the city, were stranded for months. Each one’s life was organized around all sorts of technologies – some obvious and others not so.

I have mulled over that experience since then – on and off. One of the main lines of attacks against neoliberal reforms that I have grown very familiar with is that it is ushering in a new form of governance where techno managerial experts rule and governance is emptied of politics. There is a ring of earnestness in that criticism. It asserts that techno managerial expertise is confidently replacing negotiation and conflict. But if we look closely, it seems that techno managerial experts are rarely ever so sure of themselves; blustering to the contrary notwithstanding. One never knows how those squeaky clean systems are going to be used and reused and undermined and innovated upon by the people who are to be governed by them. If we accept that, we can go in two directions. 1) Things will anyways be chaotic and unpredictable always. So give up all effort and focus on describing what we see. 2) Things are chaotic, some times more so than at others and these are times for creative work. Things are up for grabs – concepts, words, meanings, technologies, information, it is time for work. Among people who are alert to the situation described above, I have seen most opting for the first choice and very few opting for the  latter , (except for perhaps some hints in the Free and Open Source Software movement).

Let me extend this a little further. Most state governments in India commissioned the generation of some sort of raw digital spatial data for their most happening cities in the late 90s. This data is being continuously being augmented. Whoever paid for that initial data generation has primary ownership of the data. Data of that fine grain is not open access. If you had ever tried procuring a fine resolution contour map of any locality in India, you would know what I mean. It has to do with national security. Yet, look at the GIS, GPS products and their applications that either on the market or under active development today – from detailed knowledge of land parcel shapes to traffic blockages to sewerage networks. Where did all this exuberant entrepreneurship in geographic knowledge of Indian cities come from? How did data from a variety of sources start circulating, some times on the grey market, some times in the open? Look how deeply it has reshaped the spatial development of cities by speeding up some activities and scaling up some and actually making possible a lot of new activities!! And consider the sorts of new urban economic political actors and conflicts that have arisen from all this. This connection between how the city is reshaping and how knowledges and representations of the city are transformed and packaged by digital technologies cannot be reduced either to the paradigm of copyright, ownership and entrepreneurialism in digital technologies  (targets of Free and Open Source Software movement) or to corporate greed, political corruption and middle class aspirations (targets of conventional progressive activism). This is not technology in some pure form entering and transforming a formerly placid society. It is technologies being producing on the spot and being reworked.

I have used digital data on land only as an example to highlight the issue. This is not the only instance in which these changes are occurring. From water supply to sanitation to the operation of multiplex theatre complexes similar processes are at work. The trouble to my mind is not so much that recent reforms have exorcised politics and turned everything into techno managerial problems. I think the trouble is that we are not yet used to the idea that substantive, transformative  politics can happen through technologies – the nitty-gritty of how things are done and how stuff works. When we begin to delve into those details our cities will become avenues of new politics. That is after all the promise of the city new freedoms.