Matthew Wilson: Quantified Self-City-Nation

Abstract: New devices and techniques have emerged to better quantify an individual’s movement, stasis, and even sleep, while a ‘smart city’ discourse and marketing apparatus applies these principles to analysis, representation, and management of the city. Indeed, as cities are increasingly rethought as organisms and human bodies are quantified as systems, the interactive opportunities and limitations for engagement, representation, and resistance are evermore significant. In this presentation, I draw parallels between the rising consumer-electronic sector associated with personal activity monitors and the rapid visioning of smart urbanism. More specifically, I interrogate these developments in quantification, namely: interoperability and propriety, competition and habit, fashion and surveillance. What are the social-cultural and political implications for this refiguring of spatial thought and action? What capacities are reinforced and developed through the implementation of these technologies and techniques? I address these concerns, through discussion of a continuum of technologies that serve to open and close multi-scalar systems of attention control.

Bio: Matthew W. Wilson is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University and Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky, where he co-directs the New Mappings Collaboratory. His scholarly activities are at the intersection of critical human geography and geographic information science, as part of an evolving research agenda in ‘critical GIS’. Matt holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Washington.