Wednesday 21st February 2018
Accommodating algorithms: Rules, regularities, and infrastructural power in municipal traffic management
Susann Wagenknecht, University of Siegen, Germany. and DEMAND visitor
In scripting the stop and go of urban mobility, traffic infrastructures are shaped by federal laws and legally-binding engineering guidelines and by the temporalities of urban life. This talk, based on an ethnographic study of municipal traffic engineering, examined the planning and maintenance of traffic lights and their algorithms as a means of investigating infrastructural power. I argued that while traffic infrastructures matter for urban mobility, their capacity to do so is intricately interwoven with mobility practices, existing and envisioned.