Making Time: Sidewalk Labs and the Onto-politics of the Real-time City
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Around the world, cities are investing in new technologies to address the challenges they face. Underpinning these investments is a latent enthusiasm for what Rob Kitchin calls ‘the real-time city,’ and the idea that digital technology can create more productive and efficient cities. In fact, enthusiasm for real-time has remained constant even as concerns surrounding smart cities have grown. The meaning and value of real-time within the smart city discourse is nevertheless underexplored, and the interests guiding the pursuit of real-time technologies are unclear. To that end, this project interrogates the discursive politics of the ‘real-time city,’ and the ideas and ideologies that inform contemporary enthusiasm for real-time technologies. Focusing on Sidewalk Toronto, Canada’s most prominent (though ultimately abandoned) foray into smart city development, I position enthusiasm for real-time against the backdrop of what Jacques Derrida calls a ‘metaphysics of presence.’ I argue that real-time technologies promise unprecedented access to, and knowledge of, a pre-existing and objective here and now. Enthusiasm for real-time thus affirms a prophetic (and increasingly privatized) politics, in which those with access to real-time are presumed to know best about the city and its need. In the second half of the project, I argue that this idealization of real-time distracts policymakers from the diverse rhythms that inform, and are engendered by, smart city technologies, as well as the articulative decisions on which these technologies depend. From inherited histories to contingent visions of the future city, digital infrastructures are shaped by broader temporalities that are excluded by an overly narrow emphasis on the here and now. Leveraging Derrida’s notion of ‘spectrality,’ I therefore exchange idealizations of real-time for the compromised temporalities of a more ‘spectral city,’ and a politics of openness and hospitality to that which has so far been excluded from the smart city discourse. The project thus leaves those interested in urban development with the task of ‘making time,’ a creative negotiation with the ghosts that haunt our increasingly digital cities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".