Abstract

The smart city began as a socio-technical imaginary that placed human and technological efficiencies at the core of its agenda.

In recent years, a reliance on technological and data-driven decision-making in urban planning and governance—to support sustainability, carbon net zero, and climate mitigation—has become central to the smart city narrative.

In this talk, Rachel Clarke will explore critical perspectives of the smart city and approaches to reconfiguring the dominance of technoscientific sustainable and efficient futures.

Drawing from her new co-edited book, she will discuss examples through the lens of ‘justice practices’, considering how designers and practitioners are making sense of and developing more-than-human approaches to cohabitation with species, data, chemicals, hybrid technical-organic interfaces, and other-worldly entities.

Rachel Clarke

Rachel Clarke is a design researcher and practitioner whose work explores climate justice, sustainability, and social inequality through visual communication, qualitative research, performance, and storytelling.

She is Senior Lecturer in Design for Climate Justice and Course Leader for Art Direction at the London College of Communication, UAL. Her work spans international exhibitions and publications in design research, HCI, and the social sciences.

Recent projects include tools for citizen scientists to investigate environmental and health inequalities, designing more-than-human data interactions in smart cities, and research with UN Women on youth housing.

She co-edited the book Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities (OUP, 2024) with Sara Heitlinger and Marcus Foth, and advises the UK government’s DEFRA Futures Group.

Before UAL, Clarke was Senior Lecturer at Open Lab, Newcastle University, and co-investigator at the Centre for Digital Citizens. She co-chaired PDC’22, developing a decentralised hybrid model of 100+ multilingual events across five continents.