| dc.description.abstract | In the contemporary city, everything from traffic signals to street lighting to bus shelters are becoming part of the Internet of Things (IoT). With the capacity for sensing and monitoring and the all-important generation of real-time information, the application of IoT technologies promises returns of increased efficiency and optimisation to a vast array of municipal processes and services. But how does the annexing of IoT technologies to commonplace urban systems change the role and identity of the material infrastructures themselves and to their associated practices and professions? At what points are there frictions and contradictions because of the changes brought about through the introduction of IoT, and what, if any, is the value of introducing IoT technologies to infrastructures and services in the public realm? As a fundamental municipal service that is inherently interwoven with multiple larger systems of urban governance, public health, economic development and environmental services, this thesis takes the example of ‘smart waste management’ as a means through which to articulate the socio-cultural dimensions and implications of instrumenting urban services with IoT technologies. Using a multimodal methodological approach drawn from the disciplines of architecture, urban design and material culture, it uncovers findings about the role of IoT in attempting to transform urban operations, organisations and environments. The thesis provides, first, a genealogy of waste management practices throughout different historical and geographical contexts, highlighting the significant role of defined routines and regular temporal structures within waste operations. Second, through original fieldwork with several city agencies and waste management departments in New York City, it describes how contemporary IoT waste management systems forefront real-time information, ultimately reconfiguring labour practices and sometimes even contradicting pre-existing regulations and union agreements. In this way, it argues that the introduction of IoT represents a fundamental change to the operations of public waste services, from those of set temporal routines and consistent manned labour to labour practices tethered to real-time updates. It shows how IoT systems simultaneously, overlook situated and embodied knowledges while additionally bringing about new regimes of maintenance. Furthermore, this research also examines how the application of IoT to public waste infrastructure introduces new actors and business models and how the infrastructure is re-imagined as having multiple new identities, functions and values, beyond those relating to waste management. By taking the singular case of waste management, unravelling its uses, meanings and associations over time and interrogating how these change with IoT instrumentation, the intention is to move away from the typically abstract or bombastic narratives of technological change and instead to present an example of how technology is entangled with every day – even abject urban life, detailing what the technological shift actually changes, the new processes and services it creates, as well as the roles and values it leaves behind. By indexing this array of functions lost and functions gained due to the introduction of IoT, it proposes offering this mapping as a strategic tool for smart city initiators to understand and articulate the wider implications of IoT applications. | en |
