Abstract

The entanglement of physical with digital spaces is constantly creating new types of hybrid experiences and realities with a profound impact on the social, cultural, and economic dynamics of our living environments. At the individual level, the ubiquitous presence of technology in our everyday lives affects our relationships with our surroundings. These transformations pose unprecedented challenges and yet offer novel opportunities for designing the built environment - from artefact s and spaces to buildings and cities.
In this essay, the concept of Urban Glitch is introduced as an unexpected slippage of system functioning in technologically-driven urban environments. An urban glitch disrupts the functionality and effectiveness of city dynamics, encouraging designers to imagine and develop responsive artefacts, buildings, and environments that foster creativity, open up spaces otherwise unexplored, and lead to transformations throughout the whole city. Through this lens, urban glitches can ultimately spark the design of technologically enhanced built environments that are able to “outwit” their own smarts, thus creating the conditions for “post-smart cities” to be developed.

Therefore, technologically-driven systemic thinking in urban environments might ultimately have the consequence of making cities less interesting, more repetitive and even boring, limiting the “extra-ordinary” and the unexpected. This is a vision that almost echoes Max Weber’s ideology of modern society: the idea that “the world is disenchanted,” and that “one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.”⁶

This deterministic view of technology also implies that technical progress possesses an autonomous functional logic with a powerful social impact, eventually leading to “a brighter future, a happier and more open society in which everything has been measured and engineered into a state of perfect efficiency.”⁷ Smart city models typically depict these different states of “perfect efficiency” by offering urban scenarios where everything seems to be working seamlessly. For each problem, there is an optimal technological solution.

Besides the design intervention of the techno-system, smart city approaches tend to overlook human action. Social entities (i.e. citizens) are mainly users of technology and providers of information (in turn collected through technology). In that sense, what smart city models seem to lack is a clear articulation of the potential uses of new, situated technologies in the built environment. Leveraging the opportunity to urbanise the technologies they mobilise might instead counter the tendency of “futilely seeking to eliminate incompleteness,” as the sociologist Saskia Sassen suggests.⁸

In a world already dominated by multiple forms of standardisation, the focus on optimization and efficiency leaves no room for “incompleteness” - nor for creativity or even serendipity in either the daily lives of citizens or in the processes of urban development. As stated by smart city expert Anthony Townsend, “If we program all of the randomness out, we’ll have turned them [the cities] from rich, living organisms into dull mechanical automatons.”⁹

Besides the creation of routine and the danger of “endless repetition,” the analogy of the city as a machine inherently embeds the risks related to malfunctioning and errors. In his article “The Museum of Accidents,” French philosopher Paul Virilio articulates how the invention of any new kind of technology is also simultaneously the invention of a new kind of accident.¹⁰ In doing so, he questions the techno-scientific spirit that characterises modern society.

To counter those technologically-driven approaches and scenarios in smart cities, we here introduce a second attribute that contributes to the framing of the notion of responsive environments - the concept of the “urban glitch.” In its general connotation, glitch is a term mainly used to describe a malfunction caused by voltage actuation, for instance a signal failure in a circuit. It can also be seen as a break from an expected or conventional flow of information, materials, and processes in a system, often resulting in a perceived accident or error.

Thus, in its definition, a glitch incorporates the notion of failure and temporality, of a sudden and unforeseen slip in the ordinary and expected flux of events. A glitch can also be defined as a temporary, transient fault in a system that corrects itself. Glitches are cracks, frictions that create “openings” in a system, revealing new meanings and unexpected outcomes of the system itself. According to Dutch artist and theorist Rosa Menkman, “a glitch occurs on the occasion where there is an absence of (expected) functionality, whether understood in a technical or social sense.”¹¹

In some ways, a glitch is akin to a Freudian slip, or “parapraxis,” defined as an error in speech, memory, or physical action resulting from the interference of an unconscious (“dynamically repressed”) subdued wish or internal train of thought.

Examples of classical parapraxes include slips of the tongue and of the pen. Psychoanalytic theory also embraces misreadings, mishearings, temporary forgettings, and the mislaying and losing of objects as windows into the “unspeakable.” All reveal a source of ideas outside the speech, either accidental shifts in the path of a sentence - i.e., linguistic gaffes - or as mishaps in the ways we relate to people and things - i.e., behavioural gaffes.

In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Sigmund Freud analyses a number of seemingly trivial, bizarre, or nonsensical errors and slips (fehlleistungen in German, translated into English as “faulty actions”).

In his view, unacceptable thoughts or beliefs are withheld from our conscious awareness, and these slips help unearth what lurks in the unconscious. “Almost invariably I discover a disturbing influence from something outside of the intended speech,” he writes. “The disturbing element is a single unconscious thought, which comes to light through the special blunder.”¹²

Applied in the context of smart cities, the urban glitch casts off the typically negative connotation of the term and assumes a generative quality instead. We define an urban glitch as an unexpected slippage in the functioning of the systems in technologically-driven cities. It is the spatial equivalent of a Freudian slip that unveils some “unspoken truths” that lurk behind the immediate understanding of the built environment. An urban glitch exposes a situation that may undermine pre-established assumptions and certainties.

When glitches relate to the built environment, people find new connections with places, shifting the relationship from the ordinary towards the unexpected and the unpredictable. They start to move off the beaten path and come to seek the “extraordinary.”

These unexpected effects of involuntary acts expose hidden vulnerabilities (the weak links in a chain) and open up new possibilities. When the individual discovers mechanics outside of the rigid convention or norm, the system is opened up to feedback.

Opportunities then emerge to explore narratives that subvert the architect or designer’s intentions. In its lack of an established, stable and well-defined form, the urban glitch reminds the design practice of the evocative power of ambiguity. It claims the necessity of allowing enough space for interpretation and improvisation, for experiences and places where different meanings can be projected.

The urban glitch constitutes a demand for enabling conditions that will leave sufficient elbow room for informality, for uses that are not established, for surprises and novelties. Concerning the characteristics of the accepted notion of the smart city we define five qualities of urban glitches here:

– Unintentional: rather than being the result of a planned intention, an urban glitch is the outcome of unpredictable circumstances. For instance, designing urban interventions that allow for their informal interactive use by citizens shifts the experience from passive use to creative appropriation. In this case, the design needs to be sufficiently open, accessible, and pliant to accommodate multiple interaction scenarios that can give life to unpredictable experiences.

– Temporary and ephemeral: although an urban glitch is temporary, it causes permanent effects and profound repercussions that can hardly be predicted. The focus here is not on the effects of major structures or interventions that were designed to be temporary and that eventually became permanent (such as the Eiffel Tower), but rather on projects with a specific timeframe that leave traces and cause changes in the built environment.

– Democratic: an urban glitch is democratic in the sense that it results from collective preferences, and it is widely understood and embraced. The smart city approach often puts the “controller” (usually the mayor) at the top of the decision-making processes, and platform-based technologies further emphasise this control. An urban glitch shifts the perspective by creating opportunities for technology to be used in ways that allow for dynamic hierarchies of participatory urban engagement and citizen empowerment.

– Generative: an urban glitch brings the system outside of its comfort zone of functionality and effectiveness. It opens up a novel space for creation through the combination of unexpected elements to generate experiential short circuits where knowledge can find new paths. Where efficiency is about optimization, creativity is about making hidden and out-of-the-box connections. An urban glitch facilitates the discovery and generative use of these connections.

– Qualitative: an urban glitch allows for mindful experiences of the built environment, sometimes even revealing the unexpected. Instead of a precise quantitative understanding of urban dynamics, the urban glitch fosters more natural appropriations of places in the city. The result is, for instance, the production of “third spaces” where “the spatiality of human life is embraced.”¹³ Third spaces are about living in a physical and social environment in unconventional ways and are produced through social interaction and appropriation rather than rational planning.

By creating a healthy tension through the notion of urban glitches, this approach may encourage architects and designers to imagine and develop artefacts, buildings and environments that foster creativity, open up spaces otherwise unexplored, make for a better ambience, and lead to pleasant and unexpected repercussions throughout the whole city. Said otherwise, what makes today’s metropolis liveable and enjoyable can only emerge as a balance between the rationalising characteristics of smart cities - i.e. predictable, over planned, top-down, efficient, and quantitative—and the creative qualities of urban glitches - i.e. unintentional, temporary and ephemeral, democratic, generative, and qualitative.

The urban glitch then constitutes a space for critical practices that question normative representations and habits. Small interventions through glitch practices can create the conditions for urban creativity and innovation to spread across a city. Multiple meanings, openness, “the possibility of surprise”—as Richard Sennett would put it¹⁴—are all qualities that we can expect of the urban realm, and which can serve as design parameters. “And designing is a constructive method that is able to accommodate contradiction,” highlights Technical University of Munich (TUM) professor Sophie Wolfrum;¹⁵ adding that “the characteristics that determine the performative potential of architecture are decisive. These include the unpredictability and ambivalent significance of a situation, and possibly also its lasting transformative effect.”¹⁶

In relation to this performative character, we may then add four other qualities of the urban glitch:¹⁷ (1) unpredictability: an urban glitch is open and unpredictable, embracing unexpected uses (yet it is not arbitrary); (2) ambivalence: an urban glitch invites a variety of spatial situations (for instance, a slight shift in the social context can turn an urban space from inviting to threatening, from formal to casual, from busy to sleepy); (3) perceptual impact: the conditions of an urban glitch influence the spatial perception of an urban space - even if they remain below the threshold of consciousness; (4) transformative power: urban glitches - implicitly or explicitly - have the capacity to foster distinctive changes to the built environment as well as to the experience of citizens.

Through this lens, we can see how urban glitches can spark the design of technologically-enhanced responsive environments that are able to outwit their own smarts, thus creating the conditions for “postsmart cities” to be developed.


Excerpted and adapted from Responsive Environments (Actar Publishers, 2021) by Allen Sayegh, Stefano Andreani, Matteo Kalchschmidt in collaboration with Harvard REAL Lab.
A version of this chapter appeared as an article by the authors in Technological Forecasting and Social Change 142 (2019): 15–25, under the title “Reframing technologically enhanced urban scenarios: A design research model towards human centered smart cities.”

Bio

Allen Sayegh is Design Critic and Senior Interaction Technologies Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the director of REAL, the Responsive Environment and Artifacts Lab at Harvard. Sayegh is an architect, designer, and educator and the principal of INVIVIA – an award winning global design firm. He has taught at different institutions and has worked on many different projects throughout the US, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. His courses and practice focus on technologically driven architectural design, exploring potentials of media and technology integrated built environment, Interaction design and the study of architectural and urban space thought through the impact of changing technology. Sayegh most recently co-founded the ALIVE group at Harvard - an interdisciplinary team of scientists and designers from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the WYSS Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, while his Lab at Harvard - REAL looks into the future of the built environment from a technologically augmented point of view with a strong focus on sustainability and longevity of responsive and technologically design driven environments.

Stefano Andreani is a licensed architectural engineer and educator interested in innovative and transformative design research methods and solutions for the design of human-centered built environments. Pursuing his research at the intersection of technologically-augmented design, multi-faceted urban systems, and enhanced human experiences, he develops novel strategies for the study and design of interactive, engaging and responsive spaces, systems, artifacts, and ultimately experiences for a positive impact on society. Andreani is a Lecturer in Architecture at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University and a Research Associateand Project Manager at the Harvard Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab (REAL). Andreani practices as Principal of Oblyk Studio, an architecture and research studio based in Bergamo, Italy and Boston, USA. He lectured, published, and exhibited internationally in numerous venues.

Matteo Giacomo Maria Kalchschmidt is an engineer. After a master at the Faculty of Engineering, he holds a Phd in management engineering from the Politecnico of Milan. Since December 2014, he is full Professor of Project and Innovation Management at the Department of Management, Information and Production Engineering of the University of Bergamo. He conducts research in the field of innovation and management of production and logistics systems. Since 2013 he is Chairman of the Management Committee of the Smart[ER] Citizens Program, a research and joint training project between the University of Bergamo and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Since 2015 he is also a member of the Board of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Information and Production and of the School of Engineering at the University of Bergamo. Since 2015 he is Vice-Chancellor of Internationalization and International Relations for the University of Bergamo.