”Imagining a Slow City by Building and Dwelling in a Smart City” by Mihye Cho
Mihye Cho explores how to relate issues of everydayness to ‘building and dwelling’ in a smart city. Castells (1983) interprets the production of data and index as a process to identify social issues at stake and to formulate social values.The speaker explores such production of data in the seminar - what should be the forms and features of a ‘smart village’? What is measured and analyzed in order to design such a village. She examines the interview result about the quality of life in the public housing estates in Singapore, which has been a part of the project to design a ‘new urban kampung (village)’. Quality-of-life research leans toward measuring placed-based attributes of a locale while less attention has been given to understanding what people mean by quality of life. She reiterates that quality-of-life research is intrinsically about juxtaposing life conditions and life evaluation, thereby unveiling critical issues immanent in a society. According to the result of the interviews, people experience the separation between work and non-work and the clashes of different temporalities in their everyday life.The interview result unveils the efforts to reconcile ‘fast’ and ‘slow’. The Singapore case is insightful to contemplate the challenges of reconciling the increasing needs of going slower amid an accelerated pace of life, which is a contradictory yet pervasive characteristic of life in contemporary capitalist societies. The speaker discusses her insight into how smart-city building could incorporate the rhythms of everydayness in dwelling in a smart city.
Mihye Cho is an assistant professor at Sociology Department and a leader of the MA in Inter-Asia NGO studies, SungKongHoe University. Her current research focuses on evaluation and crisis narratives, slow city, and urban subjectivity. Her books include Entrepreneurial Seoulite: Culture and Subjectivity in Hongdae, Seoul (Michigan University Press, 2019) and Creative Ageing Cities (co-edited with Chong, Routlege, 2018).
Date: January 17, 2022
Time: 07:00 PM Osaka, Sapporo, Tokyo
Register from here: https://forms.office.com/r/SUi7VhgGb4
This talk is organized by James Farrer (Professor of Sociology, Sophia University)
Image by Stacey Gabrielle Koenitz Rozells via Pexels