Descripction of project by Farzin Lotfi-Jam and Mark Wasiuta
Rio de Janeiro is one of the most visible sites of smart city experimentation. In response to catastrophic natural disasters, calamitous traffic congestion, and urban health epidemics, the Centro de Operações Rio (COR) was designed as a corrective tool and as a new command and control hub that would allow the city to prepare for the 2016 Olympic Games. Launched in 2010, COR now monitors its urban camera network and information sensors, gauges optimal traffic patterns, determines landslide risk zones, predicts weather disruptions, and maps disease paths.
Rio’s wild topography, wealth disparities, and aging infrastructure make it an unlikely testing ground for the smooth rationality of urban management that smart city rhetoric proclaims. Through COR, the predictable impression of Rio de Janeiro as a lush playground of beaches and samba dancers conflicts with the new image of a Rio governed by smart city control systems. As it becomes increasingly marked by extreme police tactics and political protests , Rio appears less a case of urban optimization than a platform for viewing the conflicts that have erupted around urban data management, civil rights, and issues of social control. Yet, COR also signals a new form of participatory civic politics. Citizens visiting COR headquarters are able to observe COR operations and the data COR collects and displays. Through this demonstration of openness and access, COR serves as a public relations space from which the city attempts to broadcast an image of informational transparency and competent urban administration.
Control Syntax Rio shows the city of Rio structured through COR’s control syntax and smart city command processes. This syntax is assembled from seemingly banal “if-then” statements that become surprisingly charged by their encounters with the political and circulatory life of the city. Through COR, the exhibition sees traffic engineering as urban politics and as haunted by potential catastrophe. If a protest forms, then traffic will have to be redirected to avoid paralysis. If a building explodes, then routes will need to be cleared to bring in response teams. Explosions, fires, protests, landslides, rallies, and sudden tropical storms combine with faulty traffic lights, accidents, spilled trucks, burning buses, and quotidian congestion as elements of the COR syntax.
In the exhibition, a street route through Rio de Janeiro doubles as a COR decision path. COR assesses every incident to learn if it will escalate to an event, an emergency, or a crisis. These four conditions are color coded green, blue, orange, and red. With this code, and through COR, we are able to perceive glimpses of the current image of urban computational governmentality, not only blithely directed toward engineered efficiency, but also saturated with a thousand narratives of possible threat, risk, disruption, and instability.
