Digging into the Smartness: A Short Technopolitical (Pre)History of Vienna’s Urban Lakeside

摘要

The smart city project ‘Vienna’s Urban Lakeside’ (VUL) —“Seestadt Aspern” for German speakers— is currently being built upon a landscape where relevant historical events took place. The most well known of these events are the Battle of Aspern-Essling (1809), in which the Napoleonic army failed to cross the Danube, and the inauguration of the Aspern Airfield (1912), which was of great importance until World War II. However, widening the historical span from the Neolithic period to the current construction of this “smart” urban district of Vienna (begun in 2007), there are to be found further elements that illustrate the relevance of the Aspern region in historical and technopolitical terms. For this reason, the paper considers the possibility of “digging” into the technopolitical history of the region in order to reveal the specific intertwining of power and technology in different periods. Rather than a pure historical analysis, the paper is conceived of as a preface to an anthropological approach to the technopolitical substratum of the VUL, which can be regarded as an experimental and therefore key part of a larger smart city project involving the whole city of Vienna. Taking the example of Aspern’s region, the general suggestion of the analysis is that the historical contrast allows us to note that, while in the past technology and politics have appeared explicitly linked, in the present the discursive settings of the “smart urbanity” tend to conceal the relations of power (i.e. the political economy) behind a seemingly pure technological improvement of the ways we will dwell in the cities of the future.