Author: Joseph Popper

by Rafaela Cavalcanti de Alcântara

The first place I occupy in the world is my own body. The fact that I am a female, non-white migrant relying on a research visa to live in Austria is crucial to understanding how I see my research object and field. This perspective has been informing my academic studies and, consequently, my PhD research, in which I have been seeking to understand the interactions between bodies, data, and urban policies. Thus, my academic reflections, inevitably, are influenced by my Latin American female body, which is not necessarily welcomed in certain spaces in and outside Europe. Of course, it is not about my own body only.

This is because I must engage with other experiences and bodies to understand the complexities of living in the cities. The experiences of favelas’ inhabitants, members of the Palestinian diaspora or delivery app workers, for instance, will carry with themselves specificities in terms of their access to the urban environments they inhabit and the possibilities of living there as they wish. That said, I want to be transparent about whose existences I am concerned about when it comes to the increasing use of data to define urban policies: I am worried about those who are undocumented, disabled, trans, nonbinary, racialized, female, feminized, queer; the ones seen as ‘the others’ or ‘less human’ according to Western hegemonic thinking; the ones even unseen; the bodies that carry out low- and unpaid work; the ones that are often labeled by police forces as suspects of criminal offenses; those who are repressed when taking to the streets for their agendas, those that are deemed as ‘illegal’ or not welcome by state or conservative forces.

The deployment of big data in urban contexts is surrounded by several plans and goals: the improvement of urban safety, promotion faster automobile traffic, saving of energy consumption in public lighting — to mention only a few. Bearing in mind the scenario fostered by data-driven urbanism (Kitchin, 2017), I argue that body-territory helps me to challenge ‘one-size-fits-all’ big data promises. ‘Body-territory’ claims that “it is impossible to cut apart and isolate the individual body from the collective body, the human body from the territory and landscape” (Gago, 2020). In this sense, I see body-territory as essential to problematize and challenge official speeches data-driven solutions as silver bullets to solving city issuesThe examples introducing this paragraph, for instance, raise some immediate questions, such as: Which bodies feel safer when a city’s common spaces are surveilled and monitored by public security forces? Who — and whose interests — benefit most from the traffic lights installed to make individual car drivers’ lives easier? Does automated public lighting meet the needs of female, feminized or queer bodies moving  through the city when it is dark?

The Right to the City is a statement and call within urban debates. Introduced by Lefebvre in 1968 and translated into English in 1996 (Lefebvre, 1996), it claims that people have the right to interfere in urban life, making and remaking the city, participating and appropriating it according to collective needs (Lefebvre, 1996; Harvey, 2008). Since hegemonic discourses on big data often present it as an objective, evidence-based resource to overcome “urban problems,” I want to raise awareness about how those narratives may picture and focus on a single standardized idea of ‘urban citizen.’ Citizens that inhabit the datafied city are not homogeneous: their existences in urban space are embodied and territorialized, which should be taken into consideration when big data becomes a central player in urban planning.

Since the body-territory promotes a de-liberalization of the notion of the body as individual property, specifying an “epistemological continuity [,] of the body as territory” (Gago, 2020), I believe that this Latin American concept can also be useful to analyze European cities. This is also because body-territory challenges “the masculine naturalized as the universal” since it is a concept that “can be postulated as an image that is antagonistic to the abstract character required by the individual property owner of (neo) liberal modernity,” as described by Gago (2020). It reminds us that all bodies should be considered, and that they cannot be seen as abstract since they are situated and territorialized. Thus, when applied to European cities, the concept of the body-territory can be used to challenge some big data narratives that ignore the fact that experiences in urban spaces are both embodied and territorialized, mainly because bodies and territories are intertwined.

Therefore, the notion fosters the idea that understanding the complexities of urban life requires an analysis that goes beyond looking at the individual only. My point here is to argue that overcoming (neo) liberal views of what an ‘individual’ can be, means also overcoming an abstract and individualistic idea about the ‘urban citizen’, who is constructed in institutional narratives and is essential when thinking about ‘digital’, ‘smart’, and ‘datafied’ cities. Body-territory addresses some of my concerns since the concept helps me to elaborate on the idea that data-driven urban policies may potentially ignore some embodied certain urban experiences if urban data management reproduces claims — or illusions — for a so-called ‘objectivity.’ As for the latter, if a city police is built over a single idea of ‘city inhabitant,’ it may, for instance, base itself solely on data traffic informing motorized vehicles flows towards downtown instead of taking into consideration female pedestrians that move throughout their neighborhoods to carry out care work. 

Body-territory has been built by feminist, indigenous, peasant, and other social movements throughout Abya Yala. Gago states that the body-territory expands the way of seeing (2020), which, in dialogue with Haraway’s perspective on situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988), leads me towards an approach that considers the ones that are “not allowed not to have a body” (Haraway, 1988, p. 575), fostering my own epistemological turn towards ‘smart cities’ or ‘urban data platforms’. If bodies carry with themselves the territories they inhabit,[1]2 ‘body-territory’ helps to think about a complex scenario that seems to not be easily represented in data-driven decisions.

This said, body-territory is a powerful tool to expand debates around, for instance, what authors have been referring to as “the right to the digital city”, “the right to the smart city”, and “the right to the datafied city” (Bria & Morozov, 2018; Cardullo et al., 2019). This is a connection that becomes even more evident for me when I recall Harvey’s (2020, p. 23) words stating that the right to the city goes beyond a right of individual access to the city resources since it “depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization”.

There is a long path to walk, of course, which includes looking at what has been done. It is important to recall, for instance, that the Data Commons Manifesto states that “Data is not neutral or unbiased, so it must bear a critical, political and ethical analysis” (Bass & Old, 2020, p. 59). What I desire is questioning liberal notions that may have been preventing us from seeing beyond data promises.

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*Abya Yala ou Abiayala is the term in Kuna language given to the continent officially named as America. Over time, the term Abya Yala has been deployed by indigenous movements to refer to this territory, replacing its eurocentric name.

[1] See the card “Bodies Territories” at the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies, available at https://www.transfeministech.codingrights.org/

Author Biography

Rafaela Cavalcanti de Alcântara is currently a researcher at the Institute of Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a PhD candidate at the STS department of the University of Vienna. She has been connecting feminist science and critical data studies to other feminist scholarship – primarily historical materialist and Latin American – to elaborate on the interaction between body-territories, big data, and welfare.  

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References

Bass, T. & Old, R. (2020). Common Knowledge: Citizen-led Data Governance for Better Cities. Decode. European Union. https://www.nesta.org.uk/report/common-knowledge-citizen-led-data-governance-better-cities/

Bria, F. & Morozov, E. (2018). Rethinking the Smart City. Democratizing Urban Technology. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Office. https://www.rosalux.de/publikation/id/38134/die-smarte-stadt-neu-denken  

Cardullo, P., Di Feliciantonio, C. & Kitchin, R. (Eds.) (2019). The Right to the Smart City. Emerald Publishing Limited.

Cruz-Hernández, D. T. (2016). Una Mirada Muy Otra a los Territorios-cuerpos Femeninos. Solar, 12(1), 35-46.

Gago, V. (2020). Feminist International: How to Change Everything. Verso.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066 

Harvey, D. (2008). The Right to the City. New Left Review, 53, 23-40. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city

Kitchin, R. (2017). Data-driven Urbanism. In Kitchin, R., Lauriault, T.P., & McArdle, G. (Eds.). Data and the City (p. 44-56), Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315407388 

Lefebvre, H. (1996). The Right to the City. In H. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (1st ed., pp. 61–181). Blackwell.

by Allesandra Penders

In September of this year, one week into joining the FutureSpace research project – just as the project celebrated its first anniversary – I found myself taking notes in a Strategic Foresight Workshop hosted by the FutureSpace team members, attended by many important actors in the European space sector, including members of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI). Throughout, multiple participants voiced their surprise at, and concerns about, how little the public knows about space and our present-day space capabilities. Their observations are echoed in recent surveys and reports on the European public’s awareness of space-based activities, which indicate that although positive sentiments towards investing in space are most common, only a minor percentage are actually well-informed about European space activities (ESA, 2019; ESPI, 2023; Europe Barometer, 2014). When this point was raised, as a newcomer to the project and the Social Studies of Outer Space (SSOS) field more broadly, I certainly felt like a representative of this largely ignorant public. Despite a subconscious, common-sense knowledge that we are extremely reliant on space technologies as a society, I, like many others, do not often stop to think about the materialities behind such infrastructures.

Even if you have not been keeping up with space news, like me, you may have come across claims that ‘a new space race is in full swing.’ At present, there is indeed a wealth of public and private actors actively working towards ambitious outer space projects in the midst of intensifying international competition. As opposed to the Apollo era, the current period of space exploration – the ‘new space race’ or the ‘new space age’ – is characterized by the shift away from state-led space activities towards the rise of the private, commercial sector and subsequent public-private partnerships. SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other so-called “NewSpace” private enterprises, aim to capitalize on the promise of outer space as a novel economic frontier – encompassing satellite communication networks, space tourism, space mining, human settlements on the Moon and Mars, and other socio-technological schemes (Tutton, 2018). These changes are consequently accompanied by issues such as space debris, as satellites are being put into orbit at an unprecedented rate (Starlink plans to have 29,988 orbiting satellites next year), leading to crowded orbits and potential collisions; ecological impacts and the continuation of colonial practices, as resource-rich celestial bodies become sites for resource extraction; or questions surrounding dual-use technologies, as space infrastructures are employed for both civilian/scientific and military/security purposes, (e.g. satellite imagery). Simultaneously, China, India, and Russia are each independently advancing military operations in outer space, as the U.S. pushes for returning astronauts to the Moon with the Artemis programme.

In other words, regardless of the ‘space race’ buzzword’s truthiness, it seems space has indeed once again – albeit differently – been framed to invoke narratives of international competition and antagonism, and importantly, of global winners and losers – with political and material effects in tow.

Europe is certainly feeling the pressure. The (illusion of) competition in the new space race narratives and the rise of NewSpace has evidently lit a fire under Europe’s space sector, as European institutions and actors seek to promote their own visions for human futures in outer space. In November 2021, the Director General of ESA stated his aim for “European footprints” on the Moon by 2030, which would “become a new economic space, and a new continent” of human activity (“Bis Zum Ende”, 2021). Additionally, consider the case of the joint Ariane rocket programme. Created in 1979 by 13 collaborating European nations, partially to ensure autonomous European access to outer space (Al-Ekabi, 2015), Ariane has been heralded as a symbol of successful European integration on a political, technological, and economic level (Harvey, 2003). Hence, its commercial success was arguably not prioritized, as the programme instead stuck to the geo-return principle, which ensured every nation participating in building different rocket parts received its fair share of industry contracts. However, today this principle and other pillars of European scientific, technological and political integration are increasingly contested in the face of the previously mentioned rise of American NewSpace actors. Due to the felt pressure of an unprecedented global competition for space launches and access to space, Ariane is now increasingly seen as too expensive and with a bureaucratic governance system too complex to keep up with the speed of disruptive innovation set by its commercial competitors. Consequently, narratives that Europe is ‘lagging behind’ and needs to ‘catch up’ in the global race have become widespread. In this uniquely crucial and transformative moment in the history of (European) space exploration, the FutureSpace project studies how space future visions are shaped by particular European value constellations and, in turn, how European outer space infrastructures and space policy are co-produced by these shared visions in advancing processes of political (dis)integration (Klimburg-Witjes, 2023). Following Ariane around to construction sites, policy conferences, foresight departments and trade fairs, FutureSpace focuses on the entanglements of the imaginative, material, and political dimensions of European space activities, towards understanding how futures of European integration on and off-planet are imagined and performed (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015).

In its first year, the FutureSpace team– Asst.-Prof. Dr. Nina Klimburg-Witjes, Dr. Joseph Popper, Philipp Kürten, and Kai Strycker – has already researched a variety of topics under the European space sector, including the issue of space debris in Earth’s orbit; sociotechnical imaginaries of strategic autonomy in controversies about Ariane; topographies of Earth-Space relations and scalar narratives in the European space sector. Following the European space controversies mentioned in the previous paragraph, FutureSpace research found that positions tend to polarize around two narratives for future integrations. The first urges for a more united European approach and a reinforced commitment to Ariane, organized under the framework of ESA. The second argues for a dis-integration of the existing European launcher program in favor of creating more agile alliances between the corporate sector and a few powerful countries. This debate further reflects important and prevalent tensions between unity and plurality, and between cooperation and competition. In both cases, the emerging NewSpace ecosystem is transforming the politics of space in Europe, and complicates the relations between the national, international, and supranational institutions currently responsible for European space futures (Klimburg-Witjes, 2023). In sum, the FutureSpace research is the first of its kind in linking the rocket, and the future imaginaries it inspires, to forms of governance, engineering practices, and value constellations in multinational infrastructure projects. In doing so, FutureSpace advances the state of the art in three areas, namely Science and Technology Studies, Infrastructures Studies, and SSOS, thereby contributing to novel and highly relevant interfaces between them.

Having established the glaring relevance of understanding contemporary outer space infrastructures and the significance of research into this topic, the question remains: Why do I – and evidently, so many other Europeans – then know so little about such important space-related endeavours? Intuitively, one could easily suggest plausible reasons for the public’s ignorance about European space endeavours, such as the inherently “complex nature of space and space-related activities, including space science, -policy, -technology, and -applications” (Pieterse, 2020, p. 15), which is difficult to communicate to lay persons. Or, perhaps this ignorance is a byproduct of the modern ‘attention economy’, in which an overload of accessible information has led to increased difficulties of ‘breaking through’ in media environments – an issue that has been discussed by many researchers of science communication (Jamieson et al., 2017). To be sure, for the average citizen, it is difficult to gauge which space-related headlines warrant attention or concern, or which new launches are considered illustrative of a progressive development in space capabilities, as opposed to merely conducting ‘business as usual’. Particularly, considering real-life space exploration has become “an unexciting endeavor” for the public, as evidenced by a lack of ‘iconic’ moments in the collective memory, as opposed to the Apollo generation (Geppert, 2018, p. 310). Even the more ambitious promises for space exploration that have the potential to garner public interest – often attributed to NewSpace companies – suffer from the effects of a delayed payoff, and in today’s competitive attention economy, small incremental updates and long wait times for noteworthy results lead to a boy-who-cried-wolf condition, in which the public sentiment becomes: ‘You know what? Just let us know when we get there.’ From ESA’s perspective, one can imagine how a lack of public awareness and enthusiasm for space results in a lack of public funding, inhibiting the work that ESA could carry out. From this perspective, in line with much of the work in science communication and public engagement research, public ignorance is an undesirable risk. However, one could argue that public ignorance may be beneficial for ESA in certain cases, as awareness also comes with nosiness, questioning, and criticisms. For example, to remain evasive of public backlash, ESA may prefer that people remain unaware of issues surrounding space debris or dual-use technologies. But even in the case of less contested space endeavors, one can imagine how public awareness is not preferred, for example in questions of resource allocation. Although writing about the American context, Pieterse’s (2020, p. 20) observation about the irony in the public engagement with space is applicable here: “[The people] expect [the national space agencies] to be leading within the space arena, but express their outrage at the resources allocated to it, whilst indifferent as to the value of space technology.” Perhaps it would be in ESA’s best interest to let its space activities fade into the shadows of public consciousness so as to not remind them that public funding is being funneled into space exploration as well. (For reference, a survey from a few years ago indicated that the European public’s estimations for public resource allocation into space activities are already around twenty times higher than they actually are (ESA, 2019), a gross overestimation that cannot be easily corrected when public communication is already lacking.) Therefore, rather than an unintentional ignorance springing from contemporary communication conditions, is there a strategic and purposeful element to keeping the European public oblivious about what ESA is up to?

Indeed, my intuition is corroborated in the following excerpt from an interview^[1] with an ESA official:

“People do not know much about space, but they are not against [space investment]. If explained, then they say ‘Oh, it’s good, fine – do it.’ (…) We are in a good and comfortable position with this portfolio, that it’s not objected and challenged. (…) As long as we are not hindered to do our work for Galileo^[2], Copernicus^[3], and so on, [and] nobody knows that on the street, then it’s fine. And we should keep that on such a non-excited level.”

As evidenced by earlier sentiments, and as the Ariane rocket has been referred to as “the most boring rocket” (personal communication), I believe it is safe to say ESA successfully maintained this public non-excitement. Additionally, it is important to note the discrepancy in the interviewee’s claims that, on the one hand, once the purposes of space activities are explained and made known to the public, people tend to be okay with these activities being carried out, and on the other hand, keeping the public generally ignorant is beneficial as it evades obstructions to the work done by ESA. What is particularly interesting here, is also this notion of ‘non-excitement’. This maintained ignorance among the public is thus not one produced through secrecy or the withholding of information, but rather, it is an obliviousness produced through strategic boringness. It is a strategy of not communicating information to an audience by employing boringness under the guise of communicating information to an audience – or the Terms and Conditions approach.

Such preliminary musings remain underdeveloped for now, but warrant future research. As the FutureSpace project continues to shed light on European space futures, it is important to consider the public’s role in the shaping of such futures, especially if space remains represented as a shared common, for all humankind. During my remaining time as an intern at the FutureSpace project, I return to my initial ignorance – my impetus to join FutureSpace in the first place – and take it as a starting point rather than a hindrance to my entry into the SSOS field, as I aim to provide a first foray into this exploratory topic of (strategic) public ignorance and the European space sector. 

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^[1] This interview with an ESA official was conducted in 2019 by Dr. Nina Klimburg-Witjes for the research project “Making Europe through and for its research infrastructures” at the University of Vienna.

^[2] ESA’s Galileo mission is Europe’s independent global navigation satellite system.

^[3] ESA’s Copernicus mission consists of a constellation of satellites providing Earth observation data, monitoring the planet’s environment and climate.

Author Biography

Allesandra Penders is a master’s student in the interdisciplinary Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology Research Master programme at Maastricht University. Allesandra previously completed her Liberal Arts and Sciences bachelor’s programme at Maastricht University (University College Maastricht), with a Social Sciences/Humanities concentration focusing on STS, Cultural Studies, Sociology, and (Digital) Media Studies. As part of her current master’s programme, Allesandra is doing an internship at the University of Vienna in the FutureSpace project, working as a research assistant.

References

Al-Ekabi, C. (Ed.). (2015). European Autonomy in Space (Vol. 10). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11110-0

‘Bis zum Ende der Dekade steht ein Europäer oder eine Europäerin auf dem Mond’ (‘By the end of the decade, a European will be on the moon’). (2021, November 26). Der Standard. https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000131455919/bis-zum-ende-der-dekade-steht-ein-europaeer-oder-eine

ESA. (2019, January 16). How much do European citizens know about space? https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Corporate_news/How_much_do_European_citizens_know_about_space

ESPI. (2023). EU space policy and the involvement of civil society. European Economic and Social Committee. https://www.espi.or.at/reports/eu-space-policy-and-the-involvement-of-civil-society/

Europe Barometer. (2014). European Attitudes to Space Activities (Summary). European Commission. https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/1085

Geppert, A. C. T. (Ed.). (2018). Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture After Apollo (1st ed. 2018). Palgrave Macmillan UK?: Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36916-1

Geppert, A. C. T. (2021). What is, and to what end do we study, European astroculture? In A. C. T. Geppert, D. Brandau, & T. Siebeneichner (Eds.), Militarizing Outer Space: Astroculture, Dystopia, and the Cold War (pp. 371–378). Palgrave Macmillan.

Harvey, B. (2003). Europe’s space programme: To Ariane and beyond. Springer; published in association with Praxis Pub.

Jamieson, K. H., Kahan, D., & Scheufele, D. A. (2017). The Oxford handbook of the science of science communication. Oxford university press.

Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001

Klimburg-Witjes, N. (2023). A Rocket to Protect? Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Strategic Autonomy in Controversies About the European Rocket Program. Geopolitics, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2177157

Minenor-Matheson, G. (2023). Media and outer space. Imaginaries and discourses of the new space race. In A. Kaun & P. Åker (Eds.), Centering the Margins of Digital Culture (pp. 73–96).

Pieterse, E. (2020). Space and media. In A. Froehlich (Ed.), Outer Space and Popular Culture: Influences and interrelations (pp. 15–24). Springer.

Tutton, R. (2018). Multiplanetary Imaginaries and Utopia: The Case of Mars One. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 43(3), 518–539. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243917737366