Wednesday 21th February 2018
FASS D72/MR11
16.00-18.00. All Welcome
If you are interested in joining this seminar remotely, please email s.gristwood@lancaster.ac.uk
Accommodating algorithms: Rules, regularities, and infrastructural power in municipal traffic management
Susann Wagenknecht, University of Siegen, Germany. and DEMAND visitor
In scripting the stop and go of urban mobility, traffic infrastructures are shaped by federal laws and legally-binding engineering guidelines and by the temporalities of urban life. This talk, based on an ethnographic study of municipal traffic engineering, examines the planning and maintenance of traffic lights and their algorithms as a means of investigating infrastructural power. I argue that while traffic infrastructures matter for urban mobility, their capacity to do so is intricately interwoven with mobility practices, existing and envisioned.