Chapter 9: In the Deep Water: Envisioning a Contingent City of the Future/Past and the Tools to Do So

Beyond the idea of the city as ‘an abstract terrain for business operations’ (Greenfield, 2013), this chapter analyses alternative constructions and research processes for engaging with ideas of smart cities and digital spatiality, drawing upon the author's arts-based research making virtual reality installations. The chapter describes workshops in which participants have navigated virtual and analogue city spaces, discussing their own ideas of smartness and the mapping of cities. These workshops took place off and online, collaboratively framing intelligences beyond the extractivist logic of surveillance and the Internet of things. In the making of this work, questions of what we mean by smartness and futurity were materialised. The chapter expands on these projects and questions, asking what kinds of design prevents social equality (Ansari, 2020; Irani, 2015), who is left out of these constructs and why? The author draws upon this work in relation to Waterford, examining how the specific historical and contemporary contexts and topography of the city informs a situated approach to technologies of representation. Rivers, from the Thames to the ‘artificial’ Huangpu, the Suir and John's River in Waterford, in their contingency and ontological instability, run through the chapter as a situating, post-human presence.