Towards a Sedimentology of Information Infrastructures: a Geological Approach for Understanding the City

Abstract

Drawing primarily on ethnographic research performed in a city in Romania, this paper provides a thick description of police practices and information systems in that municipality. It shows various ways in which technologies mediate policing practitioners’ perceptions, decisions and actions. Bringing some additional material from a case in the Dutch police in which they build risk profiles predicated on real-time data from a sensor network, the paper highlights new phenomena with ethical implications emerging at the intersection of information infrastructures and policing practices. In particular, it shows a solidifying effect of technologically mediated suspicion, a sedimentation process in technological infrastructures and the formation of pockets of prejudice in the layers of software code. To adequately account for these phenomena and others, the paper provides a set of arguments and conditions for a sedimentology of infrastructures. At the same time, it offers the first steps in a larger research project that would adapt and test the limits of a geological vocabulary and approach to understand smart urban environments.

Theorizing Technologically Mediated Policing in Smart Cities: An Ethnographic Approach to Sensing Infrastructures in Security Practices

“…In this respect we could benefit from expanding and deepening the scope of investigations and bringing in the methodological and conceptual repertoire of geology to complement archaeology in our understanding of technological infrastructures. I have shown elsewhere how we can employ a sedimentological repertoire to understand phenomena with various degrees of dynamism and depth such as settling, debris, deposition, accumulation, sedimentation, explosion or volcanism in digital infrastructures (Niculescu-Dincă, 2018). Of course, human activity plays various roles in design processes.…”