Concepts

Ecologically Smart Territories (ESM) represents territories that encompass and critically accommodate various types of environmental, social, cultural and geographical topographies, smartly enhancing their local (always singular) potential by means of various forms of intelligent functioning.

The term emerged as a way of overcoming and critically challenge the idea of a smart city—a top-down and one-dimensional construct promoting technological domination and close(d)ness as a concept for organizing human habitats.

EST reaches out to collective intelligence produced within open, complex and digitally reticulated systems. It fosters different forms of noetic life understood as intermittent, technologically conditioned and fundamental for the sustainability of natural and social milieus historically transformed by technical systems. In this approach, a territory represents a morphological and existential space much bigger than a city and that results from contributory economy results and a permanent dialogue between living entities.

As a notion invested into smartness, EST inspires forms of savoir-faire for savoir-vivre developed in techno-geographical milieus. In this way, smart territories are not only smart in terms of noetic intermittence but also in terms of ecology: they produce ecological smartness within, always more or less local, communities of knowledge and revalue all forms of knowledge by understanding locality as open systems with permeable borders.

Contributory research (CR) fosters collaboration between academic researchers and inhabitants on different levels of territoriality that form societies. It specifically territorializes research practices without reducing them to what ‘research’ means in an academic context. The aim of CR is to show how different fields of ‘knowledge production’: sciences (physical sciences, life sciences, earth sciences, human and social sciences), technological research read more »

The project rests on three Work Packages, each responsible for a set of situated research and practical actions.

Work package 1: Critique of Computer Theory and Design of a New Ecology of the Digital extends the critique of digital technology already undertaken by the digital studies network. It aims to reconsider the foundations of computer theory in relation to the concepts of locality, negentropy, anti-entropy, data economy and networked AI by developing the concepts of technodiversity and cosmotechnics. The main objective of WP1 is to develop methods from the Digital Studies network in relation to singular ecological contexts where the questions of locality, negentropy and others can be addressed with regard to social practices. This is to defy the current context of big data and artificial intelligence, where thought (noesis) and language seem reducible to calculation and to computational models of language processing respectively. To question entropy (optimisation, standardisation) requires the encouragement of other forms of thought (noodiversity) by means of new philosophical concepts (e.g. cosmotechnics, technodiversity) and, consequently, the maximization of the negentropic (ecological) potential of digital technologies. WP1 explore historical computer foundations and current computer theory for the design of new ecological and organological forms of computation. This WP is led by IRI and UPL that have complementary experience in digital studies and noetic perspectives. Their critique of computation will go alongside organological research that experiments with human and computer functionalities in the living territories (see WP2 and WP3), combining the theory of computation with human computer interface design and artistic research. WP1 entails mobility between researchers from TU Dublin and Uartes and IRI and CSSD as well as exchanges between researchers from Paris Lumiere, TU Dublin, Uartes and Berkeley. The interaction between academic and non-academic partners will allow for the implementation of the theoretical models into specific contexts;

Work package 2: Existential Territorial Laboratories – Locality and Noodiversity aims to rehearse and introduce new forms of collective responsibility through territorial experimentation, enabling new forms of citizen participation in local governance by means of contributory research. This is to create ‘therapeutic niches,’ that is the local cultivation of knowledge via ‘therapeutic of diversity’ in order to recreate local dynamics between bio- and technodiversity and to reconstruct more sustainable urban, peri-urban and insular territories. WP2 has two main objectives. First, it aims to provide international experience of contributory research methodologies to academics and citizens. Second, it aims to enable researchers from different disciplines to engage in localized research projects (e.g. in Paris, Ecuador, Dublin, Dąbrowa Coal Basin). WP2 will include the development of research methodologies through digital studies, contributory research and artistic research to engage with citizens and localized, real world problems (for example: the implementation of scientific norms in relation to fishing Islands, the development of digital literacy for young adults and teenagers in relation to the use of social media within specific community). The leader and the main beneficiary of WP2 – UARTES – offers an outstanding experience in territorial experimentation and socially engaged projects. IRI and University of Silesia will support WP2 and learn from UARTES’ experience of contributory research and its implementation. Effects of WP2 will be discussed in an international forum generated during the ERs and ESRs secondments in these territories. All partners will be invited to take part in the development of a toolkit, which will be tested in a variety of social contexts. Among the expected outcomes of WP2 will be the toolkit for territorial experimentation and for smart territorial development and organization implemented by means of networking events (exhibitions, workshops).

Work package 3: The Archipelago of the Living intends to develop a network of territorial laboratories of digital contributory research in order to study constraints on living archipelagos with regard to the ecological niches of species that inhabit the same territories. This is to generate local understandings of singularities and functional cooperations between territorial laboratories and academics in light of the planetary threat. WP3 is a contributory research program that will bring together fishermen, farmers and inhabitants of insular territories exposed to tourism flows as well as academic researchers from various disciplines, including biologists, geographers, computing theorists, artists, economists and lawyers. WP3 aims to develop the modes of contributory research and contributive economies in local territories by drawing on the studies from WP1 and the experiments from WP2. WP3 will expand from the urban experimentations in WP2 to rural implementation in territories and islands (morphological and metaphorical) to systematically explore relations between humans and other species in the contexts of rurality and urbanity (urban agriculture, urban recycling and upcycling). The aim here is to develop intersectoral solutions (academic and non-academic) which take into account local contexts (localities) and which maximize the possibilities coming from digital technologies to harness the singularities and value of living territories and the cooperation between the living lab territories and academic laboratories. The secondments of WP3 will focus on the development of contributory research within different rural localities including L’Île-Saint-Denis, the Galapagos Islands, and Sherkin Island.

Contributory research (CR) fosters collaboration between academic researchers and inhabitants on different levels of territoriality that form societies. It specifically territorializes research practices without reducing them to what ‘research’ means in an academic context. The aim of CR is to show how different fields of ‘knowledge production’: sciences (physical sciences, life sciences, earth sciences, human and social sciences),technological research, design and the arts can be mutually inspiring and combined with practices on territories whose inhabitants are put in the position of urban or rural researchers. Both professional researchers and non-academics are considered contributors in contributory research. Their common task is to launch territorialized collective actions in order to limit entropy through the processes of producing new forms of knowledge and by cultivating territorial diversity.

The political aim of contributory research is to establish learning territories where experimental approaches to local economies can be tested in order to overcome the systemic crises of the Anthropocene. The contributory research method is based on the assumption that we all are able to face the Anthropocene only through localities and that these localities have to be open, permeable and reticulated, rather than closed, isolated and autarkic. Therefore, contributory research seeks to valorise the territorial condition of research practices and to create an inter-territorial, rather than ‘global,’ network of territorial laboratories which learn to know how to live, how to do and how to conceptualize, taking care of the technical, cultural, geographical and historical singularity of a given territory.

The idea of contributory research was proposed by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler in States of shock. Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21^st Century. It may seem to subscribe to the philosophy and methodology of action-research described by Kurt Lewin in relation to social sciences. But in Stiegler’s take, it emphasizes how the advent of the digital makes the stakes of the action-research approach even more vital. CR also highlights the importance of the digital condition for the transformation of what is meant by ‘research’ today. Taking into account this new technological context, the contributory research method is inseparable from digital studies whose inquiry and agenda are much broader than those of ‘digital humanities.’ The aim of contributory research and digital studies is to foster social innovations in hyper-industrial societies by practicing, rather than using, digital technologies for producing local forms of knowledge and empowering local communities.

In the book Bifurcate. ‘There Is No Alternative,’ edited by Bernard Stiegler with the Collective Internation, the artistic dimension of contributory research method is emphasized through a reinterpretation of what the German artist Joseph Beuys called ‘social sculpture.’ Understood as a form of social sculpture, contributory research aims to create territorial communities of knowledge within which psychic individuals can contribute to what the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon defined as collective individuation.

Stiegler B. (2015). States of Shock. Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21^st Century. Trans. Daniel Ross, Cambridge, UK, Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Stiegler B. with the Collective Internation, eds (forthcoming). Bifurcate. ‘There Is No Alternative.’ Trans. Daniel Ross.