Listening in on Informal Smart Cities: Vernacular Mapping in Mirpur, Dhaka

Community mapping, FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) and participatory design belong to a wider group of methods and platforms that address limitations and critiques of older forms of Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D). Produced by local citizens adding and editing data to participatory GIS platforms such as OpenStreetMap, counter or vernacular mappings diversify means of recording city habitats and pathways. These amplify alternative claims of authority and expertise, advocating informational rights to the city and, in more prosaic terms, addressing service discovery and navigation through detailed maps, databases and social media. Yet, and as it is often acknowledged, the conjunction of urban communities with technologies and other NGOs and corporate actors can generate tensions. Notions of the double bind, developed by cybernetic psychologist Gregory Bateson, seem apt to characterise these tensions in extremis. We review how double binds entangled utopic designs of mid-twentieth communist urbanism and cybernetic economies, under conditions of both greater political scale and vastly reduced informatic capacities. We then introduce and discuss Kolorob, a participatory mapping project based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Through focus group discussions and participant observation, we show the project to be an illuminating case of peers producing technological artefacts, and yet one which also faces financial and political limits that threaten the durability of these accomplishments. An acknowledgement of the double bind structure at work in this project, inherent also in the wider dialectic of freedom and constraint at work in informal smart city developments, involves a necessary recognition of the sometimes partial, temporary or intangible benefits of urban peer production. We conclude with considerations of whether the informal smart city entails the disorienting experience of a double bind, and the resources communities themselves deploy to manage its effects.