¶ On Generosity
(see also my research studies).
Notes and reflections about my personal journey during the PhD investigation.
Page under construction. More contents to be added soon.
¶ 09/06/2024 - scoping my research
Felipe Schmidt Fonseca
In the first months of doctoral investigation (2019-2020) I had to decide on, circumscribe and define my research focus. OpenDoTT had assigned me the topic "Smart Cities", and I was allowed - or rather expected - to engage critically with it. Upon getting familiarised with the topic - to which attending the conference "Beyond Smart Cities Today" in Rotterdam was essential -, I had a panorama of the scenario. There was already enough being written about the most obvious shortcoming of the smart city rhetoric: the lack of real participation, the imposition of a techno-solutionist perspective, a very superficial understanding of what the main issues in cities are. Part of my literature review is dedicated to those elements. Still, I was not drawn to a generic critique, nor did I feel I could contribute to the most visible issues of smart city technology such as surveillance, lighting, inventory, transportation.
I had arrived in Dundee ready to start a new chapter in my life. There were many strands of my previous projects that could feed the doctoral investigation, but I wasn't leaning onto any one in particular. I soon wrote - briefly, and in Portuguese about the move and published on medium. In that first blog post I listed other pieces I had written in the past that mentioned cities as sites of social innovation, made connections between online communities and urban ones, and challenged the smart city.
As a side note, writing and posting on medium was itself a first exercise on documenting my research, always a meta-topic in my work. I would later start using a subsection of my personal website as my research blog, and a couple of years in did set up this wiki to document my findings and explorations on a non-linear way.
In any case, my experience as a foreigner looking to settle in a city I had never been to opened my perception to expectations, assumptions and affordances. I made extensive notes on my journals about those, and tried to explore questions such as "what is the opposite of a smart city?" or what would be a "healthy smart city". Over the months, however, my attention was drawn to a topic that had been present in many phases of my previous career. Over the following years, I entertained diverse forms of even describing it, and that process was itself quite rich. But to make it as short as possible in this wiki note, the topic I started to focus on was waste. In particular, how materials that could still function end up being wasted instead of reused.
I didn't find much about waste on smart city literature, and the little I was able to find was off the mark for the kind of reflection I wanted to conduct. Those references were excessively focused on improvements to the efficiency of waste collection and recycling. By that time there was an interesting investigation by NPR on how plastics recycling can be interpreted as an industry-led scam. Meanwhile, I walked the streets of Dundee observing the materiality of refuse, took more notes, made photos. Some of those images are collected here (PDF) and were instrumental when I started designing my first research studies. I expect to return to those photos at some point to organise a publication or exhibition based on them.
As waste, waste prevention, repairs and reuse of materials took a prominent spot in my research, I kept writing about the topic. As a sort of public-facing reflection. Here are some examples of blog posts I made during that initial period:
- Blog Post: Reparatur Festival (2019).
- Blog Post: Things in the City (2019).
- Blog Post: Waste in my life (2020).
- Blog Post: City Mattering (2020) (Also on Makery).
- Blog Post: Waste, Value and Reuse (2020). (Also on Makery).