Anique Hommels

Studying Obduracy in the City: Toward a Productive Fusion between Technology Studies and Urban Studies

This article draws the city into the limelight of social studies of technology. Considering that cities consist of a wide range of technologies, it is remarkable that cities as an object of research have so far have been relatively neglected in the field of technology studies. This article focuses on the role of obduracy in urban sociotechnical change, an issue that, it is argued, has considerable importance for both students of the cities and the daily practice of town planners and architects, and, at the same time, forms an important theoretical debate in science, technology, and society (STS) studies. The article provides an overview of theoretical conceptions of obduracy in both technology studies and urban studies and proposes a heuristic model for the analysis of this phenomenon. In this way, this article aims to contribute to the establishment of a common interdisciplinary playground for these disciplines.

Obduracy and Urban Sociotechnical Change Changing Plan Hoog Catharijne

Although cities are considered to be dynamic places, it may be difficult to make significant adjustments in the design of cities: Once built, cities become obdurate, immobile, and fixed. Drawing on recent research in the field of science, technology, and society studies on the obduracy of technological objects, a case study of large-scale urban redesign of the city center of the Dutch city Utrecht is analyzed: Hoog Catharijne. Using Bijker’s concept of technological frame, the problem of obduracy in this redesign process is analyzed.

The making of Europe’s critical infrastructure : Common connections and shared vulnerabilities

The Making of Europes Critical Infrastructure : Common Connections and Shared Vulnerabilities

Policy Change and Policy Incoherence: The Case of Competition Versus Public Safety in Standardization Policies

Abstract This paper analyzes the struggle for policy coherence between two EU policy domains: competition policies and public safety policies. We use the notion of ‘policy coherence’ to demonstrate the difficulty of reconciling divergent policy aims, both within the EU and between the EU and its member states. We analyze the question what caused policy incoherence and why it occurred at a certain time. We aim to contribute to a further development of this concept in two ways: first, we apply it, for the first time, to an empirical domain that deals with EU internal relations. Second, we seek to enrich existing literature on policy incoherence with added insight into the causes and timing thereof. We use the notion of ‘policy framing’ to explain the occurrence of policy incoherence. In this way, we provide policy-makers and area stakeholders with advance warnings of the likelihood of its occurrence.

Software vulnerability due to practical drift

The proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) into all aspects of life poses unique ethical challenges as our modern societies become increasingly dependent on the flawless operation of these technologies. As we increasingly entrust our privacy, our well-being and our lives to an ever greater number of computers we need to look more closely at the risks and ethical implications of these developments. By emphasising the vulnerability of software and the practice of professional software developers, we want to make clear the ethical aspects of producing potentially flawed software. This paper outlines some of the vulnerabilities associated with software systems and identifies a number of social and organisational factors affecting software developers and contributing to these vulnerabilities. Scott A. Snook’s theory of practical drift is used as the basis for our analysis. We show that this theory, originally developed to explain the failure of a military organisation, can be used to understand how professional software developers “drift away” from procedures and processes designed to ensure quality and prevent software vulnerability. Based on interviews with software developers in two Norwegian companies we identify two areas where social factors compel software developers to drift away from a global set of rules constituting software development processes and methods. Issues of pleasure and control and difference in mental models contribute to an uncoupling from established practices designed to guarantee the reliability of software and thus diminish its vulnerability.

The development of the public safety standard TETRA: lessons and recommendations for research managers and strategists in the security industry

In this article we describe the European standardisation of Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) and try to draw lessons for European research managers who participate in national civil security research programmes and wish to develop standards related to their security-specific R&D results. This study challenges the findings from Weiss and Sirbu (1990), which suggest that the political skills of the sponsors of a technology are not significant for its adoption in a standardisation process. TETRAs establishment was shaped by specific people, specific skills and specific strategies. Our study shows the importance of political skills, as well as the relevance of multiple lobbying and negotiation activities in influencing the standardisation process. Specific national strategies in forging alliances, as well as lobbying on the European level were crucial, and their realisation offers lessons to learn from. Moreover, given the indisputable multinational dimension in many security issues, our article contains suggestions regarding dual national-European level standardisation strategies needed, for instance, in the context of the European security standardisation Mandate M/487. The TETRA case illustrates how to pursue such a dual level standardisation strategy successfully.

Europe’s Critical Infrastructure and Its Vulnerabilities: Promises, Problems, Paradoxes

Critical infrastructure (CI) can be damaged, destroyed, or disrupted by deliberate acts of terrorism, natural disasters, negligence, accidents, computer hacking, criminal activity, and malicious behaviour. To save the lives and property of people at risk in the EU [European Union]… any disruptions or manipulations of CI should, to the extent possible, be brief, infrequent, manageable, geographically isolated… The recent terrorist attacks in Madrid and London have highlighted the risk of terrorist attacks against European infrastructure. The EU’s response must be swift, coordinated, and efficient.1

Re-Assembling a City: Applying SCOT to Post-Disaster Urban Change

In this chapter, the rebuilding of the Dutch neighborhood Roombeek after a disaster will be analyzed from a social-constructivist STS (Science, Technology and Society studies) perspective. It will be argued that in the post-disaster negotiation process, two technological frames took shape: one in which the disaster was interpreted as offering the potential for exploring urban innovation (rebuilders frame) and another in which the city was seen as vulnerable (survivors frame). Although initially controversial, the “re-assembling” of the neighborhood is at present generally considered quite successful. It will be concluded that the eventual integration of the two technological frames can be seen as a major catalyzer for urban change and as an explanation for the quick and successful rebuilding of this neighborhood.

How Resilience Discourses Shape Cities: The Case of Resilient Rotterdam

Current views on urban resilience emphasize the non-linear, complex and unpredictable character of urban systems and pay attention to the normative and political aspects involved in dealing with urban resilience. It has such a flexible meaning that it lends itself easily to reinterpretation and integration in a diversity of academic fields. This chapter analyzes urban resilience thinking in policy documents and scholarly literature in the field of urban planning. It questions the role of technology in these discourses and studies the normative dimensions and tensions involved. A concrete case of a “resilient city” in development will be studied to see to what extent and how resilience discourses materialize in urban planning and design choices. The Dutch city of Rotterdam, a member of the world-wide 100 Resilient Cities initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation, will be studied as an attempt to embed particular meanings and principles of resilience.

Meanings and practices of learning from incidents: a social constructivist perspective of incident reporting systems

ABSTRACT Incident reporting systems (IRSs) are used in many organisations as tools that promote safety by allowing to collectively learn from incidents. In this paper, we propose a social constructivist approach to learning from incidents, in which the focus is not purely on safety, but on the technology of incident reporting itself. We employ Wiebe Bijker’s work on the Social Construction of Technology to open up the analysis of a specific IRS in use at the Belgian Nuclear Research Center. For this purpose, we carried out 28 interviews with key local actors and collected documents and observation notes. Such social constructivist perspective provides detailed insight into the practices of reporting and the meanings of learning from incidents. Our research shows that various actors within the organisation frame the IRS differently. These framings each have their own implications for the vulnerability of the organisation.