Josephine Condemi
After the pandemic, are the implicit and explicit rules of coexistence changing? The Edgelands Institute tries to understand this with interventions between art and research in different cities around the world. Here is how
Coexistence thrives on trust: interpersonal trust, between ourselves as individuals and the communities we belong to, and then with public institutions or political leadership.
What breaks this trust? How do we maintain it? What does it mean to live in a context where this trust is not there?
If a person you meet said to you, “Hey, I am distrustful” or “I am controlling you” the conversation would not evolve. «Distrust and control are among the characteristics that most influence relationships but which no one admits to having or enabling», explains Ogutu Muraya. «But what if you stepped out of yourself and into the shoes of a character?» Dramatist, speaker, in his role-playing game Times of Mistrust – A game of unconfortable encounters, Muraya invites you to step into the shoes of one of six characters: the mistrustful, the control freak, the outsider who struggles with feelings of alienation, the outcast, the character who feels powerless and always puts the blame on others and the one stuck in dualistic good/evil thinking. «Others can be added, the one who is afraid, for example», he explains.
Ogutu Muraya is a playwright, writer and speaker. He was born and lives in Kenya. He studied International Relations at USIU-Africa and graduated in 2016 with an MA in Arts from DAS Theatre in Amsterdam. His performance and narrative works have been presented in theatres and festivals around the world. He is dedicated to literary performance practices in which writing and theatre are integrated. He is currently working on a story that intersects migration and oceanic imagery.
The game’s six characters are called upon to interact in four main scenarios: one is the dilemma, in which each must choose between options that are in any case unfavourable; another is the cooperative scenario, in which they work together to achieve a goal; the third is a competitive one, in which the urge is to clash in order to win; and the last is a thought experiment, such as imagining a world without stories.
The prototype of the board game, which includes a moderator, special cards and an instruction booklet, was made in February 2022 for the exhibition Common Ground, which took place at the Bodega Confama cultural centre in Medellin at the end of a three-week residency organised by the Swiss collective Matza and the Edgelands institute, which has been studying the rules of the social contract in different cities around the world since 2021, with a particular focus on surveillance technologies.
Doesn’t every city involve a coexistence that can become “A game of uncomfortable encounters”?
The Edgelands Method
«The cities we have been to so far are: Medellìn, Colombia; Cucuta, on the Colombian-Venezuelan border; Geneva, Switzerland; Nairobi, Kenya; and we have just started in Houston, Texas (USA)» says Laura Garcia Vargas, research associate and manager of institutional alliances and operations at the Edgelands Institute. «The pandemic has caused an acceleration of digitisation: the institute was born with the idea of understanding how people perceive security in their cities and the digital technologies that are used to guarantee it. In the end, we hope to have a comparative and global view of what is happening».
Laura Garcia Vargas is research associate and manager of institutional alliances and operations at the Edgelands Institute. Born in Colombia, she lives in Geneva, Switzerland.She is pursuing a PhD in Law at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at the University of Ottawa (Canada) with a research project on the regulation of digital technologies with geolocation capabilities beyond the current data protection framework.
Edgelands, literally ‘borderlands’, was co-founded by Yves Daccord, former director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Beatriz-Botero Arcila, professor of law at Sciences Po University in Paris, and Danil Kerimi, a member of the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organisation’s independent supervisory advisory board, former terrorism prevention expert for the UN and head of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Digital Economy’ and ‘Technology Industry’ sectors.
«Edgelands is a pop-up institute, which means two things» says Garcia Vargas. «The first is that after five years we will disappear: we just want to be a spark that starts a conversation.
The second is that our work with the communities in each city is time-limited: we come, we do projects and research, then we leave, we come back for another short period and then we leave for good, hoping to have activated processes of change for the people who live there».
Just as New York University’s GovLab through its approach called AI Localism1 has listed local initiatives in different cities that seek to implement responsible use of AI, so the Edgelands would like to arrive at a list of best practices on the use of digital technologies for surveillance and security.
«The first activity we carry out in each city is a series of interviews with local people with different interests in security and surveillance technologies» explains Garcia Vargas. «We ask them to point out other people to interview and we arrive at about 30-40 in-depth interviews, summarised in a document called a diagnostic report that serves as the basis for the subsequent work».
The Edgelands method consists of three pillars: research, dialogues, art. «Dialogues take the form of workshops and/or programmes aimed primarily at young people in the city, who can converse with experts from all over the world and from whom we can understand political priorities.
Based on the problems we encounter and the ease of access to the administrations’ data, we share them with them so that they can initiate projects: in Medellin we succeeded, in Geneva we did not. In Switzerland, we then tried to do a participatory mapping of urban surveillance cameras, not only public but also private. In parallel, we do a lot of round tables with different stakeholders».
The more specific part of the research focuses on the social contract, a formula that has been used since the 1600s in the field of natural law2 to indicate the rules of the contract that individuals enter into with the state in order to get out of the “natural” condition and to obtain services such as security in return.
«The social contract is formed by the rules that allow us to live together»
Garcia Vargas explains. «What are these implicit and explicit rules today? How do people see them? What are they asking for? What trust issues are there? In addition to the traditional formula, between state and citizen, should there also be private companies? Every person has an opinion about security in the place where they live: in some cities, when we ask for it during the interview we are told: ‘I am not an expert‘, in others we are answered without any problem. In Geneva, for example, we have sometimes noticed a reluctance to go into the matter, because often, if you think things are working, you don’t create the problem».
The third pillar of the Edgelands method is art, which is structured in the collaborations with the photographic agency Magnum Photos and the Swiss collective Matza: «Magnum realises a photographic project for each city on the basis of the diagnostic report and through a residency that includes a free workshop for locals», explains Garcia Vargas «Matza, on the other hand, brings together local and international artists in multi-week residencies with a final exhibition». The first was at the Bodega Confama in Medellìn, the Colombian city that more than others synthesises the contradictions of the social contract.
Medellin and the game of uncomfortable encounters
«Art is really a form of pre-verbal understanding of the world» says Sara Arango Franco. «Even if we don’t know how to name things or how to connect certain ideas academically, art is pushing us to make these connections without words».
Sara Arango Franco is a data consultant for the Edgeland Institute. She holds a Bachelor of Science in “Mathematical Engineering” from Universidad EAFIT (Colombia) and a Master of Science in “Urban Informatics” from NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Process (CUSP). She has been an advocate for urban sustainability in Medellín, Colombia. She worked as a data scientist and associate research scholar at the Marron Institute for Urban Management at New York University (NYU) and as a researcher at Universidad EAFIT, Purdue University and Universidad de Chile.
Data consultant at Edgelands, participated in the residency at Bodega Confama. «We lived in a tent in a big, noisy bodega among homeless people for a fortnight», she says, «it was very intense and inspiring because of all the people we met».
Arango Franco exhibited Pérdidas – Espectros de Información, a digital collage made with the Python programming language that encompasses open data and images about violence in Medellin and the whole of Colombia. «I’m amazed at how deep the human connections and experiences are and how quickly this all turns into very few memories, sometimes arbitrary, or numerical data, very small fragments of the whole experience» Arango Franco says. «Naked data, although necessary, does not have the ability to make people connect to the experience or feel emotions, so I wanted to bring these representations back to the sensory level, hoping that someone would feel an emotion for a few seconds. People think that safety can only be talked about through metrics and numbers and very narrow definitions, but that is not enough, because it is a subject that affects us very closely».
In Medellín, thanks to data also provided by public agencies, the Edgelands compiled a list of all the surveillance technologies used in the city and drew a picture of the perception of their functioning; an NGO through workshops created an open citizens’ dashboard of homicide data in the city; students were able to reflect on that data. «We made a number of recommendations for the government, especially on technology impact assessments: interviews and focus groups revealed that citizens want more technology and more open technology, but they do not actually know what is being used despite substantial funding or whether these technologies work», Arango Franco explains.
«It is as if everyone is in their own little bubble: after the pandemic, is this the way society is moving forward around the world?»
Between the 1980s and 1990s, Medellin, which after Bogotá is the most populated city in Colombia, was among the most dangerous cities in the world in terms of the number of murders, kidnappings and crimes linked to the international drug trafficking cartels, of which it became one of the capitals after the collapse of the textile industry and its allied industries that had ensured good economic growth in the first part of the 20th century.
Since the mid-1990s, collaboration between the public and private sectors has enabled a series of socio-economic regeneration actions that have led to a decisive change of direction, symbolised by the city’s 2016 win of the Lee Kuan Yew World City award for urban and social innovation from the Prime Minister of Singapore.
However, it is estimated that there are still between 350 and 400 combos in Medellin, organised crime structures formed by young men who control drug trafficking, extortion and other criminal activities on the basis of a meticulous territorial control of certain low- and middle-income neighbourhoods.
«In Medellin, the social contract is very fragmented, as if there were two states, one formal and one informal», Arango Franco says. «Depending on their experiences, the places they live in, people are more or less inclined to trust the state” with a whole series of informal surveillance and self-surveillance mechanisms. «When I came back from New York I felt very much watched. I think the social contract can be described everywhere as one in which trust is not homogeneous between different places or groups».
An example of this, Garcia Vargas points out, is the popular Colombian proverb that if you are robbed, it is because you have given the thief the opportunity: «This victim blaming, due to an individualisation for which there is no state or social responsibility, is a trait that many of the people interviewed emphasised as the first point of cultural change».
Local administrations are focusing on surveillance technologies as a way to fight crime, but the cybersecurity issue remains: on 2 February 2023, the city’s ‘Emergency and Security’ computer system was hacked by a ransomware hacker attack3, and upon the administration’s refusal to pay the ransom, hundreds of thousands of pages of confidential documents with sensitive citizens’ health data, but also information on murders that occurred between 2020 and 2022, were published online4.
On the other hand, points out Maria Camila Roldan, community organiser of the Edgelands Institute, «technology does not always solve all problems nor is it always connected to people’s real needs».
It is no coincidence that the sector of the municipal administration that deals with security is called Secretaria de Seguridad y Convivencia and claims to focus on civil society and academia as knowledge levers.
In 2021, the city became Colombia’s Special District of Science, Technology and Innovation, with Special Treatment Zones for activities that enhance urban regeneration, accessibility and reindustrialisation: the results of the Edgelands’ work include recommendations for the 2024-2027 development plan.
Will it also serve to look each other in the eye with more confidence?
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- See https://ailocalism.org/ ↩︎
- Philosophical-legal current that assumes a natural law (in Latin ‘ius naturae’) superior to formal, positive law, which in modern times took the form of the nation-state. A distinction is made between voluntaristic (law of nature dictated by a superhuman will), naturalistic (natural law as the common instinct of animality) and rationalistic (law of nature dictated by reason) natural law. ↩︎
- See Tobón, S. O. (2023, February 2). Extraño ataque cibernético a la línea 123 en Medellín: se afectaron llamadas de emergencia y operación de las cámaras de seguridad. ↩︎
- See Balbín, C. Á. (2023, March 27). Ciberdelincuentes publicaron miles de documentos robados de la Línea 123 de Medellín. ↩︎
Topics in this article
America Artificial Intelligence Cities Coexistence Digital transformation Sorveglianza
