DEMOCRATIC CITIES:
INTERVIEW WITH ADAM GREENFIELD

D-CENT Project, USA
2016, 4 min 41 sec

Interview with Adam Greenfield, a London-based writer and urbanist. He elaborates on his latest work ‘Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life’. To him, ‘radical’ can mean ‘politically radical’ or ‘cutting to the root of something’.  He focusses on technologies that fundamentally condition our everyday life, condition our ability to relate to one another, condition the sorts of selves we become, condition how we organise ourselves in groups. These technologies include automation, the block chain, virtual reality and digital fabrication. He questions their possibilities and limitations and concludes them as ‘scary’, since they don’t have anything to offer that can possibly do better than the experience of participating in a general assembly, this ‘old’ technology of being physically in one another presence, forced to reckon with each other as unique individuals, forced to recognise the subjectivity of one another and to grant their validity of their perspective on the world and that we don’t necessarily need to find agreement on all matters.