Unwieldy urban knowledges

Abstract

The prospect of knowing feels tantalizing. The secret of eternal life – the universal language; the real truth – all seem promising, even though many ancient stories also warn against the hubris associated with wishing to know too much. Understood in this way, the very prospect of knowing becomes ambivalent. How much knowing is too much? Which knowledge? For whom, and how? What happens when the processes of attempting to know become unwieldy, or require such complex arrangements that technological augmentation becomes the subject of social knowledge rather than an emergent property of it? This commentary develops the concept of unwieldiness in order to reflect on the conflicting or paradoxical ways that knowledge and technology intersect in urban contexts.

The prospect of knowing feels tantalizing. The secret of eternal life – the universal language; the real truth – all seem promising, even though many ancient stories also warn against the hubris associated with wishing to know too much. Understood in this way, the very prospect of knowing becomes ambivalent. How much knowing is too much? Which knowledge? For whom, and how? What happens when the processes of attempting to know become unwieldy, or require such complex arrangements that technological augmentation becomes the subject of social knowledge rather than an emergent property of it? This special issue tests the capacity, boundaries and ambivalences of attempts to use technologies for knowing, as well as attempts to know or understand the role that technologies play in constituting urban environments.

This constitution happens in two directions: through reflection and analysis of the role of digital technologies within urban settings; and through experiments with such technologies as ways of understanding urban spaces differently. Each of the papers featured in this issue takes a different perspective on what knowledge is valuable, and which perspectives can be cultivated or foregrounded. As such, each of the papers in this special issue engages with the epistemic and ontological tensions raised by needing technology to know, while also needing to know technology. These tensions intersect with the different ways that each paper positions what is important to know or even knowable.

The concept of unwieldiness, introduced by Rupert Griffiths (2025) in this collection, describes relationships between human intent, technology, and the environment, identifying how these are difficult to integrate with each other because they operate at anthropo-, techno-, bio-, eco, and cosmocentric scales. Focusing on unwieldiness provides a way to consider the implications of people’s desires to know. Being the knower or the observer can be a powerful position, especially in the complex terrain of the city – comprised of animals, humans, inaudible signals rendered in sound, surveillance cameras and other material artefacts. As Helena Wee writes, ‘truths are slippery concepts’, and both conceptual and technological efforts towards fixing the slipperiness in place can create unexpected burdens. Unwieldiness, which captures the inability to seamless integrate the divergent scales at which the results of technological development might accumulate or the differing forms of experience that they represent, also provides a useful metaphor for reflecting on the various ethical positions that the authors represented in this collection tussle with. These include the potential for sensing technologies to create new forms of urban knowledge (Welisch, 2025) and participation (Jung and Hiebert, 2025), and make urban information systems visible or understandable (Emsley, 2025). The unwieldiness also shades into the questions of scale that Griffiths raises, and into the philosophical reflections that Wee’s essay invokes.

Unwieldly urban knowledge

Griffiths (2025) uses unwieldiness to foreground the limitations and vulnerabilities inherent in enfolding technology in human efforts to understand the world. Exploring the boundaries and overlaps between the aesthetic potential and technical functional of sensors allows for a sensorium that places human creativity into a conversation with non-human creation, proliferating ways of perceiving, if not of knowing. Humans imagine ways to use sensors to understand the movement of the seasons through patterns of light, while for insects these devices make good home. Squirrels steal the sensors – but what makes these thefts different from thefts by humans? With just the absence of the sensor observable to the designers, the outcome is the same. Sensors becoming homes for insects challenges any remaining conception that society (or technology for that matter) sits outside of nature. Unwieldiness therefore holds potential for an acceptance of impurity, incursion, and appropriation, while ultimately refusing to limit the role of sensors to that of scientific measurement. In the entwining relations between anthropo- techno-, bio-, eco- and cosmocentric perspectives, technology neither smooths relations nor subsumes nature. What results includes convivial decay as much as technological promise. Therefore, unwieldiness becomes an essential strategy for holding together apparently incommensurate elements – something that Wee’s (2026) work also engages.

Wee’s development of a Daoist approach to theorizing the relations between data, humans and non-humans invites a consideration of similarly unwieldly relations, these ones presented elementally: algorithms as fire and data as water; while humans are wood, growing and changing, but also enrolled into exploitative relations with the natural world, including indentured servitude mining minerals for computer hardware. Companies and business are metal, hard and smooth; while earth supports cities, which also potentially absorb water or drown data. The elemental dance should ideally tend towards balance, but Wee’s analysis focuses on imbalance, in terms of not only the exploitation of human labour but also the creation of harm to the living world. Relationally, the harms bounce from element to element as humans create businesses and produce data. Rebalancing the Qi – the flow – requires specific types of cosmopolitical stories. The unwieldly aspect here are the stories, which ideally should be ethical, in contrast to the amoral stories produced by machines. This sits uncomfortably with the evocation of the principle of the Dao as in balance and flow. Following the notion of wu wei or flow, perhaps a response to the unwieldly association between knowledge and technology might be to cultivate non-knowledge. This would challenge, however, the suggestion that the way to address elemental imbalances is to continue to engage with all of the elements, including the hard metal of technology.

Welisch’s Data Poets project, like Griffiths’, investigates this capacity for extended knowledge, developing ‘provotypes’ – provocative prototypes – to interface between the ecologies of the city and human observers. Prototype urbanism places technological experimentation at the centre of human experiences of urban areas, particularly as a phenomenological extension of human perception. Experimenting with a technological prototype is offered as a way to test different points of engagement with the urban landscape. More than for Griffiths or Wee, Welisch foregrounds human perception, especially collection and subsequent exploration of visual, auditory and sensory events. Yet here unwieldiness emerges too, through the still openly glitchy large language models that were used to render elements of these experiences into text or ‘poems’. The temporal aspects of the way that commercially driven model development began to favour seamless, polished language reveal some of the ambiguities and limitations of the drive to know the city through technological mediation. While the 2020 version of the GPT-2 model produced more evocative text, the subsequent social transformation around the use, perception and tuning of LLMs rendered some of the later poetic translations less compelling. The Data Poets project grapples with the unwieldly ethics of how changes in the social and cultural meanings of technologies such as LLMs. It also explores a paradox whereby the presence of provocative, speculatively designed sensing technology reveals how ‘humans imbue places with personal significance and symbolism derived from life events and interactions’ (np). Even when extra-sensory perception and translation through technology shape the formation of knowledge, some inchoate aspect remains in experience and imagination.

Ian Emsley’s Unheard City project moves away from direct human phenomenological experience, with listening devices and urban infrastructure producing their own flows. This intriguing proposition also generates its own unwieldiness, evident in the slippage between the metaphors of ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’ or ‘reading’ the results of the captured data. The relationship between signal strength, device proximity and infrastructural control illustrate the invisible regimes of control or influence that are part of the infrastructural city. This recalls the ways that such signal spaces can be related to human experience through data walks (see Hunter, 2022; Powell, 2018), as well as the unclear relationships of power (that may or may not be significant) connected to the strength of WiFi signals or the coverage of specific network operators. But these patterns don’t become relations unless they are connected to the embodied experience of city residents. This article had me wondering about the impact of this electromagnetic noise on foxes, bats, or other urban dwellers. What value for knowledge do these dynamic flows suggest? If these rhythms are produced by interactions that fundamentally result from the hard, smooth metal elements of business and commerce, is their impact on living creatures mostly harmful? Or do these signals also, like Griffiths’ sensors, inspire other forms of life?

At the juncture between human phenomenal experience of the city and analysis of digital urban infrastructure lie Jung and Hiebert’s Smart City Photo Booths. The project repositions urban ‘smartness’ as research/espionage and attempts to invert the commonly described relationship of dominance between surveillance cameras operators and urban citizens. The unwieldiness here is civic and affective: in Foucauldian interpretations of the disciplining power of surveillance, the ambiguity of whether camera footage might be viewed creates an internal ordering that compels (or is meant to compel) its subjects to particular behaviours. This is also an invitation to performative witnessing of the surveillance architecture itself. The ethics of this form of witnessing, which involves the potential for playfulness, involve the participant having sufficient distance from the operation and impact of the surveillance. However, the student participants in the project describe a range of experiences when mapping and photographing the surveillance architecture, and did not always understand their interactions as playful. This raises questions about the relative power and privilege required in order to perform such playfulness under conditions where the knowledge generated for the architects of the surveillance system exceeds the knowledge of the photo booth players. To my mind, unwieldiness assists in thinking about the different qualities and instabilities related to understanding digital technologies – or understanding with them.

Ecologies of knowing, and the limits of knowledge

The articles in this issue provide different reflection methods that evoke the prospect (and even the potential impossibility) of knowing a digital city, or knowing a city digitally. Unwieldiness comes in many different forms, including in relation to (socio-)ecologies. How should the idea of an ecology of a ‘smart’ or digital city be understood, though? Jung and Hiebert suggest that ‘playful data’ could be part of an emergent ecology of imagination centred around the smart city. But what is an ecology of imagination? How might this be related to the socio-ecology constituted by signal-generating technologies, their owners and the protocols that link them? Relations are already complex, even before considering all the connections between living and non-living entities, digital or otherwise. Perhaps it is the very invitation to knowledge that is suggested through the prospect of technological novelty that provokes this instability in the notion of ecology.

Another instability comes from the question of where these ecologies of knowledge are situated. Wee’s elemental analysis traverses space and time across the Digital Silk Road, taking urban spaces as primarily abstract examples of data and water absorption. The translocality of Griffiths’ work and of the second phase of the Data Poets project (where participants upload images of different cities) makes a mess of the idea that urban experience is necessarily fixed in space and time – and at the same time raises questions about what happens when experience is always ‘digital-first’. If we are taking selfies everywhere, what is the significance of taking a selfie with a surveillance camera in the background? If all of our photos are online, what’s the extra significance of having one translated into poetry? As Emsley points out, humans perform urban sense-making in a rhetorical sense – meaning that the rhetorical gestures of selfie-taking, field photography and especially poetry are framed as making meaning in themselves. Yet the poetry created in the Data Poets project, being the result of interactions with an LLM also implicates training data and calibration in its capacity for believability. Human craft and meaning-making lie beneath the apparent digital innovations. This raises some interesting questions about the relationship between knowledge and experience – especially since several of the papers in this issue draw from phenomenological traditions.

This collection highlights the capacity and importance of creating knowledge through sensorial experiences, either understood as phenomenological in the sense of evoking human experience, or post-phenomenological and drawing on more-than-human capacity. So, the Unheard City project attempts to sense radio waves, protocols and connections; the Data Poets project imagines AI companions with anthropomorphic interest in human photographs or records; and the Smart City Photo Booths project tries to excavate a space for playfulness in interactions with architectures of surveillance image capture. Yet these efforts also generate questions about the extent to which it is possible to imagine experiences outside of our own, which the Light Clock project explores by presenting cycles extending beyond human perception, such as cycles of light and darkness across days, months and years. Across these projects, recording devices and technical interventions create the conditions for different kinds of knowledge creation. Indeed, human knowledge about phenomena such as the movement of the cosmos or the presence of non-human animals has often depended on techniques such as measurement and technologies such as telescopes, thermometers, or sensors. But even when these techniques and technologies create readings and results, these still need to be brought together and made sense of by humans. Thus situated, perhaps even embodied experience is always part of the engagement.

Ambivalent knowledge engagements

The tension between wanting to know through an extension or speculation beyond one’s sensorial capacity, and the limitations of being in one body in one place, generate productive forms of ambivalence across these works, in tension with questions of what knowing means – whether it is a European Enlightenment matter of a rational individual observing, or a more-than-human assemblage or a Daoist philosophical puzzle. For example, Griffiths’ reading of the multiple perspectives enabled by the sensorium of the city pushes back against the assumption that technology is primarily instrumentalized. As Emsley discusses, it’s possible to situate this work at the edges of the ‘tension between technological enframing and poetic revealing’ (np). This unwieldiness also serves to explore the limits and edges of a smart city predicated on efficiency or productivity, introducing instead a muddle of questions concerning cognitive capability, relations between machines and people, and the relative value of incursions into the technological apparatus of relationships by unexpected participants like squirrels or insects.

Working with technology while exploring liveness, vitality and relationships between living things produces contrasts, tensions and strange potentialities . Some of these articles suggest that AI or connected devices have a liveness, while others (or at other moments) intimate that these devices are potential avenues for understanding urban relations in different ways, including between humans and other living creatures, or humans and the elements of planetary existence. This connects to the extent to which the different articles foreground the necessity or value of human performativity. The Data Poets project consider performativity as having inherent power to critique or reshape urban space, while the Smart City Photo Booth acknowledges the shortcomings of a focus on performance against infrastructural power. This is further complicated by aspects of these various projects that try to address translocality, from the transnational Light Clocks to the Data Poets online poetry generator. These projects decentre even situated or local knowledge, and stretch participation and performance globally and temporally. This raises more questions: what is the meaning and value of the photo with the surveillance camera, now and in the future? As AI slop becomes part of the lexicon, is it still valuable to reflect on one’s phenomenological experience of the city using text generated by an AI?

Phenomenology and politics

Despite the focus on digital mediation, the articles in this issue consistently return to phenomenological experience. Modes of research walking, including data walking and more traditional psychogeographic methods, motivate the playful explorations of surveillance cameras and the attempts to hear infrastructural relations whose frequencies and connections are normally beyond human comprehension. Yet this raises tensions once again. Embodied experience and perception are part of vital life, and embodied experience begins within the sensorium of whoever is perceiving, in relation to the other entities being perceived. The broader sensorium that Griffiths evokes invites these relations to encompass cosmological, biological and socio-ecological cycles, attending to the way that perceivers are embedded within these. The experiments of John Clare and others on more-than-human empathy also motivated Alex Taylor and myself to investigate the potential for a more-than-human politics by imagining what life might be like for a fox (Powell and Taylor, 2024). We too experienced the tensions and limits of embodied rewilding, but inspired by the political philosophy of Jane Bennett, we also explored how these limits could inspire renewed consideration of the democratic potential for shared life within urban settings. As we wrote,

The ‘otherness’ of other species prompts reflections from humans about how to account for experiences that may not ever be able to be fully shared. Thinking with Iris Marion Young’s notion of responsibility for justice, what responsibilities do humans, who currently hold all of the official rights, hold for Others? On which timescales and in relation to which other potential fellow-citizens should these responsibilities be enacted? Across studies of governance as well as technology justice (see Franklin, 1989), concepts of reciprocity are incredibly important in considering how long temporalities or uncertain outcomes should be considered. (p. 232)

Phenomenal experience and embodied rewilding have their limits. Even so, the potential for democratic or political engagement remains inchoate, and unstable reverberations come from Bennett’s (2010) writing on the potential political vibrancy of the non-human: ‘what if we loosened the tie between participation and human language use, encountering the world as a swarm of vibrant materials entering and leaving agentic assemblages? . . . Do sand storms make a difference to the spread of so-called sectarian violence . . .Can a hurricane bring down a presidency?’ (p. 107). This provocation, viewed from the present moment, seems quaint in its prescience. Of course, socio-ecological cycles have an impact. So too, as Griffiths and Wee explore, do cosmological cycles. These are related to perception, of course, but they are not only about perception. Human activity has shifted the socio-ecological and cosmological cycles, even as human technical innovation provides the tools to describe the extent and consequence of these shifts.

Politics are unwieldly, especially when they fold around perception and performance. What can playfully engaging with the presence of technological architectures like surveillance apparatuses, or hearing and mapping the protocollary relations of radio-linked devices produce for an urban politics? For the student participants in Jung and Hiebert’s first pilot of the surveillance camera selfies, the potential for visibility provoked concern, evoking possible fears about the consequences of even minor transgressions in a surveilled urban space. This seems at worst antithetical to justice and at best ambivalent towards its potential. Equally, unexplored potential characterizes the investigation of the relations of automated sensing systems. Beyond exploring another layer of the ‘unheard city’, what might this contribute to a critical political economics of the ownership and control of such devices, relative to civic involvement in designing them? As I explore in Undoing Optimization (Powell, 2021), making the smooth flow of traffic a priority is a political decision – one that prioritizes certain actions and positions within the city and which reflect human decisions about values and value.

These questions of values and value are often at stake in my version of ‘data walking’, which focuses on performance of expertise as a way to attune participants to the political potential of paying attention. Being assigned a specific role for a walk (even if it is simply ‘navigating’ or ‘map-making’) provokes participants into observing, interacting with or describing what might be a familiar urban space in a new way. This experiment links with an individual phenomenal experience of the city, of course, in much the same way at the papers in this special issue – but it also opens out the potential of the interactions between people as an emergent form of knowledge. One frequent result of this version of a data walk is often apologetic group reporting that they spent most of their time discussing what they should be paying attention to rather than ‘collecting data’. This situation might help to contextualize the unwieldiness of knowledge in the digital city. Despite distributing our sight and perception through remote cameras and sensors, humans still operate in an extremely narrow experiential zone. Pushing outside of this zone produces all the unwieldiness explored here.

Conclusion

While drafting this commentary I was walking with my partner through central London on a hot and sticky summer evening. We watched the usual anarchic ballet of humans moving around on electric bikes (some clicking or beeping because their riders hadn’t paid on the app) jumping in and out of taxis, steering busses sharply into traffic, walking, standing, waving and gesticulating. Birds wheeled overhead, and despite it not being dark yet, a fox streaked across the road, tiny feet padding. The weather, human-modified, felt like a hot, wet blanket. Someone sang out of tune. Leaves rustled. A siren wailed for a second and then stopped. The setting sun glared off the front of a supermarket as the earth turned. From all directions, I am certain, cameras recorded our passage, while in the air, unseen and unheard (except perhaps by the fox, or perhaps the mice who live in the London Underground tunnels) intermingled all the signals guiding the trains, the cars, the streetlights, the cameras:

For a moment, everything was so much for me, and I muttered, as I often do, ‘This is crazy. What even is going on here?’

My partner, bemused, took some strides down the evening-baked pavement. ‘A notable Canadian-British geographer told me once that the main characteristic of cities is that they are unknowable’.

‘Who was that?’

‘It was you’.

I had forgotten, of course. Somehow this experience, and this exchange, seem fitting ways to contextualize this special issue. Knowing is situated – in time, in place, in embodied experience. Yet because cities are complex collective human creations (becoming of course more-than-human in the process) they exceed this situated capacity, at an individual as well as interactive level. Collectively, creatively, we keep trying to know them – and through these efforts create yet more complexity.

Grappling with the unknowable, the uncertain, the complex and changing – these are central challenges in human existence. For the majority of people alive today, cities are where we negotiate these challenges day by day, exploring and creating with the technological and conceptual tools available. The paradoxes produced through this ordinary, brilliant endeavour are also central – and they highlight not only the productive un-knowability of urban space but also the capacity for this strangeness to motivate human connection. Beyond exploring the capacity for technology to provoke or promote efforts towards knowledge, the articles in this issue also open out questions about the potential for people to connect with each other, and with larger cosmo- or ecological patterns and cycles. Further explorations of urban life in situations of uncertainty and complexity would benefit from a focus on connection, imagination and belonging, both to each other as humans and to our greater, living world.