Toronto’s Ghosts: Artificial Intelligence and the Spectral Politics of Real-Time

Keywords: smart cities, urban policy, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly interwoven with urban governance, the notion that AI systems operate in real-time is often central to their appeal. Real-time systems promise more efficient, reflexive, and unmediated cities, enabling new forms of coordination and connectivity within urban spaces. As such systems become an increasingly pervasive part of urban living, however, this enthusiasm for real-time clashes with emerging literatures regarding the transtemporal and interspatial realities of digital infrastructure development. With that in mind, this paper attempts to provide an alternative theorization and politics of the real-time city, one more sensitive to the intersections between past, present, and future that often define and constrain real-time systems. Bringing together Jacques Derrida’s notion of spectrality with Sidewalk Labs’ grandiose vision for the Toronto waterfront, I show that what technologists call real-time is, in fact, a haunted house – one whose inscription in space and time exposes the real-time city to unique and transtemporal currents that determine, disrupt, and undermine the presumed progressivity of real-time systems.