The “Smart City” is a trend in contemporary urbanism that represents new computational rationalities of governing and managing infrastructures. These logics inform experimental processes of embedding digital devices into existing systems and urban lifeworlds. In Hanover, Germany, a joint-venture of public and private firms is currently prototyping a “Smart Waste” system that utilizes sensing and communication technology in order to optimize the city’s waste management. Applying recent theoretical literature on environmental governmentality to the case of Hanover, the thesis seeks to empirically expand critical studies of the Smart City. Highlighting how smart governmentality is enacted by the project, the case material suggests that waste is rearticulated from unwanted material to valuable data resource. Following a methodology that thinks infrastructures as complex systems of human and non-human actors, a mixed-method approach was utilized that employed discursive document analysis, historical research, interviews, and qualitative analysis. This research highlights power dynamics between populations and infrastructures in smart cities and underscores the transformation of urban epistemologies through smart city prototypes. The work offers a perspective that, rather than placing the human in the center of attention, asks questions about how digital technologies change our understandings of urban materials and how this shift affects urban lifeworlds.

What are possible means for us as urbanites, students or urbanists to question and eventually challenge the smart governmentality of digitalizing cities? How can we produce a kind of collective resilience of reflection and critical attention? This project is an outcome of the "Urban No-Thing" studio course at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Winter 22/23. As a short story, it engages in multiple critical trajectories simultaneously and speculatively. It features a fictional scenario around the idea of cybernetically controlled urban "smartness". The idea is to create an immersive and imaginary space to test the implications of increasing digitalization in an urban setting. The story can be seen as a vehicle for critique that emerges from a space between imagination and theory, wherein the acts of reading and writing stories are inherently political.

Diving deep into the idea of blockchain as a tool to create social infrastructure, the publication in protocol magazine presents a discussion of potentials and critical reflection of the technopolitics of the DAO, a recent phenomenon in the blockchain space. It spells out as "Decentralized Autonomous Organization" and applies to organizational modes that rely on cryptographic technology. The text presents the context of Tallinn's modernist district Laagna and speculates on modes of applying recent "DAO-ist" ideas in order to facilitate local governance. Co-authored by Paula Veidenbauma, it is a counterpart to our proposal for the Tallinn Architecture Bienalle 2022 Vision Competition, providing a more in-depth exploration of various themes surrounding the idea of fostering exchange and incentivizing collaboration through local & decentralized currencies, digital voting and circular economy.

Published in September of 2022 in the Estonian cultural journal Sirp, the article presents a review of the most recent installment of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale. Under the title "Edible, Or: Architectures of Metabolism" the festival centered around the topics of urban natures, agriculture and sustainable cities. In the review, I critically highlight the epistemological dimension of the presented projects in relation to agriculture, sustainability and food: Significant variations, in my opinion, can be detected in how projects related to the production of common knowledge about nourishment, subsistence and thus sustainment of life. Especially highly technical projects, I argue, run the risk of exceedingly centralizing knowledge and abilities, thus promoting a highly technocratic urban sustainability. This takes away agency from laypeople, which, as I argue, is key in producing a deeply sustainable and just city.

This essay makes an attempt to understand “Intelligent Transportation Systems” (ITS) through the theoretical insights derived from the study of cybernetic systems. It features different examples of ITS from the Tallinn context to illustrate its theoretical claims. Concludingly, it circles back to the so-called “Cybernetic Hypothesis” to emphasize how critically reflecting on cybernetic logic is to help us reach a just, sustainable and digital urban future.

The thesis deals with the case study of the “Projekt Commons” (PC) as a new form of civic participation as well as cooperation between an organized public and state institutions. "Common Good" is the central concept of the research because it represents a crucial concept for the project PC in framing its own actions. Beyond that, according to the thesis of the paper, it can be understood as a formative criterion of the infrastructures that shape everyday life of the project. Following up on this, the thesis proposes a reconceptualization of the term for qualitative social science research, foregrounding common good as a practice of the everyday. Ethnographic material from 3 months of field research is used to illustrate how the life form of the public sphere around the PC project emerges and is reproduced, with the concept of the prototype playing a central role.