This post is part of the paper, ‘Friction-free cities and the rise of contactless and robotised delivery infrastructure’, published in City.
Architect Sam Jacob (2015) claimed that ‘the city itself is a distributed robot’ where ‘we [might be] liberated to become friction-free smart citizens … doing our own thing’ (p. 25). In making a frictionless city, smart technologies such as urban robots contribute to reinforcing contact-free, segregated urban living, generating spaces of avoidance. Building on Lefebvre, Merrifield (2013) points out that separation and segregation are ‘profoundly anti-urban impulses’ (p. 66). I argue that the same can be said for the infrastructures that facilitate contactless deliveries—dark kitchens, MFCs, doorsteps, and delivery robots—which enable ‘order from home and stay home’, entailing avoidance and distancing. These infrastructures are mobilised to facilitate ‘the smooth running of sanitised and segmented urban living and consumption’ (While et al., 2021, p. 781). The anticipated spread of urban robots is likely to amplify such living through deliveries free of human contact, which is viewed as friction. In addition to the serving robot Dilly Plate and the delivery robot Dilly Drive and Dilly Tower, Baemin recently showcased the cooking robot YORI (which means ‘cooking’ in Korean), developed in collaboration with the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) at the University of California, Los Angeles (Kim, 2023). Baemin’s robot trio (cooking, serving, and delivery) demonstrates its aspiration to create a fully automated, human-less infrastructure. The advancing automation of contact points through these robots portends the ‘robotic urban restructuring’ (Macrorie et al., 2021) that leads to further segregation, allowing people to do their own thing in their own bubbles.
Robotics understands and structures the space in particular ways. Kyungmin noted that ‘the roads for robots and the roads for humans are different’ and so are the ways in which they navigate. Different moving entities have different spatial and infrastructural requirements. As observed in Gwanggyo, frictions need to be either eliminated beforehand or addressable by robots themselves when self-driving without the assistance of human Operators. Sumartojo et al. (2023)assert that the robotic logic of navigability assumes the world to be knowable in advance if enough data are collected, and divisible into partitioned segments that are points of action or decision. They further note that cities made for effective robot navigation would compel the flattening of their surroundings and automation of urban routines, which risks producing limited forms of urban life with homogenised rhythms and patterns. The empirical materials discussed earlier evidence that both technologists and government officials favour the robotic logic, seeing cities as knowable, hence controllable, which contrasts with the experiential, processual, and contingent notion of cities made through habitation.
In contrast to such urban spaces that promote avoidances, amplified through the robotic logic, Merrifield advocates the city that allows swerve-like encounters:
The urban is always relative form, floating form, contingent and uncertain form, only beginning to define itself ontologically when the urban is filled by a certain notion of proximity by people and activity, by events coming together in this proximity, through the swerve … The urban, we might say, is the place of the drama resultant from the encounter and the site where we encounter the drama of the encounter itself. (Merrifield, 2013, p. 66)
Similarly, Sassen’s (2010) ‘cityness’, expanding the idea of Western-centred urbanity, sees a city thriving on diversity and productive intersections. She argues that making occurs in the intersections of different lifeworlds and through space-morphing by actual use. Rigid infrastructures and buildings promote perfectly choreographed actions, precluding alternative uses, as I illustrated using examples such as Baemin’s highly controlled MFCs. Yet, a city is not a singular technology (Cammers-Goodwin, 2021), nor is it a logistical enterprise (Luque-Ayala & Marvin, 2016). The push for frictionless travel often overlooks urban realities, such as informal settlements on the fringes of cities (Odendaal, 2019). Unlike a seamlessly interconnected system or rain that falls vertically forever without ever swerving in Merrifield’s analogy, the overwhelming complexity of cities cannot be simplified to spaces for control and circulation. Seeing a city as a complex but incomplete system also has political importance because it holds out the possibility for the powerless to ‘make a history, a culture, and so much more’ that outlive the powerful (Sassen, 2017, p. 125).
The ideas of encounters and intersections can help find ways to create more inhabitable cities, even with technology like robotics. Robots may contribute to inclusive and playful engagement with the city and fellow citizens, instead of giving birth to the robotised Delivery City (cf. L. Kim 2022). Nagenborg (2020) asserts that robots should be designed for cityness, i.e. to stimulate the intersections between many people, instead of creating bubbles. He further argues that robots have the potential to overcome urban spatial injustice, rather than being a threat, in the form, for example, of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used for mapping unplanned settlements in slums. Now, spreading private mobility platforms are poised to further curate public spaces to their aims and customers (Marsden et al., 2020). The extensive deployment of sidewalk robots in shared public spaces necessitates spatial re-design and new urban regulations. These changes should enable human–robot interactions while not undermining the rights of pedestrians, including non-users (Dobrosovestnova et al., 2022).
Furthermore, the endeavour to create more liveable cities requires reorientating and reprioritising the applications of new technologies to better serve the public interests and diverse uses. In practice, it might mean holding off the excitement for the launch of drone delivery for fried chicken to riverside parks (Choe, 2023) and instead prioritising the lives of neglected groups. HY Fresh Managers driving Coco, the fridge-equipped electronic cart, are now commonly seen almost everywhere in Korean cities. They deliver pre-ordered dairy products to households and offices and also park Coco at the kerbside for street vending. Instead of prioritising ceaseless, frictionless flows, HY uses mobility technology and its workforce, who are primarily middle-aged women, for care. Fresh Managers with Coco make regular visits to elderly people living alone. During the interview, Steve, a former Baemin employee and current startup CEO, commented that making cities robot-friendly would also benefit wheelchair users.[1] This could be the other way around: making cities wheelchair-friendly, which also creates advantageous conditions for robot-friendly cities.
Crucially, frictions can be rethought to help create alternative urban infrastructures and futures that have been occluded in the pursuit of making cities frictionless, where friction is a source of slowdown and blockage. Frictionless efficiency is an unquestioned ethos in the field of technology development, where frictions are seen as what prevents us from moving through tasks (Gray, 2021). If the push for frictionlessness blinds us to the complexity of the real world, then frictions and bugs become openings for new arrangements of power that can contribute to spatial and urban justice. As Perng and Kitchin (2018) note, urban technologies are shaped by frictions, i.e. encounters with different times-places, practices, and sociotechnical imaginaries. These encounters, or frictions, make visible the neglected pressing urban issues and the needs of the communities, which can help create more inclusive urban futures with technologies. For Leszczynski and Elwood (2022), what appears as errors in platform logics are also generative errata (corrections) that reveal opportunities for differently assembling platform/urban interfaces. The potential for remaking the urban, contesting the platform logics arises from the incomplete, contingent configurations, with everyday breakdowns lurking behind (Chung, 2024).
Friction-free cities are neither achievable nor desirable. The attempt to build a resilient system, involving the removal of humans, often ends up introducing new vulnerabilities. While the image of frictionless circulation persists, the critical scholarship of global connection asserts otherwise. As Cowen (2014) claims, by showing the complex global networks of infrastructures, places, and people that form the system of circulation, seamless circulation is not a reality, but a project. She further notes that the system prioritising seamless flows not only necessitates new forms of containment (i.e. seams) but also is fundamentally vulnerable to disruptions while rendering indigenous blockades, labour actions, and piracy a threat. Friction is not only inherent and inevitable but also desirable (Cresswell, 2014). Tsing’s (2005) ethnography reveals that friction is not necessarily a source of slowdown. Rather, friction, or ‘the grip of encounter’, is what enables motion—’a wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road’ (p. 12).Gregson et al. (2017), refuting the imagined seamless flow, show the heterogeneity of cargo flows, constituting multiple units, of which frictions are an inherent part. Following Tsing, they note that frictions are not anomalies, as ‘global connections are “made, and muddled, in friction”‘ (p. 394). Likewise, cities are made through frictions that become an inherent part of them, as many urban scholars point out (e.g. Gabrys 2014; 2022; Greenfield 2013; Perng and Kitchin 2018). Then, extending Tsing’s notion of friction to the urban context, we may say that cities are made, and muddled, in friction, that is through encounters and intersections, to reiterate Merrifield and Sassen. Cities that permit disruption and discomfort pave the way for diverse cultures and practices to flourish.
Notes:
[1] Wheelchair users demanding improved mobility rights have been staging prolonged protests since December 2021. As a bold action, they have been occupying the busiest subway stations in Seoul and Daegu, a large city in the south of the country, to cause delays during rush hours by positioning themselves between the train and the platform, impacting passengers in their daily commute. The protesters have been largely blamed by the public for causing friction. This case demonstrates the politics of friction and how what is perceived as friction can open up different conditions of visibility and contribute to spatial and urban justice.
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