27928 - Laboratory (1) (LM) (G.B)

Learning outcomes

The content of the laboratories varies from year to year, but is aimed at giving the student a professionalizing competence on the various fields of the course of study.

Course contents

Urban Imaginaries

The laboratory examines the evolving relationship between Bologna’s urban regeneration strategy, pursued through the “City of Knowledge” project, and the DAMA Technopole infrastructure.

During the workshop, urban regeneration through “knowledge” will be studied not only as an urban planning or technological intervention, but also as a speculative dispositif through which a particular future for the city is anticipated and rendered operational. Maps, renderings, agreements, data, computing infrastructures, and institutional narratives do not simply describe a transformation: they select the relevant actors, establish connections and disconnections, define priorities, and make certain scenarios more probable than others.

The workshop will be organised around several conceptual themes.

Infrastructure space (Easterling, 2014). Infrastructures will not be regarded simply as material supports, but as political forms capable of organising relations, distributing possibilities, and embedding decisions. Particular attention will be paid to agreements, funding, standards, protocols, computing capacities, and partnerships connecting Bologna to regional, national, European, and transnational networks.

AIdeology. The term AIdeology will be used to analyse discourses that present artificial intelligence as autonomous, immaterial, inevitable, and capable of providing technical solutions to political problems (Cugurullo, 2025), as well as the emerging formation of AI urbanism (Halpern; Sadowski).

Speculative fabulation (Donna Haraway; Liam Young) will be approached as a practice capable of holding together real histories and possible futures, making relations, situated attachments, and responsibilities perceptible. It will not be employed as unrestricted narrative invention, but as a method for interrogating the material, symbolic, and political components of transformations in urban space.

Workshop Structure

The 30-hour workshop will be organised into five six-hour units.

1. The City as Promise

The first unit will focus on representations and narratives of the City of Knowledge and the Knowledge Axis.

The following materials will be analysed:

• maps and policy documents;
• architectural renderings;
• communication materials;
• institutional terminology;
• the spatial distribution of the principal interventions.

Terms such as “knowledge,” “innovation,” “ecosystem,” “talent,” “attractiveness,” “inclusion,” and “regeneration” will be examined as territorial operators: not simply as descriptions, but as terms capable of selecting actors, assigning value, and preparing transformations.

2. The City as Infrastructure

The second unit will focus on DAMA and the relations required for its operation.

The following elements will be examined:

• public and private actors;
• funding;
• computing infrastructures;
• the availability of energy and data;
• scientific research;
• labour and maintenance;
• regional, national, and European networks;
• relations among CINECA, Leonardo, EuroHPC, and territorial institutions.

The aim will not be to reconstruct a simple organisational chart, but to identify how and where the capacity to shape urban transformation is distributed.

3. DAMA as Data Manufactory/Factory

The third unit will examine DAMA as an operational landscape of knowledge and as a “strategic” zone in which technologies and actors from the defence industry converge.

4. Urban Diagrams

The fourth unit will involve the collaborative construction of a diagram, in the Foucauldian sense, of the thresholds and grey zones that unsettle and reconfigure political space and the very idea of the city.

5. Geographical Fabulation

Starting from the documented relations and diagrams produced during the workshop, an event will be introduced that can deviate from, disrupt, or render visible the future prefigured by existing infrastructures:

• an interruption;
• a refusal;
• an error;
• an unforeseen use;
• a request for access to data;
• an energy crisis;
• a repurposed technology;
• an infrastructure diverted from its assigned function;
• an antagonism, movement, or subjectivity not anticipated by the model.

Geographical fabulation will be neither a prediction nor a story freely set in the future. It will be a speculative composition built from verifiable relations, documents, and territorial processes. The diagram will function as a generative dispositif:

• nodes may become voices or narrative positions;
• dependencies will generate relations and reactions;
• thresholds will become passages;
• opacity will generate questions;
• securitisation and militarisation will introduce conflict;
• deviation will set the narrative in motion.

Readings/Bibliography

Crawford, Kate (2021), Né intelligente né artificiale. Il lato oscuro dell’IA, il Mulino, Bologna.

Easterling, Keller (2014), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, Verso, London-New York.

Graham, Stephen (2010), Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, Verso, London-New York.

Halpern, Orit, Mitchell, Robert, Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius (2017), “The Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a Critique”, Grey Room, 68, pp. 106–129.

Haraway, Donna J. (2019), Chthulucene. Sopravvivere su un pianeta infetto, Nero, Roma.

Larkin, Brian (2013), “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure”, Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, pp. 327–343.

Le Guin, Ursula K. (1986), “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, in Dancing at the Edge of the World, Grove Press, New York.

Sadowski, Jathan (2020), Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism Is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Teaching methods

The laboratory will adopt a seminar-based, collaborative, and research-oriented methodology. Short theoretical introductions will alternate with close readings of policy documents, agreements, maps, renderings, technical diagrams, and communication materials relating to the City of Knowledge and the DAMA Technopole.

Activities will include:critical analysis of institutional terminology and planning narratives; reconstruction of the relationships among actors, funding, infrastructures, technologies, and scales of intervention; collective discussion of sources, distinguishing documented relationships from inferences and interpretative hypotheses; collaborative construction of a diagram mapping the connections, disconnections, thresholds, and grey areas identified; exercises in diagrammatic variation and speculative writing, culminating in the production of a collective geographical fabulation.

Assessment methods

The laboratory involves continuous assessment and concludes with the award of a pass.

The following will be assessed:

• participation in the activities;
• the ability to engage critically with the proposed concepts;
• the relevance of the sources used;
• the contribution to the construction of the diagram;
• the ability to distinguish among documentation, inference, and speculation;
• willingness to discuss and revise one’s interpretations;
• the contribution to the collective geographical fabulation.

 

Regarding the learning assessment, the use of AI is prohibited. Any use of AI constitutes a violation of academic integrity.

Teaching tools

Texts, documents, maps, and visual materials will be made available on the University’s online learning platform.

Office hours

See the website of Alessandra Bonazzi