FCJ-218 Train Ticket Sharing: Alternative Forms of Computing in the City

Abstract

Who exactly defines the internal flows of the city, and what happens when this `flow' is rendered bottom-up? Rather than exploring the ways in which the digital affects the organisation of the city, in this paper, I aim to show how certain smart systems of coordination - based on a non-digital `smartness' - exist in parallel to the increasingly digital smart city today. Various forms of improvised coordination and humanled calculation are an integral part of the smartness of a city and must not be overlooked. Drawing on ethnography of train ticket sharing networks in Germany, this paper explores the assemblages of human and non-human, digital and analogue actors that can attach themselves to an existent system, acting as `parasitic infrastructure'. Understanding how these parasitic infrastructures emerge highlights how systems of calculation and computation exist beyond just the digital.