Introduction

Smart green infrastructures increasingly feature as key components of smart cities and urban development. Along with digitalised infrastructures of water and lighting, buildings and roads, more organismal and ecological infrastructures of vegetation and soil, air, and water are also undergoing networked monitoring, management, and augmentation. Many smart cities technologies that would ensure automated and optimised flows across communication and transport circuits have been implemented to measure air pollution, detect flooding, monitor soil health, and ensure adequate hydration of urban forests. Smart cities now program green as well as grey infrastructure.

This chapter discusses the possible consequences of wiring up organismal and ecological contributors to cities. Proposed and emerging digital-organismal urban connections give rise to networked infrastructures that are meant to achieve new levels of efficiency, responsiveness, and coordination. Even more than merely adding the digital to the natural, programmed green infrastructures strive toward an updated ‘infrastructural ideal’ of joined-up systems, where the fusing of technology and nature could be a way to stave off planetary collapse. Yet such projects are as likely to result in fragmented and ‘splintering urbanisms’ and inequalities,¹ whether from differential investment in networked systems, varying degrees of interoperability, and green space deserts that elude digitalisation. The socio-technical formations of smart green urbanism do not overcome urban inequalities; instead, they have the potential to amplify them. As Susan Leigh Star suggests, the study of infrastructures can surface ‘essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power’.² What are the specific social-political effects of these programmed green infrastructures and digital ecologies? And how do they potentially exacerbate extractive economies and social inequalities at the same time that they attempt to mitigate environmental impacts?

To address these questions, I first consider how digital–natural urbanisms materialise through plans to incorporate green spaces into the logic of smart cities. The wiring up of green spaces and urban forests is an infrastructural project that operationalises green infrastructures as useful urban processes and services through digitalisation. In this sense, digital–natural infrastructures remake urban ecologies as particular functions and relations meant to contribute to distinct imaginings and materialisations of urban life. In the second section of this chapter, I discuss an architectural proposal for a Smart Forest City in Cancún, Mexico, by Stefano Boeri Architects. The Smart Forest City is a speculative master plan that programs nature as infrastructure through a digital–vegetal approach to sustainable development. In working through different approaches to programming nature as infrastructure, I outline how the smart and sustainable city moves beyond energy efficiency and sustainable transport to incorporate digital-ecological programs that operationalise ‘nature’ through distinct logics of exchange, coordination, repair, and mitigation.

The programming of vegetal infrastructures aligns in part with natural climate solutions and ecosystem services that would mobilise more-than-human ecologies as key operators in addressing and averting climate crisis while realising green growth.³ Yet it also indicates how these digitalised natures function less as purified ecologies in the outmoded binary sense of nature as a world apart, and more as environments and systems that quicken to the logic of circuits, chips, and capital. Here, vegetation becomes technological, operating within digital functions that are co-extensive with smart urbanism. But such programs of efficiency and responsiveness are as likely to render obsolete and inassimilable any bodies, practices, or organisms that would not contribute to the productive augmentation of smart green economies and ecologies. To become infrastructural, in other words, nature must fit within the productive logic of the smart green city.

Networking green infrastructure, infrastructuring digital natures

Transport, utilities, and communications have formed a basic mix of grey infrastructure that informs urban life. Grey infrastructure typically refers to the built and engineered components of urban life. The provision of safe drinking water, readily available electricity, and public roadways are among the infrastructural projects that are meant to undergird the development of ‘modern’ cities.⁴ These infrastructures continue to be updated in the form of smart systems – from smart energy grids to automated transport and surveillance systems – that digitalise urban functions toward greater efficiency. At the same time, infrastructure projects have served as the basis for near-future projects that would ‘build back better’ by bouncing back from the effects of COVID-19 while forming anticipatory responses to the infrastructural destruction and decay that climate change threatens. Debates about what constitutes infrastructure run through these projects, where airports and roads are held up as most obviously infrastructural, while parks and social services are rendered the ‘softer’ approach. Infrastructure is thus highly contested and subject to power struggles, even when its many modalities are contributing to the integration of social and spatial life.

So too do digitalisation and digital infrastructures constitute distinct modes of power, governance, and everyday exchange.⁵ As many studies of smart cities and smart infrastructures have demonstrated, the digitalisation of urban spaces can reorder social life, variously enable or constrain political engagement, and amplify inequalities by creating new zones of exclusion.⁶ The governance of urban environments can become a project delegated to automated systems, detection devices, and control architectures. The digital organisation and management of everyday urban life, in other words, can constitute a type of environmentality, where digital governance is distributed through and within cities.⁷ Such environmentality coordinates not just to the movement and conduct of human bodies, however, but also the processes and relations of multiple non-humans.

In the context of climate change and environmentally stressed urban environments, infrastructure is increasingly more than the concrete and the cabled. It is also the green and growing. Green infrastructure is often used in contrast to grey infrastructure as the ‘natural’ systems that also enable urban functioning. In many smart green city proposals and projects, urban natures are reconstituted to perform particular work that is meant to achieve the infrastructural ideal of sustainable urbanism.⁸ Trees become carbon sinks, low-lying vegetation acts as flood defences, shrubs and vines take up air pollution, and mass planting mitigates urban heat island effects. Ecosystem services, natural capital, and natural climate solutions are just a few of the common concepts that describe how nature has become infrastructural as it mitigates and prevents the overheating, flooding, and collapse of cities.⁹ These increasingly common practices seek to ensure the liveability of cities in the context of environmental change,¹⁰ yet such developments also raise concerns about what infrastructural collectives and exclusions could materialise. They also point to the reworking of governance through digital-ecological arrangements that operationalise nature through an ‘ecological urbanism’ that undertakes the work of staving off ecosystem collapse.¹¹

In this way, green infrastructures are increasingly digitally monitored and managed to ensure optimal contributions to urban processes. Networked green urbanisms do not simply involve planting and preserving what otherwise would have been paved over. Instead, these digital processes program nature as infrastructure that operates and responds to the demands of ongoing environmental change and climate crisis.¹² Digital technologies undertake remote and in situ sensing to assess carbon storage capacity of trees and soil. Mapping technologies geo-locate trees and vegetation as ‘natural assets’ that can mitigate environmental stress. Robots plant, climb, and manage trees for improved growth and efficiency. Sensors detect water moisture levels and track chlorophyll levels. Citizen-sensing initiatives track and maintain urban tree planting, and joined-up digital systems contribute to real-estate development projects for creating future smart forest cities.¹³

Such digitalisation of urban ecologies forms what some advocates refer to as an ‘Internet of Nature’.¹⁴ As part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, nature is brought online to perform in ‘the next frontier of ecosystem management’ that is meant to ‘change our relationship with the natural world in the urban age’.¹⁵ The Internet of Nature merges ‘existing natural ecosystem dynamics and IoT infrastructure’, where plants can become biosensors for more resilient ecosystems, wearable technologies can monitor human health for wellbeing nearby green space, blockchain and crypto-currency can support green initiatives, sensors can monitor urban heat islands, and ‘ecosystem intelligence’ will reside in the cloud.¹⁶

Networked urbanism here involves amplifying communications within ecosystems by constructing cities through connections that also are a process of programming, operationalising, and making functional according to distinct logics for urban environmental governance. The smart green city is one of efficiency and automation, coordination and measurement, contingency and response. At the same time, the logics of digital operations – including processes for gathering data, apportioning ownership, realising value, and managing property – permeate digital-vegetal operations. Green infrastructure, including smart urban forests, in turn would function as automated systems mitigating, ventilating, and conditioning the effects of environmental change.

As an updated infrastructural ideal that would address planetary environmental change, the seamless functioning of smart green infrastructure relies on a sort of cyborgian organicism that fuses technologies and ecologies. These are forms of digital governance that unfold across multiple registers and trajectories, where environmental governance is remade, regularised, and optimised through digital systems. Digital governance here refers to the forms of environmental governance that become possible and regularised through digital systems. Smart green infrastructures and smart forest cities become bound up with the emerging practices of digital governance, where the operations and attunements of technologies inform distributions of power and resources. Forests governed through digital technologies play an increasingly central role in retooling the planet to contend with environmental change. Yet such eco-digital technologies and infrastructures implement specific compositions of justice, power, and democratic possibility, as noted earlier in this chapter.

In this sense, the emergence of any infrastructure has consequences for politics, social interactions, inequality, and distribution of resources.¹⁷ Infrastructures present distinct ways of making collectives and of joining up urban environmental life. They can also create specific barriers and exclusions, where infrastructural operations might be available to some but not others. The privatisation of infrastructure can cause fragmentation of services. So too do monopolistic formations of infrastructure have the potential to establish technocratic and inflexible exchanges, which constrain social and political life. Moreover, the resources required to create and sustain infrastructures can cause vast disparities across regions, where digital infrastructures in one location could contribute to extractive and unequal economies and relations in another. Smart green infrastructures must inevitably be considered within this longer trajectory of infrastructural problematics, rather than presented as an easy solution to pressing planetary problems. The next section outlines in more detail one example of how these infrastructural problematics erupt in a Smart Forest City.

Programming infrastructure in a Smart Forest City

The Smart Forest City in Cancún, Mexico, is a speculative project and master plan that raises such questions about the consequences of smart green infrastructure developments. Stefano Boeri Architects, a group well known for green city and building projects, developed the Smart Forest City plan in 2019. The architecture group developed the Smart Forest City plan in Cancún for the Honduras-based multinational textile manufacture and real estate developer Grupo Karim. In addition to manufacturing personal protective equipment (PPE), Grupo Karim has developed a number of smart cities as part of its broader real estate portfolio that includes commercial, residential, and industrial properties. Smart cities developed by Grupo Karim often take the form of business parks in Central America, where call centres cluster together in San Pedro Sula in Honduras; and outsourcing industries integrate with a university, residences, shopping, and a ‘corporate/diplomatic zone’ in the capital city Tegucigalpa.¹⁸

The Smart Forest City in Cancún fits within this range of developments, as a ‘unique investment opportunity’ within the smart city space.¹⁹ Just south of the Cancún International Airport, and moments from the beach on the Caribbean Sea, the Smart Forest City is designed as a smart green city of networked systems. This ‘innovation hub’ is meant to be regenerative, giving back to nature what would have otherwise been developed into a shopping mall.²⁰ Flood-proof waterways, drones, glass and steel office towers, and palm trees garlanding solar panels form a tranquil setting where families with prams, men in speedboats, and leisurely onlookers studying desalination towers populate the scenes of this imagined Smart Forest City. Electric vehicles provide smarter transport options and provide a low-carbon way to navigate this zone of high-tech research and sustainable living. Social life unfolds in scenes of seamless integration with the Smart Forest City, where city-subjects are economically privileged knowledge workers inhabiting a relatively protected enclave.

Here, technology, nature, and society harmoniously commingle in scenes of manicured and digitalised urbanism that might be slotted into the genre of ‘the eco-fantasy project’ that especially focuses on ‘performance and optimization’.²¹ The work that nature will perform to keep the Smart Forest City operational and balanced includes absorbing and stocking more than 116,000 tons of carbon dioxide. The site includes ‘400 hectares of green spaces with 7,500,000 plants of 400 different species’, selected by a botanist and landscape architect. This mix of vegetation will ensure that there are 2.3 trees to every inhabitant. The project and press literature stresses that the layout will ensure that ‘public parks, private gardens, green roofs, and green façades will all contribute to achieving a perfect balance between nature and building footprint’.²² Here, natural capital and green growth are meant to work towards a more perfectly organised environment.

However, in many ways extractive logics continue to inform how nature is put to work in support of existing socio-economic systems.²³ The human and non-human labour that would build, maintain, repair, and operate the Smart Forest City is not evident in the scenes of leisurely and automated digital-vegetal urban life. Resources required to construct and operate the Smart Forest City are dematerialised, where lithium, copper, coltan, iron, and water recede from the verdant views. The mining and harvesting of resources, as well as the disposal of obsolete and decaying devices, are activities that take place in locations distant from this more purified location. The digital–vegetal city, however, inevitably requires resources, labour, and waste sites to operate. Green infrastructure here would seem to add to the apparent immateriality of the digital, rather than make evident the materiality of these infrastructures.²⁴ Indeed, the disparity between digital–vegetal urban havens and sites of extraction could become even more entrenched through the privatisation of smart green infrastructural enclaves situated within areas of broader socio-economic depravation. Caribbean spaces and islands have served as spaces of ongoing respatialisation in the context of offshore economies, tourism, mobility, and digital infrastructures, which can reinforce colonial forms of territoriality.²⁵

Similar to many development schemes, the Smart Forest City is designated as a ‘forest’ less because anything traditionally resembling a forest materialises here, and more because it conveys a seemingly ecological approach to transforming a greenfield site into a business park. The development is proposed to be self-sustaining, producing its own energy and food through adjacent fields and solar panels, desalinating its own water, irrigating its crops, regulating floods, and achieving resilience through carefully orchestrated networked connections watched over by industrious drones. Behind the scenes, digital technologies with a high environmental footprint are meant to ensure the balance and self-sufficiency that this city would achieve.

Yet this organicism of technologies and ecologies is generative of an exclusive enclave that is self-sufficient on its own terms, while still requiring the ongoing extraction of resources from – and fortification against – a wider world. The social milieu that unfolds within this proposed natural-technological harmony includes carefully surveilled spaces where humans operate according to programs as productive and networked as those that would manage vegetation. With these programmed natural infrastructures, there is an absence of weeds and discord. Such balanced systems do not make space for struggle and protest. Order prevails in this master plan, which transforms cities and forests toward urbanisms that resemble a biosphere experiment caught in an idyllic state of homeostasis. Smart green infrastructures seem to soften the edges of the usual extractive and inequitable digital urbanisms, but reproduce many of the same infrastructural problematics of these developments.

Otherwise infrastructures

Infrastructures not only sustain forms of urban and environmental organisation. They also construct collective worlds.²⁶ As Lauren Berlant notes, infrastructures are not mere structures. Rather, they inform the movements of collective social life by generating politics and struggle. Social life is not merely an expression of perpetual balance, but includes disagreement, ‘brokenness’, and crisis.²⁷ In other words, while infrastructure informs social and urban life, it also generates moments for extending it in other ways, beyond seamless functioning and towards transformative challenges and connections. Infrastructural practices – and their transformation – can spark political potential.

However, such urban unfoldings of process and practice are less evident in plans such as the Smart Forest City and similar smart urban forest initiatives. These projects would program nature as productive and harmonious infrastructure. Climate change in the form of sea-level rise, resource depletion, and overheating are meant to be addressed through adaptive waterways, self-sufficient agriculture and energy, and vegetative air conditioning that together create digital, green, and resilient urbanisms. Such infrastructural imaginings often elide the inequalities, political struggles, environmental crises, and extractive economies that undergird plans such as the Smart Forest City. These smart green infrastructures run the risk of reproducing and amplifying environmental crises and injustices, rather than transforming them.²⁸

In this way, and following LaDuke and Cowen, programmed green infrastructure projects force encounters with the ‘profoundly practical work of infrastructure’.²⁹ In their project to ‘reimagine the critical infrastructures of everyday life on Turtle Island’ by working towards ‘collective futures hinge[d]‌ on remaking socio-technical systems’.³⁰ Such practical work could even break with the destructive qualities of what these authors refer to as ‘Wiindigo infrastructure’, which requires relentless extraction and inequality to realise its operative ideals. Instead, infrastructure as practice requires developing projects that would work towards ‘justice, decolonisation, and planetary survival’ as joined-up concerns.³¹ These are ‘otherwise infrastructures’, which recognise the work that infrastructures do to sustain social life. A project of infrastructuring otherwise points to the question of what the work of infrastructure does. Rather than speed and delay, automation and optimisation, La Duke and Cowen draw attention to accumulation and dispossession as markers of the Wiindigo economy and infrastructure, while also considering flourishing and reciprocity as conditions that would allow for infrastructural transformations. Such transformational work – an indication of the ‘public works’ that are synonymous with infrastructure – can become a way to transition towards less extractive infrastructural projects and to rework the socio-technical formations of everyday life.

Conclusion

Infrastructures form as material commitments to environmental–social worlds, both in their formation and building, and in their cultivation and continuation. This analysis of the digital–ecological infrastructures of the Smart Forest City points to the consequences of these infrastructural arrangements. Smart green infrastructures co-constitute and join up urban entities in the interests of optimisation and efficiency, which contribute to a version of sustainability that would often leave existing inequalities and extractive practices unchecked. These digital–ecological and socio-technical formations organise the capacities and inhabitations of urban life. Such digital infrastructures further operate as environmentalities, where human and non-human life and relations materialise through automated and digitalised forms of governance.

As this analysis of smart green infrastructure shows, infrastructures are not mere physical objects, in the form of fixed roadways or ‘grey’ engineering works. Instead, they are the very stuff of social life. Materiality, in this sense, is in process and transformation, made and remade by social practices, as well as by more-than-human relations and environmental change that are now testing the stress points of infrastructure and pushing infrastructure to breaking points. If urbanisms, more-than-humans, democratic political life, and social justice are to converge in more generative ways, then infrastructures – grey, green, and otherwise – need to be engaged with as key sites and processes of social and political transformation. The practical work of infrastructure could then be wrested from the property developer’s portfolio and architect’s plan to become an ongoing collective project and political struggle for more liveable urban worlds.

Acknowledgements

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 866006, Smart Forests).

An abbreviated version of this chapter was first published as ‘Programming Nature as Infrastructure in the Smart Forest City’ by Jennifer Gabrys © 2022 The Author(s), taken from Journal of Urban Technology 2022, Volume 29, Issue 1 © Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2022, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com/