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This is a one day workshop that has limited places based on experience. To express interest please contact Professor Simon Marvin/ email: s,marvin@sheffield.ac.uk 

Lunch will be provided from 12noon in Foyer Area B which is next to the stained glass window. 

The event is part of the ESRC funded project "Experimenting with robotics as a new urban infrastructure" led by Aidan While and Simon Marvin. 

Summary 

A subtle change in how the relationship between the human and technological systems is mediated in research, policy, and commercial practices is at its early stages and posed to become more significant. Neurotech (NT) provides novel brain-computer interfaces (BCI), enabling new communication capacities, interaction and control of the internet, smart homes, drones, robots and animals.  Yet urban studies have not systematically analysed their dynamics, practices, and implications. 

BCIs could become a ‘universal controller' that might one day replace smartphones as the critical interface for interacting with technical systems. Now, moving out of the realm of research laboratories and science fiction, neurotechnology is on the cusp of becoming more mainstream. Commercial neurotechnological devices are already widely available and designed to improve concentration levels, monitor workplace fatigue, and control debilitating diseases (and medical regulators have approved some). Intensive trials of BCI systems are underway to enable people with disabilities to control external devices and even complete smart home systems. The military aims to produce “super soldiers” with cognitively boosted capacities to integrate humans into battlefield control systems. 

This workshop provides a critical view of the emerging neurotechnical urban landscape focusing on, for example, the cognitively enabled workplace, smart home, and military operations. It examines the novel neural interfaces inserting humans directly ('in the loop') into socio-technical systems, the different types of cognitively augmented or enhanced cyborg humans that are being produced, and the differential capacities of the neurotechnically enabled geo-technical milieu.  It concludes by considering how urbanists might work with neurotechnology in a way that can transcend both dystopic warnings of mind control and utopian visions of superhumans.

Participants

External Speakers 

is Co-director of The Sydney Institute of Criminology and an Academic Fellow at the University of Sydney Law School. He is also President of the Centre for Neurotechnology and Law and was commissioned by the Law Society of England and Wales to write the world's first report on neurotechnology to be produced by a professional body. His first coedited book Free Will and the Law: New Perspectives is published by Routledge and his second, Neurointerventions and the Law: Regulating Human Mental Capacity is published by Oxford University Press. He regularly provides comments to the media on neurotech including for the Washington Post, The Australian, Sky News Arabia, The Indian Express and is a TEDx speaker. His work has also been featured in the BBC and The Times.

is Professor of Medical Humanities and Social Sciences at UCC - where I'm based at the Radical Humanities Laboratory, and in the Department of Sociology & Criminology. A sociologist by training, he has interests in sociologies and histories neuroscience in social and cultural theory, and in urban studies, the sociology of urban mental health, and critical approaches to nature and green space. Des is co-author (with Nikolas Rose) of the ‘Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City’ (2022).  Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. His most recent book is ‘The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow’ (2024). Faber and Faber. Described by the Financial Times as ‘Funny and provocative’ the book is highly critical of green urbanism.  His work has been supported by the Welcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) among others. 

is Professor of human geography whose research interests span urban studies, sustainability, the impacts of the psychological sciences on public policy, and the social implications of smart technology.   Mark has authored and edited 11 books and written for The Guardian and Western Mail newspapers. His work has been featured on BBC Radio 4, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC Radio Wales and in The Economist. Mark was lead author on ‘Neuroliberalism: Behavioural Government in the Twenty-First Century’ (2017) published by Routledge. This presents the results of the first critical global study of the impacts of the behavioural sciences on public policy and government actions. He was co-author (with William Collier) of ‘Smart-Tech Society: Convenience, Control, and Resistance’ (2024) Edward Elgar.  His research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, the Independent Social Research Foundation, the British Academy, HEFCW, and the Royal Geographical Society.

Rationale

The workshop seeks to construct a research agenda and community to explore the interrelationships between urban life and the current neurotechnical turn. It aims to do this by bringing the currently disconnected research communities of scholars in urban studies, geography, science and technology studies and the broader social sciences into a constructive dialogue.  Initially, we will mobilise existing work on ‘neurourbanism’ - the relationship between urban life and mental well-being - an essential platform for understanding the more recent development of neurotechnology. Neurourbanism as an existing broad disciplinary domain includes “neuroscience and the urban disciplines including urban planning, architecture, and sociology” (Lancet 2017).  Yet this vital domain has not and has not yet considered the implications of neurotechnology for urban life – and neither has mainstream urban technological studies. Consequently, the workshop seeks to address this deficit by creating a ‘critical urban neurotechnical studies’ – bridging urban studies, science and technology studies and more comprehensive research work that critically considers neurotechnology in specific application contexts. 

Aim and Objectives of the Workshop

The workshop aims to bring into dialogue currently fragmented and disconnected research on the dynamics, effectiveness and implications, unintended consequences, structural inequalities, and options for governing urban life through BCIs. This is explored through 3 objectives:

1. To explore how neurotech professionals - policymakers, scientists, technologists, developers, and commercial providers - currently understand their work's “socio-spatial” boundaries.  To what extent does this focus on the individual and the immediate environment, or does it extend to the broader relational context and networks within which neurotech is applied?
2. To examine how infrastructure studies can enlarge the analysis and understanding of neurotech. To what extent will neurotech accrete and emerge across different domains of urban life, and does it reinforce existing inequalities, enhance control, or create new progressive possibilities?
3. To promote research and societal debate and develop a framework to explore the potential of ‘working with’ neurotech as a partner to minimise harm and maximise upside for individuals and communities. To what extent can debate, experimentation, regulation reshape the development of neurotech, and other means to work towards urban transitions that respect human rights, the emerging regulatory environment, and considerations about social justice?

The workshop will explore the implications of neurotechnology as a potentially systemic and wide-ranging technology with configurational implications if widely used in the multiple domains for which it claims it can be applied. While neurotechnology developers highlight the benefits of emerging technology, much of the ethical and legal debate focuses on potential threats to human rights and privacy. The focus of the workshop is to consider the current state of the art by enrolling those researchers already undertaking innovative work on neuroscience, neoliberalism and neurourbanism to consider how neurotechnology may reshape human-machinic relations in a way that considers the implications for individuals and the emergent urban systems as a whole.  It does this through three themes:

Theme 1 Extending Neurourbanism into the Neurotechnical - The existing domain of neurourbanism has extensively and productively explored the complex interrelations between the urban human brain and the environmental milieu of cities.  Collaborations between life sciences and environmental studies have focused on understanding i) the multiple ways that urban life reshapes the human brain, focusing on stress and well-being, and ii) how more careful urban design and architecture can provide more positive and stimulating environments for the urban human that support wellbeing and health.  Yet crucially missing from this work is a consideration of the new capacities of neurotechnology to intervene more directly in the governance of the relations between the human brain and the urban environment. 

Theme 2 Constructing a Critical Urban Neurotechnical Framework - The second theme will focus on constructing a critical urban neurotechnical framework operationalising three key conceptual insights from urban and technical studies. i) to consider how neurotechnology resonates and dissonates with the current understanding of the cyborg human – especially to what extent different modalities of cyborg might be associated with neurotechnology's therapeutic versus performance enhancement aims.  ii) To explore what new interfaces are actively constructed between the human brain and existing technological systems – specifically what new BCI, decoders, and control – what knowledge and expertise are required to establish new connections, and how they are stabilised. iii) To consider the ‘associated milieu’ required to enable an individual BCI to gain wider traction – focusing specifically on how an amenable technological milieu is created for enabling new BCIs and what new capacities this provides for cognitively enabled environments. 

Theme 3 Exploring the Potential of Working with Neurotechnology The workshop will focus on the dual use of neurotechnology in domestic, medical and military environments.  There is substantial overlap here as the military is interested in the medical use of NT to treat soldiers with brain damage from bomb blasts.  Yet the military is also focused on developing the cognitively enhanced super soldier who can use NT to create new capacities and interface with distributed battlefield control capacities. By looking across these different domains, the workshop attempts to consider what working with urban NT might offer as part of a logic of care and support for developing a good city. 

Impacts and Outcomes

The workshop will have three impacts on more comprehensive scholarship: First, it will be the first interdisciplinary dialogue that brings urban and science and technology studies and legal and ethical thinking and more into conceptual dialogue about the implications of directly including the human brain within technical systems. It will build an understanding of the differentiated forms of cyborg humans, the new interfaces created between human brains and technological systems, and an analysis of their implications for neuro technically enabled niches.  Second, it will call for international research and policy networks on urban neurotech to provide research and intellectual leadership for this emerging agenda. These will be necessary to undertake comparative analysis of neurotech across international boundaries – particularly in the US, China, and Europe- and also look across contexts of applications within urban contexts at the accretion and layering of neurotech capacity across different domains and niches.  Third, it will tentatively advance a novel sociotechnical way of thinking about city life through cognitively enhanced urbanism that sees it as an interconnected web of brains and devices. This theoretical perspective critically examines its role in advancing efficiency, commercial expediency, and social control and highlights ethical and human rights considerations.