Student profile: Oskar Steiner

Before coming to the Urban School, I did a dual BA between Sciences Po and the University of British Columbia (UBC). I spent the first two years at Sciences Po’s satellite campus in Menton, before moving back home to Vancouver. Over these four years, I followed an interdisciplinary set of social sciences and humanities courses. In Menton—a campus with a regional specialisation in the Middle East and Mediterranean—I studied Economics and Sociology. At UBC, I majored in International Relations with a minor in Economics.

To be honest, my major in IR was mostly motivated by the fact that the structure of the program allowed me to continue mixing courses from across disciplines. My classes included a philosophy course on the history of economic thought, another on global environmental politics, one on contemporary French literature, another on documentary filmmaking and social change, and a course on the economics of fisheries.

While this might seem like a fairly disorganised background, I’ve realised in retrospect that I’ve had a consistent interest in using the tools of the humanities and social sciences to understand, in political terms, our relationship with the environment. Or, more accurately, I’ve wanted to understand how these tools themselves influence the relationship they attempt to describe. 

During my undergraduate degree, I realised that—more than I wanted to study ‘the international system’ or ‘the economy’ as abstractions—I wanted to study the sites in which our ecological dilemmas are produced and to understand how they interrelate.

So, when I chose to apply for GETIC, I was inspired by the interdisciplinarity of the coursework alongside the explicit commitment to a concrete (and political) objective. I also chose to study at the Urban School because of the option to apply for the research track. I knew that I wanted my master’s degree to go beyond a vocational education, but I also knew I wouldn’t be at home in a research master’s focused exclusively on economics, sociology, political science or history. The research track offered me a way to account for both. 

In my master’s thesis I studied the making of ‘urban digital twins’ and the attempts to implement these devices in practice. These ‘twins,’ defined broadly, are comprehensive 3D digital models of an urban area, onto which up-to-date data (on anything from energy usage to traffic flows to air pollution) can be mapped.

The idea is that these models can be used to simulate different scenarios and inform a more ‘scientific’ urban policy—think SimCity but real. Of course, as you might be able to guess, this is a more-or-less utopian (or dystopian) ideal that is not so easily translated in to practice. Nevertheless, a number of local authorities and tech companies have been hard at work over the last few years to make urban digital twins a reality.

So, as significant amounts of political and economic capital are being mobilised in service of this project, my aim was to understand—beyond the hype—how this was being spent and to what effect. Through the construction of these technologies, how do the agendas, interests, and imaginaries of urban actors evolve? How are networks of urban governance remade?

In the end, I see my thesis as contributing to a wider body of literature that identifies and critiques the predominance of ‘innovation’ as a paradigm in urban governance. In constantly looking towards the future as a source of solutions, we might be liable to neglecting ways we can engage with what we have already, right now. 

I researched three primary sites and actors—Rennes Métropole, the Communauté d’Agglomération Paris-Saclay and Dassault Systèmes. Rennes and Paris-Saclay are each areas that have spent a number of years working to build a digital twin of their territory, and Dassault Systèmes is a provider of computer-assisted design (CAD) software that has worked extensively with both of the above to sell urban digital twins.

I chose these cases because it was important for me to understand how these tools were being built from both the end-user and supplier’s perspectives, as well as to see how these actors interact as an ecosystem of sorts. For each case, my research involved semi-structured interviews, observations (of promotional events, council meetings, etc…) as well as document research to reconstruct the historical trajectory of each actor. 

In my PhD, where I’m researching at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE), I’m planning to build on the research I began in my master’s thesis but with a slightly different focus and an expanded scope—my current project is to study the efforts of cities to develop and implement generative AI as a tool for environmental governance.

I’m interested, broadly speaking, in what happens when urban nature is framed and treated as a system that can be known and governed using synthetic data. Through the subjectivities, coalitions, and structures that may form, what happens to local environmental politics when this promise takes root? Which pathways for action are created and which are precluded? As with my master’s thesis, I plan to study the lifecycle of these tools, to see how they interact with urban governance beyond their explicit functional effects.