Architectures of Certitude: software, linguistics, and biology in planning.

Digitalization has become an objective pursued across ideological lines in Sweden.

Government policies, implemented as new planning technical and institutional infrastructures, are driven by the believe that digitalization contributes to a more secure, open, and transparent planning process (Näringsdepartementet 2017) But these assumptions often fail to consider how computation dovetails with technocratic and positivist modes of governance: how, for example, the outputs of computational analyses, models, and visualisations present themselves with the force and certitude of their underlying mathematics, ahistorical transparent facts that become unquestionable to the public, civil servants, and policy makers.

The more important software becomes, the more necessary are methods for its critique.

If openness and public participation are the goals of the digitalization of planning, then these methods should open to scrutiny its epistemic foundations, contextualizing code and software as cultural and historical artifacts.

This project looks at models and algorithms currently used in planning and examines the period when geographers, planners, and architects used them first during the 1960s and 1970s.

By considering computer code a historical material analogous to any other written record, it examines how software could incorporate and represent then theories from linguistics and biology, and appeal to their scientific veracity in urban and regional planning.