Unwieldy urban knowledges

The prospect of knowing feels tantalizing. The secret of eternal life – the universal language; the real truth – all seem promising, even though many ancient stories also warn against the hubris associated with wishing to know too much. Understood in this way, the very prospect of knowing becomes ambivalent. How much knowing is too much? Which knowledge? For whom, and how? What happens when the processes of attempting to know become unwieldy, or require such complex arrangements that technological augmentation becomes the subject of social knowledge rather than an emergent property of it? This commentary develops the concept of unwieldiness in order to reflect on the conflicting or paradoxical ways that knowledge and technology intersect in urban contexts.