Robots Care: Urban Metabolism and System Design
Joffrey Becker
Metabolic Interventions: How Architects and Urban Planners Reshape Urban Life
Chaire Ville Métabolisme, PSL, Collège de France
16 sept. 2026
Paris
This paper explores the methodological challenges involved in extending questions of care, traditionally addressed in therapeutic and social robotics, to robotic and AI systems operating in urban environments. It starts from the premise that the city can be understood as an assemblage of technical objects, infrastructures and practices that supports the vital functions and agency of those who inhabit it. From this perspective, extending care beyond the human–robot relation requires first understanding how urban environments are actually experienced. This perspective shifts the way the Smart City is approached. Whereas performance-based approaches seek to make urban situations comparable through indicators, an approach centred on the milieu starts from situated experience and from the differentiation of bodies, practices and vulnerabilities. Durkheim’s distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity helps to formulate this shift as a move from a city understood through common and aggregated properties towards a city understood through the differentiation and interdependence of the experiences that constitute it. This distinction also calls for a shift in design practices themselves, particularly in relation to robotic systems. Rather than merely studying how an innovation is used once it has been produced, the aim is to investigate the situations in which the urban milieu constrains or supports life and agency, in order to identify appropriate forms of robotic intervention. From this perspective, the challenge is not to add care to urban robotics, but to determine, prior to design, where, for whom and under what conditions the urban milieu can support the situated experience of its inhabitants.
