Gregoire Benzakin

Gregoire Benzakin is a PhD candidate in the department of Geography and Planning. At the intersection of infrastructure studies, more-than human geographies and philosophy, his research explores the pluriversal dimensions of digital infrastructures. Focusing on the controversies surrounding Sidewalk Toronto, a smart city project which was abandoned in May 2020, Gregoire combines ethnographic methods with speculative philosophy to recast the project’s failure, and deploy an alternative narrative of Sidewalk Toronto as an unsettled trajectory. He is interested in exploring methods of dramatisation that reframe what it means to inherit failed infrastructure projects and nurture the possibility of other stories, other worlds and other futures, on the basis of what is already here but often unperceived, the latent virtualities in the cracks of our modern ground.