Do artifacts have politics? "Of course not". Such has been for many years the common sense answer: technical objects are as neutral as Aesop's tongue. They simply take the shape given to them. But when the philosopher Langdon Winner raised the question, several decades ago, his answer was a resounding 'yes': far from being neutral, technologies could 'embody' oppression in such a devious way that it was made irreversible.
One of his favourite examples will be familiar to all urbanists. When Robert Moses began to redesign New York parkways, he made sure that the bridges giving access to his beloved beaches and recreational parks would be so low that buses could not pass under them. Since, at the time, blacks were not rich enough to own private cars, this meant that Moses, without any apartheid laws, without even the appearance of impropriety, could maintain his beaches as free of any miscegenation as if he had created a racist police to enforce his edict: "For whites only". Hence Winner's conclusion: not only artifacts have politics, but it's the most perverse of all since they hide their biases under the appearance of objectivity, efficiency or mere expediency.
This is indeed a nice story. And there is no doubt when you drive along New York parkways that, to this day, parkways bridges are indeed low, so low in fact that trucks and buses still ram into them regularly. But what does it mean to say that bridges 'embody', 'reify' or 'materialise' some political intent?
That designers use detours through material objects to enforce types of behaviour, everyone who has been made to slow down near a school because of the silent presence of a speed trap (also called a 'sleeping policeman') would readily agree. Yes, we are made to do things we would not have done other ...