Smart cities – Townsend – Songdo
- If computers become architectural materials, would the disembodied (data) provided by computers and utilized by designers be considered architectural material as well?
- ‘a showroom model for what is expected to be the first of many assembly-line cities?’ – Lindsay
Are we moving towards an architecture that is economical, convenient: one where the parts to a whole assemble quickly? Just as buildings during the industrial revolution constructed assembly- line cities. Where does individuality and uniqueness of a city fall into place? Unique spaces that help to distinguish cities would then cease to exist. What happens to human experience?
- ‘Remodeling cities in the image of Multinational Corporation requires three new layers of technology (Arup) – Instrumentation, urban informatics, and urban information architecture.’
Human information and consciousness, should it not be considered as another layer of technology?
Shouldn’t multinational corporations consider humans/consumers as another layer of technology; Since Human Information and consciousness could be contained within a computer just as much as it can be contained in a biological entity. The extension or addition of using technology and by it embedded into our lives as ubiquitously and subconsciously it becomes a form of extension, amputation or replacement to or for the body. Then according to Mc Luhans view in, “The Medium is a Message”, technologies involving communication add to the post-human process of evolving humans, through technology being an extension of the body.
- Sociologist James Katz, ‘Machines that become us’, Merge with our devices. Is this debunked by Hayles, when she questions what it means to be post-human, ‘The defining characteristics [of being post-human] involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of non-biological components’. It is not the use of technology or the addition of a prosthesis that determines being post-human but subjectivity or the freedom of choice to control technology or one’s self, the ability to possess freedom. The ability to choose, decide and react has led a shift from self-organizing systems to emergent systems in responsive or mediated environments.
Smart Urbanism – Utopian Vision or False Dawn
Test bed as Urban Epistemology
- “These self-referential and self-generating properties make Songdo, perhaps unsurprisingly mimetic of the logics of the very financial systems that have conceived and sponsored this ‘product’.” Does this mean Songdo design and push towards sustainability is driven by financial systems? Does this city then too become a product of consumerism?
- ‘Omniscience and omnipresence viewers/users/consumers can exceed their human limitations. … but these interfaces work on us as much as for us. The bilateralism of the interface informs the users but also makes them informers – i.e. it works to optimize the viewers and the network in which they operate. Because their habits and maps create a map of future habits, supply and demand will eventually merge.’ By mapping, human behavior, how do these interfaces work for us? Is optimization geared more towards consumers or the producers?
- What does he mean when he says, ‘The loss of the ideal image of space is replaced with an ideal of the perfect methodology’?
- When does space become a Territory, ‘an area defined not merely by physical geography but by ratios’? What does he mean by ratios? (Quantifiable?)
- The idea of selling data to other cities, to create exportable cities how effective and successful, would this data be in relation to other cities culture, religion, economy etc?