Quantified Community

• Instrumental City – Shannon Mattern

Although it is clear in Doctoroff’s persistence and background that the development is another mean of profit and expansion. Regardless of his intentions, the implementation of such infrastructure will allow us to connect, interact and communicate in unprecedented ways. E.g as computers became more powerful as a result of competition in the tech market, the existence of recent “powerhouse” platforms allowed startups like Oculus (an entertainment tech company) to pioneer Virtual Reality experiences unprecedented in their realism and detail. It seems unrealistic and naïve to expect corporations to invest such time, effort and resources for some sort of noble non monetary gain with no intentions of capitalizing on their efforts.

“In this universe, citizens relate to their city by consuming and administering its systems, and by serving as sources of measurable behavioral data.” How does this change our perception of the city as it’s people? Does it? Does it not in fact reinforce it? Ultimately, CUSP claims their endeavors to be noble and in the genuine pursuit of boosting the general public’s quality of life – But can they be trusted?

How is the smart city rendered from the perspective of someone (as unlikely as it may be) that is not smart device-connected? How does that effect (if at all) their sense of the immediate, physical context? Do you gather they will be more connected to their environment as a result of continuously processing a “high resolution, low pace information” i.e, as McCullough puts it, being exposed strictly to a “restorative environment” or do you gather smart technology will become imbedded to such extents that to be smart-disconnected is to be isolated from your city?

Built environments and technical systems are presumed to inform human behavior, and data about that behavior is fed back into the environment to alter future human behavior. If general information is fed back to us effectively augmenting our decision making and soon shaping our habits does a smart city effectively threaten to give rise to an engineered society? “The data we generate, based on determinist assumptions and imperfect methodologies, could end up shaping populations and building worlds in their own image” Has this risk been recognized &/or being addressed?

Could the form of citizen participation simply change and not quite as dramatically cease to exist? Although the underlying infrastructure is hidden and thus not perceived or processed by the population isn’t the overlaid cyber space theoretically infinitely traversable? Could our infatuation with the hidden infrastructure be due to our human predisposition to attempt to deal or perceive new technologies in old (comfortable) ways (Mcluhan)?

If you were to create a smart city, how would you do it differently? Expose the underlying infrastructure and designate countless above ground square footage to it’s accommodation so that citizens can feel comfortable and “accustomed” to the interworks of the city? Expend billions of dollars of your and your investors’ capital in development of such infrastructure with no intention of making a monetary return on your effort(s) (perhaps more importantly, your eager investors)? Every extension is preceded by an amputation, and we’ve been through the mill a few times – with the extension of our objectivity, sensory and aggregation through the smart city could it simply be that the amputation is knowing “less” about the infrastructure that makes it work? and could we not educate ourselves? Become smarter citizens to keep up with our smart city? Would you rather wait for smart citizens to save the environment & boost the efficiency of our built context? Think they could do it without harvesting big data or even on a scale of an entire city? If they could, why haven’t they yet?

• A Framework for Computational Urban Planning – Kontokosta