The Quantified Community and the Neighborhood Labs
While the initial statement of Kontokostas might sound apelling, when he claims to use “the actual potential of big data and analytics to positively shape future cities in a way that is sensitive to social and political realities, and reflective of the needs and desires of people who actually lives in the cities”; in further developments it’s clear the contradiction beteween big data and recording the actual live in the city. Kontokostas sees the problem as a technical one, as if by creating a more granular model of measurement we would have a more direct and precise reflection of every day live, and as if there were no bias in the measurement by itself. It’s also visible how his model of participation doesn’t really take in account the citizens in an active way. In this context, which could be other possible ways to measure everyday life? which would be a model of participation by which citizens can enpower themselves and have a more active role in the shaping of the city?
Intrumental City
As Mattern states critically, the model of the Quatified City has as a result that “Smart citizenship […] is thus equated with monitoring and managing one’s relation to the urban environment […] rather than with ‘exercising the rights and responsabilities’ or ‘advancing democratics engagements through dialogue and debate'”. As this model comes from an academy-industry-government complex, as Mattern calls it, based on the conceptual models of ‘Urban triumphalism’, ‘Sustainable Urbanism’, and ‘Technoscientific Urbanism’; how can we crete different models of urbanism, which takes critically the other models, and in which this academy-industry-government complex, can be transformed to an a citinzens-academy-government-industry complex (in that order)?