Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards – Mattern
– Smart citizenship, Gabrys says, is thus equated with monitoring and managing one’s relationship to the urban environment — “operationalizing the cybernetic functions of the smart city” — rather than with “exercising rights and responsibilities” or “advancing democratic engagement through dialogue and debate,” as Arendt would prefer.
– Couldn’t we say that in a new smart urban environment like Hudson Yards, data collection, monitoring and participation are the new “dialogue & debate”?
– Are people actually scared of losing their “rights as citizens” to participate or influence the growth and development of the quantified community, or are they just misinterpreting what the present/future is offering us as inhabitants of the new quantified community vs a smart city?
The Quantified Community and Neighborhood Labs: A Framework for Computational Urban Planning and Civic Technology Innovation – Constantine Kontokosta
– The “Smart City” messaging is replete with claims of the potential for sensors and information and communication technologies (ICT) to re-shape urban life, although such rhetoric ignores the practical realties and constraints of urban decision-making and the social and distributional concerns of policy outcomes. Recent research has begun to counter and disaggregate the marketing language of smart cities with the actual potential of big data and analytics to positively shape future cities (and re-shape existing ones) in a way that is sensitive to social and political realities, and reflective of the needs and desires of people who actually live in cities… The QC provides an opportunity to vastly improve operational efficiencies and support resource conservation at the building and district scale. This objective switches the focus from understanding the dynamics of land use adjacencies and site access and mobility, to modeling resource flows and how environmental, physical, and social conditions influence consumption behavior. ”
– Does this mean we should push for a shift and expansion of quantified communities rather than ‘Smart cities’?
– How would the lives of the citizens living outside of both of these new urban typologies differ?