Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019
- Are smart cities considered to have affordable housing when demographically they would target, and would probably only be affordable for the upper class? Such fully instrumented technologies embedded in our daily lives would be expensive to afford and maintain. Would these smart cities increase the disparity between upper, middle and lower classes?
- Is social interaction is considered important when designing smart cities and spaces for people who live I these cities, how is this interaction quantified? How accurately are the data set provided by this quantification to develop smart technology successfully integrated into our lives and help improve social interaction between users and between a user and the city?
- “The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism,” Hannah Arendt warned in 1958, is “not that they are wrong but that they could become true” — that the very instruments used to measure behavior are indicative of, and constitutive of, societies of automatism and “sterile passivity.”
The data we generate, based on determinist assumptions and imperfect methodologies, could end up shaping populations and building worlds in their own image.” Data we generate does shape a city and hence people who live in that city, But what is the alternative to using instruments that measure behavior and provide data to create such environments? How else can we design technologies without monitoring a human’s behavior?
- “Circuits are the new topology of this terrain, once dominated by tunnels and tracks. while such systems are environmentally “smart” — they eliminate noisy, polluting garbage trucks; minimize landfill waste; and reduce offensive smells — they also cultivate an out-of-sight, out-of-mind public consciousness.”
Does this new topology need to adopt an out-of-sight and out-of-mind attitude? How are citizens and users (transient) affected and or their needs and wants addressed by smart cities? Do Test beds such as Hudson Yards consider data from different users and citizens relative to physical and information infrastructure?
A Framework for Computational Urban Planning – Kontokosta
- “Focusing on the neighborhood scale also allows for a meaningful interaction with, and participation by, the people who live, work, and play in that space and shifts the emphasis of data-driven design away from top-down routinization to a human- centric problem-solving.” Even though this shift from a city to a neighborhood scale may provide more opportunities to connect and engage with local residents in problem identification, data interpretation and problem solving, however it still does not take cultural, political , religious etc into consideration. A more focused approach would help identify issues more clearly but how would these problems be addressed; by the community of people themselves (participatory) or by the investors and designers of these test beds? How can ‘strength of social interaction’ be quantified? How can the unquantifiable be quantified for data collection necessary for smart cities and quantified communities?
- “The ability to test, refine, and scale the types of sensor technologies and modeling techniques described here represents a significant advancement in defining the usefulness, viability, and implementation of ubiquitous urban sensing.” Real-time feedback is one way of studying the human behavior affectively, what other ways constitute to studying the human behavior effectively without quantifying date. Is a human-centric view of urban sensing an effective strategy to understand the relationship and interaction between humans, sensors and data? Such as static sensor peering and mobile sensor peering.
- ‘in particular, the intention is to use the instrumentation framework and collected data to address specific challenges and urban problems relevant to, and defined by the local community.’ By involving communities of different scales and different types, would it not make it more complicated and difficult to create a well fit integrated model into different communities? Since every community is different, how effective would this model be?