“Citizen Sensing in the Smart and Sustainable City: From Environments to Environmentality,” Jennifer Gabrys,
1 “Urban citizens become sensing nodes— or citizen sensors— within smart city proposals. This is a way of understanding citizen sensing not as a practice synonymous with citizen science but as a modality of citizenship that concretizes through interaction with computational sensing technologies used for environmental monitoring and feedback.” What does it mean to be citizen sensors? Those who have citizenship only applicable or is it applicable to the transient population? Are these transient visitors, citizen sensors of the city as well? What If citizens choose not to ‘opt-in’ to being citizen censors?
2 “how might environmental technologies delimit citizen- like practices to a series of actions focused on monitoring and managing data? Might this mean that citizenship is less about a fixed human subject and more about an operationalization of citizenship that largely relies on digital technics to become animate?” “Behavior may be addressed or governed, but the technique is environmental.”
Would human behavior change or modify if environmental technologies monitor and manage data? Would this mean that humans are just a part of the operation needed for data in order to produce technology for these urban (smart) cities? Are we then just part of a system to produce efficient cities? How does this feedback system work? What are its parameters/limitations?
3
Here is a version of biopolitics 2.0, where monitoring behavior is less about governing individuals or populations and more about establishing environmental conditions in which responsive (and correct) modes of behavior can emerge. Environmentality does not require the creation of normative subjects, as Foucault suggests, since the environmental citizen is not governed as a distinct figure; rather, environmentality is an extension of the actions and forces— automaticity and responsiveness—embedded and performed within environments.
If biopolitics 2.0 focuses more on establishing responsive environmental conditions, does that not mean by modifying you the environment, it also constitutes to governing an individual? How can the environment be modified, maybe not consciously but subconsciously affect the way individuals are governed? Environmentality consider spatial conditions that lead to responsive and embedded environments and by action and forces does it consider human behavior?
“What’s so smart about the smart citizen?”- Smart cities- Mark Shepard and Antonina Simeti
Top down or bottom up approach?
- ‘Often top-down and centralizing, this approach promises to optimize the distribution of services and maximize energy efficiency, making cities more livable, sustainable and competitive.’ ‘Focusing on Smart Citizens would appear to be a compelling alternative to the technocratic determinism of the Smart City model. The agility of bottom-up and distributed strategies enables affecting change rapidly at far lower costs than large-scale urban infrastructure projects.’ Top down or bottom up approaches seem to have some areas where they are successful in achieving their goals and others where they are not. If the context or situation were considered and test beds were used to test both these approaches, where need be top down approach would be successful for certain cities and where quantified communities through a bottom up approach could prove to resolve more issues than prove to be detrimental?
- Yet challenges at the level of policy and regulation arise when one attempts to scale local solutions to larger urban systems, where interoperability between different systems and the development of open standards for sharing data between them become paramount.
- “Finally, we have to ask what it means to call a city or its citizens “smart” in the first place.4 the term “smart” has been popularized by marketing executives of large technology companies, and it is hard to argue with their logic: who would want to live in a “dumb” city, or to be a “dumb” citizen?” Whether the city is a smart city or a dumb city with dumb citizens or smart citizens maybe it is important to try different variation of all these systems and their components in order to find solutions to urban challenges of a local scale or an urban scale? At a community or local scale it maybe more important to consider smart citizens and at an urban scale smarter cities would be more important? Combinations and integration of technologies and participation of smart citizens may work for some cities and communities and for some cities dumb cities/ with smarter citizens would be the next step before evolving to smarter cities? Would it not be a logical to consider how such cities and communities can, successfully and efficiently evolve into smarter cities with smarter citizens?