W06
Program Earth: Environmental Sensing of Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet.
Digital Infrastructures of Withness – Jennifer Gabrys
- “The smart city as built and imagined seems to toggle in this in- between zone, instantiated in some ways but always leaning toward a more complete automation, a more fully self- regulating (and so sustainable) organism that monitors, responds, and adapts in real time in order to achieve the most efficient and optimized balance of resources, time, and money. Sensors becoming networks becoming smart cities all appear to be on a trajectory toward an urban organism that acquires an uncanny intelligence and ability to manage the city as planner, architect, and engineer all rolled into one. But when might this phase- change occur, when sensors and networks take on a life of their own and begin to organize their own automated processes within the city.”
How does this automated urban organism which takes sensors and networks into account function within the parameters and modes of ‘withness’ (human and non- human)? What are its shortcoming when dealing with participation and interaction amongst other networks and or humans? How can the infrastructural aspects of smart cities, which include the processes of measurement, automatism, and contingency, be qualified or take experience and perception into account? If these smart cities are managed by cybernetic entities, which are non-intelligent learning systems (feedback into account), how is its process of decision making determined? Do they need human intervention in order to make decisions?
- “Designing infrastructure is designing action.” This statement could easily be read in a deterministic way, where the structures of infrastructure are seen to offer automatic scripts or codes for action. But the statement could also be read less causally and more simultaneously, where infrastructures and actions coincide as entangled and co- emergent processes. A study of infrastructure could very well attend to the actions that are productive of infrastructures, as well as infrastructures that are productive of actions. This raises the question of how actions unfold within and through automated urban infrastructures.”
From Simondon’s perspective would this infrastructure of machines be sacrificing its ‘functional possibilities and many of its possible uses’ in order to make a machines automatic since these machines are engaging in a set of operations that incorporate openness and participation (human involvement)? His discussion of the pre-individual reserve “what counts as “human” is also not fixed or settled, since machinic engagements also give rise to distinct transindividuations of the entities involved.” Can the idea of tranindividuation, which takes both an individual subject and a collective subject, be applicable to automated urban infrastructures that are productive of both action and infrastructures relative to human interaction? How would humans be inputs or inputs in such systems? Are humans only considered as a source or node of information in such systems?
- “Yet as Simone reminds us in his writings on the practices of infrastructure, these are characterized by situated contingencies, where people may even tinker with and alter the city and its infrastructure. Contingencies in the smart city may emerge across human and more- than- human registers, moreover, since as the city “plays itself ” it no doubt is not simply adapting for optimization but is also generating particular materializations of sensor- spaces, transforming environments through programs of more- than- automatism, and giving rise to proliferating bugs and blockages that are sites for ongoing repair.”
Smart cities or automated urban infrastructures like any other system contain negative contingencies, are their systems or models developed to predict such contingencies? How do these contingencies take the human register / intervention into account? Does the process of constant feedback and optimization effect contingencies of a smart city relative to modes of withness (human / non-human). Are these newly generated technological practices, inhabitations and ways of life due to the integration of technology within the automated urban infrastructure not only modify human behavior but also sensor-actuator operations? Is it because a smart city and participatory urbanism projects reduce technology to a “utensil,” as Simondon has termed it, focusing on optimization, rather than on quality of life?
“This means that rather than search between determinist or constructivist approaches to technology, we might attend to how new entities, relations, and modalities of withness contingent on infection and persuasion generate new technological practices, inhabitations, and ways of life.”
Smart Cities and Politics of Urban Data – Rob Kitchin, Tracey Lauriault and Gavin McArdle
- What types of contingencies are there concerning smart cities when dealing with ‘panoptic surveillance’ or ‘dataveillance’ and security? Since smart cities have, numerous networks are there any precautions and fail-safe mechanisms to deal with hacking of its servers. To what extent are these systems open or closed systems, relative to citizen participation and privacy?
- Do corporate interests solely drive these systems? By taking users and consumers demands and participation into account, aren’t corporations building better cities for the people regardless or corporate interests? On the other hand, are these cities built for a certain demographic and hence caters to a certain types of users? Are then policies, decisions, laws, politics and data assemblage in favor of corporate interests and are then pushed and passed through because of corporate interest?
“It is the tension between the realist epistemology (data show the city as it actually is) and the instrumental rationality of smart city systems, and an alternative view that exposes the politics and assemblages of such data and systems.”
“These include anxieties related to the rise in technocratic governance, the corporatization of governance, the creation of buggy, brittle and hackable systems, panoptic surveillance, predictive profiling and social sorting and the politics of urban data.”
Emancipation from the demands of corporations possible when designing smart cities? Can both users and corporations co-exist amongst the many layers of smart cities infrastructure? Will some anxieties that are a part of the urban fabric of smart cities be addressed by and help produce better technological systems through feedback and optimization as the city “plays itself”?