Programmable City – Kitchen
“Of course, producing forms of smart urbanism that realize promises while curtailing perils is no easy task” – Could the route of the problem lie in our centralized outdated approach to planning constituent on predicting perils and attempting to resolve them in isolation from bottom up resources? Could this require time we simply do not have? Urgent and rapid development followed by a series of test versions allowing citizens to adapt to and tinker with the infrastructure could inspire developers while highlighting areas in need of more control or security. Is today’s way of approaching issues of tomorrow, outsourcing tools, technologies and power?
We have arguably established to some extend that top down and bottom up processes concrease in a cycle that constitutes: Top down Infrastructural implementation, bottom up tinkering and repurposing (predicated by access) & inspiration and further development. Stakeholders and investors in the infrastructure will always be partial to goals of efficiency and profitability while designers and citizens remain partial to “quality of life”. Is a “people code” (that functions much as building green codes do) worth considering? A dictation forcing developments to address and/or accommodate citizen sensitivities?
In highlighting the issue in our approaches to technological interventions, Kitchen states that the “means is post-justified by the ends rather than the ends shaping the means”. Is this approach not warranted? Especially after considering the notion that technologies (regardless of their original intended purposes) lend themselves to a larger picture that is yet to be realized?
Kitchen states that cities are frequently thought of by developers as a system(s) that “can be steered and controlled through technical levels”, highlighting the shallowness of the conception of the city as a set of quantifiable data sets. Is the answer in exploiting the raw data (through availability to designers, thinkers and tinkerers) to “shape the means to ends”, i.e, to draw educated complex relationships between seemingly unrelated data sets?
Kitchen highlights two issues underlying the current epistemological approaches to smart cities, the second being that the “scientific approach adopted for data generation, analysis and communication is reductionist and mechanistic… an approach that decontextualizes a city” – Must a scientific approach to data collection not simply be paired with contextual sociocultural investigation and analysis in order to minimize it’s augmentation to the city and it’s citizens? Must the scientist become the designer, sociologist, psychologist, artist, architect, engineer and citizen? Or is that in and of itself a dated ideology? Is it today’s solution a matter of outsourcing those needs to the collective rather than centralized processes? “A process of co-creation and co-production between city administrators, companies and citizens including using open platforms and standards where possible” – A Beta Smart City.
Owning the City – Martin de Waal
In introducing the notion of ownership, de Waal investigates how “digital media and culture allow citizens to engage with, organize around and act upon collective issues and engage in co-creating the social fabric and built form of the city” insinuating that infamous digital media have subserviently lent themselves to our empowerment – increasing the margin of our agency on our environment and defying dated geopolitical boarders.
“Ownership teases out several shifts that take place in the urban public domain characterized by tensions between individuals and collectives, between differences and similarities, and between conflict and collaboration.” – Initially, geopolitically constrained physical commons allowed for a limited domain of agency due to their fixation. As the internet dissolves geographical bubbles the digital environment becomes an ever more integrated and affective domain. Is power effectively decentralized in the smart future? Can actions half way around the globe have consequences at my front door? What implications (and potential) would such a scenario present with?
“The actual city is seen as the last and most difficult hurdle in successive phases of deployment of roll out rather than the sole place where experiment truly proves its value” – Could this is yesterday’s approach to issues of tomorrow? One of scientific analysis and subsequent implementations in isolation from citizens’ conscious input (including potentially relevant multidisciplinary professionals)? Does the solution lie in localized open beta smart structures that allow citizens to affect their immediate contexts (as opposed to transposed smart city structures) while preserving the analogous integrity of critical base infrastructures as a form of backup (soft failure) in the event of bugs and failures? Would this also serve as an ideal buffer to the transition to a “smart life” by allowing citizens to gradually adapt to and tinker with the infrastructure, discovering the potentials and experiencing the consequences of both the smart city and their renewed (arguably extended) domain of agency? Consider an infrastructure where citizens are not just consulted, but literally given the tools (technological platform) to build and tinker with their future environment.
In describing approach to quantified data, de Waal references Nold’s Bio mapping stating that “sudden spikes in heart rate or galvanic skin response were used to engage locals in discussions about these places and sensations produced in them” – Big data harvesting, deterministic and quantitative in it’s approach may well threaten to augment or engineer society. On the other hand, it provides with profoundly accurate information that could serve as a platform of discussion and action organized between educated professionals and citizens. Could the latter consideration allow us to circumnavigate unwanted potential consequences to the sociocultural fabric?
Could the merit in an open source approach to the smart city be that of the concreazation of an environment that allows technology to enhance our sensitivities to our commons, contexts and each other, dissolving geopolitical domains and allowing for new forms of connectivity without creating an invasive, distracting or possibly augmenting overlay? Avoiding a completely “dematerialized, decentralized and ephemeral” city and boosting our sensitivity of our immediate contexts through technological “accents” vs cognitively eclipsing them.
“The telephone and the car were jointly responsible for the vast growth of American suburbia and exurbia” – If that scenario is a result of agency exacted upon technologies that had contingent consequences, what will constitute “negative” consequences of expression of agency on the smart city, and what are the possible implications of an infrastructure that expands that domain?