Reframing, Reimagining and Remaking Smart Cities
- Page 8 “…no two cities hold the same qualities, having different histories, populations, cultures, economies, politics…and interdependencies with other places, and so on.” However, the development of smart cities seems like to make all cities be similar. People living in different cities but they will use the IoTs for same companies, they will get same comfort form same Apps. Unique makes differences, and sometimes the differences take troubles. One goal of human’s technology is to overcome troubles, also it will erase some uniques. For a city, is the unique of a city not important any more? Or should we still try to keep some unique of the cities and give up some benefit from technology.
Owning the City
- In the article, the author mentioned the ownership. A city is hard to simply be belong to one person. Lots of people share it, its functions, environment benefit, and so on. In one of goals, the smart cities try to offer a better life for everyone who living inside. But how to deal with some case like this if two people have different requires, such as temperature, but they stand together?
Give them a temperature between their requires may make each one unhappy. If the technology could offer each one a separate temperature, it will become a such lonely thing. It is just like people living their own mini Environment Bubble. Maybe “what is the weather today” can not be a common talking beginning any more. Just like the video game, some people criticize the VR technology make people more lonely than before, player will be limited in their own VR glasses. For smart cities, could we find a way that keep the aggregation and sharing as features of a city while give citizen high individual benefit?
- Section 4.5 Act: DIY urban design. “…With this crowdsourced plan they managed to persuade the local government to abandon the initial plans for the park and execute theirs instead…” This crowdsourced plan show the people’s demand. In another hand, it is telling the designers of cities, they don’t like what you are doing. In this situation, should the designers of cities follow the crowd?