Owning the City: New Media and Citizen Engagement in Urban Design – Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal
1} The author is discussing urban life and culture, implications for urban design and city’s built form. Smart cities understood as series of infrastructure manages efficiently. But critics note that these imaginaries ignore some of the basic tenants. What are these ignored basic tenets critics talking about?
2}Deployment in the smart city is one of the critics. Even today many new cities are planned which are in still a fiction and some are under construction, in future, they will exist. While each new city comes with many new individual problems and solutions and advantages too. I think deployment is really not an issue, it’s just another experiment. Concepts of smart cities and applications of ideas will be partial in early few experiments and gradually with time, it will increase. That is one way to tackle deployment issue.
3}Ownership and engagement of citizens with media and role of the citizen in a smart city are one of the important issues of smart city fiction. Smart city will not have a specific government, rather I would like to say there will be ‘self-managed’ or ‘open government’ and citizen supposed to participate, react and involve individual resources like time, creativity and productivity to city run effectively and efficiently. Under such situation what will be returning for an individual? Decision taking on common grounds will be the slow process and everyone will need to invest time and it’s not productive and decisions will be not in favor of most of the participants. Under such circumstances what will maintain interest and involvement of citizens? There should be some factors which will bound citizens to their responsibilities of involvement. Again bounding comes with some form of government. People might start migrating in mass if a city is not functioning well. Under such thought deployment and investment is really a question. Just a thought, a possible solution, there could be a citizen profile in which citizen will earn points score in returns of involvement and basic services will be provided on that score. Again this is kind of government and against freedom, but I think bounding comes with rules and rules comes from the government. Ownership and engagement are still an issue.