Programming Earth – Gabrys
Isn’t the development of test beds themselves counter intuitive in pertinence to the environment and sustainability? The manufacturing of all that steel, glass or even the development entire man made sites? Should the smart city initiative be more of an integration model than a ground up process? Is the reason it’s not, the precariousness of our communities to such implementation? Or the low monetary return on developing a soft city without renewed or additional potential for (profitable) real-estate?
How can we prevent altering or heavily impacting “material-political distributions of power” risking possible modes of “subjectification”? Is our perception of citizens as “dumb sensing nodes” due to allocation of the sensory data to corporations and not back to the city and it’s citizens instead? That instead of locals advocating changes in the community (itself a bond-strengthening interactive experience) and collaboratively striving towards a goal – that change, much like a cookie cutter, is being forced based on data that remains exclusive from our conscious input and fails to accommodate citizens existing outside the averaged datum line?
“Citizen sensing as a form of engagement is a consistent reference point for development-led and creative practice engagements with smart cities” Who is the next generation of designers and developers designing for? The average? Or does big data allow us to “zoom in” on smaller less general demographics, understand patterns in their behavior and then design for them? Although our scrutiny and suspicion is warranted, it’s healthy to bear in mind that a cookie cutter approach (albeit less informed) was taken largely to some of our most revered cities. Urban planners and architects hypothesize about how they make people feel and what people want, and once a consensus has been reached (accurate or not) the designs (ranging from single unit to entire city scales) were implemented, and the subjects forced to adapt. If the same approach is used now with the added accuracy due to sensory data analysis, Is it not then our responsibility as designers to use said information to build more inclusive, livable and traverse-able spaces?
The citizen is a data point. Both a generator of data and a responsive node in a system of feedback – does that not reinforce our participation and citizenship as parts to a whole environment? Is perhaps the reason we are so uncomfortable with such loss of control our narcissistic belief in our rights and freedom superseding the importance of all else, living and none living? A mentality that places us at the center of the universe?
What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen? – Shepard & Simeti
“More problematic is how this approach promotes a technocratic view of the city and urban development, the corporatism of civic governance” etc..Could a preventative measure be the strategically designed absence of sensors and networks in areas such as public spaces or street intersections? Citizen smartness (without technology) to balance the overload of information and possibly it’s effects on forms or perceptions of citizenship? E.g Drakun and Haron shared spaces, Holland
Embedded within the popular notion of the word “smart” is the idea that the optimizations and inefficiencies these technologies promise will inevitably make for a better life. Does the word smart itself bear a psychological effect on people and their will of adoption? That its self explanatory that smarter is always better?
“An eager, engaged, canny urban participant, where I’m not “smart” and certainly not a “citizen,” and where the infrastructures and the policies are mysterious to me.” Is Sterling not in effect describing the smart city? Where he unwittingly participates while remaining to think and act inefficiently? Which leads to the question, what will a smart city look like? Are we to expect a dense overlay of information and visual saturation or are we to imagine the embedded technology as a background that informs the mediators and urban planners of the city?