Author: feng

W12 Alternative Futures – Feng

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?

Crashing and Hacking the Smart City – Feng

An Emerging US (and World) Threat: Cities Wide Open to Cyber Attacks

  • Smart Cities as a system is subdividing, such as more sensors in different places and undertake different responsibilities. For more efficiency and more accuracy, this kind of subdividing will be continue. However, the whole system will be more weak when there are too much subdividing. One subsystem crash may lead whole failure of system.
    How could we make the stableness of system better in the processing of subdividing?

 

  • Page10

    “Main building systems are run on the Windows XP operating system, which is old, outdated, not supported and less secure than new operating systems….”
    It is a common issue in our life, the update of software and hardware is not synchro. For cities, it is a slow speed for its development but the upgrade of Cyber things is much faster.
    Which is better for a Smart City’s growth, make cities change faster or make software suit cities slower?

    Also, nowadays, lots of companies for their own benefits, do the “Planned Obsolescence”. If the PO will be used in building a smart city, there will be lots profit, and also lots of cost. Companies want the highest profit and the citizens want the lowest cost.
    How to deal with this kind of condition?

The Open Source Urbanism – Feng

Smart Cities

  • P119 “The street finds its own uses for things – uses the manufacturers never imagined.”
    Just like an plastic coca bottle could be modified to a firearms’ silencer, people could also do their own mods on the IoT or open source devices of smart cities. Because those devices are more powerful, then they could be more harmful if they are used in a wrong ways. How to keep the safety in this case? And who have the right and responsibility to manage?

UVS

  • P25 “To design something that does not yet exist, if we are not to build it at the same time, requires us to imagine it and represent it, for example on paper, through plans, in maquette form, or through software simulated fly-through.”
    Designing a thing for future adventurous, people can not fo recast what will show up in future, such as the newest iPhone can not plugin the newest MacBook anymore due to the usb-c. One adapter could solve the small issue for iThings but would it be the same easy for smart cities forecast design? Do we have or should we build some guide for this kind of design?

  • P30 “…a broken system is usually one that attracts the most attention, in part because it appeals to others’ desire to “repair” and also because breaks can enable one to understand better how something should or could work.”
    In the same time, a broken system is also one that will attract the destructive desire of people (Broken windows theory). Some open source softwares are lack to enough money for maintaining then have some security issue. If smart cities use the open way to develop, will it face the same problem?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism – Feng

Tinkering Toward Utopia

  • P144 “the unchanging receptacle in which the changing parts of the system…can work together.”
    As we know, the nowadays population is much large than many years ago. In this case, the city needs efficiency. And in some degree, efficiency force things be simple and clear, which is the opposite to the old cities. Therefore, how to deal with the vivid interesting like old cities and the high efficiency of the new cities?
  • About Foursquare
    Smart cities and foursquare-like apps have some similar points. They could work well when the number of user/citizen is big enough. Because they need the supports from enough volume of data.
    Would the scale of city be the obstacles for those cities’ “smartize”? (because the small ones could not get enough data.)

Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism

  • In the TV show Black Mirror, there is a story, in that world, everyone use the social media to show their own sense of social presence, and those ones who don’t use the social media apps are like the foundlings of that world.
    In the similar case, in a smart city, would those people who can’t or don’t want use their devices for share data to smart cities be the foundlings? Would they lose some rights then living unhappy in the future smart cities?

Urban Data Infrastructures – Feng

Program Earth

    • Page 246 “Sensors are also not the only source for data generated to manage urban systems—alternative data sources include both static and dynamic data collected from social media streams, participatory-sensing systems, and predictive and strategic modeling capabilities.”

    For the direction of future smart cities. Should we try to make sensors become the only source for the collection of data? And is it good for the “previous” other sources?

  • Page 256 “This point draws on Simondon’s discus- sion of how relations are not formed through the adding up of individuals to form collectives. Rather, collectives are transindividuated into distinct entities, and it is this mode of parsing collective potential that in-forms individuals and relations.”How to understand this “relation”? Also, as we know, in sometime, the collective’s activities will cover some individuals’, even some important ones’ activities. So how to deal with this?

    Smart Urbanism

    • Page 18 “First, a technocratic approach is highly reductionist and functionalist, always based on a limited selection of data and shaped by the formulation of algorithms, and fails to recognise the wider effects of culture, politics, policy, governance and capital in shaping city life and urban systems.”

      The limited data is not always work bad. For example, people’s eyes will collect lots of information for visual, but their brains can not deal with those mass. Thus, the brain actually only use limited information from eyes’ collection, and it already enough to support the normal life of a human. So, why base on a limited selection of data will be a problem?

Sensing the Smart Citizen – Feng Guo

Programming Earth

  • P187 “Might this mean that citizenship is less about a xed human subject and more about an operationalization of citizenship that largely relies on digital technics to become animate?”

    What dose author mean the “operationalization of citizenship” of  an non-human citizen? Is there a example of that?

  • P189 “Yet proposals focused on enabling citizens to monitor their activities convert these citizens into unwitting gatherers and providers of data that may be used not just to balance energy use, for instance, but also to provide energy companies and governments with details about everyday living patterns.” “tooling up citizens” “alter[ing] the subjectivity of contemporary citizenship” “how do urban material politics and possibilities for dem- ocratic engagement also transform?” 

    In this case, would you think “unwitting” or “tooling up” show a picture that, in this kind of smart city, people’s citizen right will be declined? And also, with the data collector’s raise, is it a possible that there will be a new autarchic “leader” who could and utilize control lots of data?

  • P194 “The project proposal materials advocate the smart city as the key to addressing issues of climate change and resource shortages, where sustainable urban environments may be achieved through intelligent digital architectures.”

    This “key” is use for the city zone, how about the suburban area?

    Smart Citizens

    • P17 “Unfortunately Sterling’s call for a temporary autonomous zone7 for smart city dropouts ultimately leads to the Smart City ghetto.”
      Following last question, is that the “key” could be the reason of forming smart city dropouts?

      Which would like more possible to generate smart city dropouts, smart infrastructure or smart citizen? In another word, static or dynamic?

Quantified Community: Hudson Yards – Feng

In Kontokosta’s passage, the author mentioned the “slice of the city”. It could be considered a kind of model of city, or similar to the “one to one map” in the previous readings. They are both the model of a city, but in the readings, one is important and profitable to smart city, another one is not. The difference between them is the scale of data which was collected. So, What scale of data is a good volume for developing of smart city? How to determine the scale or the volume?

Tabula Rase: New Sondo – Feng

Smart City

  • P21 “It would sense the layout of the modules and reassemble them overnight into a new pattern to provoke, delight, and otherwise stimulate the retreat goers.” In those words, there is a possibility or tendency for flexibility. Dose the flexibility good for a building or architecture for users.
  • P28 Why dose author said, “…Songdo became too big to fail.”?
  • The upgrade speed of “smart thing” is much faster then infrastructure. (For example the least iPhone already can not connect to the least MacBook without a usb a-c adapter.) How would people deal with them?

Test Bed as Urban Epistemology

  • At the 4th paragraph of Automated Infrastructures. “at the domestic level, it is assumed that every wall, every mirror and every surface can become an interface that offers users everything from on-demand data and weather reports to home medical monitoring.”   It’s very convenient if people could get data of information from anywhere at home, but would it become a problem about information overload at home for people?

Smart Cities/Citizens – Feng Guo

Smart City

  • As the words of George Gilder, “cities as ‘leftover baggage from the industrial era’ “. The Internet make space limit smaller on citizen’s city life. In this case, is there a possible that cities will be gone before it become smart?

Hill’s Essay

  • How to understand “It turns out that changing behavior is a way to subsequently change attitudes; this is entirely counter the thinking behind many smart system.”

What is a City that it would be smart

  • For the first view of author. Does he mean that the smart things, online things, make people go away from group slowly and they are not good for city.