Author: germania

Alternative Futures – Germania Garzon

Owning the city: New media and citizen engagement in urban design – Lange, Waal

  • “We have shown how digital media have created a number of qualitative shifts in the way publics can be engaged with organized around and act upon collective issues. The shifts mean that it has become easier for many citizens to organize themselves and take ownership of particular issues. In turn this may lead not only to new ways in which social life is organized but also to new ways of shaping the built environment.”

– As technology starts to influence urban design and the built form of our surrounding environment, with light installations, objects and real-time reflection of citizens and the space we occupy, – how can architects play a bigger role in the development of the smart city besides developing physical structures such as Hudson Yards or New Songdo to better engage the citizens and participants of the future city?

– In regards to OMA’s lecture last night could we relate the idea of ‘new ways of shaping the environment’ to their idea of reorganizing program of architectural spaces into separate ‘objects’ that compliment each other by each taking a unique form?

 

Rethinking, Reimagining and Remaking Smart Cities – Kitchin

  • “It means putting principles into action – to translate them into practical and political outcomes. Our own endeavours have demonstrated that smart city stakeholders are open to robust exchanges and are prepared to rework initiatives and change direction, especially if we are willing to work with them and others to realise any reframing, reimagining and remaking involved…However, in my view, such critique ideally also needs to suggest alternatives – whether ideological or practical – and to support the work of other oppositional groups (such as local communities or NGOs).”

– How can these reframing, and remaking initiatives be put forth and implemented without being seen as an attempt to push the idea of ‘togetherness’ when there are people like Jane Jacobs (previous reading) that would see it as a failing and destructive structure in a city?

 

Crashing and Hacking the Smart City – Germania Garzon

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

  • “Cities should be required to seriously consider how to best prepare against possible cyber attacks. Cities need to develop an emergency plan that provides steps to follow during a cyber attack and educate people on how to react while under attack. Fast and effective reaction can be key to preventing bigger problems including city chaos.”

– How does a smart city determine who develops an emergency plan for a cyber attack, and how would this plan be spread and implemented to the public?

– Is there a particular agency that regulates the type of technology used in smart buildings and monitors what is up to date or can be updated? Who is really to blame when a system undergoes a malfunction or even a threat?

– Is there a precedent we can look to that has solved this problem at any point, with Barcelona being the “smartest city” to date, how do they take precaution in these terms?

Open Source Urbanism – Germania Garzon

Urban Versioning System 1.0 – Fuller / Haque

  •  “Architects are seen as supplementary to this process, useful perhaps in advising on legal and structural matters and creating technical drawings but a bit of a hindrance when it comes to design, which, self-builders often feel is something that “anyone can do.” This do-it-yourself (DIY) approach has been popularized, even pimped, in the UK recently by television shows such as “Designer for a Day,” “Grand Designs” and “DIY SOS.” These programs chart the progress of projects undertaken by homeowners or show how design professionals can advise people in upgrading existing homes themselves.”

– Although this ‘open-source’ approach to contemporary redesign has been popularized in society more recently, it does not discredit the architect from playing an important role in whether the “design” by the owner is buildable or structural. What does this mean for architecture as a profession in the future?

– What is it about designing for one-self or designing in general that drives common ‘non-architects’ to want to produce their own surrounding domestic environment, rather than trust it in the hands of someone else?

 

DIY and Participatory Urbanism – Germania Garzon

Tinkering Toward Utopia – Anthony Townsend

The reading seems to suggest that an artificial design like a suburb or maybe a ‘smart city’ results in failure because it lacks the opportunity for spontaneity or natural organic occurrences.  But at the same time ‘DIYcity was a completely designed artificial organization that promoted interaction and participation, and was a success.

– How can we ensure that the direction we are moving in, creating smart cities from scratch and telling people to inhabit them and participate, is successful in the long run?

– Could smart cities have the potential to “live out a natural cycle” like Foursquare  or DIYcity?

– Could we find a way to integrate the idea of the smart city with the idea of a ‘natural city’ like Alexander describes?

 

Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism – Jennifer Gabrys

“If technologies are put to the test in these contexts, then participation becomes articulated through actual registers of engagement rather than as hypothetical platforms and gestures toward the common good. Idiots and idiotic encounters might even proliferate in these encounters and activate new approaches to the project of participation in the digital and sensor-based city.”

– What percentage of potential inhabitants of a smart city could be expected to act ‘idiotic’?

– Do all citizens have a tendency to act this way at some point or another?

– Are ‘idiotic’ citizens essential to the spontaneity of a “natural city” or rather a successful smart city?

Urban Data Infrastructures – Germania Garzon

Program Earth: Digital Infrastructures of Withness – Gabrys

– “How are we with the (smart) city, its infrastructure, its other inhabitants, and the many computational devices that would steer us, when emphasis is placed on coordinating ows of movement so that stoppage, disruption, breakage, and jamming are minimized? What is the withness of a ceaselessly owing city, of a city that never stops, that in its automated e ciency continues to process goods, information, and waste in the small hours of the night? Clearly, to discuss digital infrastructures of withness then also requires attending to infrastructure as pro- cess.”

– This concept of ‘with-ness’ between urban engagements and its citizens is interesting to look at currently, how are citizens currently “with” the city they inhabit?

– What are some steps that we as participating citizens of an urban environment could take in the direction of ‘with-ness’ rather than ‘self-ness’ and become a bigger role in process infrastructure?

 

Smart cities and the politics of Urban Date – Kitchen, Lauriault & McArdle

– In the reading, they mention that some municipalities believe in certain politics of indicator, benchmarking and dashboard initiatives like “rational, mechanical, linear and hierarchical” managerial systems that can easily controlled while others believe in more contextual, unpredictable, interdependental systems.

– Are we looking for a middle ground between these different forms of governance?

– What are some ways we see these different forms of governance right now, and how are they affecting citizens and cities?

Sensing the Smart Citizen – Germania Garzon

From Environments to Environmentality – Gabrys

  • “The importance of the everyday as a site of intervention signals the ways in which smart city proposals are generative of distinct ways of life, where a “micro- physics of power” is performed through everyday scenarios.40 Governance and the managing of urban milieus occur not through delineations of territory but through enabling the connections and processes of everyday urban inhabitations within computational modalities.”

– How will the CSC design proposal respond to the inevitable fact that not all humans or smart citizens will ‘participate’ or respond accordingly with what the expected dialogue predicts?

– Does the CSC proposal suggest that it can adapt to changes in human responses to a particular environment, or that it is not specific to a certain typology of ‘smart citizen’ ?

What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen? – Mark Shepard and Antonina Simeti

  •  Things get murkier when we consider whom we are referring to as Smart Citizens. Does leveraging social media and networked information systems really broaden participation, or merely provide another platform for proactive citizens already more likely to engage within the community? What barriers to entry – cultural appropriateness, technological fluency – are embedded in the design and implementation of these citizen – led initiatives? What are the incentives to opt-in?

– Is the “smart citizen” in this case an example of what was mentioned in Gabrys’ reading of bio-political management? ” ways of life are situated, emergent, and practiced through spatial and material power relations” – social media?

 

Quantified Community: Hudson Yards – Germania Garzon

Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards – Mattern

– Smart citizenship, Gabrys says, is thus equated with monitoring and managing one’s relationship to the urban environment — “operationalizing the cybernetic functions of the smart city” — rather than with “exercising rights and responsibilities” or “advancing democratic engagement through dialogue and debate,” as Arendt would prefer.

– Couldn’t we say that in a new smart urban environment like Hudson Yards, data collection, monitoring and participation are the new “dialogue & debate”?

– Are people actually scared of losing their “rights as citizens” to participate or influence the growth and development of the quantified community, or are they just misinterpreting what the present/future is offering us as inhabitants of the new quantified community vs a smart city?

 

The Quantified Community and Neighborhood Labs: A Framework for Computational Urban Planning and Civic Technology Innovation – Constantine Kontokosta

– The “Smart City” messaging is replete with claims of the potential for sensors and information and communication technologies (ICT) to re-shape urban life, although such rhetoric ignores the practical realties and constraints of urban decision-making and the social and distributional concerns of policy outcomes. Recent research has begun to counter and disaggregate the marketing language of smart cities with the actual potential of big data and analytics to positively shape future cities (and re-shape existing ones) in a way that is sensitive to social and political realities, and reflective of the needs and desires of people who actually live in cities… The QC provides an opportunity to vastly improve operational efficiencies and support resource conservation at the building and district scale. This objective switches the focus from understanding the dynamics of land use adjacencies and site access and mobility, to modeling resource flows and how environmental, physical, and social conditions influence consumption behavior. ”

– Does this mean we should push for a shift and expansion of quantified communities rather than ‘Smart cities’?

– How would the lives of the citizens living outside of both of these new urban typologies differ?

Tabula Rasa: New Songdo – Germania Garzon

Testbed as Urban Epistemology – Calvillo, Halpern, LeCavalier, Pietsch

“cisco’s strategic planners envision a totalising sensory environment in which human actions and reactions from eye movements to body movements can be traced, tracked, and responded to in the name of consumer satisfaction and work efficiency ”

– It seems like Songdo in a way plans to de-humanize people in their efforts to data-mine all human actions, do we already see this happening now in cities in America?

– What do they mean when they say ” in the name of… work efficiency”?

– How far does Songdo plan on influencing the behavior of human/city interaction?

– Are they re-defining the boundary of public/private?

 

The $100 Billion Jackpot – Townsend

– “Such green gadgetry seems irrelevant…” writes Tim Edelsten a conservationist in Korea, “when you realize that a vast natural paradise has been destroyed to create all this new office space.”

– Is Songdo headed in the wrong direction? Should we be focusing on how to make our current cities smarter and extending them, rather than building completely new smart/green cities from the ground up?

Smart Cities / Smart Citizens – Germania Garzon

What Is a City that It Would Be ‘Smart’? – Haque

– Does a smart city take into consideration the day to day life of a small business owner?

– Could there be a way that ‘smart citizens’ play a larger role in the future of these smart cities without compromising their uniqueness?

Smart Cities – Townsend

– Townsend ends the reading by saying he believes there is a better way to build a smart city than “simply calling in engineers.” I believe architects, planners and designers have a role in the development process of smart cities as well but where does the rest of society fit in? Besides being the potential future occupants.

CityofSound – Hill

– “In fact, does removing the conscious decision-making element make us less likely to be aware, to care, about our impact on the environment? Are we becoming passive citizens in response to our systems getting smart? ” – Could we elaborate on this question that seems to be a continuously reoccurring theme throughout history and developing technology over time? How do we feel about these new technologies that “free us” of worrying about turning lights off or driving our own cars? Is the passivity inevitable? Is it really hurting us or allowing us to do more or other more important things?