Leonardo – Smart Cities

Alternative futures

In his article, Rob Kitchin characterizes the epistemology behind the concept of smart cities as being “reductionist, mechanistic, atomizing, essentialist, and deterministic in how it produces knowledge about cities.” and argues that this approach “decontextualizes a city and its systems from history, its poiitics and political economy, its culture and communities, the wider set of social, economic and environmental relations that frame its development, and it wider interconnections and interdependencies that stretches out over space and time”. In this sense, how could we incorporate other epistemological models to the development of the city, or at least subsume the present one to another set of values, in a way that lets creating a model of the smart city that takes into account all this issues?

In terms of governance, Kitchin critices the current model of the smart city, and describes it as “top-down, centraly controlled and managerial in orientation, often introduced by bureaucrats rather than elected officials.” In this sense, he points out the need that solutions in the smart city “be introduced and implemented through processes co-creation and co-production between city administrators, companies and citizens; be open and transparent in their formulation and operation, including using open platforms and standards where possible; and be used in conjunction with a suite of aligned interventions, policies and investments that seek to tackle issues in complementary ways, blending technical, social, political and policy response”. In this context, how could such open structures of co-creations be implemented, and which would be the role and degree of participation of the citizens in such processes and platforms?

In their article, Lange and the Waal define ownership of the city as “the degree to which city dwellers feel a sense of responsability for shared issues and are taking action on these matters”. In this sense, how can technologies be used to foster such ownership, but not only as a feeling, but in a way that articulates action and participation to engage with the co-design of the city?

Crashing and Hacking the Smart City

If as Cerrudo afirms “The more technology a city uses, the more vulnerable to cyber attacks it is […] it’s only a matter of time until attacks on city services and infrastructure happen”, how we could thing of infrastructure that is tecnological, but not in the traditional sense, or at least not so dependant on digital information? Could a system that takes resilience as a value could be deveolped? and even if there is some loss in term of efficiency could strategies as redundancy be implemented in the building of the infrastructure of the smart city?

Townsend affirms that “The sheer of city-scale smart systems comes with its own set of problems. Cities and their infrastructure are already the most complex structure humankind has ever created. Interweaving them with equally complex information processing can only multiply the opportuities for bugs and unanticipated interactions”. In this context, could we argue that the problem is not just a matter of improving the design of the systems, but in any case, to have back-up systems that are more granular, less centralized, and less dependant on digital technologies?

In the same manner, all this scenarios, at the end, show the need of having smart citizens that have the skills necessary to undestand and deal with the problems that will come with the deployment of a smart cities. Should a plan to ‘smarten’ the citizen be integral part of the development of smart cities?

Open Source Urbanism

When Haque and Fuller affirm that “just as with any non-human entity, we collectively construct our ecological and architectural frameworks, and these frameworks tend to overlap with those of others. These overlaps have consequences. The difference is (or should be) that we consciously recognize our interdependence and thus must consciously act upon it.”, when it comes to tha Smart City, how can this be applied to people which is not necessarily involved in architecture? can new ways of fabrication be utilized to open new ways of agency in the building of the city? How this overlaps can be negotiated and by whom?

Also Haque and Fuller affirm that “This has specific impact on the role of the architect. It suggests a new focus on enabling, generating and engaging, adopting a role similar to the one an operating system designer performs in the world of software. This does not necessarily confer equal responsibility to all participants in a system but instead presumes that while hierarchies formed by experience, skill and aptitude are inevitable, they are not immutable. Equally, such an approach changes the site of the aesthetics in architecture to one not of form but of organization. The aesthetics of organization have yet to be decisively […] various interests. More important is to concentrate on widening people’s spheres of responsibility, and hence motivation, commitment and agency with regard to the design and inhabitation of the urban environment.” In this sense, up to what extent can this be achieved regarding the material limitations of architecture in relation to the design of open development in the digital realm? Up to what scale can this metaphor by applied to the physical world? Also which is the role of the architect in this context? Which is his responsability on enabiling a larger engagement on the design of the city?

In Townsend perspective, “The technology giants building smart cities are mostly paying attention to technology, not people, mostly focused on cost effectiveness and efficiency, mostly ignoring the creative process of harnessing technology at the grass roots [, but] truly disruptive application of new information technology have almost always come from the bottom up […] When you start paying attention to what people actually do with technology, you find innovation everywhere”. In this sense, how can we shift the values trough which c technology is being developed, thinking about new ways of considering values such as efficiency? How can we assure that that the innovation developed from the bottom-up is not mis-appropriated by the techology companies or the government to its own ends? and how can we assure that this development remain open for future participation and engagement?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism

In Townsend’s view “Cities are indeed an efficient way to organizing activity, since infrastructure can be shared. But efficiency isn’t why we build cities in the first place. It’s more of a convenient side effect of their ability to expedit human contact” (p. 160) In this sense, which are the modalities of participation that can enhance this human contact, and how can techology play a roll within such modalities? and also, does new technologies creates new modalities never seen before, or it reshapes ways of participating from the past?

Jennifer Gabrys characterizes critically three forms of participatory urbanism: problem-solving code, reconfigured solving economies, and participatory sensing. And in this chategories “Urban life is articulated through a series of computational problems that can be solved or enhanced through participatory platforms and programs. [And in which] Citizens achieve participation through using this platforms to perform urban functions, and at a presumaly higher level by writting programs in the first place” (p. 215) But in this sense, in Gabrys’s view, participation seems to be narrowed to a sort of citizen gatherings which only aims to contest with the the city government and private enterprises, which flaws because of it’s incapibility to create sollutions to the same scale and effectivness as those instances. In this sense, should we valorize participation just in terms of effectivness? Is paticipation main concern should be problem-solving?

If new modalities of participation are determined by technologies, how can this technologies be shaped themselves for enhancing participation themselves or to open new ways of communication? should urban participation shifted its focus from the city to the technology that enables certain aspects of it? How can we address less visible aspects of the city through participation? And how can this dialogic values be introduced in both the technology design and urban design?

Urban Data Infrastructures

As argued in the text, “Indicator, benchmarking and dashboad initiatives thus inherently express a normative notion about what should be measured and how it should be measured. The are full of values, judgements and deliberate strategies of occlusion […] They not only present urban systems, but actively help produce them” (p.28) In this scenario, what are the paths to create policies, auditing, or participating in such models of shaping the city?

On Gabrys’s text, if withness is understood as “an articulation of processes of participatinf that involve becoming together, across and extended array of entities, and setting in motion the connections and inheritance that take hold to become something like urban infrastrucure” (p. 263) How does withnessing address the problem of the different forms of agency that comes into the design of technology and into urban planning? Sepecially when as stated by the own text “Our urban future is differently distributed depending upon how close to the machine we are” (p. 264)

Also in Gabrys’s text, how does her proposal of “speculative cities” takes into account the contingency and indeterminacy proposed by Simondon to open new paths of active agency over the city, or to new forms of participation?

Senzing the Smart Citizen

In Gabrys’s words, in the Smart City “The actions of citizens has less to do with individuas excercising rights and responsabilities and more to do with operationalizing he cybernetic functions of the smart city. Participation involves computational responsiveness and is coextensive with actions of monitoring and managing one’s relation to environments, rather to engaging democratic engagment through dialogue and debate” (196). In this context, which other models of agency or subjectivity could be used to describe other forms of participation of civic engagement? And to which degree this engagement should be operationalized only through the action of sensing and providing data to the system, rather than other forms of action?

In this paradigm “the sensing that takes place in the smart city involves continually monitoring processes in order to mamage them […] Humans may participate in the sensor city through mobile devices and platforms, but the coordination across ‘manual and automated’ urban processes unfolds within programmed environments, which organize the inputs and outputs of humans and machines”. This model opens to the question on how this systems could be designed into a not centralized way? The production of data not necessarily, and not always should be centralized, and this opens a question on ownership of data, but also on how citizens can claims on their own data, their community data, and how this data can be mobilized to push development and change in a local scale, instead of gathered in a centralized manner that pushes to a top-down urban design.

In What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen?, it is argued that “Network technologies afford forms of organisation that make possible citizenled initiatives capable of competing with the traditional planning mechanisms of municipal governments. By focusing on people – not technology – as the primary actors within the system, this approach aspires to foster new forms of participatory planning and governance, where social and cultural factors are emphasised over proprietary high-tech solutions with big price tags.” This argument reflects on other models of Smart urbanism, and opens to the question on why this models are focusing on the sensing and actuating capabilities of new technologies, instead of it dialogic and communication cappabilities? When communication comes out to the surface, it is only to speak about the interconnectected infrastructure where devices and city infrastructure communicate, instead of exploring the new ways of communication and participation between people that this technologies enable.

Quantified Community

The Quantified Community and the Neighborhood Labs

While the initial statement of Kontokostas might sound apelling, when he claims to use “the actual potential of big data and analytics to positively shape future cities in a way that is sensitive to social and political realities, and reflective of the needs and desires of people who actually lives in the cities”; in further developments it’s clear the contradiction beteween big data and recording the actual live in the city. Kontokostas sees the problem as a technical one, as if by creating a more granular model of measurement we would have a more direct and precise reflection of every day live, and as if there were no bias in the measurement by itself. It’s also visible how his model of participation doesn’t really take in account the citizens in an active way. In this context, which could be other possible ways to measure everyday life? which would be a model of participation by which citizens can enpower themselves and have a more active role in the shaping of the city?

Intrumental City

As Mattern states critically, the model of the Quatified City has as a result that “Smart citizenship […] is thus equated with monitoring and managing one’s relation to the urban environment […] rather than with ‘exercising the rights and responsabilities’ or ‘advancing democratics engagements through dialogue and debate'”. As this model comes from an academy-industry-government complex, as Mattern calls it, based on the conceptual models of ‘Urban triumphalism’, ‘Sustainable Urbanism’, and ‘Technoscientific Urbanism’; how can we crete different models of urbanism, which takes critically the other models, and in which this academy-industry-government complex, can be transformed to an a citinzens-academy-government-industry complex (in that order)?

Tabula Rasa

The $100 Billion Jackpot

On Townsend words, Smart Cities rely on three different aspect: the deploy of a heavily interconnected infrastructure of power and sensing at a urban scale; “urban infomatics” capable of analysing and visualizing data coming from the network of sensors; and “managment practices” which lead to the automation and adaptation of the city to any certain condition in real time.

In this context, City is portrayed more like the development of a product, than a living environment in which people are suposed to live. In this context, which is the role of companies deveolping such cities, in terms of common political aspects of the city as governance and privacy? If instead of citizens, people are portrayed as users, which are their rights to act accordingly to this new scenario?

Test bed as urban epistemology

As Smart Cities are heavily dependent on models of data analysis that create responses based on “habits” of their users/citizens, what should we learn from the present problems related to the bias in the design of intelligent algorythims that analyse the stream of data from Social Networks and the Internet? Shouldn´t we be worried of the privacy of such data, as in the present this is used as a commodity? are there going to be a way to opt out of bringing our data? or is there going to be any kind of politics in terms of the usage of such information?

Smart City vs. Smart Citizens

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

As mentioned by Haque, the model smart cities tend to be justified by the connectivity, readability and profitability of a model of city developed in a top-down relation with the inhabitants. In this sense, looking forward to create a different relation to the development of the city, Which would be the model of a city in which technologies and further developments of the city are part of a more organic growing of the community as whole? which could be the models of participation for such city? and how could the efforts for innovation developed in the bottom can reach a more broad social level?
On the smart city; Or, a ‘manifesto’ for smart citizens instead
In his text, Hill uses Social Networks and Crowd-source platforms as models for both, explaining on-line social sociability, and the possibilities opened by a networked city in terms of the way we can create new models of governance in the smart city. In this sense, which could be other models of social interaction in the network that could be also used for thinking on our relation with the community, and our interaction with authorities? The forum, the open-communities or other forms of on-line interaction could be also taken in account for thinking about new models of governance?

Urbanization and Ubiquity

In his text, Townsend emphasizes on the role that historically the technologies have had on the development of the city, and in the way that the common live is shaped by this developments. He mentions how most of the decisions have happened as the result of the lobbying of companies and the decisions of certain urbanists to impose a certain model of the cities introducing such technologies in a way that has been more harmful than beneficial, creating the need for introducing new technologies to solve the problems of past decisions. In this sense, how can we seek to develop different relations to technologies that allow citizens to have a more active role in the development of the city? At the same, time, how can technologies be introduced in the city in an organic way that fosters a dialogical model of the city?