Author: mahmoud

Alternative Futures

Programmable City – Kitchen

“Of course, producing forms of smart urbanism that realize promises while curtailing perils is no easy task” – Could the route of the problem lie in our centralized outdated approach to planning constituent on predicting perils and attempting to resolve them in isolation from bottom up resources? Could this require time we simply do not have? Urgent and rapid development followed by a series of test versions allowing citizens to adapt to and tinker with the infrastructure could inspire developers while highlighting areas in need of more control or security. Is today’s way of approaching issues of tomorrow, outsourcing tools, technologies and power?

We have arguably established to some extend that top down and bottom up processes concrease in a cycle that constitutes: Top down Infrastructural implementation, bottom up tinkering and repurposing (predicated by access) & inspiration and further development. Stakeholders and investors in the infrastructure will always be partial to goals of efficiency and profitability while designers and citizens remain partial to “quality of life”. Is a “people code” (that functions much as building green codes do) worth considering? A dictation forcing developments to address and/or accommodate citizen sensitivities?

In highlighting the issue in our approaches to technological interventions, Kitchen states that the “means is post-justified by the ends rather than the ends shaping the means”. Is this approach not warranted? Especially after considering the notion that technologies (regardless of their original intended purposes) lend themselves to a larger picture that is yet to be realized?

Kitchen states that cities are frequently thought of by developers as a system(s) that “can be steered and controlled through technical levels”, highlighting the shallowness of the conception of the city as a set of quantifiable data sets. Is the answer in exploiting the raw data (through availability to designers, thinkers and tinkerers) to “shape the means to ends”, i.e, to draw educated complex relationships between seemingly unrelated data sets?

Kitchen highlights two issues underlying the current epistemological approaches to smart cities, the second being that the “scientific approach adopted for data generation, analysis and communication is reductionist and mechanistic… an approach that decontextualizes a city” – Must a scientific approach to data collection not simply be paired with contextual sociocultural investigation and analysis in order to minimize it’s augmentation to the city and it’s citizens? Must the scientist become the designer, sociologist, psychologist, artist, architect, engineer and citizen? Or is that in and of itself a dated ideology? Is it today’s solution a matter of outsourcing those needs to the collective rather than centralized processes? “A process of co-creation and co-production between city administrators, companies and citizens including using open platforms and standards where possible” – A Beta Smart City.

Owning the City – Martin de Waal

In introducing the notion of ownership, de Waal investigates how “digital media and culture allow citizens to engage with, organize around and act upon collective issues and engage in co-creating the social fabric and built form of the city” insinuating that infamous digital media have subserviently lent themselves to our empowerment – increasing the margin of our agency on our environment and defying dated geopolitical boarders.

“Ownership teases out several shifts that take place in the urban public domain characterized by tensions between individuals and collectives, between differences and similarities, and between conflict and collaboration.” – Initially, geopolitically constrained physical commons allowed for a limited domain of agency due to their fixation. As the internet dissolves geographical bubbles the digital environment becomes an ever more integrated and affective domain. Is power effectively decentralized in the smart future? Can actions half way around the globe have consequences at my front door? What implications (and potential) would such a scenario present with?

“The actual city is seen as the last and most difficult hurdle in successive phases of deployment of roll out rather than the sole place where experiment truly proves its value” – Could this is yesterday’s approach to issues of tomorrow? One of scientific analysis and subsequent implementations in isolation from citizens’ conscious input (including potentially relevant multidisciplinary professionals)? Does the solution lie in localized open beta smart structures that allow citizens to affect their immediate contexts (as opposed to transposed smart city structures) while preserving the analogous integrity of critical base infrastructures as a form of backup (soft failure) in the event of bugs and failures? Would this also serve as an ideal buffer to the transition to a “smart life” by allowing citizens to gradually adapt to and tinker with the infrastructure, discovering the potentials and experiencing the consequences of both the smart city and their renewed (arguably extended) domain of agency? Consider an infrastructure where citizens are not just consulted, but literally given the tools (technological platform) to build and tinker with their future environment.

In describing approach to quantified data, de Waal references Nold’s Bio mapping stating that “sudden spikes in heart rate or galvanic skin response were used to engage locals in discussions about these places and sensations produced in them” – Big data harvesting, deterministic and quantitative in it’s approach may well threaten to augment or engineer society. On the other hand, it provides with profoundly accurate information that could serve as a platform of discussion and action organized between educated professionals and citizens. Could the latter consideration allow us to circumnavigate unwanted potential consequences to the sociocultural fabric?

Could the merit in an open source approach to the smart city be that of the concreazation of an environment that allows technology to enhance our sensitivities to our commons, contexts and each other, dissolving geopolitical domains and allowing for new forms of connectivity without creating an invasive, distracting or possibly augmenting overlay? Avoiding a completely “dematerialized, decentralized and ephemeral” city and boosting our sensitivity of our immediate contexts through technological “accents” vs cognitively eclipsing them.

“The telephone and the car were jointly responsible for the vast growth of American suburbia and exurbia” – If that scenario is a result of agency exacted upon technologies that had contingent consequences, what will constitute “negative” consequences of expression of agency on the smart city, and what are the possible implications of an infrastructure that expands that domain?

Crashing and Hacking the Smart City

Buggy, Brittle and Bugged – Townsend

It becomes clear that as technology attempts to automate tasks the design for which fails to encapsulate uncertainties and preferences, we will be surrounded with “buggy” infrastructures. This begs the question, Will the smart city have a manual flush option? Or will we be subjects of frequent bugs and glitches at ever growing scales of complexity and relative consequences?

In describing the “First actual case of a bug being found”, Townsend highlights that bugs can be software glitches resultant of coding or physical wear and tear of hardware due to lack of maintenance or unforeseen accidents. Although the public persists to call for an “exposed smart city infrastructure” where citizens can more easily perceive and understand their smart city grid, do they understand the implications doing so could have in increasing the probability of bugs and failures due to tampering?

Is it worth considering that interlacing of the entire city into a centralized smart city infrastructure (due to software interdependencies) vs more analogous, fragmented structures deployed today, that the risk and relative cost of attacks/failures effectively underscores corporations’ promise of increasing efficiency and profitability?

Will fear of tampering with the smart city infrastructure delay / effectively abolish the hope of DIY citizens’ access to smart city “walled gardens”? How can we increase the smart city infrastructure’s resilience against bugs and attacks without walling out citizens and their potential contributions to the infrastructure?

If hacking is considered an expression of agency manifesting in contingent use (exploitation) of certain technologies can we think of hacking in and of itself as a form of citizen participation that prompts constant evolution adding layers of sophistication and resilience to the smart city? Are attacks, bugs and glitches the vaccine to larger scale threats? Much like viral infections are to our immune systems? Consider a group of ethical hacking activists that aim to highlight and expose areas susceptible to infiltration much like citizens report “bugs” in the physical infrastructure (potholes etc) to local authorities today

An emerging US (and World) Threat – Cesar Cerrudo

“What would commuting look like with non functioning traffic control systems” Non technologically-mediated infrastructures have been implemented in a number of areas around Europe and the UK (shared space initiative) and have had “positive” effects – It is feasible to consider where technology should be implemented vs where is can be. In doing so can we preserve our state of functionality more so than if we surrendered everything to a floating buggy infrastructure? Or would we, by doing so, omit seemingly unnecessary technologies from contributing to a larger picture that is yet to be realized?

“How would citizens respond to an inadequate supply of electricity”..etc. Consider the plausibility of a smart city backup structure that is surrendered to the citizens. The equivalent of citizen generators and independently owned and run street lights that kick in in the event of a superstructure bug or attack. Will doing so allow DIY activists to understand the system and actively contribute/inspire future implementations with regards to security and functionality, adding resilience to the smart city infrastructure and concretizing the dialogue between top down implementation and bottom up innovation?

“The public needs to see to believe. Cities are not spurred into action by discussions about suspected vulnerable products and threats” – This reiterates that bugs and hacking are a critical component to strengthening the smart city’s immune system – making it more resilient to devastating attacks and or failures.

An investigation of the weakness of sub structural infrastructures’ security systems begs the question: could their weakness be due to a general under-estimation of the public’s understanding and will to hack, manipulate and repurpose infrastructures in addition to a general complacency with regards to maintenance and upkeep with current technological processes? Is there simply less room for such complacency now?

Open source Urbanism

Open source metropolis – Anthony Townsend

In describing the evolution of social media from the platform of the internet Townsend states Burns and her team (in addition to other DIY research communities) began to experiment with new ways to deliver social services through the platform of the internet. Burns described the event forty years later stating that the convergence of amateur video and cable in the 1970s was “the perfect storm”. “In just a few short years, a growing network of public access activists had torn down barriers to community broadcasting that existed for nearly fifty years” – Could we recreate the perfect storm today? Ignoring our dispositions and fears of the hypothetical, allowing for complete smart city infrastructural implementation, assuming a revolutionary stance, infiltrating or gaining rights to the “smart city domain” of data and innovative technological platforms that supersede those of smart cities in complexity and potential? Could this not, coupled with exacting agency over the infrastructure to manipulate data results, allow us to contribute to our city in a much more proactive way?

 “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 the breach of public access cable in the 1970s is a reminder that truly disruptive applications of new information technologies have always come from the bottom up” – Notice here that the disruptive applications, while bottom up in their approach, required a top down infrastructural implementation to traverse and exploit. “The urge to repurpose technologies designed for one way communication like cable and turn them into interactive conduits for social interaction pops up again and again. Today, civic hackers, artists and entrepreneurs have begun to find their own uses and their own designs for smart-city technology.”

“But once you had an idea of the social network, it’s like ‘Dodgeball is Friendster for cell phones’. People understood it” – Crawley signifies the importance of concurrent technological applications not only as exploitable tools but as essential precursors or “molders” of the socio-cultural collective’s psychological scaffolding i.e. their ability to perceive, understand and accept new technological applications.

“Today, we take for granted the rich ecosystem of software available for our phones”, but “In 2003..Wireless carriers exacted tolls for content providers to enter their walled garden. Setting back the build-out of the mobile web for years.” – What kind of access is permitted to the smart city’s bed of sensored data? Do our dispositions with regards to privacy stand in the way of access to “walled gardens” if we persist to demand our information be “secure”? It appears that not only is top down infrastructural implementation crucial along with concurrently emergent technological applications, but the open access to both in promising to set the table for bottom up disruptive applications of sociability, serendipity and delight.

The “frequency hopping technique called spread spectrum, originally devised for torpedo guidance during World War II” extended the functionality of WiFi, in addition to it’s open source potential in that they could now “shove as much data across public airwaves as they could over wire with no subscription fees”. It seems that regardless of the original purpose of the technological invention, each “piece of the puzzle” lends itself to a complete picture in the form of bottom up exploitation and consequent disruptive applications combining and extending preceding technologies functionalities. Strategic, technological engineering must come before the creative utilization of the consequent structure/data. Does that not in some way support the smart city’s advocacy of big data harvesting? (although contingent on granted/forced access to the domain)

What form does interaction manifest if it was contingent on the spread and access to WiFi? If people are being attracted to a certain location for the promise of a portal to transport them elsewhere? In this respect does a non-sensored, digitally disconnected part of the city constitute a smart city ghetto much like Bryant park did in the 80s?

“Municipalities began to take over the deployment of public Wifi-access on a larger scale”, It seems like bottom up innovation (although contingent on preceding top down infrastructural implementation) inspires or catalyzes large scale technological implementations which in turn provide yet another traversable platform for further innovation/exploitation. Does that not shift our perception of power from a top down vs bottom up to a symbiotic relationship or dialogue between technology giants, dumb citizens (unconscious exactors of agency) smart citizens (educated DIY communities non-intimidated by the interworks of the technology) and the respective socio-cultural/political context?

Urban Versioning System 1.0 – Haque & Fuller

Architecture as one of Humanity’s oldest practices constitutes a fixed mean of channeling behaviors, a physical common that serves as a high resolution low pace environment of internal, intuitively and tacitly collected information resulting in a respective embodied predisposition in the space. As our cognitive pool becomes layers with increasing amounts of media and interfaces (sent vs internalized information) – architecture assumes the role of the background. Does code become (as a result of cycles of technological evolution and respective embodied predispositions of a new common) this generation’s tool of designing urban performances?

“The difference should be that we consciously recognize our interdependence (architecture, citizens and technologies) and thus must consciously act upon it.” We have repeatedly morphed spaces through exacting agency and populating them with socio-culturally conceived devices (such as a news paper stand) that result in consequent urban performances that challenge/extend the original functionalities of spaces and respective embodied predispositions. Is the fine line between a conscious participant and an unconscious consumer simply the recognition of where agency lies in crafting our surroundings within the seemingly restrictive smart city grid?

The design of the future built environment “appears to be split between large developers and ubiquitous computing technologists with architects finding themselves irrelevant” It can be argued that architecture, as an expansive discipline, trains us (or should) to carefully consider concurrent social, cultural & political contexts and respective implications on our designs. Are other disciplines as inclusive? Should architects now be charged with addition ubiquitous computing design to their vocabulary?

“Most important is to develop a method through which architecture the physical conduit for knowledge and memory can itself be open”, it’s signified here that architecture has thus far mainly been a top down process of attempting to create performances at different locations and scales i.e dictating vs accommodating interactivity and special use. “We want to see what happens if we work otherwise” – Is the answer quite literally delegating parts of the design process to an array of disciplines and the respective citizens (subjects) of the site of implementation? Fixity allows architecture to serve as a scaffolding populated by contingent or unplanned uses, but buildings are rarely designed for that express purpose. Can we start thinking of the concurrent socio-cultural collective as a performance that architecture must accommodate vs create/resist?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism

Tinkering towards Utopia – Townsend

In alexander’s explanation of interconnected city lattices he describes the effect a news rack had outside drug store near his office in Berkley, “the news rack, the people, the sidewalk, even the electrical impulses that controlled the traffic signal were woven together in networks of surprising complexity that formed a distinct urban place” the urban place he describes seems to follow Gabry’s analogy of withness in that it is effected by technology but not dictated by it; reserving a symbiotic relationship with the citizens and built context. Are moments of withness such as these left to DIY communities to implement?

Alexander argued that hierarchal structures plagued artificial designs as they fought against complexity. Could that have been in pursuit of efficiency? Is that which is unquantifiable inherently inefficient? And in our pursuit of efficiency are we abandoning all that is too complex to compute? Is an infrastructure that is both complex enough to allow for variable interactions to unfold and simple enough to be rendered “efficient” even feasible?

“The city is an open grid of possibilities, the suburb a universe of dead ends” – It can be argued that even the city grid imposes certain constraints on our interactions, but despite that we have been able to populate it’s nodes with layers of communication and interaction that generate respective states of withness. It is then up to the citizens (regardless of the imposed infrastructure) to arrange the unfolding of such performances, ones that supersede the limitations of the smart “grid” but exploit it’s structure. Law, order, structure is dire to preserve the freedom of self expression that we value so much; preventing complete chaos. Generating moments of organized chaos seems to have been left to us.

“Alexander’s vision of the city as a lattice underpinned the design of the software that now filtered by own view of it” (Foursquare) – Could this be the reason why we’re glued to technology interfaces? Going back to Turkle’s hypothesis about our preference of means of communication that allow division of attention, are we “alone together” because the perceived solution to our solitude has pulled us away from the seemingly isolated and fragmented built environment?

It’s interesting to note the pattern resonating in the history of disruptive companies such as Foursquare. It began as a DIY organization seeking to exploit the available technology, encouraging active participation in the form of check ins and in doing so successfully draping a “new digital lattice atop the city’s physical one and connecting the two with code”, evolving and promising to “exploit all of the new technologies that had come on the scene”, and slowly morphing due to the expression of agency of it’s users. It’s worth questioning if Foursquare is a product of interaction or rather if interaction was a product of Foursquare. Perhaps asking this question is a testament to the symbiotic relationship that formed as a product of the software, interaction of active participants and their expression of agency. Soon, foursquare would “mine date on your habits as well as your friends’ to recommend nearby venues”, beginning to augment the users’ decision making and effectively tipping the ratios; painting users as consumers, not active participants.

According to Townsend the computer age began with IBM PC, soon after the MITS Altair 8800 was released in 1975. “The Altair dramatically democratized access to computing power” – soon after that  “Hobbyists formed groups to trade tips hacks and parts for these DIY computers” serving as a training camp for innovators such as Apple, who would later overthrow IBM’s dominance of the PC industry. We all regard apple as a top down firm now, especially when considering that their products are engineered to be the furthest thing from modifiable. Does this raise the question of a certain life cycle that dictates the evolution of DIY start-ups, to successful monopolizing corporations, to their decline in more open sourced innovative start-ups that use the latest technology & infrastructure (provided by the corporate giants) to supersede existing corporations? Is this inevitable? Can it not be argued that the cycle itself is responsible a constant state of  social, cultural and technological evolution?

Engaging the idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism – Gabrys

“It is then worth noting that there is a much wider stream of participatory urbanism projects underway that runs alongside and at times mutually influences or diverges from sensor driven approaches to the city” – Does Gabrys effectively confess to the need (or the favorability) of a pre-existing infrastructure based on smart sensors etc, that at first may indeed result in false hypotheses of the city & it’s people, but will present with a platform of data that could then be used by Smart citizens or entrepreneurs to develop innovative and groundbreaking social applications?

“Passive data collection generally entails citizens having to do very little, other than turn on their smartphones or other sensor devices”, “it does not require input from the human user and it takes place by users simply being equipped with smartphones”. Foursquare seemed to (at first) have approached this issue correctly by motivating check ins and active recommendations, but as we’ve seen, at some point when participation reaches “capacity”, contingent uses take over, morphing technologies and respective corporations. Is this contingent usage pre-coded into the software’s usage (consciously or not?) or is it the sole product of the expression of agency over technology?

“As Stengers suggests in relation to the idiot, “the idea is precisely to slow down the construction of this common world, to create a space for hesitation regarding what it means to say good”, although poetic and warranted, is this ideology once again a product of individualistic tendencies? Should the common good not be that of the livability and habitability of the planet? Although “habitability” constitutes a large category including ephemeral and non physically identifiable or quantifiable attributes, should we  not assume a stance of survival in the face of environmental crisis we face today even if it threatens to “engineer society”? And then begin to use the implemented infrastructure to tend to the unquantifiable in innovative ways through bottom up processes?

Urban Data Infrastructures

Program Earth: Digital Infrastructures of Withness – Gabrys

“Abstract technology is not necessarily a cognitive model that is implemented but rather a set of dynamic changes that occur in any given techno cultural system which makes possible the concretization of particular technologies”, By becoming “environmental” the technology cognitively concresces with the environment albeit continues to mediate a message the form of “conditions in which particular entities may take hold”. Entering the environment; they threaten to alter the ratios of human perception, and “When those ratios change, Men change”

“But as embodied if differently directed creatures in shared worlds” – Does the smart city “threaten” to dismantle our human-central ideologies (what about my voice) in pursuit of a more concresced environment? Could that be by we feel threatened?

“Alternative data sources include both static and dynamic data collected from social media streams, participatory-sensing systems, and predictive and strategic modeling capabilities” – Do DIY sensors and participatory technology not allow us to easily manipulate the outcome of data and in doing so contribute to our built environment in a more conscious “citizenship-fulfilling” manner?

 “Planners, the exhibition text and book indicate, are also key to steering a city in the right direction.” In Playing the City Game, “by adjusting levers on a dashboard, a status menu indicates how well one is doing with every urban resource, infrastructure, and problem that is to be addressed must be quantified in order to be made computable”. How are citizens changed in the eyes of planners? Could a projection of the city as a data bed threaten to create a sociological divide between citizens and planners (programmer vs programmed)? The message (medium) being a status bar (low res, fast pace) vs intuitive observation and active participation in the city (high res, slow pace data)?

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” (Bloomberg), “Urban life must be enumerated in order to be managed within this cybernetic system. But once measured the city is meant to emerge as an easily pliable and modifiable system.” – What happens when non-quantifiable information results in false hypotheses and respective implementations?

“Ambient intelligence and the Internet of Things presents the problem of deciding which connectivities we really want as human beings on this planet” – This coincides with Sherry Turkle’s claim (Alone together) that digital connectivity has resulted in the preference of the majority of the public to choose media of communication that enable the division and distribution of attention between friends and family (physically present and not) and is constituted partially by today’s generalized “fear of missing out” (FOMO) brought forth by the speed at which information exchanged in the digital age. However, since multitasking is a proven myth, the result is merely a lowered, sporadic attention span.

“I see withness more as an articulation of processes of participation that involve becoming together across an extended array of entities. Whitehead described a community where multiple entities are effectively resonating within and experiencing a shared registered of world-making” – An active citizenship in the smart city is thereby constituted by the participation and self-expression of agency which collectively lends itself to a city that is a reflection of its citizen’s conscious decisions.

“Withness asks how are we thinking with, being with and becoming with the smart city (however) Rather than open technology to a multiple array of inhabitations, encounters and modes of withness, these projects often reduce technology to a utensil” – Is open circuit technology the answer? Is a closed circuit smart city indicative of our tendency to attempt to resolve today’s problems with (tomorrow’s) technology and yesterday’s state of mind?

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

“Instrumental rationality” & “Solutionism” are terms used to describe the smart city’s approach to problem solving and urban, infrastructural design implementations. “There is a belief that complex open systems can be disassembled into neatly defined problems that can be solved or optimized through computation” – Can we not agree that some issues are indeed both complex enough and computable to warrant (SOME) smart city intervention? Should a distribution of control/power be allocated to the citizens in areas not deemed fully quantifiable by “highly reductionist” means of collection and analysis? What form will that distribution take? Can it not be argued that certain power has been allocated to the citizens (in the form of their active participation) that allows them to consciously manipulate the “system” for their own benefits?

There’s a general fear that “smart cities may well lead to a highly controlling and unequal societies in which rights to privacy, confidentiality, freedom of expression and life chances are restricted”, Could this be regarded as more of a sociological issue due to the culturally imbedded notions of the importance of privacy, confidentiality and freedom of expression (set forth by print technology)? Will the actions and analyses carried by government agencies not ultimately make our cities safer in an age where infiltrations and cyber-attacks are ever more frequent?

“Cities of the world now routinely generate suites of indicator data, using them to track and trace performance, guide policy formulation and inform how the cities are governed/regulated” – Is City benchmarking any more of a benign threat to citizen morphing than a tabula rasa smart city? Used to “establish how well an area is performing vis-à-vis other locales or against best practice” – But what constitutes best practice? Or a City falling behind? If the mean of data collection is just as impersonal of that of smart sensor beds, does that not risk equally inaccurate and presumptive hypotheses and respective implementations?

Sensing The Smart Citizen

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?

Quantified Community

  • Instrumental City – Shannon Mattern

Although it is clear in Doctoroff’s persistence and background that the development is another mean of profit and expansion. Regardless of his intentions, the implementation of such infrastructure will allow us to connect, interact and communicate in unprecedented ways. E.g as computers became more powerful as a result of competition in the tech market, the existence of recent “powerhouse” platforms allowed startups like Oculus (an entertainment tech company) to pioneer Virtual Reality experiences unprecedented in their realism and detail. It seems unrealistic and naïve to expect corporations to invest such time, effort and resources for some sort of noble non monetary gain with no intentions of capitalizing on their efforts.

“In this universe, citizens relate to their city by consuming and administering its systems, and by serving as sources of measurable behavioral data.” How does this change our perception of the city as it’s people? Does it? Does it not in fact reinforce it? Ultimately, CUSP claims their endeavors to be noble and in the genuine pursuit of boosting the general public’s quality of life – But can they be trusted?

How is the smart city rendered from the perspective of someone (as unlikely as it may be) that is not smart device-connected? How does that effect (if at all) their sense of the immediate, physical context? Do you gather they will be more connected to their environment as a result of continuously processing a “high resolution, low pace information” i.e, as McCullough puts it, being exposed strictly to a “restorative environment” or do you gather smart technology will become imbedded to such extents that to be smart-disconnected is to be isolated from your city?

Built environments and technical systems are presumed to inform human behavior, and data about that behavior is fed back into the environment to alter future human behavior. If general information is fed back to us effectively augmenting our decision making and soon shaping our habits does a smart city effectively threaten to give rise to an engineered society? “The data we generate, based on determinist assumptions and imperfect methodologies, could end up shaping populations and building worlds in their own image” Has this risk been recognized &/or being addressed?

Could the form of citizen participation simply change and not quite as dramatically cease to exist? Although the underlying infrastructure is hidden and thus not perceived or processed by the population isn’t the overlaid cyber space theoretically infinitely traversable? Could our infatuation with the hidden infrastructure be due to our human predisposition to attempt to deal or perceive new technologies in old (comfortable) ways (Mcluhan)?

If you were to create a smart city, how would you do it differently? Expose the underlying infrastructure and designate countless above ground square footage to it’s accommodation so that citizens can feel comfortable and “accustomed” to the interworks of the city? Expend billions of dollars of your and your investors’ capital in development of such infrastructure with no intention of making a monetary return on your effort(s) (perhaps more importantly, your eager investors)? Every extension is preceded by an amputation, and we’ve been through the mill a few times – with the extension of our objectivity, sensory and aggregation through the smart city could it simply be that the amputation is knowing “less” about the infrastructure that makes it work? and could we not educate ourselves? Become smarter citizens to keep up with our smart city? Would you rather wait for smart citizens to save the environment & boost the efficiency of our built context? Think they could do it without harvesting big data or even on a scale of an entire city? If they could, why haven’t they yet?

  • A Framework for Computational Urban Planning – Kontokosta

If collected data isn’t accurate due to the imposition of the pre-existing infrastructure on our habits and decisions, could data collected and reinforced in that context not technically make things worse without us even noticing? That we may risk becoming less critical of our environment and more passive, accepting or even powerless?

If the systemic division of the nation and the introduction of the interstate highway systems were defensive strategies, isn’t the complete centralization of everything that will come to constitute our mean of intelligent living counterintuitive/ risky?

Tabula Rasa : New Songdo

Smarty city – Townsend

 “It was a full fledged crisis of control…Never before had the processing of material flows threatened to exceed the capacity of technology to contain them”, The telegraph was developed in reaction to the communicative/organizational crisis brought fourth by the industrial boom in the 1800s, now almost 150 years later “enhancing global competitiveness, innovation and standard of living” is Wim Elfink’s reason for pursuing a global communications network infrastructure, but how hard is communicating/organizing as is? Are we/our businesses in the face of a communicational breakdown or is a global network merely a corporal pitch to collect, analyze and sell our data to major third party corporations?

 Is the promise of a smart city worth “surrendering to the guardians behind the screen”? Have we not already?

Smart Urbanism: Utopian vision or False dawn?

 Does corporations’ pursuit of smart systems as an opportunity to boost profit revenues and market share effectively prevent the informed public of their belief in the technology’s ability to better our lives? Or can we look at it from a smart citizen’s perspective as the promise of a more efficient, traversable platform on which we can bring new inventions to light; interacting in a way we never thought possible?

 “Every wall every surface can become an interface that offers users everything..”, “Their hope is to use this latent reserve of date gathered on users to produce services that can be paid for through advertising”, Are those “integrated services” really smarter than the capabilities available on our phones today? Is the “reward” worth assuming the risk of more insecurely connected devices?

Does it not seem that as the city becomes smarter as a result of corporations like Cisco and IFEZ’s efforts, our “cognitive freedom” will become more of a commodity? That our privacy in some cases will be a thing of the past – “Legal system in Songdo is being lobbied to enact changes in privacy laws that would allow transfer of medical data outside of the hospital”

 “There can be no smartness without dumbness” Does the dumb become smarter as the city does or does he effectively morph into a bit?

Smart City/zens

“What is a City that is would be Smart?” – Usman Haque

What can a smart city offer beyond increased efficiency and convenience? Does it promise any sociological, psychological, cultural or economical benefits? Can it unlock something, or perhaps re-discover something we lost during our pursuit of efficiency and convenience such as our connections to ourselves and/or our immediate context?

Is a “plug in” smart city a logical solution? Would it not as Usman stated be a technologically advanced promise of increased efficiency such as those of the ‘60s urban planners? Would a “smart city in a box” be any different from a city that developed as a mesh of smart nodes that gradually grew to connect the entire urban fabric? How?

Do we really tend to surround ourselves with like-minded people online? It can be argued that the webspace much like city space is a system of transportation much like our streets where we pass by one another and are offered the choice of interacting with a passing individual, an acquaintance, or a store (web page) and it’s subjects.

“Second, in a world of increasing complexity where we are far more aware that our actions can have unforeseen consequences, people – especially city managers – desire control and understanding” – Is the general public aware that a smart city is a “transparent city” where all that is them in the internet of things can be accessed and or controlled by certain parties / individuals? Are we willing to barter our sense of security for an efficient and convenient e-topia? Have we not already begun to? How much of our information is actually at increased risk of unsolicited access in the smart city?

Usman discuses a smart city that is built based on efficiency and convenience however does not mention a city with an intentional, designed “performance” that is also inherent in smart city designs where a 1 to 1 relationship is not “mapped” but studied and manipulated in order to design experiences and interactions on the street and urban scale – could they exist simultaneously as one? Or is the latter rendered an inherently inefficient utilization of space, energy and technology?

City of Sound: Smart city: or smart citizens instead? – Dan Hill

“The city is its people. We don’t make cities in order to make buildings and infrastructure. We make cities in order to come together, to create wealth, culture, more people. As social animals, we create the city to be with other people, to work, live, play. Buildings, vehicles and infrastructure are mere enablers, not drivers” – is there not a way that a smart city could be designed to allow for the aforementioned “performance”? Why is the “smart city” stripped of all sentient and atmosphere?

“Can a city be “smart” and inefficient at the same time? Perhaps this is a fundamental question, un-voiced by smart city advocates” – Can a city be efficient and approachable? Designed for the people but not necessarily by them?

Does a smart city assume a dumb citizen? Why?

“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 getting dumber (more passive) as our systems get smarter?

Smart city – Townsend

Studying the history our sociological and cultural evolution can help us predict our future patterns or events. Considering our evolution from craftsmen over the industrial evolution and our increased incentive to achieve efficiency and accuracy through mechanization and soon after that atomization could our pursuit for a smart city not be considered inevitable?

“Something about Songdo just doesnt feel authentic, fully reflective of our every day digital experience” – In my humble opinion, Songdo exists as a platform of experimentation and development. It is not a product but a process of evolution/development and thus cannot be judged but in the context of the will of adoption, implementation and the entrepreneurial incentive to create ground breaking technologies that can then effectively be plugged in or tested in digital grounds like Songdo.

If a fully automated city responded to weather autonomously and automatically what happens to our sense of control or personal preferences. Much like a shift in government, does a smart city dictate that we as a species begin to abandon our self centered, almost narcissistic ideologies of privacy and personal comfort and adopt a more global perspective before it’s conception? Do smart citizens come first, and does the smart city then become merely a platform that provides for the culmination of our psychological & sociological enlightenment?

“Tokyo survived it’s digital lobotomy – there’s still enough of the conventional infrastructure in place to live manually” –  Technology, as of right now maintains an almost symbiotic relationship with us, i.e, without us there is no technology and we would be severely effected if technology vanished over night. As technology becomes “smarter” is there a risk in that relationship shifting and us becoming fully reliant on technology? What happens then?