Author: marcus

Alternative Futures

Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal, “Owning the city: New media and citizen 
engagement in urban design.” First Monday [Online], 18.11 (2013): Web. 30 Jan. 
2017

  • “At best citizens in smart city policies are allowed to provide feedback somewhere in the design process, although oftentimes they figure as ‘end–users’ instead of being engaged in the early stages of co–creation.” How can we begin to incorporate the citizen in the first design phases of a smart city? Why do developers of “smart city technology” treat the role of the citizen, more or less, as a pawn in a chess game, rather than the King in the chess game, or even the checkered board the game is played on? (Consumer vs. end-user)
  • Does the use of the term “ownership” in the text refer to what we may call a “smart citizen”? Does ownership include being able to participate in all design phases of city or community building?

Rob Kitchin, “Rethinking, Reimagining and Remaking Smart Cities,” 
Programmable City Working Paper 20 (August 2016).

  • The companies that create smart city technology create products that are supposed to be able to be incorporated anywhere they’re needed, meaning, “one size fits all”. Being that every city has different issues and specificities that need to be dealt with, can these companies or any other existing company begin to make “city-specific” products? Companies like IBM and Cisco may see smart cities as a market based opportunity. Would smaller and/or local companies who produce smart city technologies be able to begin to close that gap between the smart city begin for the people vs. for the public?

Crashing & Hacking the Smart City

“Although cities usually rigorously test devices and systems for functionality, resistance to weather conditions, and so on, there is often little or no cyber security testing at all, which is concerning to say the least.”(8) How much more would it cost for cities to actually implement these security tests?

Vendors implement little or no security testing in their products & they only sell to government agencies of specific parties, which makes it hard to acquire for research by skilled security testers. Why do governments lack the knowledge or the concern of the potential security risks these technologies may offer?

Are smart home vendors similar to vendors for “smart city technology” when considering & researching the potential security risks of their products?

Open Source Urbanism

  • If architecture becomes more “open”, such as the role of an operating system designer, does the role of the architect become less about the design of a structure according to it’s design parameters and more of the organization of “ready-built” or “ready-designed” pieces in accordance to the wants of anyone who wants to be involved?
  • If architecture indeed became “open”, it would seem possible for building and construction to be the first step in producing a building, while omitting the initial design and planning phases. Yet, would this turn architecture into another form of engineering in a sense? Where the most pragmatic building and construction techniques prevail (as long as it fits the wants and needs of the parties who will occupy it), rather than generative forms and aesthetics derived from the skilled designer for a desired party? Can this type of architecture be aesthetically pleasing and not be confused with a construction site like the Fun Palace?

 

Urban Data Infrastructures

Utopian Vision or False Dawn: Chapter 2, Smart Cities and the Politics of Urban Data – Rob Kitchin, Tracey P. Lauriault and Gavin McArdle

 

  • Smart cities create a technological lock-in or corporate path dependency that ties cities to particular technological platforms and vendors over a long period of time, creating monopoly positions. Technology advances rapidly. How long will the technologies last before it has to be changed with a more advanced version? Would governments have to buy these services as if they were shopping at an electronic store? What if a government or state wants to change the company that provides them the technology? Would this be possible?

 

Sensing the Smart Citizen

Program Earth: Chapter 7, Citizen Sensing in the Smart and Sustainable City: From Environments to Environmentality – Jennifer Gabrys

 

  • Gabrys suggest using ubiquitous and automated computerized technologies in a way in which it is used to change the environmentality of or spaces and urban fabric. How can these, or can these technologies begin to shape the social conditions within modern cities, such as the poor or lower class being subjected to the slums?
  • Gabrys states “Code is also not singularly written or deployed but may be a hodgepodge pf just-effective-enough script written by multiple actors and running in momentarily viable ways on specific platforms… A change to and element of the code, hardware, or interoperability with other devices may shift the program and it’s effects.” (Page 198) What is, or is there an example of where this has happened?

 

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

 

  • The smart citizen seems like a more justified approach to reaching a smart city instead of vice versa. Yet the essay states that it is hard to incorporate these local solutions due to the smart citizen on a larger scale, in regards to urban infrastructure. Could it be possible that smart neighborhoods or communities emerge, that can resolve their own local issues, being that our cities are already subdivided by neighborhoods?

Quantified Community: Hudson Yards

Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards – Shannon Mattern

 

  • Unlike Songdo, Hudson Yards is placed in the middle of an existing built environment. Would the data collected within the Hudson Yards be able to differentiate user activity between people who live or work there, and people who are just passing through? Can the data collected coincide with data collected in the city as a whole? Does this intermingling of “residents” and “outsiders” limit it’s capabilities or the information it obtains?

 

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

 

  • Quantified communities seem to be more of a bottom-up process compared to the Smart City, and seems to play a stronger role on the wants of each individual in the community. Would erecting a bunch of different quantified communities that can share data with one another, instead of a smart city, pave a more specific direction into a connected city being that our cities are already broken up into neighborhoods and districts?

 

Tabula Rasa: New Songdo

Urbanization and Ubiquity: Power Platform – Anthony Townsend

 

  • The Smart Grid offers a more efficient, reliable, secure, and less costly transmission and usage of electricity. How must our current power grid change to incorporate the Smart Grid? How much can a Smart City accomplish on our current power grid?

 

Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn?: Data, an urban resource – Halpren, LeCavalier, Calvillo, Pietsch

 

  • The author states, “In either case, both Cisco and IFEZ are looking for new sources of revenue and hope to ‘monetize’ the attentive capacity of Songdo’s inhabitants. Their hope is to use the latent reverse of data gathered on users to produce services that can be paid for through advertising in multiple-scale devices, electronic education, physical treatment, home tele-medicine or any number of other speculative services vying for a share of this new market.” So in other words, both Cisco and IFEZ are charging Songdo inhabitants for some of the services entailed in the Smart City, to then use this data to generate advertisements, thus monetizing their attentive capacity? If so, how does this affect what makes the city “smart”?

Smart Cities vs. Smart Citizens

Urbanization and Ubiquity – Anthony Townsend

 

– In his book, Townsend states “…in the mid-1990’s, tech pundit George gilder wrote off cities as ‘leftover baggage from the industrial era.’” (Page6) It led me to question if these technologies could also be brought to rural areas.

 

– Townsend states “If we don’t think critically now about the technology we put in place for the next century of cities, we can only look forward to all the unpleasant surprises they hold in store for us.” (Page 14) What could be a possible unpleasant surprise?

 

What Is a City that what is Would Be ‘Smart’? – Usman Haque / On the Smart City; Or, a ‘Manifesto’ for smart citizens instead – Dan Hill

 

– Both Haque and Hill refer to proclaimed benefits of the Internet and the need for smart cities to cars and the need for more roadways and highways in the 1930’s. Is enabling the smart citizen a better route to take towards developing the smart city (bottom-up) rather than using the initial focus on the smart city?