Author: neetakhanuja

Tabula Rasa: New Songdo.

At the centre of Songdo’s marketing materials and technical discourse lies a fantasized transformation in the management of life – human and machine in terms of increased access to information and decreased consumption of resources. The developers, financiers and media boosters of this city argue for a speculative space ahead of its time that operates at the synaptic level of its inhabitants.

Q) How pleasant and acceptable would be this vision of management of life with high-end monitoring devices? Will it be efficient or suffocating? Where does all this monitored data go and how are the decisions made? What will be the effects of a totalizing sensory environment on the interactions of citizens and what kind of decisions will be deduced from that data?

For example, marketing videos showed the roll-out of tele-medicine applications, which required, as some engineers suggested, transforming the laws of South Korea to allow the construction of medical grade networks to allow genetic and other data to flow from labs in the home to medical sites in the proliferation of house health-care services.

Q) What could be the implications and how would it alter the decisions that could possibly use this information? Who would be responsible for the protection of this data from being hacked and misused? How transparent will the system be and would citizens know how this data flows and its effects on their interactions in routine activities?

The promise of such number-crunching is that we will learn previously unknown things about ourselves based on an idea that the collective behavior of a city can be compiled and analyzed by machines in order to reveal profound trends in our social behavior. However, this approach could also easily, and perhaps dangerously, produce a number of false correlations.

Q) What would be the validation mechanism for these trends? What are some of the visualized outcomes? What would be the cost, cities, and citizens pay to try this methodology in the desire of an outcome that promises fitting complex urban functions and city dynamics in a numerical representation of trends? What could be some possible false correlations? What would be a mechanism to identify and filter these correlations? What could be the implications of not being able to identify these correlations and how would it effect the decision-making.

Quantified Community: Hudson Yards

Technoscientific urbanism reflects a neo-positivist return to postwar systems thinking and centralized planning; it is especially visible in the discourse around “smart cities”, which regards the intelligence generated from spatial sensing and data analysis as a “fix” for perennial urban problems.

Q) Can spatial sensing and data analysis result in a quality based decision making? What would be the process to identify the urban problems that need a fix by analyzing numbers? Would this methodology give rise to more unspeculated urban problems which would need another version of smart cities to deal with them? Will this versioning be an ever going process, not of evolving but of switching from one methodology to another giving rise to new problems in an attempt to solve old ones?

Hudson Yards offers the first opportunity in the United States to build, from the ground up, sharing”the most connected, measured, and technologically advanced digital district in the nation.”

Songdo city is built on the vision of a networked community, connecting the unconnected, real-time data analytics and spatial sensing on urban landscape.

Q) Most of all the smart city visions seem to share a common ground in terms of their philosophy of using big data and connecting communities as the primary solution for every urban problem. Where did this idea seed from? Is there no alternate way of constructing a smart city other than weaving it with networks and digital technologies?

Are there opportunities for meaningful citizen participation in creating the smart technologies that will define Hudson Yards.

Q) Who do we mean by meaningful citizen participation? What counts as meaningful? And at what cost? To what extent will it demand a compromise to privacy? Will the participation be a choice? How does that behave in the concept of geosurveillance and what could be the outcome of participation? Will it lead to social sorting, predictive profiling? Will the system be transparent to understand how the data from participation is used and how it affects the process of decision making?

Urban data Infrastructures

“Smart cities and the politics of urban data,” Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn

To be smart that is to act with wisdom one requires knowledge, which is dependent on information, which is extracted from data.

Where data itself is a process of constraints and choices, and cannot be seen as neutral but as situated, contingent, relational and framed, the process of data analysis is much more complex.

Q) The relationship of smartness, wisdom, knowledge, information and data is a complex process. The transition of data to wisdom to smartness is not a straightforward mathematical computation and thus it is crucial to understand, who are the entities that process this data to transition it from information to knowledge? What are the parameters that define this transition? What is the framework for the same and who controls, monitors, participates or contributes to the functioning mechanisms of this framework?

Panoptic surveillance, predictive profiling, and social sorting.

The fear is that, far from being a liberatory and empowering development, smart cities may lead to highly controlling and unequal societies in which the rights of privacy, confidentiality, freedom of expression and life chances are restricted.

Q) If this happens to be a right speculation for the smart city vision, it is important to understand the role of citizens in this scenario. Will this shift be so subtle leaving citizens unable to realize it or will it be imposed in a sudden explicit format? Will there be a resistance from the citizens or will it leave them unable to identify the transition until it becomes unavoidable to reject?

Facts are produced, not simply measured.

Q) The context in which big data is collected, analyzed and presented defines the decision-making. Who are the power structures that define this process of gathering data, marking for data analysis and the format for data presentation? What would be the new strategies crafted around these facts? What form of governance will it give rise to?

Alternative Future

For smart city initiatives to work well they need to be conceptualized and contextualized within a broader and richer understanding of what a city is and how it works in practice.

Q) Who does this conceptualization and decision making? What is the skill-set required to anticipate and articulate the context in order to conceptualize? Who defines as a right candidate to qualify these requirements in order to make such decisions or contribute to the process of decision-making? Is it a function of governance, city administration, architects, technology makers, citizens, users? And what would be a concrete process to visualize this broader understanding of the city? Is there a need for guidelines to develop this understanding that can be passed on the potential candidates? If yes, is there a need for consistency in these guidelines?

In general, smart city technologies, and associated rhetoric and science (urban science and urban informatics), are founded on big analytics. In short, this means algorithms are used to process vast quantities of real-time data in order to dynamically manage a system and to make future predictions.

Q) This is true for the top down and bottom up visions of smart city development. In that case, how do we ensure and facilitate participation? What would be the learning curve for users to be able to participate fully and what are the skill sets required? Is the bottom up approach just a leveling down of top-down approach? Is it an inclusive method for decision making? What happens to the excluded groups? And what would be the motivation for participation if it has a learning curve? Is it more like a competition than participation to make it loud to be heard?

The impression one gains from encountering smart city initiatives is that the starting point is the technology and then to partially approach the question from the perspective of what core issue (e.g., sustainability) its technical intervention (reducing traffic) might address. In other words, the means is post-justified by ends, rather than the ends shaping the means.

Q) Do technical interventions sometimes not function as building blocks to the process of problem-solving? Would it be a right to say, that the problem arises when, rather than using technical solutions as a resource to solve identified problems, problems are crafted to fit in the developed technology?

Smart City vs. Smart Citizens

What Is a City that It Would Be ‘Smart

The smart city vision, has one overriding motivation: efficiency.
Q) Who defines what is smart? Is efficiency a synonym for smartness? Are citizens involved in constructing the definition of smartness or these ideas sourced from influential entities and governance with the backdrop of profit- making treating cities as a canvas for corporate exchanges?

Active citizens are knitting together their own smart city, albeit not one envisaged by the systems integrators and technology corporations.

Q) How sustainable are these smart citizen platforms? What impact do the active participation for constructing a smart city create and how does it survive? What could be some possible frameworks that can strengthen these initiatives and what could be possible challenges?

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Urbanization and Ubiquity,” Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

Today, a new group of companies have taken GM’s spot in the driver’s seat and are beginning to steer us toward a new utopia, delivered not by road networks but by digital networks.
Q) What would be cost that this new utopian vision comes along with? What would be some un-speculated modifications in the urban spaces, this new infrastructure of digital networks demand?

Crashing and Hacking the Smart City.

The extent to which mass urban surveillance will be tolerated in the smart cities will differ around the world. Government, with varying degrees of citizen input, will need to strike a balance between the cost of intrusion and the benefits of early detection.
Q) What would be the format of citizen input on which the Government would base its decision to the extent of surveillance? What would be the implications of buggy, brittle systems in the context of surveillance? What decisions will be based on such inputs and what conclusions will be derived?
An interesting point raised by Joy Buolamwini in her talk on algorithmic bias,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbnVu3At-0o ”

Across the US, police departments are starting to use facial recognition software in their crime fighting arsenal”
What would be the implications of using such biased systems and who monitors these biases? Who checks the accuracy and who makes them reliable?
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A design that works for all.
Q) Is the smart city development based on the philosophy of design for all? Is it supposed to cater to needs and preferences of all the citizens with magical systems that prove to work wonderfully for everyone? If yes, how are these systems visualized to function or are the citizens required to function according to the systems? Are these solutions inclusive and if not, who is excluded and on what basis? Are there exclusions based on age, abled and disabled bodies, rich and poor, skin color among various other factors?
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If the first generation of smart cities does truly prove fatally flawed, from their ashes may grow the seeds of more resilient, democratic designs.
Q) Does this imply, there is no better mechanism for smart city development than learning from failures? What would be the cost a city pays in all aspects to recover from such a failure and is it worth? Is this quest for smarter cities blinding us to some of the fatal implications it can hold in future like global warming, energy crises among others?

W10 Open Source Urbanism

Architects in particular have the opportunity at this stage to participate in the conversations that take place with regard to enabling and encouraging good building design and collaborative practice. ,
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.

Q What could be the possible channels to create such motivations and facilitate participation?

The fact that it enables anyone to be a co-designer, does not necessarily mean that everyone will undertake to participate in the design process, just as saying that everyone can be an artist does not mean that everyone wishes to participate in artistic practice (or indeed that everything is art). However, it does recognize that those who do wish to operate in such a mode of knowing, seeing and doing may have very different skill-sets, intentions and requirements.

Q What would be the baseline skill sets for participation. if any? If not, how would a consistent format of participation be defined? And by whom?

Sketching, pre-planning and feasibility analysis are activities that function under the assumption that there is a distinct immutable “design” phase, while planning, as an activity, makes it tempting to prescribe and for a certain category of participants to proscribe the activities of others.

Q To what extent and in which context is this idea feasible? The process of conceptualizing Fun Palace ( Cedric Price & Joan Littlewood ) which is considered to be one of the successful examples of, architecture defined by activities and modifiable by the user functions and activity requirements, do show the presence of a design phase. How does this unifying of the design phase and building phase, validate in a practical scenario?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism

“ladder of participation,” a figure taken from a classic 1969 urban participation text written by Sherry Arnstein.44 This ladder- based figure of citizen participation moves from the lowly depths of manipulation and therapy to the more enlightened stages of “citizen power,” which includes partnership delegated power, and citizen control.

What could be some other possible models for participation, considering the complexity and skills required for participation in smart cities? What are the parameters that will ensure the success of one model over the other?

Guattari, together with his electronic card, is participating in the sensor based city, but if he does not have access he can become idiotic through the same technologies that would ordinarily make him a smart and participating citizen. What Deleuze describes through Guattari is an example of an interrupted or broken program of participation,  where the object- script that would facilitate participation can become a locus of control, differently articulated politics, or a machine society that unfolds in distinctly computational ways.

Are there any identifiable patterns in the scenarios of an interrupted program of participation. Can these elements be addressed and solved? Or these are inevitable?

 

Citizen Sensing in the Smart and Sustainable City – Neeta

“Theory of Smart Cities” , IBM authors involved with the Smarter Planet initiative suggest that the term ‘smart cities’ derived from ‘smart growth’, a concept used in urban planning in the late 1990s to describe strategies for curtailing sprawl and inefficient resource use which later changed to describe IT-enabled infrastructures and processes oriented toward such objectives.

So, the question arises, How did this transition from ‘smart growth’ to ‘smart cities’ take place? Where did this idea of desire for an IT enabled and networked city emerge and who guided this thought process of need for a networked and mechanically efficient city (smart city) as a progressive city?

A report funded by the Rockefeller foundation, the Institute for the Future suggests that smart cities are likely to be a ‘multi-trillion dollar global market.”

Are smart cities a need or the desire of citizens? And if ‘smart’ means efficient, would it be right to question the efficiency of cities we live in today. Are current cities inefficient? What is the optimal limit of efficiency, if that is the primary element we are looking at. Should the question be about a never ceasing want for efficiency or should it be more about being sufficient?

When code is meant to reprogram urban environments, it also becomes entangled in complex urban processes that interrupt the simple enactment of scripts.

Considering the complex nature of programmability, weaved into the fabric of urban processes it would be interesting to look at how the idea of a networked city with a primary focus on digital infrastructure ( to make it efficient and smart ) evolves with the evolving technologies and changing game players. Sensing citizen data and using this big data for decision making and the idea of connectivity using digital infrastructures is smart today. Will it be dumb in the future? Will it be replaced by concepts more rigorous, more intrusive or participative? Sensing a direction of this evolution and change is an important aspect to consider to realise when is it a time to slow down.