nida – Smart Cities

Alternative Futures – Nida

Owning the city: new media and citizen engagement in urban design by Michael de Lange and Martijn de Waal

“ Ownership teases out a number of 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.”… “When grounds are shifting, urban design professionals as well as citizens need to consider their own role in city making.”

How does regulation affect ownership in the urban public domain? Does accountability come into play when citizens participate in making cities? Dumb citizens or citizens that choose not to participate would there lack of participation still include in the context of “ownership”.

“Central is the question how collaborative principles and participatory ethics from online culture can be ported to the urban realm in order to coordinate collective action and help solve some of the urgent complex issues that cities are facing.”

What are the principles and participatory ethics from online culture? How would this bring about an action? Would this include policies of regulation and implementation? Would they include citizen’s opinions? In order to coordinate collective action would collective engagement and action lead to a better solutions and its integration into the urban fabric. What is he referring to when he says, ‘wicked problems’ – “Moreover a single intervention may catalyze unforeseen events that alter the initial state Because of this complexity such issues have been called ‘wicked problems’.”

“We have shown how digital media have created a number of qualitative shifts in the way publics can be engaged with, organized around and act upon collective issues. These shifts mean that it has become easier for many citizens to organize themselves and take ownership of particular issues. In turn, this may lead not only to new ways in which social life is organized, but also to new ways of shaping the built environment. We also argued that a culturally sensitive approach to the grassroots initiatives are organized around decentralized networks; they certainly are not without structures, rules and institutions.

Do these shifts need to be quantified, for it to be integrated into the digital infrastructure? How would you quantify such shifts? Would incentives by the government be needed to encourage citizens to participate what would they be? What is he referring to when he says a culturally sensitive approach need to be taken? How would that be possible? Would that mean a single model or approach cannot be applied and hence a new model is needed for every region?

Reframing, Reimagining and Remaking Smart Cities by Rob Kitchin

“smart city advocates frame the city as a technical entity which consists of a set of knowable and manageable systems (or system of systems) that act in largely rational, mechanical, linear and hierarchical ways and can be steered and controlled through technical levers, and that urban issues can be solved with technical solutions6. Moreover, ‘the city’ is treated as a generic analytical category, meaning a solution developed for one city can be transferred and replicated elsewhere. Such a view of cities is limited and limiting; not only does this narrow, technical view fail to capture the full complexity of cities, but it also constrains the potential benefits that smart city technologies might produce by producing solutions that are not always attuned to the wider contexts in which urban problems are situated.”

By urban issues, is he referring to the digital and physical infrastructure? Cant they both be resolved by technical issues? By treating the city as a generic analytical category, is the socio-cultural aspects of a city taken into consideration? Can it be? Should smart city technologies produce solution that are applicable to a wider context?

What is the best approach or solution for the problems mentioned? ( data is quantitative and one dimensional limited in scope) and ( scientific approach adopted for data generation, analysis and communication is reductionist…..in how it produces knowledge about cities.) ? What does he mean by other forms of knowing such as phronesis and metis? How would an epistemological approach help in reframing cities and there infrastructure? How would you quantify phronesis and metis?

Would conceptual and philosophical approaches help in reframing and rethinking of cities but would how would you integrate these approaches into more practical methods?

W11 Interdepndence and Overreliance – Nida Ali

Interdependence and Overreliance

1) “ We are weaving technologies into our homes, our communities, even our bodies- but even experts have become disturbingly complacent about their shortcomings. The rest of us rarely question them at all…. But what if it’s the harbinger of bigger problems? What is the seed of smart cities own destruction are already built into their DNA? –Buggy, Brittle and Bugged – Smart Cities. Anthony Townsend

“In our research at IOActive Labs, we constantly find very vulnerable technology being used across different industries. This same technology also is used for critical infrastructure without any security testing. 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.”

“When either wireless or wired communications security is poor, an attacker can easily intercept and hijack communications and take control of devices and networks. We see this all the time; most such communications are insecure”. – Active Hacking – Cesar Cerrudo

If smart cities contain bugs within their systems, before these systems are plugged into cities, how do you find the bug or error without plugging it into a city? How can they be tested before they are integrated into a network that effects not just the infrastructure but people as well? Is the system or method of testing prone to flaws as well? Aren’t security systems set up to prevent cyber hacking prone to hacking as well? They may defend the network better but they are also susceptible to attacks and are vulnerable too. How effective are cyber security systems? There are new virus developed everyday, how effective are cyber security softwares and systems? What are their limitations and parameters?

2) “The sheer size of city-scale smart systems comes with its own set of problems. Cities and their infrastructure are already the most complex structures humankind has ever created. Interweaving them with equally complex information processing can only multiply the opportunities for bugs and unanticipated interactions.”

“ The pervasiveness of bugs in smart cities is disconcerting. We don’t have a clear grasp of where the biggest risks lie, when and how they will cause systems to fail, or what the chain reaction consequences will be. Who is responsible when a smart city crashes? And how will citizens help debug the city?”

–Buggy, Brittle and Bugged – Smart Cities. Anthony Townsend

“There is a huge and unknown attack surface on smarter cities. With so much complexity and interdependency, it is difficult to know what and how everything is exposed. Therefore, simple problems could cause a big impact due to interdependency and chain reactions.20 This is what makes threat modeling so important…Has anyone seen a threat model for a city? Maybe these exist, but I haven’t seen one. Some larger software and services vendors have issued general documents about cyber security in cities but nothing very specific.”

“The current attack surface for cities is huge and wide open to attack. This is a real and immediate danger. The more technology a city uses, the more vulnerable to cyber attacks it is, so the smartest cities have the highest risks.”

– Active Hacking – Cesar Cerrudo

City smart systems consist of the physical infrastructure and a digital one, both come with their own set of complications and problems, What approach can lead to this integration, to be less riskier and better fitting? How would one test this integration? Does it depend on the context or the issue, whether a bottom up or top down approach is effective, it also depends on which infrastructure is effected? What type of prototype or model should be built or an actual neighborhood would be taken as a prototype to test such technologies first? Can these systems, which are interdependent on each other, function better if when one is effected it shuts down so as not to effect other systems and back up system takes its place? (parallel circuit and not a series circuit). The malfunction of one network would replace itself with a back up system to prevent the other systems dependent on it to not malfunction. System such as the internet, cloud computing, cellular networks, GPS, sensors, etc. How can these chain reactions be addressed and what countermeasures need to be made or taken in order to prevent a complete system shutdown or malfunction?

3) “ In our rush to build smart cities on a foundation of technologies for sensing and control of the world around us, should we be at all surprised when they are turned around to control us?’

“ Thinking about the unthinkable dictated a whole new approach to building cities. By concentrating population, infrastructure, and industrial capacity in nice, big juicy, megaton sized targets they had become a liability in the nuclear age.” …Norbert Weiner, “The decentralization of our cities on the spots on which they stand, plus the release of our whole communications system from the threat of a disastrous tie-up, are reforms which are long overdue… For a city is primarily a communications center serving the same purpose as a nerve center in the body.”

“We will never know if the negative impacts could have been avoided, but it would not have cost much to try. We might have even avoided the very unintended consequences we now invent smart technologies.”

–Buggy, Brittle and Bugged – Smart Cities. Anthony Townsend

“It’s extremely important: Technologies used by cities must be properly security audited to make certain that they are secure before they are implemented. …. When we see that the data that feeds smart city systems is blindly trusted and can be easily manipulated, that the systems can be easily hacked, and there are security problems everywhere, that is when smart cities become Dumb Cities.”

“The nature of the impact depends on the extent to which a city relies on the services affected.”

– Active Hacking – Cesar Cerrudo

By overseeing and managing the data being fed into and out of smart city systems, how effective would this solution of managing the data be when it comes to the structure of the system? If the system itself has bugs then does the data processing through it matter? To what extent?

If these consequences, (Townsend mentions) were addressed, would they only effect the problem in the short run or the long run? Is the patch, for solving the issue to let the system continue working rather than actually finding the core root of the problem?

Does the weakness or problems in the smart city infrastructure lead to it being called dumb city or does the existence of dumb citizens (participatory) lead to it being called a dumb city? Or the existence of both define the existence of dumb cities? What effects smart cities more, currently: citizens that effect the infrastructure of the city or do the networks or systems integrated in these cities. Can citizens take security into their own hands? How so ? Or do we need specialized companies like IOactive labs to secure our systems? How involved do citizens need to be when addressing such problems?

W-10 Open Source Urbanism – Nida

Both the readings seem to emphasize the idea of users being designers or a part of the design process.

Urban Versioning System 1.0 ,Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque

1) ‘In the coming decades computers will increasingly be a part of the architecture itself, enabling user-

centered interaction systems for configuring environmental conditions.’

To design or produce user- centric spaces, can the integration of technology designed by users and designers help aid architectural experience (physically, mentally or spiritually)? Computer scientists seem to be building technologies that are creating people centered architectural interfaces, why are architects not a part of the desing process or consulted upon designing such interfaces? Isn’t the environment we interact in just as important as the technology that helps to create it? Can the production of such interaction systems lead to a more collaborate effort amongst multidisciplinary fields or does it hinder the creative process? Does it take into account users willingness to adapt to such systems?

2) ‘It might be argued that cities are already developed analogously to the ways that a CVS (concurrent versioning system- means for software developer to collaborate) aids in the construction of software. This may be so, unconsciously; however buildings, streets and neighborhoods are still regarded as static, immutable end-products rather than dynamic states within a progression. In an architectural context, a CVS would need to achieve two goals. First, it would enable the processes of development, testing and inhabitation to occur concurrently. Second, it would

provide an infrastructure for different granularities of participation for each designer/participant.‘

Even though such systems would encourage collaboration and participation what would the parameters or limitations to such systems be? If the design process is “open” but the results are structurally, “closed” and there is no distinction between design and habitation, what issues would this bring about? Not only in the design process but also in its construction process? Does such a distinction need to exist? If softwares like CVS help software develops collaborate better, can similar systems be adapted to architecture and if so how different would its structure be that from CVS?

3 “The problem is that architectural design can often simply be a process of predicting problems, removing obstacles and resolving all possible contradictions: the best situation, from the perspective of such an architect, is to have project documentation that is so complete that every aspect of the construction process has been articulated and specified so that the eventual building construction contractor needs to make no on-site decisions and simply has to follow orders to the letter. The first was raised by cybernetician Gordon Pask (particularly in association with Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price’s “Fun Palace” structure.) Here, they emphasized the quality of underspecification.The notion of architecture as a system with underspecified goals suggests an architecture that evolves (and which is, therefore, never “complete”). Apart from making it clear that design and production are simultaneous activities, this conception also helps erase any pre-existing distinction between a building and its environment: it presupposes that a building creates an environment (which includes both our conventional understanding of ecological “environment” as well as all the constituent players, such as its occupants), and carries on creating an environment as it attempts to specify itself. In truly underspecified buildings, architecture can’t help but be ecological,not necessarily for the better, in the sense that all crucial input and output sources inherently become part of the architectural system.”

In Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, the idea was to create an architectural system that constantly evolved an dnever ‘complete’. How does this constant evolution of space psychologically effect the user within that space? How does the constantly evolving environment effect the occupants within that space and how does it effect the relationship amongst spaces within such an environment? What are parameters and limitations of such systems? Would this integration of software, hardware and architecture be considered a bottom-up approach where this building can be seen as a prototype before implementing such technologies at an urban scale?

Smart cities, ‘The Open Source Metropolis’, Anthony Townsend

Cable era giving way to the internet:

1) “William Gibson explained: “ The street finds its own uses for things- uses the manufactures never imagined. The microcassette recorder, originally intended for on-the-jump executive dictation, becomes the revolutionary medium of magnizdat, allowing the covert spread of suppressed political speeches in Poland and China. The beeper and cellular phone become tools in an increasingly competitive market in illicit drugs. Other technological artifacts unexpectedly become means of communication, either through opportunity or necessity,”….With little to lose, the grass roots readily adapts flexible and abundant technologies to pressing problems- spreading dissent, eluding law enforcement or distributing music. The stuff of smart cities- networked, programmable, modular, and increasingly ubiquitous on the streets themselves- may prove the ultimate medium for Gibsonian appropriation.”

Technological artifacts are considered to be in a sense immortal, because it is constantly changing and evolving and present in our society in one form or another. Does technology only become a means of communication through opportunity or necessity? Is there a distinction still present between the two? Top down or grass roots ( bottom up approach) support the idea of technology being a means for communication through opportunity or necessity? Would the collaboration of science fiction writers and technology developers lead to a creative and innovative design process? Why isn’t such collaboration considered when designing new technologies?

2) “ITP’s ambition was to challenge top-down thinking about technology….their focus of interest is obvious- cost effectiveness, However in concentrating… on the bottom line, they have neglected the process through which people harness the technology to create a system.”

“stop paying attention to technology, and start paying attention to people…..Because users are intimidated by the technology and do not have a hand in its design.”

“The Death and life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacob’s, “glorified how good streets create opportunities for people to meet by chance.” – Dodgeball

Apps such as Dodgeball and writers such as Jane Jacobs, all point towards a bottom up approach as opposed to ITP’s top down approach, would these different approaches be considered successful in the context and scenario they are applied in as opposed to adopting one approach over the other. Maybe different stages of the development of such technologies require either one of those approaches or it depends on the technology? Marketing departments carry out surveys or user testing of products when they are in its prototype phase, wouldn’t this integration which may be a top-down approach is still considering users in its design process?

3) “ Arduinos are becoming cheap enough to stick almost anywhere in the city, and could be the raw material for a kudzu-like explosion of a citizen- built infrastructure of urban sensing and actuation. …suggest a future where citizens decide what is connected to the Internet of Things, and why. Instead of being merely a system for remote monitoring and management, as industry visionaries see it today, the Internet of Things could become a platform for local, citizen microcontrol of the physical world…..Arduino gives us the tools to thoughtfully structure intelligence into the intimate, everyday, human-scale spaces and objects we live in. .. Instead of big data, it lets us collects and spread a few bits that really matter. The promise is that we’ll build the hardware of smart cities just like we build the web, by empowered users one little piece at a time”.

Arduinos, “becomes an excuse to build relationships with people” – Arduino share code ask someone for help. “social lubricant”.

Would technologies such as Ardunios decrease the distinction amongst different professions when designing and lead to a more open and collaborative design process? Would the integration of such hardware and software into the citys current infrastructure be accepted and adapted more willingly, since users have a say in the design process? Freedom and opportunity of choice for users help aid in well integrated infrastructures and design of technology?

W09 DIY and Participatory Urbanism – Nida

W09

Smart Cities, “Tinkering Toward Utopia” – Anthony M. Townsend

“ As Geraci described it, “DIYcity was totally bottom up organization… there was nobody giving orders…it was driven by the people showing u, looking at what needed to be done, and doing it.” Like ITP, “It was loose and collaborative and open and that’s what made it work.” What Geraci provided was a lens to focus their energy and a well-crafted moniker under which it carried forward.”

Gabry points out,” In critiques of the smart city a number of writers and tech gurus make a point of calling for greater attention to the role that “grassroots” or “bottom- up” citizen engagements can play in giving rise to a more human, just, and equitable set of digital city developments.”

“Sensor- based and digitally enabled modes of DIY and participatory urbanism have been proposed as grassroots strategies for articulating new types of commons and democratic urban participation, as well as strategies integral to smart city development proposals. By focusing specifically on the use of citizen- sensing applications for environmental monitoring and urban sustainability, I analyze the distinct modes of participation and urbanism that are expressed in these projects. Two questions that I address in this chapter include: How do citizens become sensors in participatory digital- urbanism projects? And how are cities cast as computable problems so that sensing citizens can act upon them?”

Is this bottom up approach actually working and fixing long-term urban problems as opposed to just providing a quick fix to short-term urban problems, which exist in both physical and automated infrastructures?
What roles do civic hackers play in this bottom-up approach? Whether or not these Civic hackers have the ability or skill to handle and deal with real problems that need to be solved? And how successful is grass roots when scaled up? When its solution works on a smaller scale but when taken into a larger context, how do its parameters change? Do these technical communities focus on openness and collaboration or on technology? (civic tech movement).
Although the importance of such projects isn’t in the success an app such as Foursquare and Civic commons, it is how such technologies help evolve and create newer technologies, which are closer to solving urban problems. Many a times such apps fail because users such as those in “DIYcity Challenges”, “People didn’t need to stay united”, It “lived out its natural cycle. It didn’t outlive its usefulness”. Hasn’t it become necessary to evolve and update applications not just to compete with other apps and projects in the market but also to keep people interested and involved in participating in these projects and apps? How are these open-source softwares and open-data initiatives effecting citizen participation in terms of physical infrastructure and not the digital one? How does the effect people’s behavior and interaction within the city and with each other?

Program Earth, “Engaging the idiot in Participatory Digital Urban” – Jennifer Gabrys

1 “To advance a discussion of the ways in which participation proliferates beyond the “rules of the game” and, in so doing, provokes political encounters and inhabitations,I take up Stengers’s discussion of cosmopolitics and participation, where she asks how it might be possible to attend to the role of the “idiot,” or those who would typically be seen to have nothing to contribute to the “common account” of how to approach political problems.3 In her proposal, the idiot challenges a notion of participation and politics that easily settles into consensus. This is not the idiot as a simplistic form of insult— as in a dumb or stupid citizen, the simple counterpart to the smartness of the smart city. Instead, the idiot or the idiotic is someone or something that causes us to think about and encounter the complexities of participation and social life as something other than prescribed or settled.”

“While other discussions of the idiot variously focus on processes of individuation and the making of subjects in relation to new media, my use of the idiot in this discussion of participation in the smart city engages most centrally with Stengers’s version of the idiot as a figure that cannot be articulated through a fixed subject position, not even if it is one of inversion. Instead, the idiot as understood here is a troubling and transformative agent within participatory processes who cannot or will not abide by the terms of participation that are meant to facilitate and enhance democratic engagement.”

How do dumb or stupid citizens differ from idiotic ones? What counts as digital participatory urbanism? What are its parameters and who would be included in such an infrastructure? Would a citizen be considered an idiot if the citizen is a disruptive agents, whether it is a smart city or not? Does the term idiot citizen apply to such citizens that are not a part of a smart city? Would hackers fall under the idiot citizen category?

“Civic apps are then productive of new economies and political economies of participation and are not simply articulations of digital and democratic engagement. As Ulises Mejias notes, however, participation in these networks offers up information, but at the same time the user of these platforms becomes “the product being sold,” where participation is “not coercive in a straightforward manner” but is organized to undergird particular economic exchanges and to reinforce particular modes of sociality. Participation through these platforms is then most typically aligned with digital economies where user- citizens provide the data material that often generates profits for tech companies but less frequently contributes to substantive resources for urban communities or citizens. Users and participants of sensor- based digital platforms provide sensor data that influence, if not benefit, particular types of technological and urban economies. Participation in networks requires the free labor of participants, but the networks are owned, controlled, and operated by companies that collect data in ways that are not typically transparent or contributory to advancing more democratic urban engagement or more equitable economies.”

By participating in these economies by providing data and information, they are then choosing to “opt-in”,would they still be considered as products being sold even if they consciously give up this information?

These tech companies that profit off of the data and resources provided to them by citizens using their products, whether or not citizens willingly give up this information, in what account would this be shed in a different light for example if these technologies were actually producing products to better the urban engagement, equitable economies or lives of the user? Would it still matter how the data and resources needed for that technology is retrieved? Where would the type of data whether it is a passive data collection or participatory sensing fall concerning unclear transparency by tech companies?

3- “Stengers suggests that the idiot especially forces us to attend to the concrete conditions of problems. If urban environments are under stress in one way or another, these problems would then need to be attended to in their specificity and not as conditions conducive to solutions propagated by universal information architectures. Such a specific (cosmo- )political ecology of problems is then an important part of attending to urban conditions. These specific conditions ensure that we cannot proceed through “blind confidence”or “good intentions” but rather must “[build] an active memory of the way solutions that we might have considered promising turn out to be failures, deformations or perversions.””

By attending to in their specificity, does he mean bottom up or grass roots approach? What are the solutions conducive to universal information architecture that he is referring to? What does he mean by active memory ? Where does the idiot come into play? If solutions turn out to be failures, does he mean to rebuild solutions to urban conditions? Allowing the city to “play itself” by constantly building from recreating solutions and not proceeding with blind confidence or good intentions?

W06 Urban Data Infrastructures – nida ali

W06

Program Earth: Environmental Sensing of Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet.

Digital Infrastructures of Withness – Jennifer Gabrys

“The smart city as built and imagined seems to toggle in this in- between zone, instantiated in some ways but always leaning toward a more complete automation, a more fully self- regulating (and so sustainable) organism that monitors, responds, and adapts in real time in order to achieve the most efficient and optimized balance of resources, time, and money. Sensors becoming networks becoming smart cities all appear to be on a trajectory toward an urban organism that acquires an uncanny intelligence and ability to manage the city as planner, architect, and engineer all rolled into one. But when might this phase- change occur, when sensors and networks take on a life of their own and begin to organize their own automated processes within the city.”

How does this automated urban organism which takes sensors and networks into account function within the parameters and modes of ‘withness’ (human and non- human)? What are its shortcoming when dealing with participation and interaction amongst other networks and or humans? How can the infrastructural aspects of smart cities, which include the processes of measurement, automatism, and contingency, be qualified or take experience and perception into account? If these smart cities are managed by cybernetic entities, which are non-intelligent learning systems (feedback into account), how is its process of decision making determined? Do they need human intervention in order to make decisions?

“Designing infrastructure is designing action.” This statement could easily be read in a deterministic way, where the structures of infrastructure are seen to offer automatic scripts or codes for action. But the statement could also be read less causally and more simultaneously, where infrastructures and actions coincide as entangled and co- emergent processes. A study of infrastructure could very well attend to the actions that are productive of infrastructures, as well as infrastructures that are productive of actions. This raises the question of how actions unfold within and through automated urban infrastructures.”

From Simondon’s perspective would this infrastructure of machines be sacrificing its ‘functional possibilities and many of its possible uses’ in order to make a machines automatic since these machines are engaging in a set of operations that incorporate openness and participation (human involvement)? His discussion of the pre-individual reserve “what counts as “human” is also not fixed or settled, since machinic engagements also give rise to distinct transindividuations of the entities involved.” Can the idea of tranindividuation, which takes both an individual subject and a collective subject, be applicable to automated urban infrastructures that are productive of both action and infrastructures relative to human interaction? How would humans be inputs or inputs in such systems? Are humans only considered as a source or node of information in such systems?

“Yet as Simone reminds us in his writings on the practices of infrastructure, these are characterized by situated contingencies, where people may even tinker with and alter the city and its infrastructure. Contingencies in the smart city may emerge across human and more- than- human registers, moreover, since as the city “plays itself ” it no doubt is not simply adapting for optimization but is also generating particular materializations of sensor- spaces, transforming environments through programs of more- than- automatism, and giving rise to proliferating bugs and blockages that are sites for ongoing repair.”

Smart cities or automated urban infrastructures like any other system contain negative contingencies, are their systems or models developed to predict such contingencies? How do these contingencies take the human register / intervention into account? Does the process of constant feedback and optimization effect contingencies of a smart city relative to modes of withness (human / non-human). Are these newly generated technological practices, inhabitations and ways of life due to the integration of technology within the automated urban infrastructure not only modify human behavior but also sensor-actuator operations? Is it because a smart city and participatory urbanism projects reduce technology to a “utensil,” as Simondon has termed it, focusing on optimization, rather than on quality of life?

“This means that rather than search between determinist or constructivist approaches to technology, we might attend to how new entities, relations, and modalities of withness contingent on infection and persuasion generate new technological practices, inhabitations, and ways of life.”

Smart Cities and Politics of Urban Data – Rob Kitchin, Tracey Lauriault and Gavin McArdle

What types of contingencies are there concerning smart cities when dealing with ‘panoptic surveillance’ or ‘dataveillance’ and security? Since smart cities have, numerous networks are there any precautions and fail-safe mechanisms to deal with hacking of its servers. To what extent are these systems open or closed systems, relative to citizen participation and privacy?

Do corporate interests solely drive these systems? By taking users and consumers demands and participation into account, aren’t corporations building better cities for the people regardless or corporate interests? On the other hand, are these cities built for a certain demographic and hence caters to a certain types of users? Are then policies, decisions, laws, politics and data assemblage in favor of corporate interests and are then pushed and passed through because of corporate interest?

“It is the tension between the realist epistemology (data show the city as it actually is) and the instrumental rationality of smart city systems, and an alternative view that exposes the politics and assemblages of such data and systems.”

“These include anxieties related to the rise in technocratic governance, the corporatization of governance, the creation of buggy, brittle and hackable systems, panoptic surveillance, predictive profiling and social sorting and the politics of urban data.”

Emancipation from the demands of corporations possible when designing smart cities? Can both users and corporations co-exist amongst the many layers of smart cities infrastructure? Will some anxieties that are a part of the urban fabric of smart cities be addressed by and help produce better technological systems through feedback and optimization as the city “plays itself”?

W05 Sensing the Smart Citizen

“Citizen Sensing in the Smart and Sustainable City: From Environments to Environmentality,” Jennifer Gabrys,

1 “Urban citizens become sensing nodes— or citizen sensors— within smart city proposals. This is a way of understanding citizen sensing not as a practice synonymous with citizen science but as a modality of citizenship that concretizes through interaction with computational sensing technologies used for environmental monitoring and feedback.” What does it mean to be citizen sensors? Those who have citizenship only applicable or is it applicable to the transient population? Are these transient visitors, citizen sensors of the city as well? What If citizens choose not to ‘opt-in’ to being citizen censors?

2 “how might environmental technologies delimit citizen- like practices to a series of actions focused on monitoring and managing data? Might this mean that citizenship is less about a fixed human subject and more about an operationalization of citizenship that largely relies on digital technics to become animate?” “Behavior may be addressed or governed, but the technique is environmental.”

Would human behavior change or modify if environmental technologies monitor and manage data? Would this mean that humans are just a part of the operation needed for data in order to produce technology for these urban (smart) cities? Are we then just part of a system to produce efficient cities? How does this feedback system work? What are its parameters/limitations?

Here is a version of biopolitics 2.0, where monitoring behavior is less about governing individuals or populations and more about establishing environmental conditions in which responsive (and correct) modes of behavior can emerge. Environmentality does not require the creation of normative subjects, as Foucault suggests, since the environmental citizen is not governed as a distinct figure; rather, environmentality is an extension of the actions and forces— automaticity and responsiveness—embedded and performed within environments.

If biopolitics 2.0 focuses more on establishing responsive environmental conditions, does that not mean by modifying you the environment, it also constitutes to governing an individual? How can the environment be modified, maybe not consciously but subconsciously affect the way individuals are governed? Environmentality consider spatial conditions that lead to responsive and embedded environments and by action and forces does it consider human behavior?

“What’s so smart about the smart citizen?”- Smart cities- Mark Shepard and Antonina Simeti

Top down or bottom up approach?

‘Often top-down and centralizing, this approach promises to optimize the distribution of services and maximize energy efficiency, making cities more livable, sustainable and competitive.’ ‘Focusing on Smart Citizens would appear to be a compelling alternative to the technocratic determinism of the Smart City model. The agility of bottom-up and distributed strategies enables affecting change rapidly at far lower costs than large-scale urban infrastructure projects.’ Top down or bottom up approaches seem to have some areas where they are successful in achieving their goals and others where they are not. If the context or situation were considered and test beds were used to test both these approaches, where need be top down approach would be successful for certain cities and where quantified communities through a bottom up approach could prove to resolve more issues than prove to be detrimental?

Yet challenges at the level of policy and regulation arise when one attempts to scale local solutions to larger urban systems, where interoperability between different systems and the development of open standards for sharing data between them become paramount.

“Finally, we have to ask what it means to call a city or its citizens “smart” in the first place.4 the term “smart” has been popularized by marketing executives of large technology companies, and it is hard to argue with their logic: who would want to live in a “dumb” city, or to be a “dumb” citizen?” Whether the city is a smart city or a dumb city with dumb citizens or smart citizens maybe it is important to try different variation of all these systems and their components in order to find solutions to urban challenges of a local scale or an urban scale? At a community or local scale it maybe more important to consider smart citizens and at an urban scale smarter cities would be more important? Combinations and integration of technologies and participation of smart citizens may work for some cities and communities and for some cities dumb cities/ with smarter citizens would be the next step before evolving to smarter cities? Would it not be a logical to consider how such cities and communities can, successfully and efficiently evolve into smarter cities with smarter citizens?

W04 Quantified community: Hudson Yards Nida

Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019

Are smart cities considered to have affordable housing when demographically they would target, and would probably only be affordable for the upper class? Such fully instrumented technologies embedded in our daily lives would be expensive to afford and maintain. Would these smart cities increase the disparity between upper, middle and lower classes?
Is social interaction is considered important when designing smart cities and spaces for people who live I these cities, how is this interaction quantified? How accurately are the data set provided by this quantification to develop smart technology successfully integrated into our lives and help improve social interaction between users and between a user and the city?
“The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism,” Hannah Arendt warned in 1958, is “not that they are wrong but that they could become true” — that the very instruments used to measure behavior are indicative of, and constitutive of, societies of automatism and “sterile passivity.”

The data we generate, based on determinist assumptions and imperfect methodologies, could end up shaping populations and building worlds in their own image.” Data we generate does shape a city and hence people who live in that city, But what is the alternative to using instruments that measure behavior and provide data to create such environments? How else can we design technologies without monitoring a human’s behavior?

“Circuits are the new topology of this terrain, once dominated by tunnels and tracks. while such systems are environmentally “smart” — they eliminate noisy, polluting garbage trucks; minimize landfill waste; and reduce offensive smells — they also cultivate an out-of-sight, out-of-mind public consciousness.”

Does this new topology need to adopt an out-of-sight and out-of-mind attitude? How are citizens and users (transient) affected and or their needs and wants addressed by smart cities? Do Test beds such as Hudson Yards consider data from different users and citizens relative to physical and information infrastructure?

A Framework for Computational Urban Planning – Kontokosta

“Focusing on the neighborhood scale also allows for a meaningful interaction with, and participation by, the people who live, work, and play in that space and shifts the emphasis of data-driven design away from top-down routinization to a human- centric problem-solving.” Even though this shift from a city to a neighborhood scale may provide more opportunities to connect and engage with local residents in problem identification, data interpretation and problem solving, however it still does not take cultural, political , religious etc into consideration. A more focused approach would help identify issues more clearly but how would these problems be addressed; by the community of people themselves (participatory) or by the investors and designers of these test beds? How can ‘strength of social interaction’ be quantified? How can the unquantifiable be quantified for data collection necessary for smart cities and quantified communities?

“The ability to test, refine, and scale the types of sensor technologies and modeling techniques described here represents a significant advancement in defining the usefulness, viability, and implementation of ubiquitous urban sensing.” Real-time feedback is one way of studying the human behavior affectively, what other ways constitute to studying the human behavior effectively without quantifying date. Is a human-centric view of urban sensing an effective strategy to understand the relationship and interaction between humans, sensors and data? Such as static sensor peering and mobile sensor peering.

‘in particular, the intention is to use the instrumentation framework and collected data to address specific challenges and urban problems relevant to, and defined by the local community.’ By involving communities of different scales and different types, would it not make it more complicated and difficult to create a well fit integrated model into different communities? Since every community is different, how effective would this model be?

W03 Tabula Rase / Test Bed (nida)

Smart cities – Townsend – Songdo

If computers become architectural materials, would the disembodied (data) provided by computers and utilized by designers be considered architectural material as well?

‘a showroom model for what is expected to be the first of many assembly-line cities?’ – Lindsay

Are we moving towards an architecture that is economical, convenient: one where the parts to a whole assemble quickly? Just as buildings during the industrial revolution constructed assembly- line cities. Where does individuality and uniqueness of a city fall into place? Unique spaces that help to distinguish cities would then cease to exist. What happens to human experience?

‘Remodeling cities in the image of Multinational Corporation requires three new layers of technology (Arup) – Instrumentation, urban informatics, and urban information architecture.’

Human information and consciousness, should it not be considered as another layer of technology?

Shouldn’t multinational corporations consider humans/consumers as another layer of technology; Since Human Information and consciousness could be contained within a computer just as much as it can be contained in a biological entity. The extension or addition of using technology and by it embedded into our lives as ubiquitously and subconsciously it becomes a form of extension, amputation or replacement to or for the body. Then according to Mc Luhans view in, “The Medium is a Message”, technologies involving communication add to the post-human process of evolving humans, through technology being an extension of the body.

Sociologist James Katz, ‘Machines that become us’, Merge with our devices. Is this debunked by Hayles, when she questions what it means to be post-human, ‘The defining characteristics [of being post-human] involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of non-biological components’. It is not the use of technology or the addition of a prosthesis that determines being post-human but subjectivity or the freedom of choice to control technology or one’s self, the ability to possess freedom. The ability to choose, decide and react has led a shift from self-organizing systems to emergent systems in responsive or mediated environments.

Smart Urbanism – Utopian Vision or False Dawn

Test bed as Urban Epistemology

“These self-referential and self-generating properties make Songdo, perhaps unsurprisingly mimetic of the logics of the very financial systems that have conceived and sponsored this ‘product’.” Does this mean Songdo design and push towards sustainability is driven by financial systems? Does this city then too become a product of consumerism?
‘Omniscience and omnipresence viewers/users/consumers can exceed their human limitations. … but these interfaces work on us as much as for us. The bilateralism of the interface informs the users but also makes them informers – i.e. it works to optimize the viewers and the network in which they operate. Because their habits and maps create a map of future habits, supply and demand will eventually merge.’ By mapping, human behavior, how do these interfaces work for us? Is optimization geared more towards consumers or the producers?

What does he mean when he says, ‘The loss of the ideal image of space is replaced with an ideal of the perfect methodology’?

When does space become a Territory, ‘an area defined not merely by physical geography but by ratios’? What does he mean by ratios? (Quantifiable?)

The idea of selling data to other cities, to create exportable cities how effective and successful, would this data be in relation to other cities culture, religion, economy etc?

W02 smart cities/ smart citizens – nida

Smart cities- Townsend

What does he mean by the Internet of people gave way to the Internet of things? Is ‘Big Data’ referred to as an Internet of Things? On the other hand, are the ‘Internet of Things’ translated as data to be able to measure it? (symbolic / numeric data when comparing A.I machines to humans).

‘Digital revolution didn’t kill cities. In fact, cities everywhere are flourishing because new technologies make them even more valuable and effective as face-to-face gathering place.’ Does this reinforce Jane Jacob’s view on cities and people, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” In addition, Haque’s point of view, ‘Smartness arises in expanded human interactions and creativity, not in physical infrastructures and this is most important in the urban context.’ Does the type of interaction play a role in the development of cities? Augmented interaction vs physical interaction.

By unlocking public databases and utilizing social media to create a responsive channel with citizens, where does privacy and security stand? How important is this data when it comes to technological inventions being effective and responsive to humans’ wants or needs?

Is the term smart city mutable, a term that changes overtime, how we combine information technology with infrastructure, architecture etc, determine what a smart city may become and hence redefine what a smart city is?

What is it to be a smart city? Usman Haque

Smart cities and its technologies target a certain type of demographic, so by limiting smart technologies (economically, politically and culturally) how successful or effective are these technologies currently? As Haque mentions, ‘in an age of extreme connectivity, when geographical specificity and proximity are no longer necessary for either trade or the exchange of ideas and the sense of ‘belonging’ transcends the boundaries of nation-states, what can justify the purposeful creation of new cities, not to mention so-called smart cities.’ Is the “Sense of belonging” threatened or is it protected and or encouraged in smart cities today?

‘The often-explicit assumption that the universe is formed with knowable and definable parameters assures us that if we were only able to measure them all, we would be able to predict and respond with perfection accordingly. This is best exemplified in the ‘Data>Information>Knowledge>Wisdom’ paradigm, which is founded on the mistaken notion of data purity.’ What is the idea behind data purity?

The promotion of the inevitability of smartness in cities rather cynically preys on both individuals’ fears for the future and organizational desires to rationalize their self-importance. Are the use of smart technology either in smart cities or in cities that lack such technologies, viewed with similar criticism and or should they be viewed from such a perspective?

To solve problems cities and humans face, can smart cities be applicable in places or areas or for people that need or want it: to have a choice, as opposed to smart cities and technology being imposed on one’s society? Would smart citizens help transition into more effective and productive Smart cities?

What parameters differentiate smart cities and smart citizens? Can one not exist in the other? Can a smart city not coexist with smart citizens? McLuhan mentions technologies being an extension or amputation, how are smart technologies and smart citizens perceived by keeping McLuhans point of view in mind.

What role does crowd-sourcing play in respect to smart citizens? How does it affect smart cities? Would it beneficial or harmful for smart cities to incorporate crowd-sourcing, when designing such technologies?