Author: zhicheng

Alternative Futures — zhicheng zhang

  1. is the equilibrium of the bottom–up community models and the top–down institutional participation policies brings the ownership to its citizens or the ownership make the equilibrium of the bottom–up community models and the top–down institutional participation policies?
  2. with the increase of the ownership, will the role of architect change into a solution provider and citizen become the designer who joins these solutions together?
  3. On the ethics and security concerns, will a government controlled system more secure? or a market-driven solution will be better?

Crashing and Hacking the Smart City – zhicheng zhang

  1. the reading gives us an example of the failure of a smart toilet and its backup: the physical button. the physical button is the full function of the normal toilet today, Does the smart city have to need a physical backup with the full function of the normal city? or have a basic backup?
  2. besides the physical backup, since the development of smart city will take part in multiple cities, should a city smart city become a backup for another city?
  3. the reading talks about the third disastrous situation the technology emerges at the wrong time. since right now we have some example of the smart city such as Songdo, Hudson Yards. is it better to build a new city like Songdo, then after the city and the moving in citizen adopt the new technology, then tear down the old one and rebuild?

Open Source Urbanism — zhicheng zhang

  1. open source urbanism seems to be a big idea here that allows normal citizen has an access for building up his part of the city. it provides the basic requirement for the bottom to top structure of the smart city. In the reading, it introduces some open source device such as Arduino. A single building is the basic component of the city, thus Puts the open source into a building scale. what makes a house an open source house?
  2. Should the open source of a building start from design phase? what will be an open source designed building?  a design that uploads to the internet and users can download and combine the design by themselves?
  3. Nowadays, in the countryside of China, with the increasing of the income of the people, people start to build their own house, however, without an architect. The purpose of the absence of the architect is budget control. However, for lots of cases, the budget is wasted due to lack of design.  it seems that an open source house design will be a good solution. How does an open source house in the town become the start point of the open source town or small city?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism– zhicheng zhang

1. In Townsend’s book, he introduces a bottom to top way to form the smart city. by using the example of “Foursquare”, he shows how personal location data reshape the city. A top to the bottom structure has stricter control, the bottom to top structure gives more freedom to the citizen. these two approaches seem to be a conflict to each other, thus, in the development of the smart city, should we have to choose one of the approaches, or is there a way can mix these two together?

2. In Tonwnsend’s reading, it mentions that by using the search keyword data and the IP address, google is able to analysis the trend of the disease’s spread. Is the search keyword recognized as a part of our privacy? or since we type the keyword into google, and use it to search, we give up this part of privacy?

3. Since a bottom to top system setups, data is easy to access for everyone which allows the citizen to take apart in the city building, however, it also allows crime to use it. Should the government take the responsibility to manage the usage of the data， or let the citizen do it with spontaneity?

Urban Data Infrastructures—zhicheng zhang

1. In Kitchen, Lauriault & McArdle’s reading, it says that some municipalities, indicator, benchmarking and dashboard initiatives are being used to underpin forms of new managerialism. it just likes the the dashboard of an aircraft cockpit provides detailed data about a plane and its flight. reflect this to the experiment in the 1970s in chile, even the experiment failed for many reasons, in the last few month before it failed, it was be found that some information which should be collected from factories are delayed. In the smart city which relies on the data from the sensor, unlike bugs in the system, a delay may hard to notice., as a result, a delay could be a deadly disaster. how to deal with it when we live in a city which relies on the data so much?

 

2. In Gabrys’ reading, he said “Environments and environmental computation also constitute situations in which “withness” might be articulated and inform processes of participation. Withness, following Whitehead, is a concept that signals modes of being and becoming together,” if we put this “withness” to extreme, the city and the environment have extreme withness, will we human lost our position, and become only the data provider, or may less than this?

 

3. Because of the contingency of  the infrastructure, the relationship between the city and the citizen seems to be mutualism.  When the city finally could adapt only by itself, will the “withness” of the city and its citizen disappear?

Sensing the Smart Citizen, -zhicheng zhang

1. in the reading, since sensing the smart citizen is an important process in the smart city system, the information the pull out from citizen could influence the smart city. However, most of the information that comes from the citizen is the location, movement, or health data at most.Is the subjective data such as the mood of a citizen an important component for the smart city?

2. The subjective data is kind of abstract for data collection. How to quantify the subjective data such as the satisfaction of one citizen? nowaday a survey will be a solution, however, it is inefficient and sometimes annoying.

3.  In Suzhou (a southern city close to Shanghai), China, a watch for the citizen is in crowdfunding since 8.14.2015.  Its function includes traffic card, E-wallet, sports wristbands, and smart watch. I believe it is the first step to massive produce “smart citizen”. After several updates, the watch could become the smart citizen device that collects data from its citizen. is it the only efficient way to make the citizen smart by making a universal device for its citizen?

QC — zhicheng zhang

1. Kontokosta introduced us a model of the quantified community which is a testbed and small version of “smart city”, however, even though it is building a small version of “smart city” there will be problems. because the community is still a complex space where the real estate, property management company, third party platform are the big role in building such community. Who will be the leader to organize all the components of the community?

2. Kontokosta mentions about the information that provides on social networks website, those information seems not to be a private information, however, when it became a part of big data, it may release more information than the uploader think, will QC redefines the privacy?

3. unlike Songdo, Hudson Yards is based on a developed site which means lots of the work are renewing or updating. Also, it means it has the area that connects to the “non-smart city” how to deal with the transition from smart to non-smart?

Songdo — Zhicheng Zhang

1. numerous sensors are setup in Songdo, and a demonstration control room is used for monitoring and maintenance of the city. These remind me the experiment in Chile 1970. Is the cybernetic model the prototype of the smart city today? if it is not. what is the essential difference between these two?

2.  “the smart grids offer two tricks to even out the peaks: load shifting and load shedding”. It seems that the smart grid is still a medication that suppresses the symptom without treating the condition. It tries to remove the peaks by forcing the people stop using the electricity during the peaks. In the end, are the net-zero buildings the only treatment of this condition?

3. The idea of smart city bases on the infrastructure which is quite different than the old one. This is why the test-bed is a brand new city, instead of a district in an old city. The idea of Songdo is to test a new model for the smart city. For the rising cities could be a good example, however, for those developed cities. will Songdo be a good example of the smart city?

smart city smart citizen — zhicheng zhang

1. What is a “smart citizen”? an information provider that helps to build the big data which connects the city-making? or anything more? a citizen with a smart device?

2. Dan Hill said “In fact, many of those primary drivers are intrinsically inefficient, or at least at a tangent to the entire idea of efficiency.” and he shows some example of these inefficient drivers, such as culture, commerce, community, conviviality. it seems entertainment is the inefficient driver. is there any other inefficient driver?

3. In the city-making, there is confliction between efficient city-making from top to bottom and inefficient city-making from bottom to top. which way will be the smart city-making? or both?