Category: questions

 

In his article, Rob Kitchin characterizes the epistemology behind the concept of smart cities as being “reductionist, mechanistic, atomizing, essentialist, and deterministic in how it produces knowledge about cities.” and argues that this approach “decontextualizes a city and its systems from history, its poiitics and political economy, its culture and communities, the wider set of social, economic and environmental relations that frame its development, and it wider interconnections and interdependencies that stretches out over space and time”. In this sense, how could we incorporate other epistemological models to the development of the city, or at least subsume the present one to another set of values, in a way that lets creating a model of the smart city that takes into account all this issues?

In terms of governance, Kitchin critices the current model of the smart city, and describes it as “top-down, centraly controlled and managerial in orientation, often introduced by bureaucrats rather than elected officials.” In this sense, he points out the need that solutions in the smart city “be introduced and implemented through processes co-creation and co-production between city administrators, companies and citizens; be open and transparent in their formulation and operation, including using open platforms and standards where possible; and be used in conjunction with a suite of aligned interventions, policies and investments that seek to tackle issues in complementary ways, blending technical, social, political and policy response”. In this context, how could such open structures of co-creations be implemented, and which would be the role and degree of participation of the citizens in such processes and platforms?

In their article, Lange and the Waal define ownership of the city as “the degree to which city dwellers feel a sense of responsability for shared issues and are taking action on these matters”. In this sense, how can technologies be used to foster such ownership, but not only as a feeling, but in a way that articulates action and participation to engage with the co-design of the city?

Owning the City: New Media and Citizen Engagement in Urban Design – Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal

 

1} The author is discussing urban life and culture, implications for urban design and city’s built form. Smart cities understood as series of infrastructure manages efficiently. But critics note that these imaginaries ignore some of the basic tenants. What are these ignored basic tenets critics talking about?

 

2}Deployment in the smart city is one of the critics. Even today many new cities are planned which are in still a fiction and some are under construction, in future, they will exist. While each new city comes with many new individual problems and solutions and advantages too. I think deployment is really not an issue, it’s just another experiment. Concepts of smart cities and applications of ideas will be partial in early few experiments and gradually with time, it will increase. That is one way to tackle deployment issue.
3}Ownership and engagement of citizens with media and role of the citizen in a smart city are one of the important issues of smart city fiction. Smart city will not have a specific government, rather I would like to say there will be ‘self-managed’ or ‘open government’ and citizen supposed to participate, react and involve individual resources like time, creativity and productivity to city run effectively and efficiently. Under such situation what will be returning for an individual? Decision taking on common grounds will be the slow process and everyone will need to invest time and it’s not productive and decisions will be not in favor of most of the participants. Under such circumstances what will maintain interest and involvement of citizens? There should be some factors which will bound citizens to their responsibilities of involvement. Again bounding comes with some form of government. People might start migrating in mass if a city is not functioning well. Under such thought deployment and investment is really a question. Just a thought, a possible solution, there could be a citizen profile in which citizen will earn points score in returns of involvement and basic services will be provided on that score. Again this is kind of government and against freedom, but I think bounding comes with rules and rules comes from the government. Ownership and engagement are still an issue.

Owning the City: New Media and Citizen Engagement in Urban Design – Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal

– Smart city projects typically consist of a ‘triple helix’ of government, knowledge production (e.g., universities) and industry. Such consortia often ignore the role of citizens as equally important agents.” The ‘helix’ may not name ‘citizen’ as one of its main strategies, but is it not assumed that these concentrations are chosen and being designed for the citizen? Of course a successful project should include the general public in as many aspects of the development as possible, but perhaps naming them as necessary initiators might be intimidating for citizens, even smart ones. A ‘smart citizen’ might be willing to take collective ownership of the city, but not everyone has the means or desire to author the initiative. If only few are willing, there runs a risk of systems that only represent a small number of loud, too-similar voices.

– “In her (Jane Jacobs’) view cities offer citizens the advantage to escape narrow social control of the small village, and obtain the freedom to choose their own lifestyles.” Don’t cities offer their own kind of social interdependence? Not everyone knows each other as in a small village, but there is still a great deal of mutual trust needed. If one chooses to move to a large city with a heavy overlap of people, is it not understood that although invisibility is more or less possible, participation is required?

– It seems as though projects that visualize the general feeling of the city, like the D-Tower are quite popular.

http://www.designboom.com/art/feel-o-meter-smiley-face-reflects-city-mood/ 

‘Happy Barometer’ Monitors the Mood of a Gloomy City

– “Architects adopt the roles of commissioner and executor at once. …they actively seek out an issue…and try to organize publics that take ownership.” How can architects and planners convince the public to take ownership and care? How hard should/ do they push?

 

Reframing, reimagining and remaking smart cities – Rob Kitchin

– Some of the perils listed alongside the promises in Table 2 seem to be reaching. For instance, how is it bad that “technologies deployed are objective, commonsensical pragmatic and politically benign?” As an example: an overburdened subway line is identified and additional bus/tram lines are put in place or rerouted to more equally distribute the passengers. This seems to be objective, pragmatic and not at all a peril.

– “Moreover, no two cities hold the same qualities, having different histories, populations, cultures, economies, politics, legacy infrastructures and systems, political and administrative geographies, modes of governance, sense of place, hinterlands, interconnections and interdependencies with other places, and so on.”(pp. 8) For these reasons, a one-size-fits-all approach to smart city initiatives should be avoided at all costs. But it also begs the question of how smart cities being built from the ground up can hope to be truly successful if they do not yet know what the tides and general feeling of the city will be. There is only so much than can be planned and predicted.

– “Failing to tackle these issues (of security and ethics) will undermine and curtail smart city initiatives and public support for them.”(pp.12) If administrations and designers assume that citizens will be comfortable with a certain level of surveillance and privacy when they are not, would an active refusal in participation be feasible? What would the consequences of that be? 

Owning the city

Author mentioned, “The relationship between (digital) media technologies and the physical city has often been thought of in a straightforward, even simplistic manner.” This brings us a new way to rethink smart city. As architects, we design buildings, making cities but how to make a proper space of architecture for proper future is still a challenge. Will smart city really challenge us to design “internet of things” but not a real object, for example, a building? In this circumstance, is form of architecture still important? Maybe we just live in a box with smart technologies rather than skyscrapers？

Nowadays, a lack of information will not be a barrier for smart citizens to share information and internet of things. But how do we share “situated” information between citizens? Most of them love information of gaming, news or other different personal prefer? Is it hard to manage all data to distribute to citizens to helpful for making smart cities? And only sharing information and enjoy new technologies are not enough for making a smart city by DIY ways. How to using information and engaging in the process of making smart city maybe more important than sharing information?

Reframing, reimagining and remaking smart cities

“Smart city technologies enact algorithmic governance and forms of automated management.” From my perspective, it’s right but hard to complete. When we think to redefine our government, is it too late? Redefining a government is right way to reframe a smart city, but it is primary in the process of building smart city. After we build a smart city by using top-bottom way to build, then it is too late. But does that mean we should build a smart government first before building smart city?

Reframing, Reimagining and Remaking Smart Cities

• Page 8 “…no two cities hold the same qualities, having different histories, populations, cultures, economies, politics…and interdependencies with other places, and so on.” However, the development of smart cities seems like to make all cities be similar. People living in different cities but they will use the IoTs for same companies, they will get same comfort form same Apps. Unique makes differences, and sometimes the differences take troubles. One goal of human’s technology is to overcome troubles, also it will erase some uniques. For a city, is the unique of a city not important any more? Or should we still try to keep some unique of the cities and give up some benefit from technology.

Owning the City

• In the article, the author mentioned the ownership. A city is hard to simply be belong to one person. Lots of people share it, its functions, environment benefit, and so on. In one of goals, the smart cities try to offer a better life for everyone who living inside. But how to deal with some case like this if two people have different requires, such as temperature, but they stand together?
  Give them a temperature between their requires may make each one unhappy. If the technology could offer each one a separate temperature, it will become a such lonely thing. It is just like people living their own mini Environment Bubble. Maybe “what is the weather today” can not be a common talking beginning any more. Just like the video game, some people criticize the VR technology make people more lonely than before, player will be limited in their own VR glasses. For smart cities, could we find a way that keep the aggregation and sharing as features of a city while give citizen high individual benefit?

• Section 4.5 Act: DIY urban design. “…With this crowdsourced plan they managed to persuade the local government to abandon the initial plans for the park and execute theirs instead…” This crowdsourced plan show the people’s demand. In another hand, it is telling the designers of cities, they don’t like what you are doing. In this situation, should the designers of cities follow the crowd?

Owning the city: New media and citizen engagement in urban design.

–while talking about togetherness, how to deal with the divide opinions are always the issues. Because it involve in every citizen so that we definitely can not use the minority is subordinate to the majority?

Reframing, reimagining and remaking smart cities

–Since the reformation of technology is very fast, how to balance if the technology is enough for the smart city or not enough that we need to update ?

–Smart cities bring a lot of benefits which relate to the energy solution, the citizen security. However, all these above will need a long time to show up. Which will make the test period very long. How can we get the feedback faster and more accurate?

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?