questions – Page 3 – Smart Cities

Crashing and Hacking the Smart City — Yumeng Chen

Urban Versioning System 1.0

–The purpose of architecture design is not only to satisfy the functions we need, but also chasing the aesthetics. So that if it is the same purpose of open source coding? At least in the designing process, we need more then the open source benefits.

–In the IBM case, architects work together to finish a project at the same time , does it requires the architects are in the same level or can understand each others work even during the design processing?

Open Source Metropolis

–Though the open source data brings us a lot of benefits, it broke the wall that forbid a lot of cankered people or the people who don’t have enough ability out of this zone. However, now everyone enjoyed the free cakes and who will surveill this field and keep the citizens safety with their private and property?

Open source Urbanism

Open source metropolis – Anthony Townsend

In describing the evolution of social media from the platform of the internet Townsend states Burns and her team (in addition to other DIY research communities) began to experiment with new ways to deliver social services through the platform of the internet. Burns described the event forty years later stating that the convergence of amateur video and cable in the 1970s was “the perfect storm”. “In just a few short years, a growing network of public access activists had torn down barriers to community broadcasting that existed for nearly fifty years” – Could we recreate the perfect storm today? Ignoring our dispositions and fears of the hypothetical, allowing for complete smart city infrastructural implementation, assuming a revolutionary stance, infiltrating or gaining rights to the “smart city domain” of data and innovative technological platforms that supersede those of smart cities in complexity and potential? Could this not, coupled with exacting agency over the infrastructure to manipulate data results, allow us to contribute to our city in a much more proactive way?

“The technology giants building smart cities are mostly paying attention to technology not people, mostly focused on cost effectiveness and efficiency, mostly ignoring the creative process of harnessing technology at the grass roots, but the breach of public access cable in the 1970s is a reminder that truly disruptive applications of new information technologies have always come from the bottom up” – Notice here that the disruptive applications, while bottom up in their approach, required a top down infrastructural implementation to traverse and exploit. “The urge to repurpose technologies designed for one way communication like cable and turn them into interactive conduits for social interaction pops up again and again. Today, civic hackers, artists and entrepreneurs have begun to find their own uses and their own designs for smart-city technology.”

“But once you had an idea of the social network, it’s like ‘Dodgeball is Friendster for cell phones’. People understood it” – Crawley signifies the importance of concurrent technological applications not only as exploitable tools but as essential precursors or “molders” of the socio-cultural collective’s psychological scaffolding i.e. their ability to perceive, understand and accept new technological applications.

“Today, we take for granted the rich ecosystem of software available for our phones”, but “In 2003..Wireless carriers exacted tolls for content providers to enter their walled garden. Setting back the build-out of the mobile web for years.” – What kind of access is permitted to the smart city’s bed of sensored data? Do our dispositions with regards to privacy stand in the way of access to “walled gardens” if we persist to demand our information be “secure”? It appears that not only is top down infrastructural implementation crucial along with concurrently emergent technological applications, but the open access to both in promising to set the table for bottom up disruptive applications of sociability, serendipity and delight.

The “frequency hopping technique called spread spectrum, originally devised for torpedo guidance during World War II” extended the functionality of WiFi, in addition to it’s open source potential in that they could now “shove as much data across public airwaves as they could over wire with no subscription fees”. It seems that regardless of the original purpose of the technological invention, each “piece of the puzzle” lends itself to a complete picture in the form of bottom up exploitation and consequent disruptive applications combining and extending preceding technologies functionalities. Strategic, technological engineering must come before the creative utilization of the consequent structure/data. Does that not in some way support the smart city’s advocacy of big data harvesting? (although contingent on granted/forced access to the domain)

What form does interaction manifest if it was contingent on the spread and access to WiFi? If people are being attracted to a certain location for the promise of a portal to transport them elsewhere? In this respect does a non-sensored, digitally disconnected part of the city constitute a smart city ghetto much like Bryant park did in the 80s?

“Municipalities began to take over the deployment of public Wifi-access on a larger scale”, It seems like bottom up innovation (although contingent on preceding top down infrastructural implementation) inspires or catalyzes large scale technological implementations which in turn provide yet another traversable platform for further innovation/exploitation. Does that not shift our perception of power from a top down vs bottom up to a symbiotic relationship or dialogue between technology giants, dumb citizens (unconscious exactors of agency) smart citizens (educated DIY communities non-intimidated by the interworks of the technology) and the respective socio-cultural/political context?

Urban Versioning System 1.0 – Haque & Fuller

Architecture as one of Humanity’s oldest practices constitutes a fixed mean of channeling behaviors, a physical common that serves as a high resolution low pace environment of internal, intuitively and tacitly collected information resulting in a respective embodied predisposition in the space. As our cognitive pool becomes layers with increasing amounts of media and interfaces (sent vs internalized information) – architecture assumes the role of the background. Does code become (as a result of cycles of technological evolution and respective embodied predispositions of a new common) this generation’s tool of designing urban performances?

“The difference should be that we consciously recognize our interdependence (architecture, citizens and technologies) and thus must consciously act upon it.” We have repeatedly morphed spaces through exacting agency and populating them with socio-culturally conceived devices (such as a news paper stand) that result in consequent urban performances that challenge/extend the original functionalities of spaces and respective embodied predispositions. Is the fine line between a conscious participant and an unconscious consumer simply the recognition of where agency lies in crafting our surroundings within the seemingly restrictive smart city grid?

The design of the future built environment “appears to be split between large developers and ubiquitous computing technologists with architects finding themselves irrelevant” It can be argued that architecture, as an expansive discipline, trains us (or should) to carefully consider concurrent social, cultural & political contexts and respective implications on our designs. Are other disciplines as inclusive? Should architects now be charged with addition ubiquitous computing design to their vocabulary?

“Most important is to develop a method through which architecture the physical conduit for knowledge and memory can itself be open”, it’s signified here that architecture has thus far mainly been a top down process of attempting to create performances at different locations and scales i.e dictating vs accommodating interactivity and special use. “We want to see what happens if we work otherwise” – Is the answer quite literally delegating parts of the design process to an array of disciplines and the respective citizens (subjects) of the site of implementation? Fixity allows architecture to serve as a scaffolding populated by contingent or unplanned uses, but buildings are rarely designed for that express purpose. Can we start thinking of the concurrent socio-cultural collective as a performance that architecture must accommodate vs create/resist?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism

In Townsend’s view “Cities are indeed an efficient way to organizing activity, since infrastructure can be shared. But efficiency isn’t why we build cities in the first place. It’s more of a convenient side effect of their ability to expedit human contact” (p. 160) In this sense, which are the modalities of participation that can enhance this human contact, and how can techology play a roll within such modalities? and also, does new technologies creates new modalities never seen before, or it reshapes ways of participating from the past?

Jennifer Gabrys characterizes critically three forms of participatory urbanism: problem-solving code, reconfigured solving economies, and participatory sensing. And in this chategories “Urban life is articulated through a series of computational problems that can be solved or enhanced through participatory platforms and programs. [And in which] Citizens achieve participation through using this platforms to perform urban functions, and at a presumaly higher level by writting programs in the first place” (p. 215) But in this sense, in Gabrys’s view, participation seems to be narrowed to a sort of citizen gatherings which only aims to contest with the the city government and private enterprises, which flaws because of it’s incapibility to create sollutions to the same scale and effectivness as those instances. In this sense, should we valorize participation just in terms of effectivness? Is paticipation main concern should be problem-solving?

If new modalities of participation are determined by technologies, how can this technologies be shaped themselves for enhancing participation themselves or to open new ways of communication? should urban participation shifted its focus from the city to the technology that enables certain aspects of it? How can we address less visible aspects of the city through participation? And how can this dialogic values be introduced in both the technology design and urban design?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism – Feng

Tinkering Toward Utopia

P144 “the unchanging receptacle in which the changing parts of the system…can work together.”
As we know, the nowadays population is much large than many years ago. In this case, the city needs efficiency. And in some degree, efficiency force things be simple and clear, which is the opposite to the old cities. Therefore, how to deal with the vivid interesting like old cities and the high efficiency of the new cities?
About Foursquare
Smart cities and foursquare-like apps have some similar points. They could work well when the number of user/citizen is big enough. Because they need the supports from enough volume of data.
Would the scale of city be the obstacles for those cities’ “smartize”? (because the small ones could not get enough data.)

Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism

In the TV show Black Mirror, there is a story, in that world, everyone use the social media to show their own sense of social presence, and those ones who don’t use the social media apps are like the foundlings of that world.
In the similar case, in a smart city, would those people who can’t or don’t want use their devices for share data to smart cities be the foundlings? Would they lose some rights then living unhappy in the future smart cities?

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?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism – Sandra

Tinkering Toward Utopia – Anthony Townsend

– “…They merely imitate the appearance of the old, its concrete substance: they fail to unearth its inner nature.” This makes me think of information I was given on a walking tour in Budapest. The guide told us that Budapest looked like it had existed in its current state for centuries, but it was all a false facade. The buildings and infrastructure were all relatively new, at least by European standards. The city had been taken over and had changed hands time and time again. When it finally had a chance to choose an identity, it tried to express a history that it never had. What is the mobile/online equivalent of this? Can it be a significant advantage to make an app or website seem older or more established than it is? What advantages do ‘traditional, reputable and reliable’ have over ‘innovative, fresh and novel?’

– “The Web… was becoming a lattice of its own.” Unlike a natural city, which breathes and exudes its history as part of its charm, the web covers and buries its layers. It’s mines data from the past, but doesn’t display it. Are there instances where this is not the case? Where efficiency and evolution move aside to allow room for digital nostalgia and reminiscence?

– “DIYcity was a totally bottom up organization… there was nobody giving orders… it was driven by people showing up, looking at what needed to be done, and doing it.” This only happens when there are people in the community who care enough to recognize what needs to be changed, believe that they have the power to make any kind of difference and are motivated enough to do what it takes to change it. What happens when for one reason or another, these people don’t exist in a given area? Are they left to the devices of their municipalities? What would the reception be to outsiders who swoop in trying to help?

Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism – Jennifer Gabrys

– “ Who will control the city: Team Architecture or Team Computing?” (pp.219) Is it possible for one to advance in a smart city without the other? Should they not be collaborating instead of competing? Ubiquitous computing relies on architecture to implement its practices, and the architecture of a smart city should aim to integrate computing to best serve its users.

– “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.” In an example such as this, surely not many people would have cards that allowed them to access everything. Is a teacher idiotic because he cannot open the services door in his building, even though he might be able to fix the problem? The card system thinks it is preventing inappropriate access, but it may actually delay a solution. Surely someone controls the access and availabilities of these cards. What are the dangers of those with those with both influence and prejudice alienating those they see as undesirable?

– “…unwired humans will come across as singularly unintelligent, non- conversant and incomprehensible.” Will it be impossible to refuse participation, if one wishes to exist with any amount of freedom or fluidity?

– Is there a way to support a complaint in the case of FixMyStreet? As if to say, yes, this also annoys me or inhibits me from doing xyz. Though the same person reporting the same issue again and again should not be encouraged, it would be interesting to see if multiple inputs on the same issue made a difference and could be recorded in terms of locations/concentrations of community involvement. Do unaddressed complaints bother citizens more than complete lack of this service? It may make them question why they have this website/app in the first place, if their needs are not being addressed and they have a voice no louder than before FixMyStreet was introduced.

DIY and Participatory Urbanism –Yumeng Chen

Tinkering Toward Utopia

–The DIY city requires every citizen to work together forward to the same goal, which is ok when everyone does not earn or earn the same benefit. However when someone doesn’t get the same benefit or not satisfy with the benefit, kind like the communist society. How can we keep the city running fore a long period?

Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism

–When we open an app in the smart phone like iphone, it will ask you if trhe app has the ability to get the data and personal information and send it back to their servers, or running in the background to collect data. Dpes the app developer need to tell the users that it has some risk to send your personal information or data to the serve ?

–For most of people, we use smart devices not only in order to make life easy, but also enjoy the feeling that we can control everything and view all the information of trhe city. However, if the city can talk back and improve itself, how can we make sure that human beings are the controller not controlled by the city?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism- Jiaqi

“Tinkering Toward Utopia”

“ Dodgeball had taught him that knowing where you are wasn’t actually that valuable; the value was in using that information to unlock new experience.” From this book, “Foursquare” is successful because of exploration new experience from current information. In this situation, to say there are a lot of data exchange in a single day in this world, but what is useful what is not useful? The biggest challenge of “DIYcity” is how to gather useful information(data) or how to use current information(data) for exploration new valuable interactions behind these data?

There is a very interesting part between “Bottom-up and up to bottom” ways. DIYcity which is totally bottom up organization…there was nobody giving orders but up bottom “Smart city” which has clear orders from the government. In this two ways, hackers or self-organizations seem to have different characters: one is “hand”, the second is “mind”. The contradiction here is should mind compromises to hand or hand compromises to mind? Then who could give this contradiction an order?

Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism

Such “reports” might be considered idiotic since they slow down the assumed ways in which citizens are meant to participate in maintaining streets and instead raise open-ended questions and complaints that reveal how many types of street-based concerns and politics are not easily amenable to “fixing.”

The author talked about “the idiot” in participatory digital urbanism, these “reports” are idiotic, they are wasting time, misleading, slowing down the process. But the real idiot is data – wrong data. Although the idiot participatory cannot be avoided because Smart city is based on all citizens, based on people when we engage in participating digital urbanism, could we have a solution to filter the un-useful data?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism

Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism

1- “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.” – What will disrupt the process complete non participation or participation at lowest level?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism—- Shen

1 Tinkering Toward Utopia

The success of Foursquare is let the costumer participate in the data commutation, meanwhile this kind of motivational data structure could destroy the data neutrality? In the first 3 years Foursquare was collected data like survey, then they dig the data and shift into tendentiousness. Was that reversal the purpose?

Geraci described that DIY city was a totally bottom up organization. All those community are from bottom. It that the reason those kind of form would not lasting long? Like people swipe from one social network to another, from yep to Foursquare. What if all those app share data and customer, will this help?

2 Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism

Beside mobile app and sensors devices, what else could we engage or participate the digital urbanism?

Since ancient Greek they used coins in pot to vote and participated politics engagements. In digital urbanism, individuals could more easily participate politics and voting, could that lead to a populism? And how to prevent public data engagement will not be manipulate?

The idiot of could means that public could been collected and contributed to the data network without noticing, so that data collected will be authentic and neutrality. When a person who is aware of his data and information will be collected, he/she might not be act normal. So we need the sample to be “idiot”? After several decades when people used to be a data collector, will this problem be vanished ?