questions – Page 4 – Smart Cities

DIY and Participatory Urbanism

Tinkering towards Utopia – Townsend

In alexander’s explanation of interconnected city lattices he describes the effect a news rack had outside drug store near his office in Berkley, “the news rack, the people, the sidewalk, even the electrical impulses that controlled the traffic signal were woven together in networks of surprising complexity that formed a distinct urban place” the urban place he describes seems to follow Gabry’s analogy of withness in that it is effected by technology but not dictated by it; reserving a symbiotic relationship with the citizens and built context. Are moments of withness such as these left to DIY communities to implement?

Alexander argued that hierarchal structures plagued artificial designs as they fought against complexity. Could that have been in pursuit of efficiency? Is that which is unquantifiable inherently inefficient? And in our pursuit of efficiency are we abandoning all that is too complex to compute? Is an infrastructure that is both complex enough to allow for variable interactions to unfold and simple enough to be rendered “efficient” even feasible?

“The city is an open grid of possibilities, the suburb a universe of dead ends” – It can be argued that even the city grid imposes certain constraints on our interactions, but despite that we have been able to populate it’s nodes with layers of communication and interaction that generate respective states of withness. It is then up to the citizens (regardless of the imposed infrastructure) to arrange the unfolding of such performances, ones that supersede the limitations of the smart “grid” but exploit it’s structure. Law, order, structure is dire to preserve the freedom of self expression that we value so much; preventing complete chaos. Generating moments of organized chaos seems to have been left to us.

“Alexander’s vision of the city as a lattice underpinned the design of the software that now filtered by own view of it” (Foursquare) – Could this be the reason why we’re glued to technology interfaces? Going back to Turkle’s hypothesis about our preference of means of communication that allow division of attention, are we “alone together” because the perceived solution to our solitude has pulled us away from the seemingly isolated and fragmented built environment?

It’s interesting to note the pattern resonating in the history of disruptive companies such as Foursquare. It began as a DIY organization seeking to exploit the available technology, encouraging active participation in the form of check ins and in doing so successfully draping a “new digital lattice atop the city’s physical one and connecting the two with code”, evolving and promising to “exploit all of the new technologies that had come on the scene”, and slowly morphing due to the expression of agency of it’s users. It’s worth questioning if Foursquare is a product of interaction or rather if interaction was a product of Foursquare. Perhaps asking this question is a testament to the symbiotic relationship that formed as a product of the software, interaction of active participants and their expression of agency. Soon, foursquare would “mine date on your habits as well as your friends’ to recommend nearby venues”, beginning to augment the users’ decision making and effectively tipping the ratios; painting users as consumers, not active participants.

According to Townsend the computer age began with IBM PC, soon after the MITS Altair 8800 was released in 1975. “The Altair dramatically democratized access to computing power” – soon after that “Hobbyists formed groups to trade tips hacks and parts for these DIY computers” serving as a training camp for innovators such as Apple, who would later overthrow IBM’s dominance of the PC industry. We all regard apple as a top down firm now, especially when considering that their products are engineered to be the furthest thing from modifiable. Does this raise the question of a certain life cycle that dictates the evolution of DIY start-ups, to successful monopolizing corporations, to their decline in more open sourced innovative start-ups that use the latest technology & infrastructure (provided by the corporate giants) to supersede existing corporations? Is this inevitable? Can it not be argued that the cycle itself is responsible a constant state of social, cultural and technological evolution?

Engaging the idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism – Gabrys

“It is then worth noting that there is a much wider stream of participatory urbanism projects underway that runs alongside and at times mutually influences or diverges from sensor driven approaches to the city” – Does Gabrys effectively confess to the need (or the favorability) of a pre-existing infrastructure based on smart sensors etc, that at first may indeed result in false hypotheses of the city & it’s people, but will present with a platform of data that could then be used by Smart citizens or entrepreneurs to develop innovative and groundbreaking social applications?

“Passive data collection generally entails citizens having to do very little, other than turn on their smartphones or other sensor devices”, “it does not require input from the human user and it takes place by users simply being equipped with smartphones”. Foursquare seemed to (at first) have approached this issue correctly by motivating check ins and active recommendations, but as we’ve seen, at some point when participation reaches “capacity”, contingent uses take over, morphing technologies and respective corporations. Is this contingent usage pre-coded into the software’s usage (consciously or not?) or is it the sole product of the expression of agency over technology?

“As Stengers suggests in relation to the idiot, “the idea is precisely to slow down the construction of this common world, to create a space for hesitation regarding what it means to say good”, although poetic and warranted, is this ideology once again a product of individualistic tendencies? Should the common good not be that of the livability and habitability of the planet? Although “habitability” constitutes a large category including ephemeral and non physically identifiable or quantifiable attributes, should we not assume a stance of survival in the face of environmental crisis we face today even if it threatens to “engineer society”? And then begin to use the implemented infrastructure to tend to the unquantifiable in innovative ways through bottom up processes?

Urban Data Infrastructures

As argued in the text, “Indicator, benchmarking and dashboad initiatives thus inherently express a normative notion about what should be measured and how it should be measured. The are full of values, judgements and deliberate strategies of occlusion […] They not only present urban systems, but actively help produce them” (p.28) In this scenario, what are the paths to create policies, auditing, or participating in such models of shaping the city?

On Gabrys’s text, if withness is understood as “an articulation of processes of participatinf that involve becoming together, across and extended array of entities, and setting in motion the connections and inheritance that take hold to become something like urban infrastrucure” (p. 263) How does withnessing address the problem of the different forms of agency that comes into the design of technology and into urban planning? Sepecially when as stated by the own text “Our urban future is differently distributed depending upon how close to the machine we are” (p. 264)

Also in Gabrys’s text, how does her proposal of “speculative cities” takes into account the contingency and indeterminacy proposed by Simondon to open new paths of active agency over the city, or to new forms of participation?

Urban Data Infrastructures – Sandra

Smart cities and the politics of urban data – Kitchin, Lauriault, McArdle

– “…these new systems lead to the discontinuation of analogue alternatives, meaning that if they fail there are no alternatives until the system is fixed/rebooted.” Certainly in early implementation, there are bound to be glitches, failures and hacks on new “smart” systems. Should we leave a skeleton of older analogue systems to default back to when/if this happens? How much of the prior infrastructure should we leave behind as a failsafe, and for how long?

– “Reducing the city to a collection of facts decontextualizes it from its history, its political economy, the wider set of social, economic and environmental relations that frame its development and its interconnections and interdependencies that stretch out over space and time.” Can the same not be said for the people living in the cities? Reducing people down to a collection of statistics diminishes their expression, culture and individualism. If the consequences of corporate interests mean that cities are reduced to facts and citizens are represented by statistics in the name of efficiency and market growth, what kind of societal loss will we meet?

– “Dashboards facilitate the illusion that it is possible to ‘picture the totality of the urban domain’, to translate the messiness and complexities of cities into rational, detailed, systematic, ordered forms of knowledge.” They also have a hierarchy. Information can be highlighted or hidden from the public/figureheads depending on what the person/group presenting the information wants shown. It can be that a viewer is overwhelmed with information, and therefore does not see a statistic hidden in plain sight. Will municipalities claim transparency while burying unpleasant information in more positive material?

Digital Infrastructure of Withness: Constructing a Speculative City – Gabrys

– ” The city also never sleeps, as it efficiently and automatically activates, restocks, recharges, and recycles during the night.” Why, exactly, does the city need to rest and recharge at all? Can a smart city, made up of machines not be continuously working?

– “Those that can speak to it, in its language, stand a better chance of counting and being taken into account as a relevant node in its networks. Those who do not may find they cannot get a foothold in the world the smart city has made and possessed.” What happens to those who either cannot or will not accept and join a “smart” society? Do they get left behind? Is the population eased into a new, smart lifestyle or forced into it?

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”?

Urban Data Infrastructures – Jiaqi

“Smart cities and the politics of urban data”

As the author mentioned in this book, “the fear for some commentators is the creation of highly vulnerable and costly urban systems, rather than robust systems that create efficiencies and resilience.” The author said “hackable”. Does that mean after smart city is hacked, it could not “smart” again or just say it is not under control anymore? Will the infrastructures also can not regulating-self or say crashing, if we do not consider the cost of smart city before making it?

“…a fact is never simply a fact.Facts are produced, not simply measured.” The indicator, benchmarking, and dashboard all can not be a fact, but they could help measure a fact. When they all have been changing with the different time and space, does fact change along with them? But if fact is changing, why call it fact? Does Smart City need a fact?

“Digital Infrastructures of Witness: Constructing a Speculative City”

The author mentioned three witnesses here – measurement, automatism and contingency. Three of them, from my perspective, the hardest and easiest part is “contingency”. Because the most factors of contingency are citizens( sensing citizens & citizen sensing), the big data come from citizens and change along with citizens daily life and their routines. To say contingency is so hard to measure, manage and unpredictable, but why the author said contingency is a key way in which the concretization of digital infrastructure can be understood?

Urban Data Infrastructures

Digital Infrastructure Withness

“The transformations that occur as smart cities migrate from an abstract and even speculative set of technologies to more concrete materializations,” What is concrete materialization author referring to.

“It is important to continue to extend the environmental aspects of computation in these ways, since it enables a more dynamic and processual understanding of how environments and digital media concresce to form actual entities and actual occasions,” How would these sensors work during any environment hazard?

“Sensors can be found overlapping with existing infrastructures, in some cases forming new networks; sensors are in place to monitor speci c temporary uses and events such as construction; sensors are monitoring air and vibration and water levels; and sensors are carried around in smartphones, as wearables, and other portable devices, whether as DIY citizen-sensing tools or monitors for detecting specific phenomena,” – does that mean participation by citizens is just using the digital infrastructure (lowest layer as discussed in previous lecture)?

Urban Data Infrastructure —-Shen

1 Smart cities and the politics of urban data

Technocratic governance is government under the data and suitable algorithms control. Those solutions created by algorithms should be always the best choice. In such cases will we lost control by algorithms? In the end those algorithms might destroy democracy?

Those concerns about smart city data most of them are already existing, there is an issue about data neutrality. Such as carbon dioxide rate, it used to believed carbon dioxide is main reason causing global warming, will in recent research shows that aren’t. data at our present perceive could be total different and might leading to serious problems.

2 Digital Infrastructures—-Jennifer Gabrys

The program earth as techno-geographies it easily confuse with GIS geographic information system. The GIS system also is a data collector testing bed which help making better decision and improved communication, but GIS is more likely a data recording. Should we use the sensing to track huge environment data? The environment seems like an invariable data model, which only change tiny in a decade.

Urban Data Infrastructures – Feng

Program Earth

- Page 246 “Sensors are also not the only source for data generated to manage urban systems—alternative data sources include both static and dynamic data collected from social media streams, participatory-sensing systems, and predictive and strategic modeling capabilities.”
For the direction of future smart cities. Should we try to make sensors become the only source for the collection of data? And is it good for the “previous” other sources?
Page 256 “This point draws on Simondon’s discus- sion of how relations are not formed through the adding up of individuals to form collectives. Rather, collectives are transindividuated into distinct entities, and it is this mode of parsing collective potential that in-forms individuals and relations.”How to understand this “relation”? Also, as we know, in sometime, the collective’s activities will cover some individuals’, even some important ones’ activities. So how to deal with this?
Smart Urbanism
- Page 18 “First, a technocratic approach is highly reductionist and functionalist, always based on a limited selection of data and shaped by the formulation of algorithms, and fails to recognise the wider effects of culture, politics, policy, governance and capital in shaping city life and urban systems.”
  
  The limited data is not always work bad. For example, people’s eyes will collect lots of information for visual, but their brains can not deal with those mass. Thus, the brain actually only use limited information from eyes’ collection, and it already enough to support the normal life of a human. So, why base on a limited selection of data will be a problem?

Urban Data Infrastructures – Yumeng Chen

Digital Infrastructures of Withness: Constructing a Speculative City

–In this article, the author talked several times about indeterminate technology about the smart city. How ever, if technology can not be positive, should we take the risk to upgrade our city to smart cities?

–In alomost all the cases, smart city is kind like equal to smart devices, or only the new buildings can be part of the smart city. Is there any example that we turn the old building to the smart building without destroy?

Smart cities and the politics of urban data

— When we are talking about the smart city, we always focus on the functions and benefits. However, we ignored that if we use devices to send and receive signals, it has the requirement of the hardwares. So that most of the citizens have to replace their devices. Does the citizens have to pay for upgrading toward the smart city?

Urban Data Infrastructures

Program Earth: Digital Infrastructures of Withness – Gabrys

“Abstract technology is not necessarily a cognitive model that is implemented but rather a set of dynamic changes that occur in any given techno cultural system which makes possible the concretization of particular technologies”, By becoming “environmental” the technology cognitively concresces with the environment albeit continues to mediate a message the form of “conditions in which particular entities may take hold”. Entering the environment; they threaten to alter the ratios of human perception, and “When those ratios change, Men change”

“But as embodied if differently directed creatures in shared worlds” – Does the smart city “threaten” to dismantle our human-central ideologies (what about my voice) in pursuit of a more concresced environment? Could that be by we feel threatened?

“Alternative data sources include both static and dynamic data collected from social media streams, participatory-sensing systems, and predictive and strategic modeling capabilities” – Do DIY sensors and participatory technology not allow us to easily manipulate the outcome of data and in doing so contribute to our built environment in a more conscious “citizenship-fulfilling” manner?

“Planners, the exhibition text and book indicate, are also key to steering a city in the right direction.” In Playing the City Game, “by adjusting levers on a dashboard, a status menu indicates how well one is doing with every urban resource, infrastructure, and problem that is to be addressed must be quantified in order to be made computable”. How are citizens changed in the eyes of planners? Could a projection of the city as a data bed threaten to create a sociological divide between citizens and planners (programmer vs programmed)? The message (medium) being a status bar (low res, fast pace) vs intuitive observation and active participation in the city (high res, slow pace data)?

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” (Bloomberg), “Urban life must be enumerated in order to be managed within this cybernetic system. But once measured the city is meant to emerge as an easily pliable and modifiable system.” – What happens when non-quantifiable information results in false hypotheses and respective implementations?

“Ambient intelligence and the Internet of Things presents the problem of deciding which connectivities we really want as human beings on this planet” – This coincides with Sherry Turkle’s claim (Alone together) that digital connectivity has resulted in the preference of the majority of the public to choose media of communication that enable the division and distribution of attention between friends and family (physically present and not) and is constituted partially by today’s generalized “fear of missing out” (FOMO) brought forth by the speed at which information exchanged in the digital age. However, since multitasking is a proven myth, the result is merely a lowered, sporadic attention span.

“I see withness more as an articulation of processes of participation that involve becoming together across an extended array of entities. Whitehead described a community where multiple entities are effectively resonating within and experiencing a shared registered of world-making” – An active citizenship in the smart city is thereby constituted by the participation and self-expression of agency which collectively lends itself to a city that is a reflection of its citizen’s conscious decisions.

“Withness asks how are we thinking with, being with and becoming with the smart city (however) Rather than open technology to a multiple array of inhabitations, encounters and modes of withness, these projects often reduce technology to a utensil” – Is open circuit technology the answer? Is a closed circuit smart city indicative of our tendency to attempt to resolve today’s problems with (tomorrow’s) technology and yesterday’s state of mind?

Smart cities and the politics of Urban Date – Kitchen, Lauriault & McArdle

“Instrumental rationality” & “Solutionism” are terms used to describe the smart city’s approach to problem solving and urban, infrastructural design implementations. “There is a belief that complex open systems can be disassembled into neatly defined problems that can be solved or optimized through computation” – Can we not agree that some issues are indeed both complex enough and computable to warrant (SOME) smart city intervention? Should a distribution of control/power be allocated to the citizens in areas not deemed fully quantifiable by “highly reductionist” means of collection and analysis? What form will that distribution take? Can it not be argued that certain power has been allocated to the citizens (in the form of their active participation) that allows them to consciously manipulate the “system” for their own benefits?

There’s a general fear that “smart cities may well lead to a highly controlling and unequal societies in which rights to privacy, confidentiality, freedom of expression and life chances are restricted”, Could this be regarded as more of a sociological issue due to the culturally imbedded notions of the importance of privacy, confidentiality and freedom of expression (set forth by print technology)? Will the actions and analyses carried by government agencies not ultimately make our cities safer in an age where infiltrations and cyber-attacks are ever more frequent?

“Cities of the world now routinely generate suites of indicator data, using them to track and trace performance, guide policy formulation and inform how the cities are governed/regulated” – Is City benchmarking any more of a benign threat to citizen morphing than a tabula rasa smart city? Used to “establish how well an area is performing vis-à-vis other locales or against best practice” – But what constitutes best practice? Or a City falling behind? If the mean of data collection is just as impersonal of that of smart sensor beds, does that not risk equally inaccurate and presumptive hypotheses and respective implementations?