Category: questions

 “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?

 

 

3

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?

1. ‘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?

 

2. 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.

 

3. “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?

 

 

 

 

Citizen sensing in the smart and sustainable city

 

*In concept of smart city, continues change in imaging, implementation and experience is predicted which might create instability or disturbance in lifestyle. It might create confusions among citizen or lead to wrong decisions related to feedback.

 

*Citizen need to be smart and participative for concept of smart city. What will encourage citizens to participate? It could be a personal profile building issue and related dependent consumer services. (ex. credit score )

Is this a regulation or freedom?

 

*In future, citizens are concretizing concept of sustainability with give and take relationship in terms and feedback and services. In quick feedback system negative reactions from citizens will get unite quickly which might create unhealthy environment in city, just a negative thought.

 

*The smart city is indicative of political and economic interest and targets will be related to that. How an idea of sustainable or smart city will solve socio-cultural problems? Or how it will deal with problems like insensitivity in citizens?

In Gabrys’s words, in the Smart City “The actions of citizens has less to do with individuas excercising rights and responsabilities and more to do with operationalizing he cybernetic functions of the smart city. Participation involves computational responsiveness and is coextensive with actions of monitoring and managing one’s relation to environments, rather to engaging democratic engagment through dialogue and debate” (196). In this context, which other models of agency or subjectivity could be used to describe other forms of participation of civic engagement? And to which degree this engagement should be operationalized only through the action of sensing and providing data to the system, rather than other forms of action?

In this paradigm “the sensing that takes place in the smart city involves continually monitoring processes in order to mamage them […] Humans may participate in the sensor city through mobile devices and platforms, but the coordination across ‘manual and automated’ urban processes unfolds within programmed environments, which organize the inputs and outputs of humans and machines”. This model opens to the question on how this systems could be designed into a not centralized way? The production of data not necessarily, and not always should be centralized, and this opens a question on ownership of data, but also on how citizens can claims on their own data, their community data, and how this data can be mobilized to push development and change in a local scale, instead of gathered in a centralized manner that pushes to a top-down urban design.

In What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen?, it is argued that “Network technologies afford forms of organisation that make possible citizenled initiatives capable of competing with the traditional planning mechanisms of municipal governments. By focusing on people – not technology – as the primary actors within the system, this approach aspires to foster new forms of participatory planning and governance, where social and cultural factors are emphasised over proprietary high-tech solutions with big price tags.” This argument reflects on other models of Smart urbanism, and opens to the question on why this models are focusing on the sensing and actuating capabilities of new technologies, instead of it dialogic and communication cappabilities? When communication comes out to the surface, it is only to speak about the interconnectected infrastructure where devices and city infrastructure communicate, instead of exploring the new ways of communication and participation between people that this technologies enable.

Programming Earth

• P187 “Might this mean that citizenship is less about a xed human subject and more about an operationalization of citizenship that largely relies on digital technics to become animate?”

  What dose author mean the “operationalization of citizenship” of  an non-human citizen? Is there a example of that?

• P189 “Yet proposals focused on enabling citizens to monitor their activities convert these citizens into unwitting gatherers and providers of data that may be used not just to balance energy use, for instance, but also to provide energy companies and governments with details about everyday living patterns.” “tooling up citizens” “alter[ing] the subjectivity of contemporary citizenship” “how do urban material politics and possibilities for dem- ocratic engagement also transform?” 

  In this case, would you think “unwitting” or “tooling up” show a picture that, in this kind of smart city, people’s citizen right will be declined? And also, with the data collector’s raise, is it a possible that there will be a new autarchic “leader” who could and utilize control lots of data?

• P194 “The project proposal materials advocate the smart city as the key to addressing issues of climate change and resource shortages, where sustainable urban environments may be achieved through intelligent digital architectures.”

  This “key” is use for the city zone, how about the suburban area?

  Smart Citizens

  • P17 “Unfortunately Sterling’s call for a temporary autonomous zone7 for smart city dropouts ultimately leads to the Smart City ghetto.”
    Following last question, is that the “key” could be the reason of forming smart city dropouts?

    Which would like more possible to generate smart city dropouts, smart infrastructure or smart citizen? In another word, static or dynamic?

From Environments to Environmentality

• Gabrys mentioned citizens should not denounce theses projects and proposals as tools of control, neither the governance, but to understand the ways how to distribute computational materializations. It ’s difficult to do with that, but how about another way to remake citizens in smart city – making citizens themselves to be the governance. Is that possible?

• When technique become to the new environment in our world replacing the natural environment, for example, when you walk on the street, your attentions no more focus on the surrounding people, trees or birds but the smartphones, smart- screens, what do you sense the real nature? Is this issue would become to be a psychological problem of citizens?

What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen?

• Top- bottom is to say a smart city in a box. How about bottom- top? could we call this way as a smart city on a tree? The author seems to say no matter which way to build a smart city, the technology is not the key. But what is?

What is so smart about smart citizens?

 

As smart citizens are the data indicator, we all contribute to the system. Those data could influence the political and governance. If the data which play the main role in making policy, it would be centralized governance, we might also lost freedom and flexibility to control our own life?

The smart citizens are come up with commercial idea, if we look on the other way, all the citizens in the smart city are just data indicator or collector, it’s not unreplaceable. Indeed the city and network system become more smart, but what about the citizens? How much benefits could we get from the smart city?

 

Citizens sensing—-Jennifer Gabrys

Biopolitical 2.0 is a term discuss about life living in smart city with media network, consider the programming the city, how should citizen be the part of the city?  Who will be the input and who will be the output devices? And what is the sequence of each person as input/output devices?

 

Biopolitical 2.0 seems more concern like population effect. Under this circumstance the citizen and citizenship could have distinct shift. Power and wealthy will shift easily. Is this change give citizen more democracy or constraint the citizen’s distinctive?

 

 

 

Citizen Sensing in the Smart and Sustainable City: From Environments to Environmentality

 

If the citizens depend on the smart city’s devices too much, when accident happens, such like  power cut or  system crashed. Do the citizens still have the ability to reply?

 

If our city becomes the smart city, does it mean our living habit will change very much? Just like bought a new computer, we should install all the soft wares we need and learn how to use the new operating system?

 

What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen?

 

Now the situation is, the smart devices make a city into a new city, citizens have to learn the new like style. Which makes people do not have the sentience to the city they living in. will it makes the city became a fast food city?

 

When every citizen becomes the participant of building a smart city, which sounds very sweet that people will have more sense of belonging of the city. However, every human being has his own idea and understanding of how to make his own city. How can we make certain that the city will develop in the right way?

Citizen Sensing in the Smart and Sustainable City – Gabrys

– “…the term “smart cities” derives from “smart growth,” a concept used in urban planning in the late 1990s to describe strategies for curtailing sprawl and inefficient resource use…” In some cities, even those who have “smart” initiatives, physical growth and expansion is necessary and already occurring (not suburbs, actual growth of the city) in order to keep up with a growing population. In what ways can we learn from sprawl, and manage a swelling city in a smart way?

– “The primary way in which sustainability is to be achieved within smart cities is through more efficient processes and responsive urban citizens participating in computational sensing and monitoring practices. Urban citizens become sensing nodes- or citizen sensors- within smart city proposals.” In both passive and active descriptions of citizens as sensors, people are viewed as data inputs to be mined, monitored and analyzed so much so that the “smart city” might forget that they are just that- people. Even if the citizens are willing to participate, is there a way to make them feel like they are more than just an instrument after the planning and development stages are complete? We have become accustomed to instant gratification, is this something to play into? In what ways can individuals and groups see immediate benefits (and consequences) for the city, themselves and others through their choices?

What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen? – Shepard, Simeti

– A control room for a smart city or dumb citizens; which is more of a risk? With the Smart City in a Box idea, there are many possibilies for something to go wrong. It may be hacked, it may fail after a power surge or natural distaster, it could be tampered with or damaged physically. If the whole brain of the smart city is in one box, what happens when that box is compromised? On the other hand, what happens if a smart city relies mainly on smart citizens to function and the citizens do not comply as they should?

– “Does leveraging social media and networked information systems really broaden participation, or merely provide another platform for proactive citizens already more likely to engage within the community?” Just how easy do we have to make it for people to participate? Is it constructive to offer participation to the idlest and ‘dumbest’ of citizens, or does the lack of an easy means of contribution and feedback further polarize and silence those who already do not have voices within their communities?

Programming Earth – Gabrys

Isn’t the development of test beds themselves counter intuitive in pertinence to the environment and sustainability? The manufacturing of all that steel, glass or even the development entire man made sites? Should the smart city initiative be more of an integration model than a ground up process? Is the reason it’s not, the precariousness of our communities to such implementation? Or the low monetary return on developing a soft city without renewed or additional potential for (profitable) real-estate?

How can we prevent altering or heavily impacting “material-political distributions of power” risking possible modes of “subjectification”? Is our perception of citizens as “dumb sensing nodes” due to allocation of the sensory data to corporations and not back to the city and it’s citizens instead? That instead of locals advocating changes in the community (itself a bond-strengthening interactive experience) and collaboratively striving towards a goal – that change, much like a cookie cutter, is being forced based on data that remains exclusive from our conscious input and fails to accommodate citizens existing outside the averaged datum line?

“Citizen sensing as a form of engagement is a consistent reference point for development-led and creative practice engagements with smart cities” Who is the next generation of designers and developers designing for?  The average? Or does big data allow us to “zoom in” on smaller less general demographics, understand patterns in their behavior and then design for them? Although our scrutiny and suspicion is warranted, it’s healthy to bear in mind that a cookie cutter approach (albeit less informed) was taken largely to some of our most revered cities. Urban planners and architects hypothesize about how they make people feel and what people want, and once a consensus has been reached (accurate or not) the designs (ranging from single unit to entire city scales) were implemented, and the subjects forced to adapt. If the same approach is used now with the added accuracy due to sensory data analysis, Is it not then our responsibility as designers to use said information to build more inclusive, livable and traverse-able spaces?

The citizen is a data point. Both a generator of data and a responsive node in a system of feedback – does that not reinforce our participation and citizenship as parts to a whole environment? Is perhaps the reason we are so uncomfortable with such loss of control our narcissistic belief in our rights and freedom superseding the importance of all else, living and none living? A mentality that places us at the center of the universe?

What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen? – Shepard & Simeti

“More problematic is how this approach promotes a technocratic view of the city and urban development, the corporatism of civic governance” etc..Could a preventative measure be the strategically designed absence of sensors and networks in areas such as public spaces or street intersections? Citizen smartness (without technology) to balance the overload of information and possibly it’s effects on forms or perceptions of citizenship? E.g Drakun and Haron shared spaces, Holland

Embedded within the popular notion of the word “smart” is the idea that the optimizations and inefficiencies these technologies promise will inevitably make for a better life. Does the word smart itself bear a psychological effect on people and their will of adoption? That its self explanatory that smarter is always better?

“An eager, engaged, canny urban participant, where I’m not “smart” and certainly not a “citizen,” and where the infrastructures and the policies are mysterious to me.” Is Sterling not in effect describing the smart city? Where he unwittingly participates while remaining to think and act inefficiently? Which leads to the question, what will a smart city look like? Are we to expect a dense overlay of information and visual saturation or are we to imagine the embedded technology as a background that informs the mediators and urban planners of the city?