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For smart city initiatives to work well they need to be conceptualized and contextualized within a broader and richer understanding of what a city is and how it works in practice.

Q) Who does this conceptualization and decision making? What is the skill-set required to anticipate and articulate the context in order to conceptualize? Who defines as a right candidate to qualify these requirements in order to make such decisions or contribute to the process of decision-making? Is it a function of governance, city administration, architects, technology makers, citizens, users? And what would be a concrete process to visualize this broader understanding of the city? Is there a need for guidelines to develop this understanding that can be passed on the potential candidates? If yes, is there a need for consistency in these guidelines?

In general, smart city technologies, and associated rhetoric and science (urban science and urban informatics), are founded on big analytics. In short, this means algorithms are used to process vast quantities of real-time data in order to dynamically manage a system and to make future predictions.

Q) This is true for the top down and bottom up visions of smart city development. In that case, how do we ensure and facilitate participation? What would be the learning curve for users to be able to participate fully and what are the skill sets required? Is the bottom up approach just a leveling down of top-down approach? Is it an inclusive method for decision making? What happens to the excluded groups? And what would be the motivation for participation if it has a learning curve? Is it more like a competition than participation to make it loud to be heard?

The impression one gains from encountering smart city initiatives is that the starting point is the technology and then to partially approach the question from the perspective of what core issue (e.g., sustainability) its technical intervention (reducing traffic) might address. In other words, the means is post-justified by ends, rather than the ends shaping the means.

Q) Do technical interventions sometimes not function as building blocks to the process of problem-solving? Would it be a right to say, that the problem arises when, rather than using technical solutions as a resource to solve identified problems, problems are crafted to fit in the developed technology?

Reframing Reimaging Remarking Smart City

The author mentions the Promises and Perils in the process of smart city. One of them are: “ Will create a smart economy by fostering entrepreneurship, innovation, productivity, competiveness, and inward investment”  and “Promotes a strong emphasis on technical solutions and overly promotes top-down technocratic forms of governance, rather than political/social solutions and citizen-centred deliberative democracy”. After reading all the articles, I think the top – down is not against the democracy at all. It is just part of process. The totally democracy like bottom-up will not exist without top-down. But top- down will survived by it own. The question or fear is not to pause the develop of top-down system but engage the bottom-up system more. Then it goes back to the chapter: how can we engage the process of building the smart city. The development of multi-interface should be important component. Then another question emerges: what will be the benefit of citizen whom is engaging in the process, the sense of ownership?

Owning The City

One question before reading the article: what is the ownership in term of the smart city, and who is the owner and what did he/she/us own? The ownership is broad topic. In the aspect of smart city or big date, I do not think we as individual own anything, just because it is such big scale. Individual matters so little. We can claim we as group of user/ citizen owns our date. But what can we use it for? Research? Analysis? Development? I do not think the big data effect at all for our individual. The function of big data exists when it is processed. The person who process it, may claim he own it. But we are the generator of the date. From the base, we have the ownership. Just like the article I read before: Death of Authorship. The end of authorship is beginning of art. Could the death of ownership simulate a new page of smart city? We are no longer talking being the citizen of smart city but we are the smart city.

In the part of “ Recounting the role of urban tech: From smart city to social city”, author talks about the mobile device will allow the user to create the highly personalized image for their city. I just keep think the video that is post of Facebook. Even it is kind not related. But somehow the Facebook becoming a tool to review another city/ state for me. Maybe not only Facebook, but all other social media. Anyone which allow user to up load photos is kind creating a small file of city/ people. But not all image are nice, should we have a system to eliminate the “bad” one? Then who is doing that? Should we have a more “smart” upload system. Will this system reduce the participation of citizen?

Owning the city: New media and citizen engagement in urban design – Lange, Waal

• “We have shown how digital media have created a number of qualitative shifts in the way publics can be engaged with organized around and act upon collective issues. The shifts mean that it has become easier for many citizens to organize themselves and take ownership of particular issues. In turn this may lead not only to new ways in which social life is organized but also to new ways of shaping the built environment.”

– As technology starts to influence urban design and the built form of our surrounding environment, with light installations, objects and real-time reflection of citizens and the space we occupy, – how can architects play a bigger role in the development of the smart city besides developing physical structures such as Hudson Yards or New Songdo to better engage the citizens and participants of the future city?

– In regards to OMA’s lecture last night could we relate the idea of ‘new ways of shaping the environment’ to their idea of reorganizing program of architectural spaces into separate ‘objects’ that compliment each other by each taking a unique form?

Rethinking, Reimagining and Remaking Smart Cities – Kitchin

• “It means putting principles into action – to translate them into practical and political outcomes. Our own endeavours have demonstrated that smart city stakeholders are open to robust exchanges and are prepared to rework initiatives and change direction, especially if we are willing to work with them and others to realise any reframing, reimagining and remaking involved…However, in my view, such critique ideally also needs to suggest alternatives – whether ideological or practical – and to support the work of other oppositional groups (such as local communities or NGOs).”

– How can these reframing, and remaking initiatives be put forth and implemented without being seen as an attempt to push the idea of ‘togetherness’ when there are people like Jane Jacobs (previous reading) that would see it as a failing and destructive structure in a city?

On de Lange and de Waal, “Owning the city: New media and citizen engagement in urban design.” First Monday

-The authors argue that city dwellers should neither be expected to trade in their freedom of choice and autonomy for a community of homogeneous parochiality, nor supposed to be blasé about shared concerns of the commons (section#3). Looking beyond scenarios of compromise between one or the other of the prominent opposing modes of citizen engagement, the authors underline the need to create a common ground. What would the role of ICT be in addressing the current opposition? What kind of digital media would support such a paradigm shift towards the hybridization of the two extremes?

-In an attempt to redefine or expand the concept of community, de Waal and de Lange refer to Varnelis’ “networked publics” to describe the ways that assemble themselves around shared concerns, strengthened by their differences and organized through distributed networks (section#3). What architectures would enable ‘networked publics’ to come together and influence their environment? Are those spatial configurations more likely to reach a certain mature form or are they instead in a continuous process of production by the ‘networked publics’?

on Kitchin, “Rethinking, Reimagining and Remaking Smart Cities,” Programmable City 

-After tracing the two sides of the smart urbanism coin, Kitchin notes it is high time the constructive critique on smart cities matured into “concrete advice” (pp.6) for making smart cities, notably in a proactive manner – as if their networked and mobile ICTs are already fully in place. Later on, he suggests that governing bodies should be the first to lead this process to form and address normative questions and then coordinate smart city initiatives accordingly (pp.7). What kind of institutional and legal framework could grant city administrations with a more dynamic, ad-hoc role in the smart city discussion, instead of them being merely ‘clients’?

-Another challenge is to redefine smart governance and its technologies towards a more open, transparent and diverse “suite of solutions” (pp.8) or “interventions” (pp.11) where technical, socio-cultural, political and administrational parameters converge. What would the rules (and ratios) of such a complex and ambitious blend comprise of? How and by whom could these be written?