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Alternative Future—-Shen

1 Owning the city: New media and citizen engagement in Urban design

When we facing the issues about turning Smart City into Social cities, such like social equity and environmental sustainability and adequate water. Those issues could solve easily by the smart city and other issues such like perceived decline of publicness and aging population. Those issues as it said are not single party issues, they are collective issues that involve multiple fiction. What if those problem are remaining by ages and social change. Those issues could be facing city transition and city decline, which could not change by smart city and how to deal with them ?

Like it said the ownership relationship between citizens and city. Which citizen could get involved decided where the place to build and how the land will be used. This could be happened in a small population region. With massive population to involve the original intention could be failed. Populism some time could destroy a city without code or guide line. How could we select the people who can involve and how far citizens could involve the process, and what is the guide line of this involvement?

2 Rethinking, Reimagining and Remaking Smart cities

While we consider what smart city we would like to live in, it has several viewing angle, like compare with the promises and perils we could choice which technology we could us and apply best to us in our smart city. the writer said the means is post- justified by ends, rather than the ends shaping the means. Is that also means that we should choice and build our smart city we want not supposed be fit with the smart city as it data collector?

The process of smart city evolve is required stakeholder and working relationship how do we decided the principles? And how could principles balance the stakeholder and the public? Will this be practical? Or just ideological imagine?

Alternative Futures — zhicheng zhang

is the equilibrium of the bottom–up community models and the top–down institutional participation policies brings the ownership to its citizens or the ownership make the equilibrium of the bottom–up community models and the top–down institutional participation policies?
with the increase of the ownership, will the role of architect change into a solution provider and citizen become the designer who joins these solutions together?
On the ethics and security concerns, will a government controlled system more secure? or a market-driven solution will be better?

Alternative Futures

Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal, “Owning the city: New media and citizen  engagement in urban design.” First Monday [Online], 18.11 (2013): Web. 30 Jan.  2017

“At best citizens in smart city policies are allowed to provide feedback somewhere in the design process, although oftentimes they figure as ‘end–users’ instead of being engaged in the early stages of co–creation.” How can we begin to incorporate the citizen in the first design phases of a smart city? Why do developers of “smart city technology” treat the role of the citizen, more or less, as a pawn in a chess game, rather than the King in the chess game, or even the checkered board the game is played on? (Consumer vs. end-user)
Does the use of the term “ownership” in the text refer to what we may call a “smart citizen”? Does ownership include being able to participate in all design phases of city or community building?

Rob Kitchin, “Rethinking, Reimagining and Remaking Smart Cities,”  Programmable City Working Paper 20 (August 2016).

The companies that create smart city technology create products that are supposed to be able to be incorporated anywhere they’re needed, meaning, “one size fits all”. Being that every city has different issues and specificities that need to be dealt with, can these companies or any other existing company begin to make “city-specific” products? Companies like IBM and Cisco may see smart cities as a market based opportunity. Would smaller and/or local companies who produce smart city technologies be able to begin to close that gap between the smart city begin for the people vs. for the public?

Smart City vs. Smart Citizens

What Is a City that It Would Be ‘Smart

The smart city vision, has one overriding motivation: efficiency.
Q) Who defines what is smart? Is efficiency a synonym for smartness? Are citizens involved in constructing the definition of smartness or these ideas sourced from influential entities and governance with the backdrop of profit- making treating cities as a canvas for corporate exchanges?

Active citizens are knitting together their own smart city, albeit not one envisaged by the systems integrators and technology corporations.

Q) How sustainable are these smart citizen platforms? What impact do the active participation for constructing a smart city create and how does it survive? What could be some possible frameworks that can strengthen these initiatives and what could be possible challenges?

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Urbanization and Ubiquity,” Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

Today, a new group of companies have taken GM’s spot in the driver’s seat and are beginning to steer us toward a new utopia, delivered not by road networks but by digital networks.
Q) What would be cost that this new utopian vision comes along with? What would be some un-speculated modifications in the urban spaces, this new infrastructure of digital networks demand?

Crashing and Hacking the Smart City

Based on Cesar Cerrudo’s reading: An Emerging US (and World) Threat: Cities Wide Open to Cyber Attacks, I think we can understand the smart city is tending to make citizen life better. It is like the large scale laptop. In the box there are many components which are working closely to perform its function. Can smart city like the laptop, it can be somehow back up itself and able to restart when it was attacked? Maybe the plan B will solve the partial problem that he mentions on paper such as cyber-attack. Then there will be another question, where to restore the data for such large “computer”? Since every second we produce thousands of data which will be process by some smart device, could be our phone, traffic sensor etc. Maybe on the end of data collection point we can have a smart filter device which only keep the important data. The idea of security is always going to be the major issue for today society. Maybe we should rethink the definition of security instead of fighting for it.

Also Cesar Cerrudo talks about the simple bugs with huge impact which is not an attack but the failure of software. Will the failure of software of the platform start impact other thing since we are trying to connect all smart things together? For example, he mentions that the traffic light system will be easiest system to be hacked. If we are using the smart phone to check the traffic on the road. Somehow the phone will hook up with traffic system. Will the failure of traffic system create a chine effect on our phone? Then the computer, maybe even bigger, other smart sensors/ system of city. Since the failure of software will exist somehow. Can we have some more complex interface just like he said on paper. For example, the internet access we have today. It should be the cellular data, wifi and line connection. Even the dinner next door. The example Townsend mentions on his book, the bug in BART system is the multiple failure of one single system. If we were not try to fix the problem immediately, instead we have another one which can have similar function. Then it will give us more time to fix the problem, not have the system shut down three times.

Crashing and Hacking the Smart City.

The extent to which mass urban surveillance will be tolerated in the smart cities will differ around the world. Government, with varying degrees of citizen input, will need to strike a balance between the cost of intrusion and the benefits of early detection.
Q) What would be the format of citizen input on which the Government would base its decision to the extent of surveillance? What would be the implications of buggy, brittle systems in the context of surveillance? What decisions will be based on such inputs and what conclusions will be derived?
An interesting point raised by Joy Buolamwini in her talk on algorithmic bias,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbnVu3At-0o ”

Across the US, police departments are starting to use facial recognition software in their crime fighting arsenal”
What would be the implications of using such biased systems and who monitors these biases? Who checks the accuracy and who makes them reliable?
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A design that works for all.
Q) Is the smart city development based on the philosophy of design for all? Is it supposed to cater to needs and preferences of all the citizens with magical systems that prove to work wonderfully for everyone? If yes, how are these systems visualized to function or are the citizens required to function according to the systems? Are these solutions inclusive and if not, who is excluded and on what basis? Are there exclusions based on age, abled and disabled bodies, rich and poor, skin color among various other factors?
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If the first generation of smart cities does truly prove fatally flawed, from their ashes may grow the seeds of more resilient, democratic designs.
Q) Does this imply, there is no better mechanism for smart city development than learning from failures? What would be the cost a city pays in all aspects to recover from such a failure and is it worth? Is this quest for smarter cities blinding us to some of the fatal implications it can hold in future like global warming, energy crises among others?

Crashing and Hacking the Smart City – Germania Garzon

An Emerging US (and World) Threat: Cities Wide Open to Cyber Attacks – Cerrudo

“Cities should be required to seriously consider how to best prepare against possible cyber attacks. Cities need to develop an emergency plan that provides steps to follow during a cyber attack and educate people on how to react while under attack. Fast and effective reaction can be key to preventing bigger problems including city chaos.”

– How does a smart city determine who develops an emergency plan for a cyber attack, and how would this plan be spread and implemented to the public?

– Is there a particular agency that regulates the type of technology used in smart buildings and monitors what is up to date or can be updated? Who is really to blame when a system undergoes a malfunction or even a threat?

– Is there a precedent we can look to that has solved this problem at any point, with Barcelona being the “smartest city” to date, how do they take precaution in these terms?

Crashing & Hacking the Smart City

“Although cities usually rigorously test devices and systems for functionality, resistance to weather conditions, and so on, there is often little or no cyber security testing at all, which is concerning to say the least.”(8) How much more would it cost for cities to actually implement these security tests?

Vendors implement little or no security testing in their products & they only sell to government agencies of specific parties, which makes it hard to acquire for research by skilled security testers. Why do governments lack the knowledge or the concern of the potential security risks these technologies may offer?

Are smart home vendors similar to vendors for “smart city technology” when considering & researching the potential security risks of their products?

Crashing and Hacking the Smart City – Feng

An Emerging US (and World) Threat: Cities Wide Open to Cyber Attacks

Smart Cities as a system is subdividing, such as more sensors in different places and undertake different responsibilities. For more efficiency and more accuracy, this kind of subdividing will be continue. However, the whole system will be more weak when there are too much subdividing. One subsystem crash may lead whole failure of system.
How could we make the stableness of system better in the processing of subdividing?

Page10

“Main building systems are run on the Windows XP operating system, which is old, outdated, not supported and less secure than new operating systems….”
It is a common issue in our life, the update of software and hardware is not synchro. For cities, it is a slow speed for its development but the upgrade of Cyber things is much faster.
Which is better for a Smart City’s growth, make cities change faster or make software suit cities slower?

Also, nowadays, lots of companies for their own benefits, do the “Planned Obsolescence”. If the PO will be used in building a smart city, there will be lots profit, and also lots of cost. Companies want the highest profit and the citizens want the lowest cost.
How to deal with this kind of condition?

Crashing and Hacking the Smart City — Shen

1 Buggy, Brittle, and Bugged

From the case 9.11 and US east earthquake in 2011 are showed that creation myths rely on faith as much as fact. It demonstrated how our cyber world could more brittle then we thought. And those are just caused by nature. In fact our cyber world are suffering attack or errors thousand times a day. How could we measure the loss of the cyber broke down? and how’s the restore power of the our society in the future cyber world?

Like the sensor served by it code, every data capture by it are served by own purpose. How to consider the hacker act of hacking system? Hacking bank system and benefit for itself considered as negative? Or hacking government data exposure dark history consider as positive? How could we defined the boundary of the cyber world act? Or could it consider access forbidden data as hacker?

2 An emerging US threat: City Wide Open to Cyber Attacks

There are so many option to break down our cyber world. What if our data infrastructure has been wiped out? Like one day all our individual currency or credit information data has been wiped out. Could we restore our order to our used to be? Is there any crash program to due with certain kinds of issues?