Uncategorized – Page 6

Urban Data Infrastructures—zhicheng zhang

1. In Kitchen, Lauriault & McArdle’s reading, it says that some municipalities, indicator, benchmarking and dashboard initiatives are being used to underpin forms of new managerialism. it just likes the the dashboard of an aircraft cockpit provides detailed data about a plane and its flight. reflect this to the experiment in the 1970s in chile, even the experiment failed for many reasons, in the last few month before it failed, it was be found that some information which should be collected from factories are delayed. In the smart city which relies on the data from the sensor, unlike bugs in the system, a delay may hard to notice., as a result, a delay could be a deadly disaster. how to deal with it when we live in a city which relies on the data so much?

2. In Gabrys’ reading, he said “Environments and environmental computation also constitute situations in which “withness” might be articulated and inform processes of participation. Withness, following Whitehead, is a concept that signals modes of being and becoming together,” if we put this “withness” to extreme, the city and the environment have extreme withness, will we human lost our position, and become only the data provider, or may less than this?

3. Because of the contingency of the infrastructure, the relationship between the city and the citizen seems to be mutualism. When the city finally could adapt only by itself, will the “withness” of the city and its citizen disappear?

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?

Sensing the Smart Citizen – Germania Garzon

From Environments to Environmentality – Gabrys

“The importance of the everyday as a site of intervention signals the ways in which smart city proposals are generative of distinct ways of life, where a “micro- physics of power” is performed through everyday scenarios.40 Governance and the managing of urban milieus occur not through delineations of territory but through enabling the connections and processes of everyday urban inhabitations within computational modalities.”

– How will the CSC design proposal respond to the inevitable fact that not all humans or smart citizens will ‘participate’ or respond accordingly with what the expected dialogue predicts?

– Does the CSC proposal suggest that it can adapt to changes in human responses to a particular environment, or that it is not specific to a certain typology of ‘smart citizen’ ?

What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen? – Mark Shepard and Antonina Simeti

Things get murkier when we consider whom we are referring to as Smart Citizens. 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? What barriers to entry – cultural appropriateness, technological fluency – are embedded in the design and implementation of these citizen – led initiatives? What are the incentives to opt-in?

– Is the “smart citizen” in this case an example of what was mentioned in Gabrys’ reading of bio-political management? ” ways of life are situated, emergent, and practiced through spatial and material power relations” – social media?

Citizen Sensing in the Smart and Sustainable City – Neeta

“Theory of Smart Cities” , IBM authors involved with the Smarter Planet initiative suggest that the term ‘smart cities’ derived from ‘smart growth’, a concept used in urban planning in the late 1990s to describe strategies for curtailing sprawl and inefficient resource use which later changed to describe IT-enabled infrastructures and processes oriented toward such objectives.

So, the question arises, How did this transition from ‘smart growth’ to ‘smart cities’ take place? Where did this idea of desire for an IT enabled and networked city emerge and who guided this thought process of need for a networked and mechanically efficient city (smart city) as a progressive city?

A report funded by the Rockefeller foundation, the Institute for the Future suggests that smart cities are likely to be a ‘multi-trillion dollar global market.”

Are smart cities a need or the desire of citizens? And if ‘smart’ means efficient, would it be right to question the efficiency of cities we live in today. Are current cities inefficient? What is the optimal limit of efficiency, if that is the primary element we are looking at. Should the question be about a never ceasing want for efficiency or should it be more about being sufficient?

When code is meant to reprogram urban environments, it also becomes entangled in complex urban processes that interrupt the simple enactment of scripts.

Considering the complex nature of programmability, weaved into the fabric of urban processes it would be interesting to look at how the idea of a networked city with a primary focus on digital infrastructure ( to make it efficient and smart ) evolves with the evolving technologies and changing game players. Sensing citizen data and using this big data for decision making and the idea of connectivity using digital infrastructures is smart today. Will it be dumb in the future? Will it be replaced by concepts more rigorous, more intrusive or participative? Sensing a direction of this evolution and change is an important aspect to consider to realise when is it a time to slow down.

W5. Sensing the Smart Citizen – Pinelopi

On Gabrys, Jennifer – Program Earth: Chapter 7, Citizen Sensing in the Smart and Sustainable City: From Environments to Environmentality.

– According to Foucault, the behavior of a subject or population is but indirectly influenced in the generalized state of ‘environmentality’ (pp190). What would the techniques of environmental governance come to be in a smart city of direct monitoring of bodies and their predicted behavior patterns?

– In the smart city, software constitutes urban processes to such an extent, that they themselves fail in case the former does (pp197). Should computational operations consciously allow for faults and glitches in programmed environments instead of programming them out? The production of code, as MacKenzie describes it (pp197-198), bears resemblance to that of space. Software is a complex, co-written product that is constantly subject to change and prone to error. Do we need to design an oxymoron ‘non-plan’ approach to urban computing?

On Shepard, Mark and Simeti, Antonina – What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen?

– Mapping the field of smart urbanism, we come to realize that it is not at all homogeneous. To the contrary, it is characterized by a strict opposition whose ends are defined according to who leads the initiative (ICT companies, developers, governments vs. citizens), what are their methods (top-down, centralized vs. bottom-up, distributed) and what are their -more or less pronounced- intents (automation, optimization, efficiency vs. engagement, social and cultural revitalization) (pp13-14). As with every opposition, each end in a sense includes the ideas of the other – just inverted. This underlying convention prohibits them from articulating a different, more holistic approach and inducing change (pp17). A hybrid between the Smart City and the Smart Citizen may seem as a long-anticipated bridge, but what are would its ‘materials’ be? Who and how could design the convergence of two so seemingly disparate poles? Should we rather reinvent completely new tools for this middle ground?

Sensing the Smart Citizen

Program Earth: Chapter 7, Citizen Sensing in the Smart and Sustainable City: From Environments to Environmentality – Jennifer Gabrys

Gabrys suggest using ubiquitous and automated computerized technologies in a way in which it is used to change the environmentality of or spaces and urban fabric. How can these, or can these technologies begin to shape the social conditions within modern cities, such as the poor or lower class being subjected to the slums?
Gabrys states “Code is also not singularly written or deployed but may be a hodgepodge pf just-effective-enough script written by multiple actors and running in momentarily viable ways on specific platforms… A change to and element of the code, hardware, or interoperability with other devices may shift the program and it’s effects.” (Page 198) What is, or is there an example of where this has happened?

What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen? – Mark Shepard and Antonina Simeti

The smart citizen seems like a more justified approach to reaching a smart city instead of vice versa. Yet the essay states that it is hard to incorporate these local solutions due to the smart citizen on a larger scale, in regards to urban infrastructure. Could it be possible that smart neighborhoods or communities emerge, that can resolve their own local issues, being that our cities are already subdivided by neighborhoods?

Sensing the Smart Citizen, -zhicheng zhang

1. in the reading, since sensing the smart citizen is an important process in the smart city system, the information the pull out from citizen could influence the smart city. However, most of the information that comes from the citizen is the location, movement, or health data at most.Is the subjective data such as the mood of a citizen an important component for the smart city?

2. The subjective data is kind of abstract for data collection. How to quantify the subjective data such as the satisfaction of one citizen? nowaday a survey will be a solution, however, it is inefficient and sometimes annoying.

3. In Suzhou (a southern city close to Shanghai), China, a watch for the citizen is in crowdfunding since 8.14.2015. Its function includes traffic card, E-wallet, sports wristbands, and smart watch. I believe it is the first step to massive produce “smart citizen”. After several updates, the watch could become the smart citizen device that collects data from its citizen. is it the only efficient way to make the citizen smart by making a universal device for its citizen?

Quantified Community: Hudson Yards – Germania Garzon

Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards – Mattern

– Smart citizenship, Gabrys says, is thus equated with monitoring and managing one’s relationship to the urban environment — “operationalizing the cybernetic functions of the smart city” — rather than with “exercising rights and responsibilities” or “advancing democratic engagement through dialogue and debate,” as Arendt would prefer.

– Couldn’t we say that in a new smart urban environment like Hudson Yards, data collection, monitoring and participation are the new “dialogue & debate”?

– Are people actually scared of losing their “rights as citizens” to participate or influence the growth and development of the quantified community, or are they just misinterpreting what the present/future is offering us as inhabitants of the new quantified community vs a smart city?

The Quantified Community and Neighborhood Labs: A Framework for Computational Urban Planning and Civic Technology Innovation – Constantine Kontokosta

– The “Smart City” messaging is replete with claims of the potential for sensors and information and communication technologies (ICT) to re-shape urban life, although such rhetoric ignores the practical realties and constraints of urban decision-making and the social and distributional concerns of policy outcomes. Recent research has begun to counter and disaggregate the marketing language of smart cities with the actual potential of big data and analytics to positively shape future cities (and re-shape existing ones) in a way that is sensitive to social and political realities, and reflective of the needs and desires of people who actually live in cities… The QC provides an opportunity to vastly improve operational efficiencies and support resource conservation at the building and district scale. This objective switches the focus from understanding the dynamics of land use adjacencies and site access and mobility, to modeling resource flows and how environmental, physical, and social conditions influence consumption behavior. ”

– Does this mean we should push for a shift and expansion of quantified communities rather than ‘Smart cities’?

– How would the lives of the citizens living outside of both of these new urban typologies differ?

Quantified Community: Hudson Yards – Feng

In Kontokosta’s passage, the author mentioned the “slice of the city”. It could be considered a kind of model of city, or similar to the “one to one map” in the previous readings. They are both the model of a city, but in the readings, one is important and profitable to smart city, another one is not. The difference between them is the scale of data which was collected. So, What scale of data is a good volume for developing of smart city? How to determine the scale or the volume?

W4. Quantified Community: Hudson Yards – Pinelopi

– On Kontokosta K., “The Quantified Community and Neighborhood Labs: A framework for computational Urban Planning and Civic Technology Innovation”

The key feature of the Quantified Community (QC) seems to be that of scale. Kontokosta is repeatedly emphasizing on its importance to demonstrate that, as opposed to previous urban scale smart projects, time and resources are not squandered, social and political aspects are considered and citizens are an integral part of decision-making. Notably, the QC is understood as a hybrid of urban-scale Smart City initiatives and the “Quantified Self” movement (pp2) to overcome the problem of ‘low-resolution’ evaluation criteria of urban policies and design (pp4). In the words of Kontokosta, data acquired “voluntary (…) could also be used to understand links between the neighborhood/community conditions and personal health outcomes of residents” (pp7, my emphasis). Aren’t there ways to gain insight on behavior patterns other than directly monitoring bodies themselves?

– on Mattern S., “Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards circa 2019”

Mattern touches extensively on the material expression of ‘smartness’, identifying three key issues. On the one hand, fundamental urban processes are being dematerialized, hidden away and thus, ‘forgotten’ by citizens (pp5). The physical infrastructure that profoundly sustains the instrumental city is to be observed through “a deceptively clean, shallow interface” (pp13) – not unlike the screen-filled control rooms in Songdo. On the other hand, the build environment becomes an architectural product that appears to perform according to the branded identity of the district (pp5) in a ‘form follows data’ manner (pp6).

Considering the above, it seems that the instrumental city embodies the opposition of depth vs. surface: while its digital infrastructure mediates multiple levels of urban processes, it remains out of sight for the citizens and it is merely represented as an interface – a surface of control. The build environment is also developed along these lines, offering little or no insight on the parameters that constitute it. Shouldn’t the smart city be primarily about transparency and accessibility? Could contrasts like this be resolved in the future, or are they part of the smart problematique by default?