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?

W05 Sensing the Smart Citizen

 “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?

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. “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?

 

 

 

 

W05 – Sensing the Smart Citizen

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?

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.

Senzing the Smart Citizen

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.

Sensing the Smart Citizen – Feng Guo

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?

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 – Jiaqi

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?