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?

Sensing the Samrt Citizen —- Shen

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?

 

 

 

Sensing the Smart Citizen — Yumeng Chen

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?

Sensing The Smart Citizen – Sandra

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?

Sensing The Smart Citizen

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?

W04 Quantified community: Hudson Yards Nida

Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019

  1. Are smart cities considered to have affordable housing when demographically they would target, and would probably only be affordable for the upper class? Such fully instrumented technologies embedded in our daily lives would be expensive to afford and maintain. Would these smart cities increase the disparity between upper, middle and lower classes?
  2. Is social interaction is considered important when designing smart cities and spaces for people who live I these cities, how is this interaction quantified? How accurately are the data set provided by this quantification to develop smart technology successfully integrated into our lives and help improve social interaction between users and between a user and the city?
  3. “The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism,” Hannah Arendt warned in 1958, is “not that they are wrong but that they could become true” — that the very instruments used to measure behavior are indicative of, and constitutive of, societies of automatism and “sterile passivity.”

The data we generate, based on determinist assumptions and imperfect methodologies, could end up shaping populations and building worlds in their own image.” Data we generate does shape a city and hence people who live in that city, But what is the alternative to using instruments that measure behavior and provide data to create such environments? How else can we design technologies without monitoring a human’s behavior?

 

  1. “Circuits are the new topology of this terrain, once dominated by tunnels and tracks. while such systems are environmentally “smart” — they eliminate noisy, polluting garbage trucks; minimize landfill waste; and reduce offensive smells — they also cultivate an out-of-sight, out-of-mind public consciousness.”

Does this new topology need to adopt an out-of-sight and out-of-mind attitude? How are citizens and users (transient) affected and or their needs and wants addressed by smart cities? Do Test beds such as Hudson Yards consider data from different users and citizens relative to physical and information infrastructure?

 

 

A Framework for Computational Urban Planning – Kontokosta

 

  1. “Focusing on the neighborhood scale also allows for a meaningful interaction with, and participation by, the people who live, work, and play in that space and shifts the emphasis of data-driven design away from top-down routinization to a human- centric problem-solving.” Even though this shift from a city to a neighborhood scale may provide more opportunities to connect and engage with local residents in problem identification, data interpretation and problem solving, however it still does not take cultural, political , religious etc into consideration. A more focused approach would help identify issues more clearly but how would these problems be addressed; by the community of people themselves (participatory) or by the investors and designers of these test beds? How can ‘strength of social interaction’ be quantified? How can the unquantifiable be quantified for data collection necessary for smart cities and quantified communities?

 

  1. “The ability to test, refine, and scale the types of sensor technologies and modeling techniques described here represents a significant advancement in defining the usefulness, viability, and implementation of ubiquitous urban sensing.” Real-time feedback is one way of studying the human behavior affectively, what other ways constitute to studying the human behavior effectively without quantifying date. Is a human-centric view of urban sensing an effective strategy to understand the relationship and interaction between humans, sensors and data? Such as static sensor peering and mobile sensor peering.

 

  1. ‘in particular, the intention is to use the instrumentation framework and collected data to address specific challenges and urban problems relevant to, and defined by the local community.’ By involving communities of different scales and different types, would it not make it more complicated and difficult to create a well fit integrated model into different communities? Since every community is different, how effective would this model be?

Quantified Community

The Quantified Community and the Neighborhood Labs

While the initial statement of Kontokostas might sound apelling, when he claims to use “the actual  potential of big data and analytics to positively shape future cities in a way that is sensitive to social and political realities, and reflective of the needs and desires of people who actually lives in the cities”; in further developments it’s clear the contradiction beteween big data and recording the actual live in the city. Kontokostas sees the problem as a technical one, as if by creating a more granular model of measurement we would have a more direct and precise reflection of every day live, and as if there were no bias in the measurement by itself. It’s also visible how his model of participation doesn’t really take in account the citizens in an active way. In this context, which could be other possible ways to measure everyday life? which would be a model of participation by which citizens can enpower themselves and have a more active role in the shaping of the city?

Intrumental City

As Mattern states critically, the model of the Quatified City has as a result that “Smart citizenship […] is thus equated with monitoring and managing one’s relation to the urban environment […] rather than with ‘exercising the rights and responsabilities’ or ‘advancing democratics engagements through dialogue and debate'”. As this model comes from an academy-industry-government complex, as Mattern calls it, based on the  conceptual models of ‘Urban triumphalism’, ‘Sustainable Urbanism’, and ‘Technoscientific Urbanism’; how can we crete different models of urbanism, which takes critically the other models, and in which this academy-industry-government complex, can be transformed to an a citinzens-academy-government-industry complex (in that order)?

Quantified Community: Hudson Yards

“The Quantified Community and Neighborhood Labs:
A Framework for Computational Urban Planning and Civic Technology”  -Constantine E. Kontokosta

“In practice, dated and antecdotal rules of thumb are often used to guide development, planning, and design decisions and to evaluate the effects of policies implemented” – clarify

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?