Alternative Future

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?

Alternative Future

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?

Alternative futures

 

In his article, Rob Kitchin characterizes the epistemology behind the concept of smart cities as being “reductionist, mechanistic, atomizing, essentialist, and deterministic in how it produces knowledge about cities.” and argues that this approach “decontextualizes a city and its systems from history, its poiitics and political economy, its culture and communities, the wider set of social, economic and environmental relations that frame its development, and it wider interconnections and interdependencies that stretches out over space and time”. In this sense, how could we incorporate other epistemological models to the development of the city, or at least subsume the present one to another set of values, in a way that lets creating a model of the smart city that takes into account all this issues?

In terms of governance, Kitchin critices the current model of the smart city, and describes it as “top-down, centraly controlled and managerial in orientation, often introduced by bureaucrats rather than elected officials.” In this sense, he points out the need that solutions in the smart city “be introduced and implemented through processes co-creation and co-production between city administrators, companies and citizens; be open and transparent in their formulation and operation, including using open platforms and standards where possible; and be used in conjunction with a suite of aligned interventions, policies and investments that seek to tackle issues in complementary ways, blending technical, social, political and policy response”. In this context, how could such open structures of co-creations be implemented, and which would be the role and degree of participation of the citizens in such processes and platforms?

In their article, Lange and the Waal define ownership of the city as “the degree to which city dwellers feel a sense of responsability for shared issues and are taking action on these matters”. In this sense, how can technologies be used to foster such ownership, but not only as a feeling, but in a way that articulates action and participation to engage with the co-design of the city?