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?

Alternative Futures

Programmable City – Kitchen

“Of course, producing forms of smart urbanism that realize promises while curtailing perils is no easy task” – Could the route of the problem lie in our centralized outdated approach to planning constituent on predicting perils and attempting to resolve them in isolation from bottom up resources? Could this require time we simply do not have? Urgent and rapid development followed by a series of test versions allowing citizens to adapt to and tinker with the infrastructure could inspire developers while highlighting areas in need of more control or security. Is today’s way of approaching issues of tomorrow, outsourcing tools, technologies and power?

We have arguably established to some extend that top down and bottom up processes concrease in a cycle that constitutes: Top down Infrastructural implementation, bottom up tinkering and repurposing (predicated by access) & inspiration and further development. Stakeholders and investors in the infrastructure will always be partial to goals of efficiency and profitability while designers and citizens remain partial to “quality of life”. Is a “people code” (that functions much as building green codes do) worth considering? A dictation forcing developments to address and/or accommodate citizen sensitivities?

In highlighting the issue in our approaches to technological interventions, Kitchen states that the “means is post-justified by the ends rather than the ends shaping the means”. Is this approach not warranted? Especially after considering the notion that technologies (regardless of their original intended purposes) lend themselves to a larger picture that is yet to be realized?

Kitchen states that cities are frequently thought of by developers as a system(s) that “can be steered and controlled through technical levels”, highlighting the shallowness of the conception of the city as a set of quantifiable data sets. Is the answer in exploiting the raw data (through availability to designers, thinkers and tinkerers) to “shape the means to ends”, i.e, to draw educated complex relationships between seemingly unrelated data sets?

Kitchen highlights two issues underlying the current epistemological approaches to smart cities, the second being that the “scientific approach adopted for data generation, analysis and communication is reductionist and mechanistic… an approach that decontextualizes a city” – Must a scientific approach to data collection not simply be paired with contextual sociocultural investigation and analysis in order to minimize it’s augmentation to the city and it’s citizens? Must the scientist become the designer, sociologist, psychologist, artist, architect, engineer and citizen? Or is that in and of itself a dated ideology? Is it today’s solution a matter of outsourcing those needs to the collective rather than centralized processes? “A process of co-creation and co-production between city administrators, companies and citizens including using open platforms and standards where possible” – A Beta Smart City.

Owning the City – Martin de Waal

In introducing the notion of ownership, de Waal investigates how “digital media and culture allow citizens to engage with, organize around and act upon collective issues and engage in co-creating the social fabric and built form of the city” insinuating that infamous digital media have subserviently lent themselves to our empowerment – increasing the margin of our agency on our environment and defying dated geopolitical boarders.

“Ownership teases out several shifts that take place in the urban public domain characterized by tensions between individuals and collectives, between differences and similarities, and between conflict and collaboration.” – Initially, geopolitically constrained physical commons allowed for a limited domain of agency due to their fixation. As the internet dissolves geographical bubbles the digital environment becomes an ever more integrated and affective domain. Is power effectively decentralized in the smart future? Can actions half way around the globe have consequences at my front door? What implications (and potential) would such a scenario present with?

“The actual city is seen as the last and most difficult hurdle in successive phases of deployment of roll out rather than the sole place where experiment truly proves its value” – Could this is yesterday’s approach to issues of tomorrow? One of scientific analysis and subsequent implementations in isolation from citizens’ conscious input (including potentially relevant multidisciplinary professionals)? Does the solution lie in localized open beta smart structures that allow citizens to affect their immediate contexts (as opposed to transposed smart city structures) while preserving the analogous integrity of critical base infrastructures as a form of backup (soft failure) in the event of bugs and failures? Would this also serve as an ideal buffer to the transition to a “smart life” by allowing citizens to gradually adapt to and tinker with the infrastructure, discovering the potentials and experiencing the consequences of both the smart city and their renewed (arguably extended) domain of agency? Consider an infrastructure where citizens are not just consulted, but literally given the tools (technological platform) to build and tinker with their future environment.

In describing approach to quantified data, de Waal references Nold’s Bio mapping stating that “sudden spikes in heart rate or galvanic skin response were used to engage locals in discussions about these places and sensations produced in them” – Big data harvesting, deterministic and quantitative in it’s approach may well threaten to augment or engineer society. On the other hand, it provides with profoundly accurate information that could serve as a platform of discussion and action organized between educated professionals and citizens. Could the latter consideration allow us to circumnavigate unwanted potential consequences to the sociocultural fabric?

Could the merit in an open source approach to the smart city be that of the concreazation of an environment that allows technology to enhance our sensitivities to our commons, contexts and each other, dissolving geopolitical domains and allowing for new forms of connectivity without creating an invasive, distracting or possibly augmenting overlay? Avoiding a completely “dematerialized, decentralized and ephemeral” city and boosting our sensitivity of our immediate contexts through technological “accents” vs cognitively eclipsing them.

“The telephone and the car were jointly responsible for the vast growth of American suburbia and exurbia” – If that scenario is a result of agency exacted upon technologies that had contingent consequences, what will constitute “negative” consequences of expression of agency on the smart city, and what are the possible implications of an infrastructure that expands that domain?

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 – Sandra

Buggy, Brittle and Bugged – Anthony Townsend

– In the case of a blackout or crisis (like the 2007 Washington Metro rail fire, pp. 255) caused by buggy software, how can we ensure that a failsafe is in place without further burdening the system? Is a manual switch too inefficient? How long should previous models be kept in dormant, but functioning order incase the current system fails? How is the economic toll of a shutdown calculated?

– “Today, netizens everywhere believe that the Internet began as a military effort to design a communications network that could survive a nuclear attack.” (pp. 259) Especially in the US, where the budget for military and defense is so immense, it seems as though many huge technical leaps were derived from military research and efforts. It would be interesting to know what percentage this is, or a list of modern tech that was developed as a martial consequent.

– “…power outages and power quality disturbances cost the US economy between $80 billion and $188 billion a year.” (pp. 264) Again, how is this calculated? By simple ‘time is money’ reasoning, or does it also account for the cost of repairs, etc.?

– ” It’s one thing for your e-mail to go down for a few hours, but it’s another thing when everyone in your neighborhood gets locked out of their homes.” (pp. 265) If a buggy or brittle software means people might get locked out of their homes, it also stands to reason that people could be accidentally locked in or that the software could be hacked. Would this inspire a new system of robberies, where the thieves can simply unlock your door remotely and stroll into your residence? Even more threatening than a home robbery, what happens when government or large infrastructural networks are hacked maliciously?

– “In November 2010, without public objection, the city of Chongqing launched an effort…to install some five hundred thousand video cameras…” (pp. 273) Was the public really asked in the first place, and if so, was there really even a realistic option for objection?

– As Townsend asks in the last paragraph, could we have predicted the consequences of sprawl and new technologies? Just as importantly, would it have mattered if we did? Would the public have believed these possibilities, and would they have cared? Would the technology of the time have allowed us to avoid these consequences by going about motorization in a different way?

 

An Emerging US (and World) Threat – Cesar Cerrudo

– In contrast to Townsend, who states several times that a buggy, brittle smart city is “unimaginable,” Cerrudo seems to have thought about and imagined just that in great detail. What exactly, is his target audience? I’d imagine everyone, but is his goal for the public, the private sector, or municipalities to read this paper and take the listed risks seriously? Is he worried that once they know the risks, they still won’t be taken seriously? Especially with the state of the world now, I do not think these threats are at all hard to imagine.

– Cerrudo offers a brief list of recommendations for the reduction of hacking problems. If it is not already happening, what can be done to make sure that a city introducing ‘smart’ initiatives is robust and protected as a priority from the outset? Are there already examples of this?

– In terms of smart waste management and smell sensors which may not be seen as a priority, is there a risk of the public becoming more and more aggravated knowing that a sensor is picking up the disturbance but nothing is happening? (As seen in the FixMyStreet issues brought up in the Gabrys reading.)

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

If as Cerrudo afirms “The more technology a city uses, the more vulnerable to cyber attacks it is […] it’s only a matter of time until attacks on city services and infrastructure happen”, how we could thing of infrastructure that is tecnological, but not in the traditional sense, or at least not so dependant on digital information? Could a system that takes resilience as a value could be deveolped? and even if there is some loss in term of efficiency could strategies as redundancy be implemented in the building of the infrastructure of the smart city?

Townsend affirms that “The sheer of city-scale smart systems comes with its own set of problems. Cities and their infrastructure are already the most complex structure humankind has ever created. Interweaving them with equally complex information processing can only multiply the opportuities for bugs and unanticipated interactions”. In this context, could we argue that the problem is not just a matter of improving the design of the systems, but in any case, to have back-up systems that are more granular, less centralized, and less dependant on digital technologies?

In the same manner, all this scenarios, at the end, show the need of having smart citizens that have the skills necessary to undestand and deal with the problems that will come with the deployment of a smart cities. Should a plan to ‘smarten’ the citizen be integral part of the development of smart cities?

 

 

 

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?
—-
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?
—-
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 and Hacking the Smart City – Jiaqi

“Buggy, Brittle and Bugged,” Smart Cities

  • “Today, we routinely send anonymous bug reports to software companies when our desktop crashes.” If this is a portable model to debug smart cities in the future, will smart citizens be prepared? Although we report these bugs, it is maybe too late because the bugs may have already lead to a crashing of the system. In this situation, should we rethink a new way to build a smart city? It may not be top- bottom or bottom- top that simple. Maybe we could start to build smart citizens first?
  • As the book mentioned, in the parts of the world, different countries face the same issue – surveillance, but they have different feedbacks. It brings the idea- situated smart cities. When smart cities are crashing, and every smart cities are different. Should we make all back-up ways all the same or we must situate back-up ways for specific smart cities in the world when smart cities face the same bug?

An Emerging US (and World) Threat

  • The author mentioned “Cyber Security Problems” and also gave “Recommendations” for basic problems of smart cities. Maybe there will be disastrous If we change all cities in this world to be smart cities one day, would we have the possibility to change them back to current? When we think about how to back up our technology masterpiece – the smart cities, should we think throughout for years how could we make a smart city(test bed) without bugs before we make the second one or we could predict and solve these bugs at least?

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?