Crashing and Hacking the Smart City — Yumeng Chen

 

Urban Versioning System 1.0

–The purpose of architecture design is not only to satisfy the functions we need, but also chasing the aesthetics. So that if it is the same purpose of open source coding? At least in the designing process, we need more then the open source benefits.

–In the IBM case, architects work together to finish a project at the same time , does it requires the architects are in the same level or can understand each others work even during the design processing?

 

Open Source Metropolis

–Though the open source data brings us a lot of benefits, it broke the wall that forbid a lot of cankered people or the people who don’t have enough ability out of this zone. However, now everyone enjoyed the free cakes and who will surveill this field and keep the citizens safety with their private and property?

W10. Open Source Urbanism – pinelopi

on Townsend, “Open Source Metropolis,” Smart Cities (pp. 115-141)

– In the seventies, Burns acted as a mediator between cable, the ground-breaking technology of the day, and people that wished to appropriate it (pp.117). The community video centers she launched in numerous cities could not have been made possible without the support of local governments and the industry. Townsend uses the term “perfect storm” to describe the synced point in time where technologies and people’s understanding of them become ripe together. Later in the chapter, it is implied that a similar condition is taking place today. How will the contemporary “perfect storm”, supposedly comprised of open source commons, ‘wirelessness’ and democratized electronics affect ‘the ways the city plays itself’ in the words of Gabrys? Are local governments and industry still fit to support the creative process “through which people harness technology to create a system” (pp.118) in the smart city?

– The format and standards of technology emerge as enablers of unplanned ‘idiotic’ applications from the users themselves (such as the microcassete recorder or the beeper of the 70’s, pp.119), yet on the other hand, they also pose important challenges along the way. An example of the latter is the obstacle of ‘walled gardens’ for the mobile web and how Crowley identified e-mail, a technology that was already in place as a workaround (pp.123). In a similar manner, Wi-Fi’s limited scale range was initially tackled with an ingenuous use of simple, already existing tools brought together in unexpected ways (arrays of DIY antennas linked to wireless networks, pp.129). But as technologies become more sophisticated, innovation tends to be in the hands of the ones that have the know-how – the hackers, as the last two examples show. Yet, as the “steep learning curve” of physical computing (pp.136) is being evened out, how are non-engineers empowered to meaningfully disrupt and appropriate the existing smart infrastructure of the city?
on Haque and Fuller, “Urban Versioning System 1.0,” Situated Technologies Pamphlets #2

– To approach the building as an in-progress model of itself opens the floor to the participation of non-designers and directs the discussion towards real-world constraints – two features that are apparently suspended by the representational practices and media through which spatial design is usually communicated (pp.23-24). However, it is probable that if the non-linear space-making processes described here were to be entirely carried out in meatspace, then the financial and spatial challenges that would consequently arise would threaten the feasibility of the project or force to unpleasant compromises. It seems that Haque and Fuller identify a resolution in BIM systems’ ability for digitally merging design and construction in an object-oriented manner (pp27). How are BIM systems suggestive of a shift from representation (a linear structure of communication) to simulation (a digital version of the real, constantly subject to change)? BIM systems have been accused of isolating the designed artifact from its context by situating it in an oversimplified approximation of its original environment. How to resolve this contradiction? For instance, in which ways could BIM systems take social parameters as an input?

– Where non-plan ideas meet Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), Haque and Fuller advocate for an Urban Versioning System that runs on granular parameters. There may include participation [from the non-designer to the virtuoso (p.30, 36)], modularity [ dependent on scale, expertise and time (p.37)] property [from its existing neoliberal redundancy to its mitigation (p.49)] and many others. Is there also a need to granularize persistence (from permanence to ephemerality)? The non-planners proposed permanent hyper-structures on which ephemeral envelopes would allow for ever-changing situations to happen. How would such a condition translate in the contemporary setting? How will the joints between the parts of the system change when the base structure itself is contingent?

Open source Urbanism

Open source metropolis – Anthony Townsend

In describing the evolution of social media from the platform of the internet Townsend states Burns and her team (in addition to other DIY research communities) began to experiment with new ways to deliver social services through the platform of the internet. Burns described the event forty years later stating that the convergence of amateur video and cable in the 1970s was “the perfect storm”. “In just a few short years, a growing network of public access activists had torn down barriers to community broadcasting that existed for nearly fifty years” – Could we recreate the perfect storm today? Ignoring our dispositions and fears of the hypothetical, allowing for complete smart city infrastructural implementation, assuming a revolutionary stance, infiltrating or gaining rights to the “smart city domain” of data and innovative technological platforms that supersede those of smart cities in complexity and potential? Could this not, coupled with exacting agency over the infrastructure to manipulate data results, allow us to contribute to our city in a much more proactive way?

 “The technology giants building smart cities are mostly paying attention to technology not people, mostly focused on cost effectiveness and efficiency, mostly ignoring the creative process of harnessing technology at the grass roots, but the breach of public access cable in the 1970s is a reminder that truly disruptive applications of new information technologies have always come from the bottom up” – Notice here that the disruptive applications, while bottom up in their approach, required a top down infrastructural implementation to traverse and exploit. “The urge to repurpose technologies designed for one way communication like cable and turn them into interactive conduits for social interaction pops up again and again. Today, civic hackers, artists and entrepreneurs have begun to find their own uses and their own designs for smart-city technology.”

“But once you had an idea of the social network, it’s like ‘Dodgeball is Friendster for cell phones’. People understood it” – Crawley signifies the importance of concurrent technological applications not only as exploitable tools but as essential precursors or “molders” of the socio-cultural collective’s psychological scaffolding i.e. their ability to perceive, understand and accept new technological applications.

“Today, we take for granted the rich ecosystem of software available for our phones”, but “In 2003..Wireless carriers exacted tolls for content providers to enter their walled garden. Setting back the build-out of the mobile web for years.” – What kind of access is permitted to the smart city’s bed of sensored data? Do our dispositions with regards to privacy stand in the way of access to “walled gardens” if we persist to demand our information be “secure”? It appears that not only is top down infrastructural implementation crucial along with concurrently emergent technological applications, but the open access to both in promising to set the table for bottom up disruptive applications of sociability, serendipity and delight.

The “frequency hopping technique called spread spectrum, originally devised for torpedo guidance during World War II” extended the functionality of WiFi, in addition to it’s open source potential in that they could now “shove as much data across public airwaves as they could over wire with no subscription fees”. It seems that regardless of the original purpose of the technological invention, each “piece of the puzzle” lends itself to a complete picture in the form of bottom up exploitation and consequent disruptive applications combining and extending preceding technologies functionalities. Strategic, technological engineering must come before the creative utilization of the consequent structure/data. Does that not in some way support the smart city’s advocacy of big data harvesting? (although contingent on granted/forced access to the domain)

What form does interaction manifest if it was contingent on the spread and access to WiFi? If people are being attracted to a certain location for the promise of a portal to transport them elsewhere? In this respect does a non-sensored, digitally disconnected part of the city constitute a smart city ghetto much like Bryant park did in the 80s?

“Municipalities began to take over the deployment of public Wifi-access on a larger scale”, It seems like bottom up innovation (although contingent on preceding top down infrastructural implementation) inspires or catalyzes large scale technological implementations which in turn provide yet another traversable platform for further innovation/exploitation. Does that not shift our perception of power from a top down vs bottom up to a symbiotic relationship or dialogue between technology giants, dumb citizens (unconscious exactors of agency) smart citizens (educated DIY communities non-intimidated by the interworks of the technology) and the respective socio-cultural/political context?

Urban Versioning System 1.0 – Haque & Fuller

Architecture as one of Humanity’s oldest practices constitutes a fixed mean of channeling behaviors, a physical common that serves as a high resolution low pace environment of internal, intuitively and tacitly collected information resulting in a respective embodied predisposition in the space. As our cognitive pool becomes layers with increasing amounts of media and interfaces (sent vs internalized information) – architecture assumes the role of the background. Does code become (as a result of cycles of technological evolution and respective embodied predispositions of a new common) this generation’s tool of designing urban performances?

“The difference should be that we consciously recognize our interdependence (architecture, citizens and technologies) and thus must consciously act upon it.” We have repeatedly morphed spaces through exacting agency and populating them with socio-culturally conceived devices (such as a news paper stand) that result in consequent urban performances that challenge/extend the original functionalities of spaces and respective embodied predispositions. Is the fine line between a conscious participant and an unconscious consumer simply the recognition of where agency lies in crafting our surroundings within the seemingly restrictive smart city grid?

The design of the future built environment “appears to be split between large developers and ubiquitous computing technologists with architects finding themselves irrelevant” It can be argued that architecture, as an expansive discipline, trains us (or should) to carefully consider concurrent social, cultural & political contexts and respective implications on our designs. Are other disciplines as inclusive? Should architects now be charged with addition ubiquitous computing design to their vocabulary?

“Most important is to develop a method through which architecture the physical conduit for knowledge and memory can itself be open”, it’s signified here that architecture has thus far mainly been a top down process of attempting to create performances at different locations and scales i.e dictating vs accommodating interactivity and special use. “We want to see what happens if we work otherwise” – Is the answer quite literally delegating parts of the design process to an array of disciplines and the respective citizens (subjects) of the site of implementation? Fixity allows architecture to serve as a scaffolding populated by contingent or unplanned uses, but buildings are rarely designed for that express purpose. Can we start thinking of the concurrent socio-cultural collective as a performance that architecture must accommodate vs create/resist?

W6. Urban Data Infrastructures – pinelopi

on Kitchin, Lauriault and McArdle, “Smart cities and the politics of urban data,” Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn pp. 16-33

This chapter underlines the urgency to revisit existing smart-city technologies. The most constructive start in this process seems to be the exposure of the data assemblage (pp22) that produces them as opposed to its usual concealment or disregarding (pp30). The process of this revelation would be inevitably political itself – especially if It would not be enough to merely present the dispositif to all stakeholders, but to allow them to understand and actively engage with it too. What would the means of such a process be? How can we keep it from inheriting the same weaknesses that indicator, benchmarking and dashboard initiatives demonstrate?

Being the final visual output of city-sensing, dashboards are responsible for the illusion that a city is a collection of absolute facts to be observed. However, it is the conception of data as a solid, stand-alone series of facts that creates this oversimplified approach to city management in the first place, as it decontextualizes the city from the complex relations that constitute it (pp27). Should the next generation of the smart-city toolbox emphasize on making those relations between facts more apparent to citizens and city managers as a means to prove their contingent nature?
Also, how would a spatial interface with the ability to render these relations tangible look like?

on Gabrys, “Digital Infrastructures of Withness: Constructing a Speculative City,” Program Earth, pp.241-266

Within the digital infrastructures of smart cities, various types of participation arise, some of which produce modalities of withness. As opposed to the usual approach to participatory urbanism that attends to the ways through which individuals and communities are empowered  to get involved, withness identifies the human and more-than-human parts that together constitute “a wider infrastructural network of participatory and transindividuating politics and action” (pp243). Is this shift telling of a more post-human approach to urbanism? Would there be enough room for human agency in the cybernetic vision of the city as an “automated urban organism” (pp253)? Also, when Gabrys considers digital infrastructure as Automatism, she refers to Easterling’s quote saying “designing infrastructure is designing action” to suggest that infrastructures and actions coincide and co-emerge (pp257). Are they co-designed as well though? Isn’t the city-as-platform scenario, mostly promoted and implemented by corporations such as Microsoft and IBM, a profoundly top-down one?

Gabrys identifies a paradox in the evolution of abstract technology, where the process of its concretization is apparently one of high indeterminacy (pp254). Is this margin of indeterminacy a fertile ground for all three modalities of withness – measurement, automatism, contingency- or only for the latter?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism

“ladder of participation,” a figure taken from a classic 1969 urban participation text written by Sherry Arnstein.44 This ladder- based figure of citizen participation moves from the lowly depths of manipulation and therapy to the more enlightened stages of “citizen power,” which includes partnership delegated power, and citizen control.

What could be some other possible models for participation, considering the complexity and skills required for participation in smart cities? What are the parameters that will ensure the success of one model over the other?

Guattari, together with his electronic card, is participating in the sensor based city, but if he does not have access he can become idiotic through the same technologies that would ordinarily make him a smart and participating citizen. What Deleuze describes through Guattari is an example of an interrupted or broken program of participation,  where the object- script that would facilitate participation can become a locus of control, differently articulated politics, or a machine society that unfolds in distinctly computational ways.

Are there any identifiable patterns in the scenarios of an interrupted program of participation. Can these elements be addressed and solved? Or these are inevitable?

 

DIY and Participatory Urbanism

In Townsend’s view “Cities are indeed an efficient way to organizing activity, since infrastructure can be shared. But efficiency isn’t why we build cities in the first place. It’s more of a convenient side effect of their ability to expedit human contact” (p. 160) In this sense, which are the modalities of participation that can enhance this human contact, and how can techology play a roll within such modalities? and also, does new technologies creates new  modalities never seen before, or it reshapes ways of participating from the past?

Jennifer Gabrys characterizes critically three forms of participatory urbanism: problem-solving code, reconfigured solving economies, and participatory sensing. And in this chategories “Urban life is articulated through a series of computational problems that can be solved or enhanced through participatory platforms and programs. [And in which] Citizens achieve participation through using this platforms to perform urban functions, and at a presumaly higher level by writting programs in the first place” (p. 215) But in this sense, in Gabrys’s view, participation seems to be narrowed to a sort of citizen gatherings which only aims to contest with the the city government and private enterprises, which flaws because of it’s incapibility to create sollutions to the same scale and effectivness as those instances. In this sense, should we valorize participation just in terms of effectivness? Is paticipation main concern should be problem-solving?

If new modalities of participation are determined by technologies, how can this technologies  be shaped themselves for enhancing participation themselves or to open new ways of communication? should urban participation shifted its focus from the city to the technology that enables certain aspects of it? How can we address less visible aspects of the city through participation? And how can this dialogic values be introduced in both the technology design and urban design?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism – Germania Garzon

Tinkering Toward Utopia – Anthony Townsend

The reading seems to suggest that an artificial design like a suburb or maybe a ‘smart city’ results in failure because it lacks the opportunity for spontaneity or natural organic occurrences.  But at the same time ‘DIYcity was a completely designed artificial organization that promoted interaction and participation, and was a success.

– How can we ensure that the direction we are moving in, creating smart cities from scratch and telling people to inhabit them and participate, is successful in the long run?

– Could smart cities have the potential to “live out a natural cycle” like Foursquare  or DIYcity?

– Could we find a way to integrate the idea of the smart city with the idea of a ‘natural city’ like Alexander describes?

 

Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism – Jennifer Gabrys

“If technologies are put to the test in these contexts, then participation becomes articulated through actual registers of engagement rather than as hypothetical platforms and gestures toward the common good. Idiots and idiotic encounters might even proliferate in these encounters and activate new approaches to the project of participation in the digital and sensor-based city.”

– What percentage of potential inhabitants of a smart city could be expected to act ‘idiotic’?

– Do all citizens have a tendency to act this way at some point or another?

– Are ‘idiotic’ citizens essential to the spontaneity of a “natural city” or rather a successful smart city?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism – Feng

Tinkering Toward Utopia

  • P144 “the unchanging receptacle in which the changing parts of the system…can work together.”
    As we know, the nowadays population is much large than many years ago. In this case, the city needs efficiency. And in some degree, efficiency force things be simple and clear, which is the opposite to the old cities. Therefore, how to deal with the vivid interesting like old cities and the high efficiency of the new cities?
  • About Foursquare
    Smart cities and foursquare-like apps have some similar points. They could work well when the number of user/citizen is big enough. Because they need the supports from enough volume of data.
    Would the scale of city be the obstacles for those cities’ “smartize”? (because the small ones could not get enough data.)

Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism

  • In the TV show Black Mirror, there is a story, in that world, everyone use the social media to show their own sense of social presence, and those ones who don’t use the social media apps are like the foundlings of that world.
    In the similar case, in a smart city, would those people who can’t or don’t want use their devices for share data to smart cities be the foundlings? Would they lose some rights then living unhappy in the future smart cities?

DIY and Participatory Urbanism

In Townsend’s reading, he described the city should be tree like and it should have more connection within branches. The urban sprawl during postwar period is the “tree” which lacks communication between braches. But I think city is more like nest: there are different start points and connection in multiple directions. Anyhow the connection is essential for a successful city. He mentioned the Foursquare as the tool to link people in the city. It simply connects people digitally through the platform of “check-in” meanwhile people share their opinions. What if the digital platform somehow determines our destination? Will city become generalized. For example, traveling. Base on Foursquare’s review, we may end up at most “popular” part of city. Will there be space for surprises or we just going to be “organized” to the “best” place. Then it come to the question: do we want to be connected in both big and small scale”

Undeniable, the DIY city is the free form of city which we can design a prefect city. But it is physical limited, only for tech elites. Functionally, it is unlimited. Not talking about whether the DIY city can from a city in reality. The idea of group of people gather together creating their own vision of settlement is like having a city. Does the freedom of DIY city benefit the process of making city? Just like at the end of reading, Townsend talked about the bugs in the grass roots. How to evolve the smart city organically? The word organically is the key. It is the fundamental different between concept of DIY city and concept of really city. Because there are limits for physical development of city, so the city starts from organic shape.

Do idiots have to participate in digital urbanism? Do we all have to be smart? May be having some idiots is not bed at all. Smart city with digital sensors is new and trendy. It need to be promoted but it does not mean to replace the old fashion. Start with computer. 2o years ago, it was so new, knowing it is smart. But today it just part of our life, knowing it is like eating and sleeping. Smart city could use the same way. The app FIXMYSTREET is great tool to communicate within community. But do we know our neibroghood expect the question/problem that he/she/it post? Smart city is based on the digital. Do we want to push the digital sense far? Or having some physical aspect is be supplement for it.