Smart Cities

W09

Smart Cities, “Tinkering Toward Utopia” – Anthony M. Townsend

 

“ As Geraci described it, “DIYcity was totally bottom up organization… there was nobody giving orders…it was driven by the people showing u, looking at what needed to be done, and doing it.” Like ITP, “It was loose and collaborative and open and that’s what made it work.” What Geraci provided was a lens to focus their energy and a well-crafted moniker under which it carried forward.”

Gabry points out,” In critiques of the smart city a number of writers and tech gurus make a point of calling for greater attention to the role that “grassroots” or “bottom- up” citizen engagements can play in giving rise to a more human, just, and equitable set of digital city developments.”

“Sensor- based and digitally enabled modes of DIY and participatory urbanism have been proposed as grassroots strategies for articulating new types of commons and democratic urban participation, as well as strategies integral to smart city development proposals. By focusing specifically on the use of citizen- sensing applications for environmental monitoring and urban sustainability, I analyze the distinct modes of participation and urbanism that are expressed in these projects. Two questions that I address in this chapter include: How do citizens become sensors in participatory digital- urbanism projects? And how are cities cast as computable problems so that sensing citizens can act upon them?”

 

1. Is this bottom up approach actually working and fixing long-term urban problems as opposed to just providing a quick fix to short-term urban problems, which exist in both physical and automated infrastructures?
2. What roles do civic hackers play in this bottom-up approach? Whether or not these Civic hackers have the ability or skill to handle and deal with real problems that need to be solved? And how successful is grass roots when scaled up? When its solution works on a smaller scale but when taken into a larger context, how do its parameters change? Do these technical communities focus on openness and collaboration or on technology? (civic tech movement).
3. Although the importance of such projects isn’t in the success an app such as Foursquare and Civic commons, it is how such technologies help evolve and create newer technologies, which are closer to solving urban problems. Many a times such apps fail because users such as those in “DIYcity Challenges”, “People didn’t need to stay united”, It “lived out its natural cycle. It didn’t outlive its usefulness”. Hasn’t it become necessary to evolve and update applications not just to compete with other apps and projects in the market but also to keep people interested and involved in participating in these projects and apps? How are these open-source softwares and open-data initiatives effecting citizen participation in terms of physical infrastructure and not the digital one? How does the effect people’s behavior and interaction within the city and with each other?

 

Program Earth, “Engaging the idiot in Participatory Digital Urban” – Jennifer Gabrys

 

1 “To advance a discussion of the ways in which participation proliferates beyond the “rules of the game” and, in so doing, provokes political encounters and inhabitations,I take up Stengers’s discussion of cosmopolitics and participation, where she asks how it might be possible to attend to the role of the “idiot,” or those who would typically be seen to have nothing to contribute to the “common account” of how to approach political problems.3 In her proposal, the idiot challenges a notion of participation and politics that easily settles into consensus. This is not the idiot as a simplistic form of insult— as in a dumb or stupid citizen, the simple counterpart to the smartness of the smart city. Instead, the idiot or the idiotic is someone or something that causes us to think about and encounter the complexities of participation and social life as something other than prescribed or settled.”

“While other discussions of the idiot variously focus on processes of individuation and the making of subjects in relation to new media, my use of the idiot in this discussion of participation in the smart city engages most centrally with Stengers’s version of the idiot as a figure that cannot be articulated through a fixed subject position, not even if it is one of inversion. Instead, the idiot as understood here is a troubling and transformative agent within participatory processes who cannot or will not abide by the terms of participation that are meant to facilitate and enhance democratic engagement.”

 

How do dumb or stupid citizens differ from idiotic ones? What counts as digital participatory urbanism? What are its parameters and who would be included in such an infrastructure? Would a citizen be considered an idiot if the citizen is a disruptive agents, whether it is a smart city or not? Does the term idiot citizen apply to such citizens that are not a part of a smart city? Would hackers fall under the idiot citizen category?

 

2. “Civic apps are then productive of new economies and political economies of participation and are not simply articulations of digital and democratic engagement. As Ulises Mejias notes, however, participation in these networks offers up information, but at the same time the user of these platforms becomes “the product being sold,” where participation is “not coercive in a straightforward manner” but is organized to undergird particular economic exchanges and to reinforce particular modes of sociality. Participation through these platforms is then most typically aligned with digital economies where user- citizens provide the data material that often generates profits for tech companies but less frequently contributes to substantive resources for urban communities or citizens. Users and participants of sensor- based digital platforms provide sensor data that influence, if not benefit, particular types of technological and urban economies. Participation in networks requires the free labor of participants, but the networks are owned, controlled, and operated by companies that collect data in ways that are not typically transparent or contributory to advancing more democratic urban engagement or more equitable economies.”

 

By participating in these economies by providing data and information, they are then choosing to “opt-in”,would they still be considered as products being sold even if they consciously give up this information?

These tech companies that profit off of the data and resources provided to them by citizens using their products, whether or not citizens willingly give up this information, in what account would this be shed in a different light for example if these technologies were actually producing products to better the urban engagement, equitable economies or lives of the user? Would it still matter how the data and resources needed for that technology is retrieved? Where would the type of data whether it is a passive data collection or participatory sensing fall concerning unclear transparency by tech companies?

 

3-  “Stengers suggests that the idiot especially forces us to attend to the concrete conditions of problems. If urban environments are under stress in one way or another, these problems would then need to be attended to in their specificity and not as conditions conducive to solutions propagated by universal information architectures. Such a specific (cosmo- )political ecology of problems is then an important part of attending to urban conditions. These specific conditions ensure that we cannot proceed through “blind confidence”or “good intentions” but rather must “[build] an active memory of the way solutions that we might have considered promising turn out to be failures, deformations or perversions.””

 

By attending to in their specificity, does he mean bottom up or grass roots approach? What are the solutions conducive to universal information architecture that he is referring to? What does he mean by active memory ? Where does the idiot come into play? If solutions turn out to be failures, does he mean to rebuild solutions to urban conditions? Allowing the city to “play itself” by constantly building from recreating solutions and not proceeding with blind confidence or good intentions?

 

Tinkering Toward Utopia

–The DIY city requires every citizen to work together forward to the same goal, which is ok when everyone does not earn or earn the same benefit. However when someone doesn’t get the same benefit or not satisfy with the benefit, kind like the communist society. How can we keep the city running fore a long period?

 

Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism 

 

–When we open an app in the smart phone like iphone, it will ask you if trhe app has the ability to get the data and personal information and send it back to their servers, or running in the background to collect data. Dpes the app developer need to tell the users that it has some risk to send your personal information or data to the serve ?

 

–For most of people, we use smart devices not only in order to make life easy, but also enjoy the feeling that we can control everything and view all the information of trhe city. However, if the city can talk back and improve itself, how can we make sure that human beings are the controller not controlled by the city?

“Tinkering Toward Utopia”

• “ Dodgeball had taught him that knowing where you are wasn’t actually that valuable; the value was in using that information to unlock new experience.” From this book, “Foursquare” is successful because of exploration new experience from current information. In this situation, to say there are a lot of data exchange in a single day in this world, but what is useful what is not useful? The biggest challenge of “DIYcity” is how to gather useful information(data) or how to use current information(data) for exploration new valuable interactions behind these data?

• There is a very interesting part between “Bottom-up and up to bottom” ways. DIYcity which is totally bottom up organization…there was nobody giving orders but up bottom “Smart city” which has clear orders from the government. In this two ways, hackers or self-organizations seem to have different characters: one is “hand”, the second is “mind”. The contradiction here is should mind compromises to hand or hand compromises to mind? Then who could give this contradiction an order?

Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism

Such “reports” might be considered idiotic since they slow down the assumed ways in which citizens are meant to participate in maintaining streets and instead raise open-ended questions and complaints that reveal how many types of street-based concerns and politics are not easily amenable to “fixing.”

• The author talked about “the idiot” in participatory digital urbanism, these “reports” are idiotic, they are wasting time, misleading, slowing down the process. But the real idiot is data – wrong data. Although the idiot participatory cannot be avoided because Smart city is based on all citizens, based on people when we engage in participating digital urbanism, could we have a solution to filter the un-useful data?

Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism

1- “Instead, the idiot as understood here is a troubling and transformative agent within participatory processes who cannot or will not abide by the terms of participation that are meant to facilitate and enhance democratic engagement.” – What will disrupt the process complete non participation or participation at lowest level?

1 Tinkering Toward Utopia

The success of Foursquare is let the costumer participate in the data commutation, meanwhile this kind of motivational data structure could destroy the data neutrality?  In the first 3 years Foursquare was collected data like survey, then they dig the data and shift into tendentiousness. Was that reversal the purpose?

Geraci described that DIY city was a totally bottom up organization. All those community are from bottom. It that the reason those kind of form would not lasting long? Like people swipe from one social network to another, from yep to Foursquare. What if all those app share data and customer, will this help?

 

2 Engaging the Idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism

 Beside mobile app and sensors devices, what else could we engage or participate the digital urbanism?

Since ancient Greek they used coins in pot to vote and participated politics engagements. In digital urbanism, individuals could more easily participate politics and voting, could that lead to a populism? And how to prevent public data engagement will not be manipulate?

The idiot of could means that public could been collected and contributed to the data network without noticing, so that data collected will be authentic and neutrality. When a person who is aware of his data and information will be collected, he/she might not be act normal. So we need the sample to be “idiot”?  After several decades when people used to be a data collector, will this problem be vanished ?

Tinkering towards Utopia – Townsend

In alexander’s explanation of interconnected city lattices he describes the effect a news rack had outside drug store near his office in Berkley, “the news rack, the people, the sidewalk, even the electrical impulses that controlled the traffic signal were woven together in networks of surprising complexity that formed a distinct urban place” the urban place he describes seems to follow Gabry’s analogy of withness in that it is effected by technology but not dictated by it; reserving a symbiotic relationship with the citizens and built context. Are moments of withness such as these left to DIY communities to implement?

Alexander argued that hierarchal structures plagued artificial designs as they fought against complexity. Could that have been in pursuit of efficiency? Is that which is unquantifiable inherently inefficient? And in our pursuit of efficiency are we abandoning all that is too complex to compute? Is an infrastructure that is both complex enough to allow for variable interactions to unfold and simple enough to be rendered “efficient” even feasible?

“The city is an open grid of possibilities, the suburb a universe of dead ends” – It can be argued that even the city grid imposes certain constraints on our interactions, but despite that we have been able to populate it’s nodes with layers of communication and interaction that generate respective states of withness. It is then up to the citizens (regardless of the imposed infrastructure) to arrange the unfolding of such performances, ones that supersede the limitations of the smart “grid” but exploit it’s structure. Law, order, structure is dire to preserve the freedom of self expression that we value so much; preventing complete chaos. Generating moments of organized chaos seems to have been left to us.

“Alexander’s vision of the city as a lattice underpinned the design of the software that now filtered by own view of it” (Foursquare) – Could this be the reason why we’re glued to technology interfaces? Going back to Turkle’s hypothesis about our preference of means of communication that allow division of attention, are we “alone together” because the perceived solution to our solitude has pulled us away from the seemingly isolated and fragmented built environment?

It’s interesting to note the pattern resonating in the history of disruptive companies such as Foursquare. It began as a DIY organization seeking to exploit the available technology, encouraging active participation in the form of check ins and in doing so successfully draping a “new digital lattice atop the city’s physical one and connecting the two with code”, evolving and promising to “exploit all of the new technologies that had come on the scene”, and slowly morphing due to the expression of agency of it’s users. It’s worth questioning if Foursquare is a product of interaction or rather if interaction was a product of Foursquare. Perhaps asking this question is a testament to the symbiotic relationship that formed as a product of the software, interaction of active participants and their expression of agency. Soon, foursquare would “mine date on your habits as well as your friends’ to recommend nearby venues”, beginning to augment the users’ decision making and effectively tipping the ratios; painting users as consumers, not active participants.

According to Townsend the computer age began with IBM PC, soon after the MITS Altair 8800 was released in 1975. “The Altair dramatically democratized access to computing power” – soon after that  “Hobbyists formed groups to trade tips hacks and parts for these DIY computers” serving as a training camp for innovators such as Apple, who would later overthrow IBM’s dominance of the PC industry. We all regard apple as a top down firm now, especially when considering that their products are engineered to be the furthest thing from modifiable. Does this raise the question of a certain life cycle that dictates the evolution of DIY start-ups, to successful monopolizing corporations, to their decline in more open sourced innovative start-ups that use the latest technology & infrastructure (provided by the corporate giants) to supersede existing corporations? Is this inevitable? Can it not be argued that the cycle itself is responsible a constant state of  social, cultural and technological evolution?

Engaging the idiot in Participatory Digital Urbanism – Gabrys

“It is then worth noting that there is a much wider stream of participatory urbanism projects underway that runs alongside and at times mutually influences or diverges from sensor driven approaches to the city” – Does Gabrys effectively confess to the need (or the favorability) of a pre-existing infrastructure based on smart sensors etc, that at first may indeed result in false hypotheses of the city & it’s people, but will present with a platform of data that could then be used by Smart citizens or entrepreneurs to develop innovative and groundbreaking social applications?

“Passive data collection generally entails citizens having to do very little, other than turn on their smartphones or other sensor devices”, “it does not require input from the human user and it takes place by users simply being equipped with smartphones”. Foursquare seemed to (at first) have approached this issue correctly by motivating check ins and active recommendations, but as we’ve seen, at some point when participation reaches “capacity”, contingent uses take over, morphing technologies and respective corporations. Is this contingent usage pre-coded into the software’s usage (consciously or not?) or is it the sole product of the expression of agency over technology?

“As Stengers suggests in relation to the idiot, “the idea is precisely to slow down the construction of this common world, to create a space for hesitation regarding what it means to say good”, although poetic and warranted, is this ideology once again a product of individualistic tendencies? Should the common good not be that of the livability and habitability of the planet? Although “habitability” constitutes a large category including ephemeral and non physically identifiable or quantifiable attributes, should we  not assume a stance of survival in the face of environmental crisis we face today even if it threatens to “engineer society”? And then begin to use the implemented infrastructure to tend to the unquantifiable in innovative ways through bottom up processes?