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?”
- 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?
- 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).
- 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?
- “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?