Tag: W04 – Quantified Community: Hudson Yards

Technoscientific urbanism reflects a neo-positivist return to postwar systems thinking and centralized planning; it is especially visible in the discourse around “smart cities”, which regards the intelligence generated from spatial sensing and data analysis as a “fix” for perennial urban problems.

Q) Can spatial sensing and data analysis result in a quality based decision making? What would be the process to identify the urban problems that need a fix by analyzing numbers? Would this methodology give rise to more unspeculated urban problems which would need another version of smart cities to deal with them? Will this versioning be an ever going process, not of evolving but of switching from one methodology to another giving rise to new problems in an attempt to solve old ones?

Hudson Yards offers the first opportunity in the United States to build, from the ground up, sharing”the most connected, measured, and technologically advanced digital district in the nation.”

Songdo city is built on the vision of a networked community, connecting the unconnected, real-time data analytics and spatial sensing on urban landscape.

Q) Most of all the smart city visions seem to share a common ground in terms of their philosophy of using big data and connecting communities as the primary solution for every urban problem. Where did this idea seed from? Is there no alternate way of constructing a smart city other than weaving it with networks and digital technologies?

Are there opportunities for meaningful citizen participation in creating the smart technologies that will define Hudson Yards.

Q) Who do we mean by meaningful citizen participation? What counts as meaningful? And at what cost? To what extent will it demand a compromise to privacy? Will the participation be a choice? How does that behave in the concept of geosurveillance and what could be the outcome of participation? Will it lead to social sorting, predictive profiling? Will the system be transparent to understand how the data from participation is used and how it affects the process of decision making?

Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards – Mattern

– Smart citizenship, Gabrys says, is thus equated with monitoring and managing one’s relationship to the urban environment — “operationalizing the cybernetic functions of the smart city” — rather than with “exercising rights and responsibilities” or “advancing democratic engagement through dialogue and debate,” as Arendt would prefer.

– Couldn’t we say that in a new smart urban environment like Hudson Yards, data collection, monitoring and participation are the new “dialogue & debate”?

– Are people actually scared of losing their “rights as citizens” to participate or influence the growth and development of the quantified community, or are they just misinterpreting what the present/future is offering us as inhabitants of the new quantified community vs a smart city?

 

The Quantified Community and Neighborhood Labs: A Framework for Computational Urban Planning and Civic Technology Innovation – Constantine Kontokosta

– The “Smart City” messaging is replete with claims of the potential for sensors and information and communication technologies (ICT) to re-shape urban life, although such rhetoric ignores the practical realties and constraints of urban decision-making and the social and distributional concerns of policy outcomes. Recent research has begun to counter and disaggregate the marketing language of smart cities with the actual potential of big data and analytics to positively shape future cities (and re-shape existing ones) in a way that is sensitive to social and political realities, and reflective of the needs and desires of people who actually live in cities… The QC provides an opportunity to vastly improve operational efficiencies and support resource conservation at the building and district scale. This objective switches the focus from understanding the dynamics of land use adjacencies and site access and mobility, to modeling resource flows and how environmental, physical, and social conditions influence consumption behavior. ”

– Does this mean we should push for a shift and expansion of quantified communities rather than ‘Smart cities’?

– How would the lives of the citizens living outside of both of these new urban typologies differ?

In Kontokosta’s passage, the author mentioned the “slice of the city”. It could be considered a kind of model of city, or similar to the “one to one map” in the previous readings. They are both the model of a city, but in the readings, one is important and profitable to smart city, another one is not. The difference between them is the scale of data which was collected. So, What scale of data is a good volume for developing of smart city? How to determine the scale or the volume?

– On Kontokosta K., “The Quantified Community and Neighborhood Labs: A framework for computational Urban Planning and Civic Technology Innovation”

The key feature of the Quantified Community (QC) seems to be that of scale. Kontokosta is repeatedly emphasizing on its importance to demonstrate that, as opposed to previous urban scale smart projects, time and resources are not squandered, social and political aspects are considered and citizens are an integral part of decision-making. Notably, the QC is understood as a hybrid of urban-scale Smart City initiatives and the “Quantified Self” movement (pp2) to overcome the problem of ‘low-resolution’ evaluation criteria of urban policies and design (pp4). In the words of Kontokosta, data acquired “voluntary (…) could also be used to understand links between the neighborhood/community conditions and personal health outcomes of residents” (pp7, my emphasis). Aren’t there ways to gain insight on behavior patterns other than directly monitoring bodies themselves?

– on Mattern S., “Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards circa 2019”

Mattern touches extensively on the material expression of ‘smartness’, identifying three key issues. On the one hand, fundamental urban processes are being dematerialized, hidden away and thus, ‘forgotten’ by citizens (pp5). The physical infrastructure that profoundly sustains the instrumental city is to be observed through “a deceptively clean, shallow interface” (pp13) – not unlike the screen-filled control rooms in Songdo. On the other hand, the build environment becomes an architectural product that appears to perform according to the branded identity of the district (pp5) in a ‘form follows data’ manner (pp6).

Considering the above, it seems that the instrumental city embodies the opposition of depth vs. surface: while its digital infrastructure mediates multiple levels of urban processes, it remains out of sight for the citizens and it is merely represented as an interface – a surface of control. The build environment is also developed along these lines, offering little or no insight on the parameters that constitute it. Shouldn’t the smart city be primarily about transparency and accessibility? Could contrasts like this be resolved in the future, or are they part of the smart problematique by default?

Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards – Shannon Mattern

 

• Unlike Songdo, Hudson Yards is placed in the middle of an existing built environment. Would the data collected within the Hudson Yards be able to differentiate user activity between people who live or work there, and people who are just passing through? Can the data collected coincide with data collected in the city as a whole? Does this intermingling of “residents” and “outsiders” limit it’s capabilities or the information it obtains?

 

The Quantified Community and Neighborhood Labs: A Framework for Computational Urban Planning and Civic Technology Innovation – Constantine Kontokosta

 

• Quantified communities seem to be more of a bottom-up process compared to the Smart City, and seems to play a stronger role on the wants of each individual in the community. Would erecting a bunch of different quantified communities that can share data with one another, instead of a smart city, pave a more specific direction into a connected city being that our cities are already broken up into neighborhoods and districts?

 

1. Kontokosta introduced us a model of the quantified community which is a testbed and small version of “smart city”, however, even though it is building a small version of “smart city” there will be problems. because the community is still a complex space where the real estate, property management company, third party platform are the big role in building such community. Who will be the leader to organize all the components of the community?

2. Kontokosta mentions about the information that provides on social networks website, those information seems not to be a private information, however, when it became a part of big data, it may release more information than the uploader think, will QC redefines the privacy?

3. unlike Songdo, Hudson Yards is based on a developed site which means lots of the work are renewing or updating. Also, it means it has the area that connects to the “non-smart city” how to deal with the transition from smart to non-smart?