Tag: W05 – Sensing the Smart Citizen

What is so smart about smart citizens?

 

As smart citizens are the data indicator, we all contribute to the system. Those data could influence the political and governance. If the data which play the main role in making policy, it would be centralized governance, we might also lost freedom and flexibility to control our own life?

The smart citizens are come up with commercial idea, if we look on the other way, all the citizens in the smart city are just data indicator or collector, it’s not unreplaceable. Indeed the city and network system become more smart, but what about the citizens? How much benefits could we get from the smart city?

 

Citizens sensing—-Jennifer Gabrys

Biopolitical 2.0 is a term discuss about life living in smart city with media network, consider the programming the city, how should citizen be the part of the city?  Who will be the input and who will be the output devices? And what is the sequence of each person as input/output devices?

 

Biopolitical 2.0 seems more concern like population effect. Under this circumstance the citizen and citizenship could have distinct shift. Power and wealthy will shift easily. Is this change give citizen more democracy or constraint the citizen’s distinctive?

 

 

 

Citizen Sensing in the Smart and Sustainable City: From Environments to Environmentality

 

If the citizens depend on the smart city’s devices too much, when accident happens, such like  power cut or  system crashed. Do the citizens still have the ability to reply?

 

If our city becomes the smart city, does it mean our living habit will change very much? Just like bought a new computer, we should install all the soft wares we need and learn how to use the new operating system?

 

What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen?

 

Now the situation is, the smart devices make a city into a new city, citizens have to learn the new like style. Which makes people do not have the sentience to the city they living in. will it makes the city became a fast food city?

 

When every citizen becomes the participant of building a smart city, which sounds very sweet that people will have more sense of belonging of the city. However, every human being has his own idea and understanding of how to make his own city. How can we make certain that the city will develop in the right way?

Citizen Sensing in the Smart and Sustainable City – Gabrys

– “…the term “smart cities” derives from “smart growth,” a concept used in urban planning in the late 1990s to describe strategies for curtailing sprawl and inefficient resource use…” In some cities, even those who have “smart” initiatives, physical growth and expansion is necessary and already occurring (not suburbs, actual growth of the city) in order to keep up with a growing population. In what ways can we learn from sprawl, and manage a swelling city in a smart way?

– “The primary way in which sustainability is to be achieved within smart cities is through more efficient processes and responsive urban citizens participating in computational sensing and monitoring practices. Urban citizens become sensing nodes- or citizen sensors- within smart city proposals.” In both passive and active descriptions of citizens as sensors, people are viewed as data inputs to be mined, monitored and analyzed so much so that the “smart city” might forget that they are just that- people. Even if the citizens are willing to participate, is there a way to make them feel like they are more than just an instrument after the planning and development stages are complete? We have become accustomed to instant gratification, is this something to play into? In what ways can individuals and groups see immediate benefits (and consequences) for the city, themselves and others through their choices?

What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen? – Shepard, Simeti

– A control room for a smart city or dumb citizens; which is more of a risk? With the Smart City in a Box idea, there are many possibilies for something to go wrong. It may be hacked, it may fail after a power surge or natural distaster, it could be tampered with or damaged physically. If the whole brain of the smart city is in one box, what happens when that box is compromised? On the other hand, what happens if a smart city relies mainly on smart citizens to function and the citizens do not comply as they should?

– “Does leveraging social media and networked information systems really broaden participation, or merely provide another platform for proactive citizens already more likely to engage within the community?” Just how easy do we have to make it for people to participate? Is it constructive to offer participation to the idlest and ‘dumbest’ of citizens, or does the lack of an easy means of contribution and feedback further polarize and silence those who already do not have voices within their communities?

Programming Earth – Gabrys

Isn’t the development of test beds themselves counter intuitive in pertinence to the environment and sustainability? The manufacturing of all that steel, glass or even the development entire man made sites? Should the smart city initiative be more of an integration model than a ground up process? Is the reason it’s not, the precariousness of our communities to such implementation? Or the low monetary return on developing a soft city without renewed or additional potential for (profitable) real-estate?

How can we prevent altering or heavily impacting “material-political distributions of power” risking possible modes of “subjectification”? Is our perception of citizens as “dumb sensing nodes” due to allocation of the sensory data to corporations and not back to the city and it’s citizens instead? That instead of locals advocating changes in the community (itself a bond-strengthening interactive experience) and collaboratively striving towards a goal – that change, much like a cookie cutter, is being forced based on data that remains exclusive from our conscious input and fails to accommodate citizens existing outside the averaged datum line?

“Citizen sensing as a form of engagement is a consistent reference point for development-led and creative practice engagements with smart cities” Who is the next generation of designers and developers designing for?  The average? Or does big data allow us to “zoom in” on smaller less general demographics, understand patterns in their behavior and then design for them? Although our scrutiny and suspicion is warranted, it’s healthy to bear in mind that a cookie cutter approach (albeit less informed) was taken largely to some of our most revered cities. Urban planners and architects hypothesize about how they make people feel and what people want, and once a consensus has been reached (accurate or not) the designs (ranging from single unit to entire city scales) were implemented, and the subjects forced to adapt. If the same approach is used now with the added accuracy due to sensory data analysis, Is it not then our responsibility as designers to use said information to build more inclusive, livable and traverse-able spaces?

The citizen is a data point. Both a generator of data and a responsive node in a system of feedback – does that not reinforce our participation and citizenship as parts to a whole environment? Is perhaps the reason we are so uncomfortable with such loss of control our narcissistic belief in our rights and freedom superseding the importance of all else, living and none living? A mentality that places us at the center of the universe?

What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen? – Shepard & Simeti

“More problematic is how this approach promotes a technocratic view of the city and urban development, the corporatism of civic governance” etc..Could a preventative measure be the strategically designed absence of sensors and networks in areas such as public spaces or street intersections? Citizen smartness (without technology) to balance the overload of information and possibly it’s effects on forms or perceptions of citizenship? E.g Drakun and Haron shared spaces, Holland

Embedded within the popular notion of the word “smart” is the idea that the optimizations and inefficiencies these technologies promise will inevitably make for a better life. Does the word smart itself bear a psychological effect on people and their will of adoption? That its self explanatory that smarter is always better?

“An eager, engaged, canny urban participant, where I’m not “smart” and certainly not a “citizen,” and where the infrastructures and the policies are mysterious to me.” Is Sterling not in effect describing the smart city? Where he unwittingly participates while remaining to think and act inefficiently? Which leads to the question, what will a smart city look like? Are we to expect a dense overlay of information and visual saturation or are we to imagine the embedded technology as a background that informs the mediators and urban planners of the city?