Tag: W06 – Urban Data Infrastructures

“Smart cities and the politics of urban data,” Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn

To be smart that is to act with wisdom one requires knowledge, which is dependent on information, which is extracted from data.

Where data itself is a process of constraints and choices, and cannot be seen as neutral but as situated, contingent, relational and framed, the process of data analysis is much more complex.

Q) The relationship of smartness, wisdom, knowledge, information and data is a complex process. The transition of data to wisdom to smartness is not a straightforward mathematical computation and thus it is crucial to understand, who are the entities that process this data to transition it from information to knowledge? What are the parameters that define this transition? What is the framework for the same and who controls, monitors, participates or contributes to the functioning mechanisms of this framework?

Panoptic surveillance, predictive profiling, and social sorting.

The fear is that, far from being a liberatory and empowering development, smart cities may lead to highly controlling and unequal societies in which the rights of privacy, confidentiality, freedom of expression and life chances are restricted.

Q) If this happens to be a right speculation for the smart city vision, it is important to understand the role of citizens in this scenario. Will this shift be so subtle leaving citizens unable to realize it or will it be imposed in a sudden explicit format? Will there be a resistance from the citizens or will it leave them unable to identify the transition until it becomes unavoidable to reject?

Facts are produced, not simply measured.

Q) The context in which big data is collected, analyzed and presented defines the decision-making. Who are the power structures that define this process of gathering data, marking for data analysis and the format for data presentation? What would be the new strategies crafted around these facts? What form of governance will it give rise to?

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?

Utopian Vision or False Dawn: Chapter 2, Smart Cities and the Politics of Urban Data – Rob Kitchin, Tracey P. Lauriault and Gavin McArdle

 

• Smart cities create a technological lock-in or corporate path dependency that ties cities to particular technological platforms and vendors over a long period of time, creating monopoly positions. Technology advances rapidly. How long will the technologies last before it has to be changed with a more advanced version? Would governments have to buy these services as if they were shopping at an electronic store? What if a government or state wants to change the company that provides them the technology? Would this be possible?

 

In Gabrys’s reading, she asked: What are the processes that these infrastructures instigate and sustain? How do they at once individuate and join up cities and citizens? What are the capacities of these infrastructures and what modes of inhabitation do they facilitate? She answered these question by the environmental approaches which bring up the idea of withness. However, the environmental quality is not how I image the withness. Could it be a hybrid solution which combine environmental approaches with moving approaches?

 

Considering the digital infrastructures as the physical infrastructure which is eventually going to be have some sort of maintenance. But different form the physical infrastructure such as road, we can partially fix it. The digital infrastructure such as sensors are all connected. How do we maintain the service of the digital infrastructure? If like Gabrys described, digital sensors are embedding into the environment, will be increase the difficulty of maintenance. Or the system could be node to node.

 

“Smart Urbanism” touched the concern about the corporatization of governance. Are there ways to result the conflict between the operation of smart city and the “profit” of smart. So the building process of smart city can equality distribute the benefit. One idea I have in mind is requiring the customized “dashboard”. The London dashboard and Dublin dashboard should not be the same. Each of them should be more specific focus on their own city problem in term of city management. Then this raise another question: who is willing to putting the extra effort?

Program Earth: Digital Infrastructures of Withness – Gabrys

– “How are we with the (smart) city, its infrastructure, its other inhabitants, and the many computational devices that would steer us, when emphasis is placed on coordinating ows of movement so that stoppage, disruption, breakage, and jamming are minimized? What is the withness of a ceaselessly owing city, of a city that never stops, that in its automated e ciency continues to process goods, information, and waste in the small hours of the night? Clearly, to discuss digital infrastructures of withness then also requires attending to infrastructure as pro- cess.”

– This concept of ‘with-ness’ between urban engagements and its citizens is interesting to look at currently, how are citizens currently “with” the city they inhabit?

– What are some steps that we as participating citizens of an urban environment could take in the direction of ‘with-ness’ rather than ‘self-ness’ and become a bigger role in process infrastructure?

 

Smart cities and the politics of Urban Date – Kitchen, Lauriault & McArdle

– In the reading, they mention that some municipalities believe in certain politics of indicator, benchmarking and dashboard initiatives like “rational, mechanical, linear and hierarchical” managerial systems that can easily controlled while others believe in more contextual, unpredictable, interdependental systems.

– Are we looking for a middle ground between these different forms of governance?

– What are some ways we see these different forms of governance right now, and how are they affecting citizens and cities?