Townsend, Anthony M. Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia. WW Norton & Company, 2013.

Anthony Townzend grounds smart cities on the history of urban planning theories. He describes what smart cities are and how governance of cities is going to change by these new interventions. He clarifies the idea in accordance with its different actors: city mayors, industry, entrepreneurs, civic hackers and citizens. In this confrontation, what author is conveying is how determinant is each one of these actors. Townzend’s perspective as a planner is different from what corporations as actual initiators of smart cities in the market, claim. He takes a critical position to draw realities versus overexcitement of city mayors that is happening by seductive situation that has formed for them.

Gabrys, Jennifer. Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

In Program Earth, Gabrys asks many questions. She frames notions in their usual framework and then tries to take them beyond their recognized concepts. Her philosophical and artistic approach in contemplating about the relation of technologies with human in the context of sensing environments is radical but unfinished. Through the book and more specifically in chapter 9, the author suggests that rather than deciding which connectivities are preferred in a way towards smart city, we might instead attend to the ways in which collectives are turned into measurable entities and individuals, which are further put into relation through infrastructures of measurement.

Graham, Stephen, 1965, and Simon Marvin 1963. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition, Routledge, New York;London;, 2001.

Arendt, Hannah. The human condition. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

McQuire, Scott. Geomedia: Networked Cities and the Future of Public Space. 2016

Scott McQuire prefers looking at the characteristics of the future cities not as smart cities or sentient cities but as media cities. He considers new media technologies from smart phones to LED screens as an integral part of the contemporary city. Here he moves from media into geomedia where online connections have moved from being placeless to being geolocated in urban spaces. Geomedia is a concept based on the intersection of four characteristics of communication in cities by new technologies: ubiquity, real-time feedback, location awareness and convergence.

Zuckerman, Ethan. Rewire: Digital cosmopolitans in the age of connection. 2013.

We live in the age of connection. With exponential growth of online tools and the number of connected people to internet, there are more opportunities for connectivity of people and societies.  However these opportunities are not enough and equal to more connectivity. Zuckerman describes how we are stuck in our own limited social circle and how we are unaware of the news that is happening around the world. He draws the necessity of factors involved in forming a meaningful connection and becoming cosmopolitan citizens.

Dourish, Paul, and Genevieve Bell. ““Resistance is futile”: reading science fiction alongside ubiquitous computing.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 18.4 (2014): 769-778.

The authors have written another essay, Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision in 2005. In that essay they criticize the dominant fashion of scientific writing about ubiquitous computing which is highly based on the predictions of Weiser. However they argue that we no longer need to talk about the future in the way that Weiser used to because now we are living in that future. They see a lack of cultural and realistic consideration in the most of scholarly researches of ubiquitous computing. Their Resistance is futile suggests looking at the future in a different way. They analyze the role of science fiction movies on culture on how they have in fact enriched science. Their case studies on sci-fi movies are different from Weiser point of view because of their cultural elements where failures are or victories are based on the intersection of future technologies and culture.

Bleecker, Julian. “Design Fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction.” Near Future Laboratory 29 (2009).

Centralized top down implementation of smart governance in the growing urbanization process, is now popular more than ever to help better decision making based on citizen engagement. While there are many indeterminacies about appropriateness of digital infrastructures, they are now the inseparable part of the city. Ubiquitous computing including transportation mobile apps, civic data gathering approaches and playful urban apps, has changed the behavior of citizens. The excitement of automation might conceal the true potential of using aforementioned platforms.

First set of question in this research is concerned with target group. The promise of tech companies on more efficiency, rarely addresses the marginalized citizens. How equity of accessibility to these platforms have been considered? What are the scenarios for marginalized people who are not connected to the digital urban network? Are they truly counted as citizen? Asking who is citizen, leads to the notion of citizenship itself. The other set of questions is concerned with implicit definitions of new citizenship and city and what they offer to each other. How ways of life and not merely lives are governed through these particular environmental distributions due to their modalities? What is measurable in a city and what is not measurable? What future cities offer or limit in terms of livability, joy and having new experiences? What is the potential of moving from desktop computing to urban computing for becoming a communicative city and forming new relations with other human beings? This investigation looks at examples of former automated governance systems and experiments with current successful mobile computing networks to understand how they are able to manipulate urban life; in addition, analyzes participatory urban projects to extract their effective elements. These studies joined with literature review of the subject, form a solid critical point of view.

The goal of the project is to engage technologists, designers, decision makers and public, effectively with this point of view through a speculative set of urban scenarios, digital platform and devices. The implication of this study is going to raise conversations about the developed critiques.

Centralized top down implementation of smart governance in the growing urbanization process, is now popular more than ever to help better decision making based on citizen engagement. While there are many indeterminacies about appropriateness of digital infrastructures, they are now the inseparable part of the city. Ubiquitous computing including transportation mobile apps, civic data gathering approaches and playful urban apps, has changed the behavior of citizens. The excitement of automation might conceal the true potential of using aforementioned platforms.

First set of question in this research is concerned with target group. The promise of tech companies on more efficiency, rarely addresses the marginalized citizens. How equity of accessibility to these platforms have been considered? What are the scenarios for marginalized people who are not connected to the digital urban network? Are they truly counted as citizen? Asking who is citizen, leads to the notion of citizenship itself. The other set of questions is concerned with implicit definitions of new citizenship and city and what they offer to each other. How ways of life and not merely lives are governed through these particular environmental distributions due to their modalities? What is measurable in a city and what is not measurable? What future cities offer or limit in terms of livability, joy and having new experiences? What is the potential of moving from desktop computing to urban computing for becoming a communicative city and forming new relations with other human beings?

This investigation looks at examples of former automated governance systems and experiments with current successful mobile computing networks to understand how they are able to manipulate urban life; in addition, analyzes participatory urban projects to extract their effective elements. These studies joined with literature review of the subject, form a solid critical point of view. The goal of the project is to engage technologists, designers, decision makers and public, effectively with this point of view through a speculative set of urban scenarios, digital platform and devices.

Number of city-dwellers will be doubled by 2050. Rise of different technologies is rapidly changing the way in which cities are managed. City mayors around the world compete to achieve a smart city. While there are many indeterminacies about appropriateness of digital infrastructures, they are now the inseparable part of the city. Use of smart phones let citizens to participate in shaping their cities more than before. Transportation mobile apps, civic data gathering approaches along with playful urban apps are changing the behavior of citizen.

Centralized top down implementation of smart governance systems are popular to predict the possible problems and support better decision making based on citizen engagement. But are these decisions offering a solution to our existing big problems or they will bring more problems with themselves? There are growing concerns about ownership of data gathered about citizens, as well as what really information technologies are changing. The excitement of automation might conceal the true potential of this new technologies.

What future cities offer in terms of livability and joy? What are the potentials of future cities and information technologies embedded in them for improvement of equity, life of poor and middle-class? What is measurable in a city and what is not measurable? These are crucial questions of this research. The emphasis and promises of tech companies on better life condition, rarely addresses the situation of marginalized and how new information technologies can support them. This investigation is looking for possibilities of better measurement and engagement.

A two-Fold Movement: Design research as dialectical critical practice

1. Is critical practice a direct consequence of limits of architecture to instrumentally deliver a specific social or political transformation?

2. Retroactive manifesto places people and their messy urban lives at the heart of architectural discourse, but who is the audience of “Spaces of Possibility in Palestine”? It seems that this work’s subject has the potential to discuss the issue with public, however, its medium avoids the project to go beyond architectural discourse.

3. Is subjectivity of work of Koolhaas similar/close to superiority of a fully three dimensional town-design in Eliel Saarinen’s book?

A way with words: Feminists writings architectural design research

1. Making problematic artefacts versus application driven design, can help to understand the problems of architectural design, and to understand what architecture can do for problems outside its realm at the time. The second one investigates what architecture might be, but where are the limits of this extension?

2. Site-writing is an evident of structural similarities between architecture as a medium and textual media. How today’s forms of design research can use literature to find new structures for architecture beyond the poetic use of literature?

3. The discipline of performance studies has been well connected to feminists writings in architecture because of the conceptual depth to the thinking through performativity. What is specific about feminist notions which pushes its writing more than other fields of architecture in using performativity?

Spaces are evolving as a result of designers’ works and the behavior of people interacting in them. This behavior is not only an outcome of the designed environment, but also a result of natural and sociopolitical complexities. Today’s technologies relate “designed environments” and “social rules” as two separate objectives in such a way that new digital platforms are becoming both environments to live in and platforms to change. “Ingress” and “Pokémon GO” are popular examples of mobile games that are changing the way people use urban spaces.

My research is based on the intersection of Online Social Networks, including their limits and potential, Civic Media strategies for maximum engagement, and Smart Distributed Networks. My primary imagination of the outcome, whether practical or speculative, is a self-governing system based on user participation input and data gathered by sensory networks.

This system, which should be situated in a limited context, is an attempt to represent a sample of living in the future of self-regulating social systems. This system contains evolving agents; at one side is the minimized state of a centralized management and on the other side is in the maximized civic engagement mode. The form of presentation could be an urban mobile game, a physical installation, a screen based simulation, or a combination of the aforementioned.
Though my research should be narrowed during the semester, I am trying to find answers to questions such as:
– What we can learn from the effects of social media algorithms on politics in society?
– How might decision makers be replaced by systems trained by artificial intelligence and machine learning?
– How do new modes of communication and cooperation between citizens change our cities?
– How can digital spaces maximize civic engagement?