1) In Shepard’s Sentient City, I was struck by the passage in page 23 about the “program for a house”, as if building a city was an exercise in object oriented programming. A house has characteristics that may vary from one to the other, but they all descend from a common class of “House.” To find hybrid, or unexpected spaces like the laundromat/bar, this object oriented way of thinking won’t get you very far. If each node in the network of a city is an opportunity to find and explore a ludic space not just through the architecture, how can digital technology help break down these seemingly arbitrary barriers that define spaces? How can a single space hold multitudes?

3) On p20 of Sentient City, Mark write about various ways in which locative technology can be of use (traffic patterns), where it may be an irritant (targeted advertising), and where it’s intrusive (profiling). What are the differences in the applications here? It would seem that a level of anonymity is required before it becomes something that is welcome and useful on a city wide scale. What about edge cases though? If you aren’t in the center of the dataset, what are you missing out on in this scenario? Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction has a good series of examples of “outsiders” or people who are statistically separate in large sets of data. When thinking about locative media, it’s something to keep in mind, who is implementing these tools, and for whom?

3) McCullough writes about attempts at making smart cities, and the failure of top-down implementations. Masdar City, which I’ve visited and can attest to the totality of a flop, is a great example. In fact, the UAE as a whole may eventually be seen as a story of missed opportunity, in large part because of this top-down planning of everything in the country. Even as technology enables cybernetic systems to help regulate these environments, there is still a failure in realizing the overall goals that are laid out. Can this be attributed to a failure of vision, implementation, will, or some combination of all of the above? Is it possible to build a city with a non-hierarchical system? What would that look like?