In Wired’s article on The road to tomorrow: streets need to be as smart as the cars driving on them, Luke Dormehl presents the reader with examples of cities smarting up their dumb infrastructures. The ultimate objectives seem to be the usual suspects: reduction of traffic, reduction of cars in the street causing pollution and congestion and increased safety. The articles takes us on a ride though the streets of cities like Copenhagen, Bristol, Boston and the well-known case of Songdo, all working towards the development of smart roads filled with gadgets and sensors to enable smart self-driven cars. The point the article is trying to make (one of them at least, according to the title) is the following: if major cities want their landscapes to resemble the future shown in The Jetsons where the digitization and automation of cars reign supreme, they need to beef up the software ingrained in their infrastructure. What do these relationships mean with regards to the presence of code, its affect on the concept of space (and public space) and the impact on today’s societies?


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Kitchin and Dodge address the topic of digital cities through a less conventional lens; that of code and the language it uses to create software. Less conventional because code and software are not necessarily the subjects of exciting literature. Code is just not sexy enough to get into the discussion. But it’s about time we shed some light on this silent worker, as software does all the heavy lifting. Through its lines of code and algorithms it orders hardware around, telling it what to do and when to do it. Sometimes in such an automated way that we humans have no interaction whatsoever in the process and no notion of its actual existance. The very notion of public space is affected by code, as Berry points out: “Public space more than often functions as a space between the vir­tual and the real, between labor and leisure, between work and home. In urban public space, the technology that sends us off into virtual worlds and the embodied experience of physical and mental mean­dering all but collide, forming a mise-en-scene that is all montage. (…) The technological and the embodied become just so many reified strips of perception whose arrangement is all but arbi­trary.” (Berry et al., page 7). 

Code is all around us. It is ubiquitous as software is present in our everyday lives, all of the time. It is in our entertainment, our work and our daily operations such as shopping with a credit card. Code creates spaces where we operate and live; it transduces spaces that already exist. “Code/space occurs when software and the spatiality of everyday life become mutually constituted, that is, produced through one another. Here, spatiality is the product of code, and the code exists primarily in order to produce a particular spatiality.” (Kitchin, R. & Dodge, M.,page 16). In this relationship, one cannot exist without the other. The same applies to the smart-coded cars described in Wired and in every other blogpost or article referencing smart cities. These cars, coded infrastructure according to Kitchin and Dodge, are driving on physical streets, also containing software, coming together as coded assemblages that depend on each other to perform. 

The way we move in our cities, the way we understand space is defined by the code that it transduces. However, it is not the software that determines how we as citizens cities should move and function in our cities. It is an actual decision and vision coming from the engineers who programme the code, ultimately from the decision-makers who enable this to happen.

Although software is not sentient and conscious, it can exhibit some of the characteristics of being alive. (...) code can make things do work in the world in an autonomous fashion-that is, it can receive capta and process information, evaluate situations, make decisions, and, most significant, act without human oversight or authorization. (Kitchen and Dodge, page 5)

As Townsend mentions in the Wired article, “Cars didn’t take over the city until cities put rules in place that allowed it. It was a choice that city governments made. That’s one of the things that’s often uninformed about speculation that’s coming out of Silicon Valley now. They think they’re going to solve all the problems the car created by just putting in some software. Its a lot more complicated than that.” (Townsend quoted from  Wired). Software has been referred to as semi-sentient because of its automation capabilities, but this does not go as far as to believe that code is inserting itself in our cities without our human intervention. We might not be aware as inhabitants of a city of how far engrained and present software is around us, but it was purposely put there and that decision has shaped the spaces we inhabit as well as the way we function as a society.

References: 

• Kitchin, R. & Dodge, M., 2011. Code/space software and everyday life, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press:
• Berry, C., Harbord, J. & Moore, R.O., 2013. Public space, media space, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 1-15 (Introduction). 
• The road to tomorrow: streets need to be as smart as the cars driving on them

Laura Adler published SimCities: Designing Smart Cities through Data Driven Simulation in August, 2016. The article focuses on innovative new software such as ‘CityScope’ and ‘UrbanSim’ which are helping urban planners to simulate the impact of their Smart City development programs; in order to create the” new horizons for cultural activity,” that Kitchin and Dodge predict in ‘Code / Space’, (2011, pg.1), as a result of contemporary, constantly developing software.

Adler writes: “The most fundamental benefit of simulation is the ability to mitigate the problem of ‘unintended consequences’.” The coded sim programs show the potential effects of how improvements to one aspect of infrastructure could impact on another, or several, or all, in the real world. As Kitchin and Dodge state, code has the capability to ‘evaluate situations’, and can: “exhibit some of the characteristics of being alive,” (pg.2). Now an ‘indispensable tool’ for urban planners (Adler, 2016), the simulations are just like the surface temperature models in Kitchen and Dodge (pg.30), in that; “the models analyze the world and the world responds to the models.”

An extremely positive reaction by the urban planners is that the simulations allow for a new level of participation by citizens in their projected designs. Residents can voice their opinions online, and urban planners can utilise their ideas for the input of future simulations (Adler, 2016). The residents are effectively affecting the design of their future environment(s).

And it is not just through simulations run by urban planners and local governance that can impact the design of Smart Cities either.  Emerson College created an interactive multiplayer game called: Participatory Chinatown (below), that engages its players to create avatars and start an online life in a digital version of Boston’s Chinatown, the results of which are used to: “generate urban planning priorities to guide city officials,” (Adler, 2016). The game, and the simulations, are effectively capturing and enacting: “knowledge about the world … in order to augment, mediate, and regulate people’s lives.” (Kitchen and Dodge, 2011, pg.26).

However, as Berry, et al states: “Public space is a corporeal affair,” (2013, pg.4), and the idea of computer-generated sprites generating the: “visible and tangible,” effects that Kitchen and Dodge predict does not seem to fit (2011, pg.2). Questions remain about what to include in the programs; how far do the urban planners go in creating a realistic version of a city, before predicting how it will develop? Can the programs account for the ‘historic legacy’ of certain areas, building, or existing communities? (Adler, 2016). This is also a consideration of Berry, when weighing up the opportunities of how new media might impact urban public space(s) with: “particular historical, political and social configurations,” (pg.7).

Adler confirms that challenges remain in using simulations in urban planning. Without the ‘human’ characteristics built into their design, do the simulations really consider public space ‘as place’, in the sense of Berry, et al? (pg.9). Kitchin and Dodge believe that: “Space is not simply a container in which things happen; rather, spaces are subtly evolving layers of of context and practices that fold together people and things and actively shape social relations,” (pg.13).

This sounds similar to what the simulations intend to recreate, so in some ways the spaces the simulations are designed to develop, and the programs themselves, have similar capabilities and intentions. Adler believes that the key to their combined success lies with the very people their social symbiosis will affect: “Only with simple, accessible simulation programs can citizens become active generators of their own urban visions, not just passive recipients of options laid out by government officials,” (2016).

Bibliography:

Adler, L., (2016). SimCities: Designing Smart Cities through Data-Driven Simulation. [online resource, accessed Feb 2018, via http://www.scoop.it/t/the-programmable-city]. Available at: https://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/news/article/simcities-designing-smart-cities-through-data-driven-simulation-893

Berry, C., Harbour, J., Moore, R., (2013). Public Space, Media Space. Palgrave Macmillan. Hampshire.

Kitchin, R., and Dodge, M., (2011). Code / Space. MIT. Massachusetts.

For me, the headline of the BBC article encapsulates the general mood of excitement-verging-on-anxiety currently surrounding both the conceptual and physical nature of Smart Cities. There exists an ambivalence towards their current value as opportunities for new freedoms, communities and chances for a sustainable future:

“Tomorrow’s cities: Just how smart is Songdo?” (Williamson, 2013) sums it up; a statement, backed up by the technology that created it, followed by a hesitancy to commit fully to its promise (the word ‘but’, right in the middle of the two, would fit well).

As Sadowski and Pasquale state: “Calculating the costs and benefits of the innovation is a Sisyphean, and deeply ideological task,” (2015, pg.2). The mood is the same throughout many similar case studies on Smart Cities and Smart City Technology. From the likes of the aforementioned researchers, even: “experts are divided on whether it will spell doom or salvation for the environment,” (Lewis, 2016), and citizens who have had a tangible glimpse of the modern smart city still feel the same. After visiting a Singaporean Smart City, Wired journalist Sara Watson concluded: “the model is compelling in theory, on the ground the reality is not seamless,” (2017).

The purpose of Watson’s case study was to see if the anxiety of Brexit Britain might be assuaged by the promise of the Smart-City future – could one unconnected island nation thrive as an interconnected hub? The comparison is intriguing. Sadowski and Pasquale see cities “getting smart” as solutions for austerity, urban system management, and generating a new flow of capital; the motivations of doing so being of a political economic nature (2015, pg.3), much like Britain’s decision to leave the EU.

Funnily enough, it is the very sort of empowerment that many Brexit voters believe(d) they would be rewarded with that may be essential for the skepticism surround Smart Cities to disappear. Shaw and Graham write in depth about Henri Lefebre’s ‘right to the city’ philosophy; “a powerful conceptual weapon for the collective good – it can represent the right to change ourselves by changing the city,” (2017, pg.5). They discuss an ‘informational right’ to such cities; a movement that demands transparency about the technologies of Smart Cities and the massive amounts of data they collects from their citizens: “a rallying call for snatching back power from the political and technical elites who reconfigure the city as a platform for corporate smartness,” (pg.11).

So, while new communities can certainly be built, connected, and the potential for empowerment exists, these cities still have to be built by someone, or some-bodies: “These new cities, like Eko Atlantic in Lagos in Nigeria and Waterfall City (South Africa), bring a new model where urban governance is shared between the private and public sector,” says Mira Slavov (cited in Giles, 2018), from the London School of Economics (the potential sharing also between ’empowered’ citizens exempt from her statement). Slavov was referring specifically to African Smart Cities, including Vision City, where the average price of a property is beyond the majority of the country. And if empowerment is still only available only to those who can afford it, then surely it doesn’t exist (?).

Confusion certainly does exist, however, over the sustainability of Smart City Technology. Lewis (2016) writes about two ends to the eco-friendly spectrum; low-power, low-data transmitting devices existing side-by-side with energy-hungry, data-gobbling surveillance systems – ironically gathering the very information that feeds into the monetary industries that fund the cities’ growth (Shaw & Graham, pg.8).

It seems clear that as Smart Cities develop, the belief in their development is itself a work in progress. Simultaneously interpreted as ‘Tomorrow’s Cities’, while being quizzed on their real capabilities and underlying intentions, the potential of freedom, community and sustainability remains open. As Charles Taylor states (in Sadowski and Pasquale, pg.10); “interpretation ‘is an attempt to make clear, to make sense of an object of study’ that is in ‘some way confused, incomplete, cloudy, seeming contradictory – in one way or another, unclear’.”

This is where we appear to be with Smart Cities. They may be for ‘tomorrow’, but they have not truly been accepted, yet, today.

Bibliography:

Giles, C., (2018). African ‘smart cities:’ A high-tech solution to overpopulated megacities?. CNN. [online resource, accessed Feb 2018]. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/12/africa/africa-new-smart-cities/index.html

Lewis, D., (2016). Will the internet of things sacrifice or save the environment?. Guardian. [online resource, accessed Feb 2018]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/dec/12/will-the-internet-of-things-sacrifice-or-save-the-environment

Sadowksi, Pasquale, (2015). The spectrum of control: A social theory of the smart city. First Monday: 20: 7: 6.

Shaw, J., Graham, M., (2017). Our Digital Rights to the City. Meatspace Press.

Watson, S., (2017). What the UK can learn from Singapore’s smart city. Wired. [online resource, accessed Feb 2018]. Available at: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/sara-watson-singapore-smart-cities

Williamson, L., (2013). Tomorrow’s cities: Just how smart is Songdo? BBC. [online resource, accessed Feb 2018]. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23757738

A smart city like Songdo screams potential from every angle and perspective. Processes like interactivity and automation through digitalization can improve the daily lives of a city’s inhabitants as they can reduce stress caused by everyday frictions (easy commutes to work), promote diversity (embedding technologies in the city to support people with sight loss) facilitating access to participation and citizenship (through quick and efficient e-government and the use of data for decision-making) and perhaps most relevant in the context of the Agenda 2030, provide the tools for sustainable development (greener approach to waste management). However, according to these articles in the BBC and Le Monde this particular case study of the Korean city of Songdo seems to be more of a lesson learned on how not to conceptualize and develop smart cities.

Every aspect described above that seemed to make Songdo appealing has not effectively materialized as initially planned for this 40 billion dollar city, and furthermore, these aspects of digitalization are not as straightforward as they seem to be. Is Songdo reason for existing only based on embracing technology for technology’s sake? Is the digitalization of a city like Songdo just intended to improve mundane aspects of our lives or are there ulterior implications that affect our citizenship rights and responsibilities?

As insightful as these articles may be, according to various authors in Our Digital Rights to the City and The Spectrum of Control: A Social Theory of the Smart City, there is much more to read and interpret from them than initially meets the eye.

Before diving into the issue of data which is prevalent in this week’s readings, let’s look into some interesting concepts brought to our attention in the news articles, and link them to the readings mentioned above.

Songdo is what Sadowski (The spectrum of control) calls a smart city built from scratch. In this case, a smart city where intelligence is not fostered or collected from its inhabitants but from the digital hardware that make up the Internet of Things. As described by the BBC “And that’s because the city is currently less than half full; less than 20% of the commercial office space is occupied, and the streets, cafes and shopping centres still feel largely empty”.

Going back to last week’s reading on Townsend, “We need to empower ourselves to build future cities organically, from the bottom up, and do it in time to save ourselves from climate change.” (Townsend, page 18)

What Townsend is saying might be easier applied in the case of cities that are retrofitted and renovated from dumb to smart. This is not the case in this city built from scratch where there is no citizenry to begin with. One may argue that faced with the shocking statistics presented by the UN on the exponential growth of cities, countries like Korea are facing this issue head-on, and in a sustainable way, by addressing needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Brundtwald Report). All of this achieved through the development of green housing and infrastructure.

Sustainability, however, encompasses much more than green development as defined above. This complex and rich concept includes social aspects such as diversity and gender. However, as described in Le Monde, “Sterile and soul-less, the city looks different from Korean cities. There are no poor people, no street vendors, no old people.” This sterility embodies not only the absence of people but for those who have decided to call Songdo their home, the lack of diversity which sets the stage for a city that might not be sustainable in the long run for a more varied type of citizenry.

The lack of means of transportation to and from the city are also a concern from a sustainability point of view. As referenced in the BBC article, “Despite being next to South Korea’s main international airport, transport links into the capital itself are rudimentary, and the incentives for companies moving to a new smart city don’t always outweigh the costs.” How is the city expected to grow and to serve the needs of current and future generations if it is being developed without these considerations?

Even with regards to green infrastructure, the city of Songdo does not seem to tackle that issue very smartly, as mentioned in Le Monde, “The buildings are totally transparent and it is impossible to open the windows”. “In summer and winter the air conditioning is on all the time. I wonder if I don’t use more than before”. She herself had not seen the link between smart city and environment.” 

The articles describe a city booming with technological innovation, a digital landscape almost devoid of people. The city’s infrastructure has developed quicker than the actual need and appeal to move to the city, as well as the surrounding infrastructures such as means of transport that connect Songdo to Seoul. Especially in Le Monde’s description, it is an engineers dream of a modern and futuristic city, but ultimately lacking the ability to enable interactions between people and things.

An article in Datafloq further describes the big data capabilities of Songdo and the promises it intends to deliver. According to the article, surveillance and traffic control are obvious reasons behind data monitoring, but Songdo aims for more. Climate, energy consumption, leisure activities and water consumption will be monitored by data capturing systems. These systems feed off of people and their activities, habits, actions. Companies might understandably not feel compelled to move their operations to Songdo, especially considering the promises of surveillance and data monitoring are not quite appealing in a city with a population less than half of the originally intended.

According to Le Monde: “Songdo is also a town under constant surveillance: 500 cameras ensure total grid coverage to regulate the traffic or detect ‘suspicious’ behaviour. Even the opening of a sewer cover is immediately notified to the IFEZ management centre in one of the towers in Songdo. “We work in close collaboration with the police, but the data are not kept for more than thirty days”.

This last comment regarding data used for policing ties strongly to Sadowski’s section on The hard power of policing technologies. Smart cities are relying in technology and big data with the excuse of using non-violent means for crowd control and ensuring the safety of their citizens. But “technological means threaten to even prevent crowds from forming in the first place, thus moving from reactionary to prophylactic strategies.” (Sadowski, The Spectrum of Control). The use of big data to justify decisions without context or knowledge of historical patterns or trends might result in dangerous and unjust rulings and also go against a citizen’s basic right to assemble and protest.

The infrastructure in Songdo is laid out for data collection in every front, however, the issue of consent is a prevalent one in discussions regarding the use of big data by governments and organizations. Sadowski warns future architects of smart cities “without consistent citizen consultation and serious penalties for misuse of data, their apparatus of omniveillance could easily do more harm than good.” But even before addressing the issue of consent, when building a city from scratch like Sondgo, government officials, town planners and engineers should keep in mind that every city requires its citizenry to exist. Cities require people’s empowerment and participation to make the city before making the data. As Sadowski says “We make the city, and the city makes us. In a time when the urban environment is crisscrossed, undergirded, and overlaid with digitality, the corollary is: We make data, and  data makes us. We thus have—and must claim hold of—“the right to command the whole urban process.” (Sadowski, page 10-11)

Shelton continues this line of thought by referring to a process of knowledge production within cities that start from the ground up: “In order to attain the right to both participation in, and appropriation of, the city, citizens must be free to understand the city and construct their own knowledges and representations of it.” (Shelton, page 27)

Participation and community engagement are also building blocks of sustainability, and in the world we are living in with a growing population and unprecedented development, the digitaliization of cities, either from the ground up or as a transition from dumb to smart, should take these perspectives into consideration.

References:

Sadowski, J (2017) ‘Access denied: Snapshorts of exclusion and enforcement in the smart city’ in Shaw, J and Graham, M. ed. Our Digital rights to the city, pp 6-11. Meatspace Press [Free access, available to download, read online or self print]

Sadowski, J. and Pasquale, F. (2015). The Spectrum of Control: A Social Theory of the Smart City.’ First Monday 20(7): Available at URL: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/5903/4660

Shaw, J and Graham, M (2017) ‘An informational Right to the City?’ in Shaw, J and Graham, M. ed. Our Digital rights to the city, pp. 1-5. Meatspace Press [Free access, available to download, read online or self print]

Shelton, T (2017) ‘Repoliticizing data, in Shaw, J and Graham, M. ed. Our Digital rights to the city, pp 24-27. Meatspace Press [Free access, available to download, read online or self print]

Townsend, A.M., 2013. Smart Cities, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. xi-18. 

BBC 2013 Tomorrow’s cities. Just how smart is Songdo?  (2/9/13) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23757738

Le Monde 2017 Songdo, a city for the affluent http://www.lemonde.fr/smart-cities/article/2017/05/29/songdo-ghetto-for-the-affluent_5135650_4811534.html

The Smart City Of The Future Will Bring Big Data To A New Level https://datafloq.com/read/smart-city-future-bring-big-data-level/183

Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development Our Common Future http://www.exteriores.gob.es/Portal/es/PoliticaExteriorCooperacion/Desarrollosostenible/Documents/Informe%20Brundtland%20(En%20ingl%C3%A9s).pdf

Hello everyone. My name is Mercedes and I am enrolled in the distance learning MA on Digital media, Culture and Society. I am a sociologist, originally from Argentina, currently living in Denmark, working for the United Nations Office for Project Services as a Knowledge Management and Communications specialist. I have also worked in other UN agencies as well as the private sector, where I focused on bridging the digital gap through online educational platforms for children and adults. This MA will support my career development by expanding my knowledge and understanding of how digital media impacts development. Digital cities is my first module. I am a late arrival to the course so I hope to catch up with everything fast and look forward to the semester.

I work for the Infrastructure and Project Management Group within UNOPS and I find that this module in particular addresses many issues my team is struggling to comprehend such as the relationships between infrastructure assets and systems, with concepts like governance and social justice. I look forward to exploring this and going back to my team with some solutions to the many issues raised by our partners. The challenge we have in the development sector is introducing concepts such as digital cities to developing countries who barely have the infrastructure required to service a population with the basic needs such as water, electricity, plumbing, schools and clinics. However, the focus on Sustainable Development Goals for the Agenda 2030 presents an opportunity for countries to start planning their infrastructure roadmaps in a sustainable way, ensuring the path is laid out to build towards a better and sustainable future.

Regarding the numerous links and reading material I accessed so far, I must say I am not shocked but constantly amazed at how much innovation is happening around the topic of digital or smart cities. I always considered myself to be pretty much on top of these issues but I have a feeling this module is going to take me on a wild ride through the “internet of things.”

Regarding the topics of the course, I look forward to Sustainability and Sensing Cities as it seems to be very relevant to my current role in UNOPS.

Finally, along with a full-time job, I have a 1 year-old daughter. I recognize the challenges I am facing with so many things going on in my life but I am committed to this module and this course. Any tips from any working parents out there is appreciated!