Social Cities of Tomorrow conference text. By Michiel de Lange & Martijn de Waal
Excerpts from Social Cities of Tomorrow conference text by Michiel de Lange & Martijn de Waal.
Note: The bolds are mine.
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Can digital technologies enable citizens to act on collectively shared issues?
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We see three promising interrelated developments where urban technologies may be used to create livable and lively cities.
1. Data-commons
Sensing technologies and networked urban media create vast amounts of data about a wide range of urban processes and practices. These data can become a valuable resource, a platform on top of which new services and infrastructures can be built. We will explore how these new resources can be harvested and opened up, and turned into useful information and applications that are available to everyone. Furthermore, we will investigate how these datasets can be used to bring out, visualise and manage collective issues.
2. Sense of place and a feeling of ‘ownership’
To engage people with communally shared issues, it is essential that people envision themselves as part of the urban fabric, and understand that their individual actions make a difference to the common good. They also need to trust other urbanites to act accordingly. How can digital media be employed to foster a shared sense of belonging and responsibility, and a feeling that indeed the city is ‘ours’ to take and shape? We will explore how digital tools for story-telling, urban games, data visualisations and interactive media facades can help foster a sense of place and a sense of ‘ownership’.
3. DIY urban design & networked publics
‘Networked publics’ are groups of people that use social media and other digital technologies to organise themselves around collective goals or issues. In online culture, networks of ‘professional amateurs’ create ‘user generated content’ or take part in ‘citizen science’ projects. Think of open source software or Wikipedia as successful examples. Can we port these principles from online culture, like self-organisation and collective action, to urban life in order to make it more ‘social’ as well? We will look at the ways in which new media technologies can be employed to involve citizens in designing their own city, and to include them in governing urban issues. We will explore how these technologies can be used to create and manage publics around common pool resources, varying from car sharing to urban gardening.
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The event Social Cities of Tomorrow is also intended as an alternative to the increasingly popular idea of ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ cities.
Sensors and sensibilities | The Economist
“For a city to offer smart services and save money, its departments have to work closely together, share their data and use a common IT infrastructure. London, for instance, has different payment systems for public transport, bicycle hire and toll roads. Such fragmentation is costly and makes it more difficult to come up with new offers (say, reducing the congestion charge for those who often hire a bicycle). But getting a city’s islands of bureaucracy to work together tends to be difficult, says Mark Cleverley of IBM, who helps governments and cities develop plans for smart systems. The problem is not just that departments often jealously protect their data, something experts call TEP, as in “turf, ego and power”. Officials also lack a common language or generally agreed criteria for a smart city—which is a big issue, too, for the many companies that are usually involved in a project. “It’s hard to build a business case if people don’t understand each other,” says Simon Giles, in charge of strategy for smart technologies at Accenture. Things are easier in Singapore. Ministries and agencies compete for reputation and resources, but they also co-operate closely on implementing master plans such as “A Lively and Liveable Singapore: Strategies for Sustainable Growth”, the city-state’s roadmap to becoming smart. That helps to explain why Singapore will probably be the first city to combine its various smart systems into a single one.”
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A special report on smart systems: Sensors and sensibilities | The Economist
/via: smartercities
Source: economist.com
Smart cities should be open-source, says Saskia Sassen
A post by citybreaths in which comments “Talking back with your intelligent city” by Saskia Sassen
The urbanization of intelligent technologies
PlanIT Valley, Portugal
McKinsey & Company recently published an article by Saskia Sassen, in which she writes about the current hype around smart cities. She reminds planners and scientists what it is all about: “It is the need to design a system that puts all that technology truly at the service of the inhabitants—and not the other way around.”
Rather than constructing completely new hyperintelligent cities like Masdar and Songdo, Sassen urges cities to take up initiatives like the Amsterdam Innovation Monitor (Amsterdam Smart City). She also praises the innovativity of the Delft University of Technology regarding urban issues. The work of AIM and TU Delft can be implemented by cities around the world in sync with their particular context, without requiring tens of billions of dollars. Also, Sassen warns that an over-managed urban space can go from “sensored” to “censored”.
Masdar City, Abu Dhabi
Not only are these supersmart urban systems unaffordable for many cities, they can impossibly be one size fits all. Sassen says that these technologies have not yet been sufficiently “urbanized”. They have not been made to work in a particular urban context. Technology that works in one city might not be feasible for another because of differences in density, infrastructure, culture, climate, etcetera.
Songdo International Business District, South Korea
Sassen calls for the urbanization of these new technologies. Rather than simply deploying all the new technologies in any city, they have to be made responsive and available to the people whose lives they affect. The computerized systems should become transparent, not invisible. They should be open-source networks, subject to changes and innovations. She concludes: “After all, that ability to adapt is how our good old cities have outlived the rise and fall of kingdoms, republics, and corporations.”
Source: citybreaths
A compilation of resources on smart cities
Humanscalecities has just completed a series of posts about the smart city reviewing the most significant elements: the conceptual confusion between its energy and environmental management approach and issues related to digitalapps and data, the role big companies are playing to market their urban technological solutions, new urban developments that are self-proclaimed smart city, the ability of these strategies to promote local technological systems and, finally, their social and political implications.
As smart cities are gaining great attention lately, humanscalecities has compiled different sources of information he has used lately and here you can find a list of links of resources you may find interesting. Of course, it is impossible to have a fully comprehensive catalogue, so other resources could be included. Feel free to suggest others to him.
Source: humanscalecities
