History Theory Criticism | 2016

SMART CITIES REVELATION - EVENTUALLY IT WILL

DESTROY THE PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL EQUALITY
( What this smart city vision might mean for the ordinary citizen? )

Aadrika Sharma
3-A

Sushant School of Art and Architecture

Let us first define what a smart city is . According to the Government of

India a smart city "Is in the intersect between competitiveness, Capital and Sustainability.
The smart cities should be able to provide good infrastructure such as
water, sanitation, reliable utility services, health care; attract investments;
transparent processes that make it easy to run a commercial activities;
simple and on line processes for obtaining approvals, and various citizencentric services to make citizens feel safe and happy."

So, a smart city uses information and communication , technologies to enhance the quality,
performance and interactivity of urban services, to reduce costs and resource consumption
and to improve contact between citizens and government. In other words, A city equipped
with basic infrastructure to give a decent quality of life, a clean and sustainable environment
through application of some smart solutions.
A smart city is basically a city that functions properly and is run by
competent people. The city will have to have it's various agencies in sync
with each other to optimize standards of living.
To analyze the benefits and drawbacks of implementing smarter cities, a certain
analytical framework must be employed. Are smart cities making old business
processes more effective through use of existing data in novel ways? Second, are
they creating new services and processes through collecting and leveraging new
data via sensors and technology? More importantly, what even is a smart city?
A smart city is one that leverages existing and new infrastructure and technologies
to enable the development and deployment of efficient and effective solutions or
services for citizens, businesses and governing agencies.

The Government also believes that smart technologies may help to address some of the
challenges of urbanisation such as pollution and resource consumption. Closer
monitoring and comprehensive information gathering could lead to a better management
of supply and demand of scarce resources. It may also allow consumers to make more
informed decisions about their consumption of such resources which in theory will
reduce the waste and cost of utilities and extend the life of existing infrastructure.[1]

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Promoters of smart cities have helped us to visualise a world where technology could be
seamlessly integrated into every facet of the urban environment. From transport
systems, lighting and climate control, to commerce, utilities and security, the smart city
has come to epitomise the most efficient, clean, and safe way to live. We are led to
imagine that the smart city will benevolently watch over its citizens, gathering data for
the purpose of responding instantly and intelligently to their needs. In reality, there is little
consensus over the extent to which smart technologies, and the relentless collection and
dissemination of data, will measurably improve the lives of ordinary citizens.
As technological functionality advances, it tends also to centralise. It is likely that in the
smart cities of the near future, our phones and watches will become the remote controls
to our lives - summoning our driverless vehicles, communicating with our appliances,
transacting our payments and monitoring our health and wellbeing. All this functionality
in one place carries an enhanced risk of operative paralysis, inconvenience and financial
loss should controllers be lost, stolen or damaged or if connectivity suffers through
malfunction or cyber-attack. These are genuine perils that millions of mobile phone
owners will readily recognise.

Our government has decided over this vision to set up 100 smart cities across the
country soon after the government was sworn into power mid last year. Since then a
race has been on among cities to land on the list that the ministry of urban
development is compiling.

The smart city is, to many urban thinkers, just a buzzphrase that has outlived its
usefulness: the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people. So
why did that happen and whats coming in its place?

What role will the citizen play? That of unpaid data-clerk, voluntarily
contributing information to an urban database that is monetised by private
companies? Is the city-dweller best visualised as a smoothly moving pixel,
travelling to work, shops and home again, on a colourful 3D graphic
display? Or is the citizen rightfully an unpredictable source of obstreperous
demands and assertions of rights? Why do smart cities offer only
improvement? asks the architect Rem Koolhaas. Where is the possibility
of transgression?

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One of the quotes: The notion of the smart city in its full contemporary form
appears to have originated within these businesses, Greenfield notes in his 2013
book Against the Smart City, rather than with any party, group or individual
recognised for their contributions to the theory or practice of urban planning.
Better living through biochemistry gives way to a dream of better living through data.

The smart city concept arguably dates back at least as far as the invention of automated traffic
lights, which were first deployed in 1922 in Houston, Texas. Leo Hollis, author of Cities Are
Good For You, says the one unarguably positive achievement of smart city-style thinking in
modern times is the train indicator boards on the London Underground. But in the last
decade, thanks to the rise of ubiquitous internet connectivity and the miniaturisation of
electronics in such now-common devices as RFID tags, the concept seems to have
crystallised into an image of the city as a vast, efficient robot a vision that originated,
according to Adam Greenfield at LSE Cities, with giant technology companies such as IBM,
Cisco and Software AG, all of whom hoped to profit from big municipal contracts.

The notion of the smart city in its full contemporary form appears to have originated within
these businesses, Greenfield notes in his 2013 book Against the Smart City, rather than
with any party, group or individual recognised for their contributions to the theory or practice
of urban planning.

Promotional illustrations for a proposed new smart city in Dholera, India.

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Promotional illustrations for a proposed new smart city in Dholera, India.
Whole new cities, such as Songdo in South Korea, have already been constructed according
to this template. Its buildings have automatic climate control and computerised access; its
roads and water, waste and electricity systems are dense with electronic sensors to enable the
citys brain to track and respond to the movement of residents. But such places retain an eerie
and half-finished feel to visitors which perhaps shouldnt be surprising. According to
Antony M Townsend, in his 2013 book Smart Cities, Songdo was originally conceived as a
weapon for fighting trade wars; the idea was to entice multinationals to set up Asian
operations at Songdo with lower taxes and less regulation.

In India, meanwhile, prime minister Narendra Modi has promised to build no fewer than 100
smart cities a competitive response, in part, to Chinas inclusion of smart cities as a central
tenet of its grand urban plan. Yet for the near-term at least, the sites of true smart city
creativity arguably remain the planets established metropolises such as London, New York,
Barcelona and San Francisco. Indeed, many people think London is the smartest city of them
all just now Duncan Wilson of Intel calls it a living lab for tech experiments.

So what challenges face technologists hoping to weave cutting-edge networks and gadgets
into centuries-old streets and deeply ingrained social habits and patterns of movement? This
was the central theme of the recent Re.Work Future Cities Summit in Londons Docklands
for which two-day public tickets ran to an eye-watering 600.

The event was structured like a fast-cutting series of TED talks, with 15-minute investorfriendly presentations on everything from emotional cartography to biologically inspired
buildings. Not one non-Apple-branded laptop could be spotted among the audience, and at

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least one attendee was seen confidently sporting the telltale fat cyan arm of Google Glass on
his head.

Instead of a smart phone, I want you all to have a smart drone in your pocket, said one
entertaining robotics researcher, before tossing up into the auditorium a camera-equipped
drone that buzzed around like a fist-sized mosquito. Speakers enthused about the transport
app Citymapper, and how the city of Zurich is both futuristic and remarkably civilised.
People spoke about the huge opportunity represented by expanding city budgets for
technological solutions.

Screengrab from Usman Haque's project Thingful.

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Usman Haques project Thingful is billed as a search engine for the internet of things
Strikingly, though, many of the speakers took care to denigrate the idea of the smart city
itself, as though it was a once-fashionable buzzphrase that had outlived its usefulness. This
was done most entertainingly by Usman Haque, of the urban consultancy Umbrellium. The
corporate smart-city rhetoric, he pointed out, was all about efficiency, optimisation,
predictability, convenience and security. Youll be able to get to work on time; therell be a
seamless shopping experience, safety through cameras, et cetera. Well, all these things make
a city bearable, but they dont make a city valuable.

One only has to look at the hi-tech nerve centre that IBM built for Rio de Janeiro to see this
Nineteen Eighty-Four-style vision already alarmingly realised. It is festooned with screens
like a Nasa Mission Control for the city. As Townsend writes: What began as a tool to
predict rain and manage flood response morphed into a high-precision control panel for the
entire city. He quotes Rios mayor, Eduardo Paes, as boasting: The operations centre allows
us to have people looking into every corner of the city, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

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Whats more, if an entire city has an operating system, what happens when it goes wrong?
The one thing that is certain about software is that it crashes. The smart city, according to
Hollis, is really just a perpetual beta city. We can be sure that accidents will happen
driverless cars will crash; bugs will take down whole transport subsystems or the electricity
grid; drones could hit passenger aircraft. How smart will the architects of the smart city look
then?

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A less intrusive way to make a city smarter might be to give those who govern it a way to try
out their decisions in virtual reality before inflicting them on live humans. This is the idea
behind city-simulation company Simudyne, whose projects include detailed computerised
models for planning earthquake response or hospital evacuation. Its like the strategy game
SimCity for real cities. And indeed Simudyne now draws a lot of its talent from the world
of videogames. When we started, we were just mathematicians, explains Justin Lyon,
Simudynes CEO. People would look at our simulations and joke that they were inscrutable.
So five or six years ago we developed a new system which allows you to make visualisations
pretty pictures. The simulation can now be run as an immersive first-person gameworld, or
as a top-down SimCity-style view, where you can literally drop policy on to the playing
area.

Another serious use of pretty pictures is exemplified by the work of ScanLAB Projects,
which uses Lidar and ground-penetrating radar to make 3D visualisations of real places. They
can be used for art installations and entertainment: for example, mapping underground
ancient Rome for the BBC. But the way an area has been used over time, both above and
below ground, can also be presented as a layered historical palimpsest, which can serve the
purposes of archaeological justice and memory as with ScanLABs Living Death Camps
project with Forensic Architecture, on two concentration-camp sites in the former Yugoslavia.

Scanlab image.
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The former German pavilion at Staro Sajmite, Belgrade produced from terrestrial laser
scanning and ground-penetrating radar as part of the Living Death Camps project.
Photograph: ScanLAB Projects
For Simudynes simulations, meanwhile, the visualisations work to gamify the underlying
algorithms and data, so that anyone can play with the initial conditions and watch the
consequences unfold. Will there one day be convergence between this kind of thing and the
elaborately realistic modelled cities that are built for commercial videogames? Theres
absolutely convergence, Lyon says. A state-of-the art urban virtual reality such as the
recreation of Chicago in this years game Watch Dogs requires a budget that runs to scores of
millions of dollars. But, Lyon foresees, Ten years from now, what we see in Watch Dogs
today will be very inexpensive.

What if you could travel through a visually convincing city simulation wearing the VR
headset, Oculus Rift? When Lyon first tried one, he says, Everything changed for me.
Which prompts the uncomfortable thought that when such simulations are indistinguishable
from the real thing (apart from the zero possibility of being mugged), some people might
prefer to spend their days in them. The smartest city of the future could exist only in our
heads, as we spend all our time plugged into a virtual metropolitan reality that is so much
better than anything physically built, and fail to notice as the world around us crumbles.

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In the meantime, when you hear that cities are being modelled down to individual people or
what in the model are called agents you might still feel a jolt of the uncanny, and insist
that free-will makes your actions in the city unpredictable. To which Lyon replies: Theyre
absolutely right as individuals, but collectively theyre wrong. While I cant predict what you
are going to do tomorrow, I can have, with some degree of confidence, a sense of what the
crowd is going to do, what a group of people is going to do. Plus, if youre pulling in data all
the time, you use that to inform the data of the virtual humans.
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Lets say there are 30 million people in London: you can have a simulation of all 30 million
people that very closely mirrors but is not an exact replica of London. You have the 30
million agents, and then lets have a business-as-usual normal commute, lets have a
snowstorm, lets shut down a couple of train lines, or have a terrorist incident, an earthquake,
and so on. Lyons says you will get a highly accurate sense of how people, en masse, will
respond to these scenarios. While Im not interested in a specific individual, Im interested
in the emergent behaviour of the crowd.

City-simulation company Simudyne creates computerised models to aid disaster-response

planning.
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City-simulation company Simudyne creates computerised models with pretty pictures to
aid disaster-response planning
But what about more nefarious bodies who are interested in specific individuals? As citizens
stumble into a future where they will be walking around a city dense with sensors, cameras
and drones tracking their every movement even whether they are smiling (as has already
been tested at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival) or feeling gloomy there is a ticking time-bomb
of arguments about surveillance and privacy that will dwarf any previous conversations about
Facebook or even, perhaps, government intelligence agencies scanning our email.
Unavoidable advertising spam everywhere you go, as in Minority Report, is just the most
obvious potential annoyance. (There have already been smart billboards that recognised
Minis driving past and said hello to them.) The smart city might be a place like Rio on
steroids, where you can never disappear.

If you have a mobile phone, and the right sensors are deployed across the city, people have
demonstrated the ability to track those individual phones, Lyon points out. And theres
nothing that would prevent you from visualising that movement in a SimCity-like landscape,
like in Watch Dogs where you see an avatar moving through the city and you can call up their
social-media profile. If youre trying to search a very large dataset about how someones
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moving, its very hard to get your head around it, but as soon as you fire up a game-style
visualisation, its very easy to see, Oh, thats where they live, thats where they work, thats
where their mistress must be, thats where they go to drink a lot.

This is potentially an issue with open-data initiatives such as those currently under way in
Bristol and Manchester, which is making publicly available the data it holds about city
parking, procurement and planning, public toilets and the fire service. The democratic
motivation of this strand of smart-city thinking seems unimpugnable: the creation of
municipal datasets is funded by taxes on citizens, so citizens ought to have the right to use
them. When presented in the right way curated, if you will, by the city itself, with a sense
of local character such information can help to bring place back into the digital world,
says Mike Rawlinson of consultancy City ID, which is working with Bristol on such plans.

But how safe is open data? It has already been demonstrated, for instance, that the openly
accessible data of Londons cycle-hire scheme can be used to track individual cyclists. There
is the potential to see it all as Big Brother, Rawlinson says. If youre releasing data and
people are reusing it, under what purpose and authorship are they doing so? There needs,
Hill says, to be a reframed social contract.

The interface of Simudynes City Hospital EvacSim.

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The interface of Simudynes City Hospital EvacSim
Sometimes, at least, there are good reasons to track particular individuals. Simudynes
hospital-evacuation model, for example, needs to be tied in to real data. Those little people
that you see [on screen], those are real people, thats linking to the patient database, Lyon
explains because, for example, we need to be able to track this poor child thats been
burned. But tracking everyone is a different matter: There could well be a backlash of
people wanting literally to go off-grid, Rawlinson says. Disgruntled smart citizens, unite:
you have nothing to lose but your phones.

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In truth, competing visions of the smart city are proxies for competing visions of society, and
in particular about who holds power in society. In the end, the smart city will destroy
democracy, Hollis warns. Like Google, theyll have enough data not to have to ask you
what you want.

You sometimes see in the smart citys prophets a kind of casual assumption that politics as we
know it is over. One enthusiastic presenter at the Future Cities Summit went so far as to say,
with a shrug: Internet eats everything, and internet will eat government. In another
presentation, about a new kind of autocatalytic paint for street furniture that eats noxious
pollutants such as nitrous oxide, an engineer in a video clip complained: No one really owns
pollution as a problem. Except that national and local governments do already own pollution
as a problem, and have the power to tax and regulate it. Replacing them with smart paint aint
necessarily the smartest thing to do.

And while some tech-boosters celebrate the power of companies such as ber the
smartphone-based unlicensed-taxi service now banned in Spain and New Delhi, and being
sued in several US states to disrupt existing transport infrastructure, Hill asks reasonably:
That Californian ideology that underlies that user experience, should it really be copy-pasted
all over the world? Lets not throw away the idea of universal service that Transport for
London adheres to.

Perhaps the smartest of smart city projects neednt depend exclusively or even at all on
sensors and computers. At Future Cities, Julia Alexander of Siemens nominated as one of the
smartest cities in the world the once-notorious Medellin in Colombia, site of innumerable
gang murders a few decades ago. Its problem favelas were reintegrated into the city not with
smartphones but with publicly funded sports facilities and a cable car connecting them to the

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city. All of a sudden, Alexander said, youve got communities interacting in a way they
never had before. Last year, Medellin now the oft-cited poster child for social urbanism
was named the most innovative city in the world by the Urban Land Institute.

One sceptical observer of many presentations at the Future Cities Summit, Jonathan Rez of
the University of New South Wales, suggests that a smarter way to build cities might be
for architects and urban planners to have psychologists and ethnographers on the team. That
would certainly be one way to acquire a better understanding of what technologists call the
end user in this case, the citizen. After all, as one of the tribunes asks the crowd in
Shakespeares Coriolanus: What is the city but the people?

As the tech companies bid for contracts, Haque observed, the real target of their advertising is
clear: The people it really speaks to are the city managers who can say, It wasnt me who
made the decision, it was the data.

Of course, these speakers who rejected the corporate, top-down idea of the smart city were
themselves demonstrating their own technological initiatives to make the city, well, smarter.
Haques project Thingful, for example, is billed as a search engine for the internet of things. It
could be used in the morning by a cycle commuter: glancing at a personalised dashboard of
local data, she could check local pollution levels and traffic, and whether there are bikes in
the nearby cycle-hire rack.

The smart city was the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people,
suggested Dan Hill, of urban innovators the Future Cities Catapult. It never answered the
question: How is it tangibly, materially going to affect the way people live, work, and
play? (His own work includes Cities Unlocked, an innovative smartphone audio interface
that can help visually impaired people navigate the streets.) Hill is involved with
Manchesters current smart city initiative, which includes apparently unglamorous things like
overhauling the Oxford Road corridor a bit of horrible urban fabric. This smart stuff,
Hill tells me, is no longer just IT or rather IT is too important to be called IT any more. Its
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so important you cant really ghettoise it in an IT city. A smart city might be a low-carbon
city, or a city thats easy to move around, or a city with jobs and housing. Manchester has
recognised that.

The "smart city" is a futurist's dream town. It's carbon neutral because computers
regulate its energy use perfectly. It has no traffic jams because sensors capture realtime data on the roads and guide drivers to optimal routes. Other sensors can quickly
alert police to crime, or send information to your mobile about cool events. But living
in a smart city could be a nightmare.
About a decade ago, these companies wanted to figure out how they could turn their
computer networking products into something that made sense in physical space.
Essentially, they were wondering how they could start selling networking devices to
cities, governments, and even consumers not to connect their computer devices,
but to connect the physical objects around them.
They were, in essence, trying to figure out how to monetize what is now often called
"the internet of things." Out of those early brainstorms at large companies emerged
the idea of a smart city, where buildings, cars, infrastructure, and public utilities
would all be networked. They could be easily regulated and controlled with a "city
operating system" that could figure out where power was needed and wasn't in the
city or where police were needed and they weren't.
Most of all, this city would be a data-gathering machine. Sensors would adhere to
every surface, monitoring air quality, foot traffic, crime, water use, and even how
many insects were flying around. Smart phones would be one of the most important
sensors of all, as they would track the activities of every person in the city. Once Cisco
or another company had enough of that data, they could use algorithms to optimize
everything in the city, routing traffic, stationing police officers or planting trees to
draw insects away from schoolyards.

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Eventually this data could even be used to drive city government, generating
information about what citizens need before they even realized they needed it.

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It all sounds lovely in theory, and the idea has now leapfrogged out of the corporate
R&D zone, into academic research and enthusiastic pop science books. There are
even smart cities being built, with help from Cisco, like Songdo in South Korea.
The problem is that making a city "smart" could also crush everything that makes it a
city, argues urban studies expert Adam Greenfield in a new pamphlet called "Against
the Smart City." A former designer for Nokia and professor at NYU's design school,
Greenfield has written extensively about urban life and technology. He believes that
cities have a logic all their own, which is based on chaos and diversity. Making them
"smart," and subjecting their citizens to the logic of algorithms, could be more like
authoritarianism than freedom.

Against the smart city (The city is here for you to use Book 1)
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Though the idea of a smart city is appealing, it's crucial to keep Greenfield's
perspective in mind. He and I talked about the dark side of smart cities by email,
right after Greenfield had relocated to London one of his favorite cities from
New York.

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io9: Your essay is a response to advertising about smart city products,

primarily from IBM, Cisco and Siemens. Why are tech companies leading
the conversation about future city planning? How is that changing the
way people understand cities?
Adam Greenfield: In order to understand the disproportionate influence these
companies have on a domain as seemingly distant from their remit as urban
planning, I think we need to start from the idea that the perception of where
capability resides has shifted in our culture. We live in a time when the popular
imagination positions any individual who made their name and fortune in
information technology a Bill Gates, a Steve Jobs, a Jeff Bezos, or even, latterly, a
Mike Bloomberg, a Marissa Mayer or a Mark Zuckerberg as some kind of universal
genius, capable of speaking meaningfully to just about any domain of human
endeavor, and the enterprises they founded as being capable of productive
intervention in just about any state of affairs you care to mention.

This is why Bill Gates's opinions on family planning in the Global South are taken
seriously, and nobody bats an eyelash when a company whose best-known and most
widely-used product is a search engine proposes to intervene in automotive design.
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That's just where all the grandeur has come to reside in our age, and inevitably a
tremendous share of the capital as well. So when a municipal governing body finds
itself confronting the kind of wickedly complicated, multidimensional challenge that
any real city generates on a routine basis, it's natural (or "natural") that it would turn
for help to the institutions that appear to have all the answers.
The enterprises you mention just organically have a better grasp of the specifically
information-technological possibilities cities and city governments now have
available to them. So they're well-positioned to profit from the general sense abroad
in our culture that whatever the domain, problems that have bedeviled people for
decades or even centuries will readily yield to the application of insight founded in
these technologies. And while I don't, myself, think that sense is entirely misguided, I
definitely don't think that an IBM or Cisco is ever going to have anything like the
whole picture, either. To them, the city's just another terrain for business operations;
they're inevitably (and, if you're a shareholder, maybe even properly) oriented
toward selling the products and services they already know how to sell, and the
systems they propose to deploy are no different than those one might use to manage
any other large, complex organization. As far as I'm concerned, they completely miss
most of the salient, defining features of urban life in doing so.
io9: Do you think there are aspects of city life that every city shares, no
matter where it is in time or place? What are they?
AG: I do, yeah. I think they mostly have to do with personality with the kind of
affect, subjectivity or sensibility the act of living in a great city reliably seems to
produce in people. Negotiating the circumstances of everyday life in any true city
tends over time to create a broad-minded, feisty, opinionated personality type we'd
have no problem recognizing, wherever and whenever it appears in human history.
City people may well be tolerant of diversity not out of any personal commitment to a
utopian politics, but because that's just what the daily necessity of living cheek-byjowl with people who are different imposes upon you. City people are possessed of a
hard-earned savoir faire; they know how to operate. They're not easy to cow, to snow,

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to take advantage of or to dominate. They like to believe, anyway, that they think for
themselves.
From what I can tell, this is so across cultures and centuries both. It's this kind of
personality that underlies the culture, the innovation, the urban productivity
economists like Richard Florida and Ed Glaeser seem so transfixed by. And yet it's
just this set of characteristics that so many smart-city provisions seem hellbent on
undermining, or even eradicating. The ability to search the space of the city for the
perfectly congenial set of circumstances, to tune the environment until we never have
to leave the contours of our own comfort: where the making of citydwellers and
citizens is concerned, that's a bug, not a feature. It erodes the development of savoir
faire; it eliminates the risk, but also everything wonderful, that arises in the
confrontation with difference.

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It seems bound to produce self-absorbed, self-centered people, trapped in a foam of

epistemic bubbles, each unable to communicate meaningfully with all of the others,
acknowledge the validity of anyone else's prerogatives, or even stipulate the basic
humanity of the others who happen to share the space and time of the city. And at
the limit, the technical capability to bring the environment under arbitrarily finelygrained personal control ultimately means each of those bubbles is the size of a single
individual. I obviously can't speak for anyone else, but I sure don't want to live in a
densely packed hive of ten or twelve or twenty million such individuals.
io9: You argue that there are elements of the smart city idea that are
already creeping into our everyday urban lives without most of us
realizing it. Can you talk about what these elements are, and why some of
them are dangerous?
AG: Well, the first and most obvious to me is the emphasis placed on quantification
in the smart-city discourse the idea that something doesn't exist, or has no
meaning, unless it can be measured. As it happens, I believe that the qualities most
of us cherish about urban life just aren't susceptible to direct measurement, whether
that's the pleasure of the "sidewalk ballet," the thrill of discovering something secret,
the solidarity when times are rough or the tacit understanding that neighbors help
each other when the chips are down. You may be able to infer the presence of these
from metrics you can actually garner from a distributed net of sensors, but in
themselves they're just not the kind of indices that show up on a wallscreen
dashboard in City Hall. So I worry that we'll undervalue precisely those qualities that
are the most important to us, and the most definitive of metropolitan experience,
because they can't be harvested from a camera, an accelerometer, a load cell, a GPS
trace or some other order of machinic perception.

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The next concern I have is a sentiment you overwhelmingly encounter in smart-city

advocates, which is that the act of quantification is somehow neutral that there
somehow haven't been deeply interested decisions made about how, when and where
to collect data, using what means, or how it's labeled, characterized, represented and
made use of, that color its interpretation profoundly. I mean, I actually heard a very
senior scientist at IBM say, in so many words, "The data is the data," perfect, serene
and eternal, at which his colleagues nodded sagely. I confess that I have a hard time
understanding how any adult could believe that, let alone an incredibly bright and
accomplished adult whose job it was to build systems capable of acting on collected
data. But there it is. It's inexplicable to me.
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My third beef is something I've already alluded to, the belief inherent to a product
like IBM's Intelligent Operations Center that municipal administration is a
straightforward matter of triggering stereotyped, preformulated protocols in
response to the fluctuation of key performance indicators. You might be able to run a
small commercial enterprise that way, or a battalion-sized military unit some
organization where there's a relatively clear and uncomplicated chain of command
and accountability, and a single, overridingly shared mission. But a city? Come on.
Any city, at least in a nonauthoritarian society, is a roiling cauldron of contestation,
in which a million constituencies, with profoundly different conceptions of the right,
the just and the good constituencies, mind you, which are themselves in a
constant, ongoing process of coherence and decoherence jockey for access to
spatial, budgetary, attentional and other resources, and it's impossible to satisfy
them all simultaneously. And that's true even in principle. There are and will be no
Pareto-optimal solutions to the city. Cities are inherently tragic.

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So, again, it's inexplicable to me that you would even for half a heartbeat entertain
the idea that a city can or should be managed like a top-down, hierarchical,
command-and-control organization. Finally, there's a sense that hovers over the
more recent "urban science" work, that it very definitely shares with the smart-city
rhetoric, that a city is in some sense algorithmic that all its perceptible operations
are little more than the shadow cast in four dimensions by an equation or set of
equations that persist in some eternal Platonic hyperspace, and that if we could but

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wrap our head around these equations we'd be able to intervene in urban affairs
more or less as we chose to. That however blindly we'd been feeling our way through
the dark, we'd at long last stumbled onto the royal levers that govern systemic
behavior, and found them numeric. This mindset feels pernicious to me because the
state of affairs it implies is so profoundly corrosive of our sense of agency, whether
individual or collective.
I'm not saying that systemic approaches to things aren't useful, and potentially
hugely and irreplaceably so. Nor am I afraid of whatever uncomfortable truths might
be waiting for us in future explorations of the Big Set. But even so profoundly
cybernetic a thinker as Stafford Beer placed the greatest stock in our ability to choose
among the futures available to us. I think it's just disappointing that the parties
currently carrying on this work seem to so badly misunderstand what cities are, what
they do and what they're for.
io9: You contrast the corporate vision of the smart city with the idea of
an open city that is heterogeneous, and whose citizens participate in
creating an "emergent order." I love the moment toward the end of your
essay where you talk about a city that uses information gathering to
empower citizens, inform political debate, and improve the city. What
does this open city look like, and what kind of government does it have?
AG: I mean, "Against the Smart City" was essentially hygienic, right? It just felt
necessary to clear the table, sweep these fatally flawed and shallow and ultimately
antidemocratic smart-city visions away, and open up some space for alternatives,
before laying out what I think is ultimately much more interesting (to me and to
everyone else), which is some kind of affirmative proposition.
What is it that I do think we can achieve in our cities with sensitively-designed
informational-technical tools and services? I like to tell a story about a management
consultant I once saw give a talk about technology and the future of civic governance.
During the Q&A after his very conventional, bullet-pointy presentation, he was asked
if he thought the basic forms of democratic municipal government elected mayors,

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city councils and so on were still relevant, and would remain so. And very
surprisingly to me, he said no, that there was a decent chance that due to the
decentralizing and distributing effects of networked information technologies, more
power would come to reside with citizens themselves, organized in something
resembling a federation of autonomous local collectives. I mean, this was a very
conservative, very buttoned-down guy, who worked for the most prominent name in
his industry, and whether he quite knew it or not, what he was describing would have
been immediately familiar to, say, the members of the anarchosyndicalist CNT union
who ran the Barcelona Telephone Exchange during the first part of the Spanish Civil
War.
I found it fascinating that his understanding of contemporary political dynamics
would lead him to any such belief. It was profoundly hopeful and encouraging. And
that actually is what I believe that if there's a tendency to universal surveillance
and control latent in the design of these tools, which there unquestionably is, there's
at the same time an equally strong tendency in them to the decentralization and
distribution of knowledge of the world, which we can grasp hold of, reinforce and
make use of if we choose to. We can use the technics of data collection,
representation and actuation to reinforce the best qualities of our cities, and all the
things about them that make us stronger and wiser and more capable. And that's a
pretty exciting set of circumstances.
io9: What is it that you love about London?
AG: Oh, god. Damn near everything. The texture of it, to start with. Even though
London is not in any meaningful sense any older than New York relatively few
extant buildings are any older than the Great Fire of 1666, vast swaths of the East
End were bombed to rubble by the Nazis during the Blitz, and some fairly misguided
"regeneration" projects have done for a lot of the rest it's still built to the contours
of a medieval street plan, and that's what furnishes the urban fabric with its enduring
drama, mystery, and human scale. Every corner is, quite literally, a revelation.

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There are any number of landmarks of personal significance to me here's the

sidestreet in Hackney where Throbbing Gristle had their Death Factory, there's the
Mayfair storefront where Archigram launched "Living Cities," and that's supposedly
where the infamous schoolkid's issue of Oz was put together. There's an arcane,
eldritch, non-Euclidean aspect to the city that delights me, as well, on a daily basis
I mean, you're not going to find anything as weird as the mythos around the
Hawksmoor churches in the States. And finally, the sense that you're swimming in a
different gene pool here you just see different faces on the bus or the sidewalk than
you do in New York. It's just, in so many ways, an overflowingly generous base of
operations for an urbanist and a lover of cities.

Perhaps the smartest of smart city projects neednt depend exclusively or even at all
on sensors and computers.
Whats more, if an entire city has an operating system, what happens when it goes
wrong? The one thing that is certain about software is that it crashes. We can be sure
that accidents will happen driverless cars will crash; bugs will take down whole
transport subsystems or the electricity grid; drones could hit passenger aircraft. How
smart will the architects of the smart city look then?

SOURCES-

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Article-

We don't need PM Modi's new 'smart' cities, we need to run existing ones better,

Firstpost

by Mahesh Vijapurkar Sep 12, 2014 19:30 IST

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