Offering a critical response to the dominant vision of the smart city, this talk seeks to look beyond the seductive imagery and hype that surrounds emerging smart city paradigms. In their place, it explores arrange of critical perspectives to smart city planning that are emerging across the social sciences and activist communities, in various places across the world. These critiques centre, broadly, on ways in which smart city paradigms radically deepen urban surveillance ; the way they embed power into corporate urban operating systems; the way the glossy hype and marketing hides tendencies toward authoritarianism and centralized power ; and the way in which ‘smart’ city labels are used to camouflage the construction of highly elitist urban enclaves. The talk will finish by exploring efforts to mobilise digital media to more democratic and egalitarian urban vision.
2. The Seduction
of “Enacted
Environments”
(Dana Cuff)...
• High modernist dreams of
perfect, real-time, remote
control, anticipation, clarity
• Ubiquitous computing/Internet
of Things/social media
• ‘Big Data’ and ‘Data Fusion’
• Geodata
• Optimisation
• Anticipation
• Robotisation
• Blurs into discourses
surrounding “sustainable cities’,
‘resilient cities’, ‘creative cities’
etc etc.
Figure 1: the cyberne0c city
Rela%onship between smart ci%es and IT (Hitachi
2013:14) Hitachi, 2013: 14)
3. Those Damned Silos!
Panoptic Dreams?
Configuring urban crises as
requiring, of necessity, ‘smart
city’ OS cures
“Today’s cities are based on separate domains with no
real ability to be managed as an entire entity. City
managers have no single place to get real-time status or
historical reports of city events. Older systems are
domain-specific and are not concerned with the
consequences on other domains. Daily operations of
cities generate vast amounts of data from many different
sources but cities often lack the ability to visualize and
extract meaningful information” IBM 2012.
5. Deterministic.
Self-Evident
and Messianic
Discourses...
‘Smart city’ concepts “tend.. to be discussed casually,
as if it were self-evident that all one need do to finally
“solve” the city is to weave sensors into the urban fabric
by the million, trawl the relevant social networks for
geotagged utterances, and apply just the right analytic
algorithms to the ever-mounting tally of terabytes
captured this way” Adam Greenfield
7. Four Areas of Critique:
(1) We’ve Been Here Before (Many Times!)
“As technical solu0ons to social problems, informa0on and communica0ons
technologies encapsulate the promise of order over disarray … as a path to an
emancipatory poli0cs of modernity” Hannah Knox
8. Michael Benedikt (1991):
‘Cyberspace’ would work by:
"decontaminating the natural and urban landscapes,
redeeming them, saving them from the chain-dragging
bulldozers of the paper industry, from the diesel smoke of
courier and post-office trucks, from jet fuel flames and
clogged airports, from billboards, trashy and pretentious
architecture, hour-long freeway communities, ticket lines,
choked subways... from all the inefficiencies, pollution
(chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to
moving information attached to things across, over and
under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than
letting it fly free in the soft hail of electrons that is
cyberspace."
12. (3) Glitzy and
Troubling
Exemplars:
Elite, Privatised
Capsules
“In marketing materials and press releases for smart city
initiatives, we hear about idyllic dashboards,
switchboards, and control rooms, artifices that enable
government decision makers to interface with data
streams being produced by the city and simultaneously
obscure the process from those people who inhabit it”
Lily Bui (2014) Sensor Journalism Lab
13. Foster’s Masdar City, Abu Dhabi; Songdo, South Korea; Eko Atlantic, Lagos
“Songdo is as much a protocol as it is a city: other territories can ‘download’ its
plans. Its technology was bought by other cities before it had even been built in
Songdo itself. Its master plan is being exported to Ecuador; meanwhile, China has
purchased kits from similar companies to make its cities more closely resemble
Singapore. Nations dissolve into transnational, portable, cities in a box. With
simulation emerging as the dominant paradigm, material and lived histories are
rendered obsolete” Ava Kofman (2014)
29. ‘Fusion’ and the ‘Surveillance-Security-Military-
Industrial Complex’
30. Links to a Wider Authoritarian Shift: “What we are handing
the administrators of a smart city is a suite of all the tools
they would need to isolate, quash or even prevent
whatever conduct they defined as undesirable”
Adam Greenfield (2013)
.
31. Regional
Caracas Havana
Tegucigalpa Panama Cir5
Geneva Boguia.
Attens MeNien
Rome Brasilia
Quith Managua 1-Fague.
an _1 nsie
KinRhaca Sufis -
Lusaka Bangkok
New Dull
Berlin r'Flinn Guatemala
rana RESC
Phnom. Pr nh
Frankfurt SaTaievn dam
IL Paz 111-11114t7
Zagreh Vienna Annex. Reston
Fluclaput
Prague Paris
lienna. Rang pun
oFORNSAT
STELLAR
SOUNDER
SNACK
MOONPEN
NV
LADYLOVE
INDRA
IRON SAND
JACKKNIFE
CARBOY
TIMBERLIN
High Spood
Optical Gable
Covent,. Clandestine
r Coorperative Lar
Accesses
20 Amen Proirems
Worldwide
-1 Classes of Accesses
• 3rd PARTY/LIAISON
:3C. GE) untriW
• REGIONAL
9D SCS
ONE
50.000 World-wide Implants
LARGE CABLE
20 MaJor Accesses
• FORNSAT
12+40 Regional
TOP SECHET//COMINTI/REL TO USA, ALPS, CAN, GBR, NZL
TOP SECRET/ICON/INT/MEL TiO USA, ALPS, CAN, GEM, NZL
I- TO Pin'
Driver 1: Worldwide SIGINT/Defense Cryptologic
Platform
40. Conven0onal smart city paradigms tend to:
• Be realist: Uncri0cally assume objec0vity of data
• Be presented as self-evident
• Be generic: assume applicability to all ci0es, everywhere
• Privilege quan0ta0ve over qualita0ve and space over place in truth
claims
• Assert that ICTs per se are solu0ons to urban problems, not part of the
problems themselves
• Depoli0cise or postpoli0cise: Neglect wider social, environmental and
poli0cal crises
• Neglect ques0ons of jus0ce, ci0zenship and the right to the city
• Deny knowledges that are uncomputable
• Be top-down and not grassroots-led
• Inscribe ethical, social, cultural and poli0cal judgements and
inequali0es into the secret agencies of code; and
• Overlap worryingly with wider processes of urban securi0sa0on whilst
camouflaging such processes
42. Place not space: Must match scepticism with
critical and democratic insurgent practices
• Data democratisation;
hacktivism; open code;
challenging depoliticizing
discourses of techno-rationality
• Expose creeping power of
surveillance-security-military-
industrial complexes
• Undermine anti democratic
control logics of top-down
‘smart city’ paradigms and
securitisation/criminalisation of
ICT-based activism