January 20

EMP Building in Seattle

 

Centre Georges Pompidou

Smart Cities

Lia Petronio

January 20, 15

 

Are ‘Smart Cities’ Smart Enough?

Stephane Roche, Nashid Nabian, Kristian Kloekl, and Carlo Ratti

 

Urban Computing and its Disconnects

Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard

To what extent does an effect need to be unpredicted to be a response rather than reaction? How many alternative effects need to be possible? If an effect is one of many options to a condition is it a response?

As city populations grow there need be new systems to organize, house, and govern people. The significant expansion of peoples cannot necessarily be adequately responded to by the structures of existing government. The cultural individualization of peoples using portable personal computers can be compatible with acts of self-monitorization through self-sensing, however, the result of self-sensing can not necessarily be significant unless the results of a populations health conditions be pooled together with corresponding data for environmental conditions in order to find patterns for causes so that solutions can be more properly rooted. But how can people feel comfortable giving their bodily and locational data to a ruling party without feeling vulnerable? Can systems of collecting data be made transparent? If the city is run by data, societies will need to be educated in the matter as they are in other subjects. If a society is educated about environmental and bodily data inputs can it be more aware if its impacts? owHow How can the presence of “ambient informatics” benefit rather than distract society?

Conclusion

Whether ambient informatics and city sensing will benefit or endanger society, or both, it is an inevitable condition of humanities evolution as cultural interconnectedness with personal computation and communication devices rises. Information designers, architects, media analysts, technologists, and other thinkers and makers of society a like need to confront their potential role in the revolutionization of humanity.