Our technology-first approach has failed the city of the future. So-called “smart cities,” powered by technology, carry the promise of responding to the great pressures of our time, such as urban population growth, climate instability, and fiscal uncertainty. But by focusing on the cutting-edge technologies themselves and relying on private companies to move forward, we have lost sight of what we even want our cities to achieve with all that tech. — wired.com
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Who dosen't like smart cities? You'd have to be a dummy not to, except when the electrical grid goes down, or when a computer gets corrupted, or when systems need to be upgraded, becasue everything must be upgraded. For the technologists, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.
You'd have to be a dummy not to
then you go on to explain why you don't like smart cities?
It should be noted that 'smart' is a term used to advance corporate interests. Smart car, smart grid, smart house, etc. are all simply optimistic names intended to spin corporate agendas into something digestible and desireable by the public.
Smart in reality is the rejection of such agendas and the development of humane and socially centric activity and culture.
^agree.
Using additive systems to sustain an inherently unsustainable way of life. Another diet pill.
it's the information age. i'm pretty sure 'smart' often implies some sort of information management system. for example, a 'smart' energy grid allows access to how much power is being used, and when, and where. the inanimate electric grid is capable of communicating with people.
what people do with that information is something else.
saying things would be better if we could go back to mayberry where we didn't have access to as much information and aunt b put her pies on the window sill is not "smart." what might be more practical would be to learn how to better aggregate and filter the information available to us, and to use that information to develop better solutions to the problems we face.
architects might not be the right people to design cities or develop zoning ordinances. you'll just get a bunch of arbitrary form generating parametric shit. abandoning access to valuable and useful information so you can talk about your 'vision' or whatever other self-indulgent ego-inflating nonsense opinion you might have is impractical and i would prefer to not see it in any city i live in or travel through.
"architects might not be the right people to design cities or develop zoning ordinances. you'll just get a bunch of arbitrary form generating parametric shit."
As if that where the only kind of architect. If you don't want "a bunch of arbitrary form generating parametric shit, then hire an architect who's studied cities as forms of human settlements, and accept that they will be delving into history to find solutions that work with the envirionment, prior to when we became so smart.
that is a good idea if you want to design a city that meets the needs of the people of the past.
you could also hire an architect that knows how to analyze the available data rather than discard it, and develop a solution that meets the current needs of the inhabitants.
of course either option is preferable to random form generating fluff. i'm sure there are a bunch of other options too.
I love data. BTW history is data.
What scares me the most is that we still have people who think they know the "...Right Way to Build the Futuristic Cities of Our Dreams."
How do they know it's the "right way." How do they know it's the city of MY "dreams?" How do they know it's the city of the "future" when the future is always becoming the past?
^ correct LA.......ts called Emergence - Santa Fe Institute ish- Emergence..................Historical data and policies is guesswork at best when it comes to cities even if Smart infrastructure exists.......by Emergence I mean the equivalent of the discovery of Beer and its consequences. Stored liquid grain becomes alcoholic beverage (this is slightly a Lewis Mumford reference). The alcohol makes people do funny things and random babies happen. No amount of data on grain storage would have predicted the social implications just like prior to cities no amount of available data would have predicted the results of contained masses of humans - mainly culture.
you know that Stephen King story, Tommyknockers?
The people in it start getting very smart, they start losing their human emotions and their teeth.
We're always positioned between two miseries. The misery of the past with its diseases, with its wars and its feuding identities and the misery of the future with the promise of our mass convergence towards self-destruction. the past as a big black tunnel and the future a big black hole.
i hope the world at least survives us , and devours everything we leave behind in turf, vines, moss; that it ebbs back into fruition with flora and fauna devoid of this destructive internal capacity to alter nature, to think and to marry nature to thought.
:“Our culture is permeated with a nihilism, a defeatism, that is generally agreed to be the outcome of the rise of science; it is aggravated by the sense of insignificance that is bound to be felt by most individuals in a highly mechanized civilization. Too many of our days amount to psychological defeat, and there is no sense of a background of real values of the kind that mediaeval man possessed, to make us feel that our individual defeat is unimportant. Man, as described by science, is passive, a product of a process of mechanical evolution, a blind will to live conditioned by natural selection.” Colin Wilson, Beyond the Outsider (1965)........ there is way out of this without reverting historically or hitting the reset button....Otherwise we would just be cycling and not progressing.
There are several perspectives in which one can view humanity. First, if we zoom out looking from the edge of the Milky Way we will see an insignificant star orbited by an insignificant blue sphere floating in the infinite boondocks of the universe. From that vantage point nothing matters much what happens here on earth. The second perspective would be from the earths orbit. From here we would notice a bacterial like growth engulfing the beautiful green land. From this point we are a disease. The third, hovering in close enough to witness earth and all its arbitrary divisions, its wars, its cities, etc. from here we are as a whole both creative and destructive. We can appreciate the urban manifestations as we can appreciate any other natural organism, as a product of nature in both its altruism and its brutal struggle towards fitness. The fourth, we can zoom into the individual life, we can see the great significance of culture and all the beauty of art and drama of life. From this point everything matters. Culture, society, love, etc. All of these perspectives and all other variations of it are true. Our humanity is a paradox. The paradox is the totality of our reality. The problem is that we often choose one way to look at it all rather than embracing the paradox and seeing things as they are in in there totality. Reality is the sum of all perspectives.
We cannot possibly know what "smart growth" is if we only view it from our narrow daily vantage point.
jla, we can know what 'smart growth' is. my water meter is connected to a 'grid' of water meters supported by the city's water department. i can view how much water i use on any given day, and i can even tell what part of day (early, late, midday, etc) i was using that water. if, on our daily vantage point, we were concerned about too much water being used, or certain parts of the water system being overly taxed, that information can be used to develop better water infrastructure. that's smart growth. policy-wise, as an example, maybe i could water the lawn before people start taking showers to spread out the demand.
of course when we start thinking of 'smart growth' as some sort of spiritual/philosophical debate, then sure it's hard to know what it is. but, if we look at is as fundamentally a set of tools that we have available to use, it become a more realistic and reasonable conversation. sure, we may use those tools wrong or inefficiently, we may make mistakes, and we may fail. but if we try, and if we learn from our mistakes, there will probably be improvements in the way cities grow and policies associated with that growth.
on the other hand, we can learn from history that the aqueducts were a great marvel, from a practical sense, an engineering sense, and when they built those big stone bridges it looked neat. we can get rid of flushing toilets entirely, because the romans did it right.
"but if we try, and if we learn from our mistakes, there will probably be improvements in "
that ridiculously positivistic.
jla-x " Reality is the sum of all perspectives. " i totally disagree with you. :)
Mistakes and improvements are the same thing in this river of time. More Colin Wilson - "Man is a paradoxical being who believes that he is distinguished from the animals by this ‘thirst for truth’. The thirst for truth has taught him that this difference does not really exist; truth is a destructive appetite.”......you can see the world through only one vantage - your consciousness. With that said jla-x your summary is only possible after the fact. Emergence my friend, nullifying the smartness of data past (curtram), is the yet-to-come.
your summary is only possible after the fact
right, so if you think of 'smart growth' as something based on the result, such as smart growth is a city that has met criteria like lower energy consumption after a year or something, then it's hard to know if you're doing it right without the benefit of hindsight. you need to create the 'smart growth' policy, and then wait a year to see if you've done it right.
if you think of 'smart growth' as a series of tools that help you measure and understand both what you're doing and what you've done, then it's the implementation of the tool at the outset that makes the policy or the city or the growth 'smart,' rather than the result.
my 'smart' water meter doesn't make me use less water, doesn't make me use water at a better time, and doesn't make me use water more efficiently. it just tells me and the water department what i'm doing. it's still smart growth, even if the results might not show any improvement over previous time periods.
curt, the water grid isn't "smart", it's simply hooked up to a data collection system for billing purposes. Smart would be a managed system that billed for water use on progressive basis, monitored for and highlighted excessive use and leaks, and among other things incorporated industrial usage and waste water management as part of a comprehensive system with a clearly specified set of goals intended to protect and manage the entire system in a way that doesn't deplete water tables or introduce toxic chemicals into the supply (chlorine, fluoride, etc.) and so on.
One example of a "smart" grid is the now-popular Nest thermostat with remote access. A back door allows Google to remotely manipulate the temperatures in your house in order to "level" energy use. What this means is they can crank up the AC to burn off accidental or intentional excessive power production or to create an artificial shortage. Just think of all the highly profitable possibilities!
or the wholeness of the picture, owing to..or rather evidenced by its unfathomableness, does not exist.
and neither do these plateaus of realities jla-x supposes, each obliterating the other in its instance of existence...and each necessarily a creature of our imagination, whether imagined as an imaginary plateau or imagined as a non imaginary one.
splintered, fragmented, taunted by our predisposition to reading into signs of wholeness and wholesomeness some wholeness and wholesomeness that should therefore must but might not exist.
i only feel the rush to demise with the intermittent scatter of a few sparkling laughs and good feelings, wit and intelligence; a black pool of starkness animated by the necessary glitter that ultimately underlines nothing but that blackness that encircles and threatens to extinguish the few seeming embers of our consciousness. and its not just ironic that these embers are not embers but illusions, reflections of nothing reachable. and that these illusions are an inversion of the platonic ones - helping to orchestrate the convergence of our unideal dubious anxious tenable maybe-existence into darkness. turn of the lights, go back to black
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