Kicked a smart city lately?
By now you’ve heard the “smart cities” pitch. Our streets will be embedded with sensors, our buildings plugged into the internet of things, our commons monitored by cameras and drones, our urban systems recalibrated by real-time data on energy, water, climate, transportation, waste and crime. Any day now, our cities will be marvelously transformed into efficient machines. But it’s not so easy to see where you and I fit in. Most discourse on “smart” and “sentient” cities, if it addresses people at all, focuses on them as sources of data feeding the algorithms. Rarely do we consider the point of engagement — how people interface with, and experience, the city’s operating system.
As Ada Louise Huxtable might put it: Kicked a city lately?
Typically the urban interface is imagined as a screen. A 2011 report by the Institute for the Future predicted displays “embedded in buildings, kiosks and furnishings,” delivering “‘supercharged’ interactions that combine speech and gestural inputs with immersive, high-definition graphics,” while “ambient interfaces, which boil down complex streams of data to one or two simple indicators, will lurk in the background of everyday urban life, quietly signaling in our periphery.”
And behind all those screens is a flood of data....
Can we create a formal or structural parallel between the urban structures we desire and the interfaces we create to mediate those cities? Are we sure, Hill wonders, that core civic values — serendipity and productive inefficiency, personal and civic responsibility, “meaningful activity from citizens and government, the city as public good, and ... diversity and regard for the affective dimensions of urban experience — are part of the smart city vision?” Furthermore, he asks, “are our governance cultures and tools in the right shape to genuinely react to the promise of The Network?” [35] Are these same values embodied formally in our smart city interfaces? Could governments use these tools to “boldly prototyp[e] new versions” of themselves? Could citizens use these same tools to investigate urban power structures and access to resources? We should be using our urban interfaces to afford our publics a peek “down the urban stack,” to the invisible infrastructures that make the city work; to call attention to the unrepresented populations and urban problems that are filtered out of our whitewashed and abstracted city renderings; to highlight opportunities for improvement, and the roles everyday people could potentially play in effecting that change. We could be using our urban interfaces to educate our publics about the nature of government and the expanding “science” of urban management — about the methodologies of data gathering and analysis, the politics of visualization, the algorithms behind the “urban operating system,” and the servers and wires and waves that make it all possible.
Our urban interfaces could compel us to ask questions about what kind of cities we want, and what kind of citizens we want to be. The creation of a better interface — an interface that reflects the ethics and politics that we want our cities to embody — is necessarily a collaborative process, one drawing on the skills of designers of all stripes, technicians, engineers, logisticians, cultural critics and theorists, artists, bus drivers and sanitation workers, politicians and political scientists, economists, policymakers and myriad others (including women and people of color, who have been egregiously underrepresented in relevant debates). If our interfaces are to reflect and embody the values of our city, the conception and creation of those interfaces should be ours, too — not Cisco’s, not the administrators’, certainly not mine or yours. But ours.