An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
We are also a culture obsessed by image and impression. Look at the image at the top of this article. Images of futurist cities like this drive me nuts, am I looking at a pimped up motherboard or a city where people actually live? What if a sustainable and livable city doesn't look very exciting on picture?
Cities are complex adaptive social systems that we are nowhere near fully understanding. Formulating a vision of a city with its base in a technological ideal ("smart") just shows how disconnected you are from reality and how setup you will be for complete failure.
Agreed, though, that simple timeless things, like meals with friends and family, are underrated in these futurist visions.
I regular go by group rides from Spaulding Rehab Hospital, and the array of adaptive cycling equipment they have is stunning.
My point is that biking is great, but it isn't necessarily time efficient.
If dropping off the kids with your current cycling equipment is really, really hard, then perhaps your setup is deficient. A lot of what makes school drop off in particular difficult is the sheer mass of cars, which are hardly efficiently using the space or time of everyone there.
Jane Jacobs addresses this topic at length in Chapter 19 of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Here are the first few paragraphs (the whole book is a worthwhile read if you have the chance):
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When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities. A city cannot be a work of art.
We need art, in the arrangements of cities as well as in the other realms of life, to help explain life to us, to show us meaning, to illuminate the relationship between the life that each of us embodies and the life outside us. We need art most, perhaps, to reassure us of our own humanity. However, although art and life are interwoven, they are not the same things. Confusion between them is, in part, why efforts at city design are so disappointing. It is important, in arriving at better design strategies and tactics, to clear up this confusion.
Art has its own peculiar forms of order, and they are rigorous. Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist. To be sure, the artist has a sense that the demands of the work (i.e., of the selections of material he has made) control him. The rather miraculous result of this process—if the selectivity, the organization and the control are consistent within themselves—can be art. But the essence of this process is disciplined, highly discriminatory selectivity from life. In relation to the inclusiveness and the literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.
To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life.
The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities.
A lot people mentioned that she would have been aghast at how traffic choked the streets of Manhattan have become with cars. The irony and significance in this is that she was very instrumental in the successful fight against Robert Moses's plan to put a 10 lane express way through Washington Square Park in lower Manhattan.
That's a seminal book in urban planning and policy. I was happy to see it mentioned in the discussion. There was also a good documentary of Jane Jacobes that was released last year(she would have 100) called "Citizen Jane: Battle for the City"
Urban planning is complex. One can simultaneously be aghast at some of the worst excesses of Robert Moses' highway visions and mum on the impact of, say, Lincoln Center on the then-existing neighborhoods.
And, as I alluded to in another comment, an organic/livable city doesn't necessarily equate to one that's as inexpensive to live in as potential inhabitants would like it to be.
I disagree with this. Cities have been adding designated bike lanes for years now. And the growth in bike ridership in cities seems to have moved lock-step with this. Using NYC as an example:
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/04/the-steady-ri...
So clearly a picture of people walking or biking has fit some city planner's idea of "future." The fact that bike lanes continue to be added seems to point to a recognition of their success and place in the future.
I think it would be more accurate to say that "A picture of people walking or biking to work" might not fit Google's or SV's idea of "the future" because it doesn't involve collecting data and selling advertising. For example NYC's DOT put is putting in the biking lanes. Google(via Sidewalk Labs) converted payphone kiosks ostensibly to provide free internet access. Google provides this in exchange for collecting data and displaying advertising.
Sure, but roads are added/expanded far faster than bike lanes, so the percentage of roads that have bike lanes has been going down over time.
Done the drive from Seattle to San Diego a few times this year, along with a drive to Texas. Worst part has consistently been LA, keep having to dodge cars almost rear-ending me in that city.
I don't believe this statement is true at all. How do you expand or add to a street in the city? A street is bounded by sidewalks and/or building frontage that is private property. There is finite amount of space often laid out in a grid.
It is also quite a rare occurrence for a new street to be added to a city. The only circumstances I can see that happening would be as part of a major redevelopment project.
As for sustainable, once you ban cars(as a thinking exercise) but build the best and most innovative public transportation, you could get something great and sustainable, where great can be as an extra 1/2-1 hours a day to spend with your kids.
Of course. Amsterdam is around 1M. In general, biking is one of the highest throughput forms of transport available.
7 miles is also very far - that’s more like a city of 5M
Just as a data point, the picture is an aerial shot containing a highway interchange and part of the Olympiapark in Munich, built for the '72 summer Olympics.
Which is sort of interesting because it's both a futurist planned thing (the Olympiapark) and a city where people actually live (Munich).
Whenever I hear about another smart city project, it seems to be done for show. There are pictures of architecture, vegetation, various mechanical systems or circuits. As if people living there didn't matter. Everyone will fit in and it will be great because concrete will do the thinking for you.
(Why are parks less commonly included? Two reasons: One is that parks are often used for other, more active, activities and usually during the day while third places are more seen as an evening and leisurely activity. Second is, especially in more urban cities, that parks are seen as "dirty" or "unseemly" because homeless or vagrant populations congregate there.)
You can also spot people working there, or doing physical training, classes of small children drawing… really diverses activities.
I also noticed that museum or libraries are more often included as third places than parks are (even when parks in paris got free wifi at the same time as libraries).
Indeed, gyms and swimming pools will not be seen as third spaces, so parks might be conceptually somewhere in between "body hygiene spaces" (as inherited from the early 20th vision) and intellectual third spaces (idem, inherited from Vienna intellectual life early 20th).
As an example Les Buttes Chaumont in Paris is clearly modeled as a very early theme park, with fake lake, fake caves… placing it at birth in the entertainment space category, generally not considered third places.
Edit: the notion of "promenade" (just walking together) is central in the creation of early public parks in Paris. I think play and picnic are more recent additions, but they combine in the concepts that drive most of public park design.
1. The third social space (restaurants, cafe's, etc) becomes more and more irrelevant due to delivery services. So you can enjoy restaurant food within the comfort of your home. As a result urban space used for restaurants will likely decrease.
2. Retail is dying for a long while. Currently 10.3% of urban retail space in Singapore (where I live) is not used. Tendency increasing. The only thing working against the trend are co-working spaces, accelerators and incubators.
We have to come to terms that instead of building cities for cars we need to build cities for mobile humans with a cellphone.
Did you really mean to write that? :-)
To be fair, delivery services aren't really responsible for undermining the "third space" nature of these places: we've been treating them increasingly as retail conveniences for a very long time, failing to acknowledge their social and psychological role. But it is true that the rise in delivery makes the resulting isolation even more stark.
I don't think so. Public websites and Web based social networks are useful but final decisions are not made there. Really good relationships are only born during personal interactions. I don't say remote relationships are impossible but they usually cover only one side of your life - professional, entertainment etc. Personal relationships are much more diverse. The fact that you touch, feel, smell somebody, see the whole body makes a personal relationship much more complex than just a digital relationship. That's why people who can afford move out to suburban areas where you have time for such interactions. I think this is the only way to go. Some decentralized smart devices can help our lives but without personal interactions it won't be better.
I thought the entire point was to avoid other people.
I was surprised by that when I moved to the burbs.
Way easier to meet people in the city. I had his I guess sitcom vision of cook outs and July 4th type stuff (am Brit) and that happens but norm really amongst neighbors just nuclear and extended families.
We moved thinking we’d have kids by now but turns out we can’t have children - kids seem to be the only ‘in’ to the social scene here and we don’t have that. I’m agitating for a move back to the city but not sure my wife is ready to admit that’s our life now and give up then ‘normal’ path. 2500 Sqf, 3 beds and 3 baths for 2 people and two puppies does not make good economic or ecological sense.
By moving public matters to a website you move them out of sight. Out of sight, out of mind. People think less of common good, and how the city should work. Public matters become distant, abstract and impersonal.
Many people value restaurant not exclusively for the food - which can be a bit stale or cold if it's delivered to you - but also for the service, pleasant atmosphere and sometimes to meet interesting people. And to show off.
I don't know how it works in Singapore, but in a traditional shop you can examine goods you'd like to purchase, try them on, ask questions, or even negotiate a little bit. In my country it's rare that a shop's website has accurate and complete descriptions for all items, or even photos from all sides. A shop may have a contact form or a person answering questions through instant messages, but you can't know if he/she is active and not on a coffee break. To make a perfect shop website you have to make special cases to emulate many kinds of service that you take for granted entering a physical shop.
Delivery works well for easily defined items like books that don't have many variants, such as books, and even then if you know precisely which book do you want. A recommendation system might or might not give you valuable suggestions. In a shop or library, you can browse a book or ask the librarian or clerk.
In some ways, delivery shops and shops in general are very inefficient. For example if you buy physical books, everyone must have their own book, whereas in a library one copy can be used by many people. In some ways it's much more efficient. Digital books are even more efficient, but publishers fight very hard to create artificial scarcity and disallow copying, which is next to free in cost.
But a digital version of a soldering iron, a hammer or climbing equipment won't suffice, and this could be handled similar to a library, even for a fee. These items are only needed occasionally in most homes - if you run your own workshop, it's another story.
Considering that the US didn't allow poor people to vote until the mid 19th century (which ancient Athens allowed), didn't allow blacks to vote until much later, and women to vote until 1920s, and it still had slavery until 1860s -- that is, 2 and a half millennia after those ancient Athenians, I'd say they were quite ahead of the time in their democracy.
One way is by restricting who gets to vote. Should clinically insane people be allowed to vote ? How about criminals ? But where to draw the line ? Another is similar - some wise people would get more votes. Third way - provide decent free education to everyone. It has been achieved on a small scale (Finland), in fact Finnish education is much more than that.
I'm sympathetic to the Karl Popper's definition of democracy:
It is wrong to ask who will rule. The ability to vote a bad government out of office is enough. That is democracy.
and
I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence 'democracy,' and the other, 'tyranny.'.
also
Democracy cannot be fully characterized as the rule of the majority, although the institution of general elections is most important. For a majority might rule in a tyrannical way. (The majority of those who are less than 6 ft. high may decide that the minority of those over 6 ft. shall pay all taxes.) In a democracy, the powers of the rulers must be limited;
The idea behind democracy, at least real athenian democracy, is that it doesn't matter who is an idiot and who is a genius.
Not just because they are all people, but mainly because since they are all to be affected by the decisions of a vote, they should all have a say.
If anything, when one was "too much of a genius" or too distinct from others, it was viewed with suspicion, and they could see themselves ostracised (with "ostraca" being the ancient greek word for sea-shells, but also the shards of pottery using for voting, upon which athenians wrote the names of people to exile from the city) [1].
(And come to think of it, some of the most disastrous, self serving, society destructing, laws and ideas, come not from "idiots" but for very clever and well educated people).
So democracy is not about "finding what's best". It's about people participating in it, whether their thinking (or lack thereof), having equal say on what should be done in their community.
That's why ancient athenians besides mass popular vote, they also gave some high official positions by lottery -- so anybody, at random, can get a chance to get to them (for a term).
>People living under a rock, not knowing what's going on in the neighborhood, let alone the country, are worth just as much. How to deal with that ?
Accept it.
[1] Aristedes a.k.a. "Aristedes the just" was a renowned state-person, who everybody considered trustworthy and just (hence the nickname), and he had done much to prove himself so over the years. (...). Once, when there was a vote for ostacizing, (...) it is said that an illiterate voter who did not recognise Aristides approached the statesman and requested that he write the name of Aristides on his voting shard to ostracize him. The latter asked if Aristides had wronged him. "No," was the reply, "and I do not even know him, but it irritates me to hear him everywhere called 'the Just'." Aristides then wrote his own name on the ballot.
There is no "knowledge to regulate" that has been imparted to some. The most educated "sages" have historically made the same (and worse) BS mistakes and disastrous policies as the ordinary citizen.
And even if it was, it's not their call to impart it to the rest of the people. Those who get the effects of a regulation should have a say on the design of the regulation.
>There is no way to accept anything, in terms of information, from someone who knows nothing.
There is a way. It's called democracy (even more so in direct than in modern "representative" diluted democracy, but still).
What there should not be a way of is for anybody, even if they know nothing, to accept the will of some other other them, without having their equal share in influencing what will happen. Those people would be slaves.
* two kings (equivalent of president)
* apella (public voting for males over 30...)
* ephors (ministers)
* gerusia (elders... so senate ? In practice they held the most power and Sparta was an oligarchy)
* * *
The issue is not that the decisions aren't perfect. Ignorant people are disturbingly easy to manipulate into voting. Stupid people can be outright dangerous. I think Carlo M. Cipolla argued it best: from social perspective, a stupid person is a person who causes harm to you while not getting any benefit for it or even getting hurt himself in the process.
Maybe (instead of age requirement?) there should be some kind of "public affairs" test based on knowledge of what happened in the last few years ? Something like that.
There is just no good way to do such tests in a fully enfranchised democracy. It’s like parent tests or licenses people occasionally think of, ive thought it myself ‘no way should that scumbag be allowed to breed’ when reading about terrible abuse etc., but again those rules can and will end up applied to social undesirables and who decides that?
Rosa Parks was socially undesirable.
Whoever wrote the test would control which culture-bubbles got to vote.
Considering there are still wars being fought in the modern world, even if we often choose not to call them such, I don't know that we can look upon that from a moral high ground.
As for slavery, some periodization / historical perspective is important here. "Modern/American slavery" is based upon a notion of racial superiority, but that was not always the case. I'm not well-acquainted with Ancient Greece in particular, but consider Ancient Rome[1], where slavery was much closer to a social class.
Further, there was a lot of mobility in and out of this class. You could become a failing to pay your debts, or being captured in war. Slaves, although property themselves, could earn money and own property; they sometimes recieved salaries from their masters. Freeing slaves was a common occurrence (not necessarily out of altruism; freed slaves often became clientes[2] of their former master). Freedmen (former slaves) were a very influential political blok).
Due to the amount of mobility, it was not uncommon for freedmen to own slaves, or former masters to become slaves; there was a very acute sense of "that could be me", exemplified in the Roman concept of humanitas[3], the concept that we are all human, and certain standards of empathy toward and treatment of one another (it's hard to translate well because there's no 1:1 concept that covers both the definition and connotations, nowadays; maybe the closest modern parallel is "one love").
I do not mean to imply slavery was a good thing (it wasn't) or that slaves were never abused (they were). But it is worth recognizing that the character of slavery has changed over the centuries/millenia.
[1]: Please note the Ancient Roman Empire spanned many hundreds of years; the above was not true for the entirety of its existence. [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage_in_ancient_Rome [3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitas
I think there were some positive aspects to slavery. Currently widespread prison system has a major problem - the prisoners are a money drain on the society. There was no such problem with slaves because by definition they worked to support themselves. Unfortunately, often in ruthlessly harsh conditions. Still, it was more profitable to raid a village and enslave the survivors instead of slaughtering them.
That's not really relevant. The idea of public space remains important.
>Public matters can be solved in distributed ways since the 1990s via public websites.
Seeing the other in a physical space is a whole different culture (and leads to whole other discussions and interactions) than merely exchanging messages in some forum.
I'm wondering 1) how it went then; and 2) is the house now obsolete after just 20 years?
A house being obsolete in 20 years is one thing, but a whole city being obsolete is quite another.
NYC is currently learning that lesson all over again (or more likely failing to learn it) with the long overdue and long-dragged-out upgrade of our subway's 80 year old signaling systems. (Not to mention the hundred year old water tunnels that we can't afford to take out of service for repairs.)
Also a trampoline room.
This is why it's so important for governments to move towards open source solutions as much as possible despite the "high-cost of switching and training" and whatnot. Technology is going to be ingrained so much more in our institutions in the future. And it's going to be way more expensive to solve issues if there is proprietary products lock-in.
My personal view is that to see the cities of our near future, go to practically any big city in Asia today. High population density, everybody (whole families and and their farm animals) racing about on small motor scooters. Not a bad standard of living, but nothing like what we in thew west are used to (I'm in Australia).
Segways and flying cars are too expensive to make, too hard to fix, and too expensive to run. Ditto for maglev trains running in vacuum tunnels under cities.
In some scenarios it makes sense to have both lights and roundabouts, in extreme cases it even makes sense to fit roundabouts on a circle of roundabouts which then have lights at peak times.
It probably ran on Windows 3.1 and they lost the install disks.
The end result is that economic laws put practical limit on what you can achieve with smart. The smart aspect of things needs to generate enough savings for the economic entity to be able to muster the experts to fix things, as they inevitably break in various ways. And it only happens if the entity is large enough.
Every, say, home could be made smarter, and the total savings would be probably big. But we won't do that as individuals, because for each of us, the cost of the expert is scary compared to the tiny savings that we can individually achieve with it. If we would organize (that is, create a larger economic entity), then perhaps it would be possible. But organization causes additional costs, too.
That might be true in some cases. But the motive might be to provide epsilon demand to help develop a market for an embryonic product — in effect, making a small investment in which the hoped-for ROI in the long term is a "better" world — even though in the near term there might be less-costly options available.
That's why, for example, for years my household has bought our electricity under Green Mountain's wind-and-solar option, even though it costs a few dollars more per month (although the delta has been dropping). Our choice of electricity providers isn't visible to others, and it's not a subject of everyday conversation for us, so it's difficult to see how there's any virtue-signaling going on.
Ditto for why we bought a Prius years ago, even though economically a conventional vehicle made more sense notwithstanding the high gasoline prices back then. While we could be accused of virtue-signaling, I think it's more accurate to characterize it as signaling social acceptability, as in, "you won't be alone if you take the plunge and buy one of these cars instead of the usual [fill in the blank for your neighborhood]."
In math terms, you could think of this as trying to help the market to seek a long-term global maximum as opposed to a near-term local one.
My dad spent his career as a general manager in manufacturing. He had some machines that were over 100 years old, still running like a champ. The newer ones caused nothing but headaches (but did run more efficiently when they were working). When someone came to him with a problem, the root of it was almost always TMDE (Too Much Damn Electronics). I used to make fun of him for being a stodgy old fart...
But after spending ~20 years as a software engineer, I'm beginning to think he was right.
Putting all these posts beforehand sounds to me like waterfall development, where cities are naturally built in an "agile" way. See Rome, for example :)
I think the main point is that fancy IoT gadgetry counts for very little compared to the things that really make a city work: infrastructure for power, water, sanitation, and transportation; places for people to live, not for gadgets to watch them.
Now I have to have this T-Shirt to wear to sprint planning meetings.
Take a look at the center of Stockholm: the area past the old town connecting the southern, central and western islands (Söder, Norrmalm/City, Kungsholmen) is a horrific spaghetti of motorways leading right into the heart of town - impossible to navigate on foot (pedestrians are led under overpasses, through tunnels, up and down litter-strewn stairways, and past 'unofficial’ toilets. It’s a truly dystopian vision of what can happen to a town when city-planners decide that cities are not for living in, and only local activism and historical accident preserved the parts of the old town that tourists now think are so beautiful and charming.
Nowadays things are improving, but the center of the city itself is still largely pedestrian and cycle-unfriendly, and many central streets have no doors, windows or stores facing the street itself: the idea was to keep the sidewalks free from people loitering or strolling around.
If you want a human-scaled model of a city that’s built to encourage public space, walking and meeting, then almost any southern European town that’s built to radiate from a central (traffic-free) square, ringed by restaurants and cafés, is a better example than anywhere in Sweden.
These roads don't connect the 'bunch of islands' (which are all linked by quite short bridges) they were intended to transport people living in the suburbs to their jobs in an otherwise uninhabited town, and back again in the evening, travelling by car. Trying to cross this network from the city-center to the neighboring island (Kungsholmen) involves the sort of dystopian walk I described above. Naturally there are other ways to get from one island to the other that circumvent this mammoth road network.
The center of Stockholm was viewed as unmodern and slum-like in the 1960s, and the planners at that time intended to completely remove all of the buildings and streets that you refer to: they were prevented from totally razing the Old Town (Gamla Stan) by local activists and protests, but large areas of the City were demolished and replaced by faceless office-space, with no entrances, shops, cafés or any features that would encourage people to do anything than walk or drive past as fast as possible on their way elsewhere.
These streets [2] have only begun to be 'humanized' in recent years, now that planners have seen the error of attempting to empty the city-center of all people before and after work hours - and now the process of establishing restaurants, hotels, cafés, shops and other lively street activities is really in full swing, with construction across almost all the streets listed in the note below.
But the attitude that car-traffic comes first is hard to shake for a generation of planners brought up with the feeling that masses of cars is a sign of a 'big city' and of 'city pulse' (stadspuls), so cycle lanes are generally rubbish [3] and pedestrians' needs are generally subsumed under the requirement to keep car-traffic moving (framkomlighet). Although much lip-service is now paid to cycling and walking in towns, very little is done outside of the tourist-visible areas in the center.
[1] https://goo.gl/4sWntM [2] For example: Vattugatan, Malmskillnadsgatan, Herkulesgatan, Mäster Samuelsgatan [3] https://goo.gl/JfWRtU
I often wonder what they were smoking in those decades to see such things as normal. I can understand that they thought that the car was the future, seeing all the convenience and not being aware of the full importance of the drawbacks (congestion, pollution, unhealthy lifestyle, etc.), but couldn't they at least have some appreciation of beauty?
Atlantic Hotel, A Coruña, opened in 1923, demolished in 1967: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/56/99/92/569992a08191d5af0593...
The new hotel taking its place from 1968: https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/04/64/ac/17/...
Just one among many examples that give one the urge to reach for a time machine and an axe...
When the cost with the labour force rises, you need to clean with fewer people, and faster. You need to use larger tools to cover the same area faster, and the tools require simple large shapes where, a vacuum for e.g. can easily go in any corner - hence a cube. Add the need to build fast and cheap, so concrete is it, or, after technology advances, just metal, glass and drywall - who has time to wait for the concrete to set? - so you end up with utilitarian cubes of cheap materials.
These things always sound amazing on paper. But they're always a bit lacking in person.
Irvine company owns all of the land of city of Irvine. Or something like it.
A bit like Seahaven Island from the Truman show.
Details about 10 min into this video: https://youtu.be/sLCHg9mUBag