#adamgreenfield

[throughmachineanddarkness]

... The new way to of handling such situations is to look for emergent patterns in previously unstructured data ... In fact, this is what ‘big data’ is all about. There's something uncanny, almost Deleuzian about this process of interrogation: as they are iteratively resolved in ever higher fidelity, the patterns themselves begin to suggest the questions that might be asked of them.

Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies, 2017

[newtowntosmartcity]

Week 7: Smart City: Return of the New Town

Nabi Agzamov

na2677

Built and controlled by data, Smart City is a new utopian model for the 21st century New Towns. Greenfield, one of the critics of internet of things, points out, modernist like, arrogance of the corporations that, among other things, claim to predict future by surveillance the present. How powerful is the collected data? The invisible layer digital overlay influence the environment of not only new cities like Masdar, or Songdo abut also established metropolises. However, the accessibility to the technology may not be equally distributed among the population, yet it can affect us all. The complexity of urban environment, or any environment for that matter, cannot be measured or dismissed. Nevertheless, “contemporary portrayals of smart cities smart cities treat landscape as mere backdrop “.

 Although criticism of smartness in generic space, and of “generic time” is more than fair, dismissing the ICT and IoT is simply impossible, for better or worse, it is part of the urban morphology. However, designers will inevitably play major roles in the ways these technological advancements will perform in the urban fabric, and it is crucial for us to ask the right questions. Can the access to the digital systems be “visible” and monitored? How can people speak the language of data? What are the politics, rules and legislature that govern the way the data is collected and used? The ICT relies on the connectivity and feedback of users; how can future relationships be shaped by both parties?

[saltonwounds]

#humanentities #adamgreenfield #anothercityispossible (em Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa)

[whichlights]

"So if neither distributed organizational topologies nor horizontal decision-making nor radical transparency and openness necessarily buy you equity and justice, it’s appropriate to ask: what would? And the only answer I have is that you have to fight directly for equity and for justice. You have to believe in and want those things first, and the tools that support them will follow, will be discovered or invented. But you can’t first build the tool and suppose that progressive values and organizing logics will flow outward from it — certainly not in any straightforward or uncomplicated way." Adam makes a very clear argument against technical determinist utopianism; networks aren't going to save us. You have to do the work.