Smart cities

Smart cities

Last week I spent a couple of days mostly listening at a conference on smart cities. Some thoughts have lingered on; let's try to put them together.

Authorities

Many equate the city to the municipality or other local authority. That's surely not the case. Cities are complex ecosystems in which authorities certainly have a key role. Sometimes they lead, mostly they follow and generally they facilitate. The future of the city is not the content of a vision document by any authority. Such a document usually encapsulates ongoing developments and emerging trends. Its compilers naturally try to take credit for all that it contains and authorities use it to stipulate relevant policies. Still, the future may escape these constraints. 

Power 

Lots of talk about power, lots of assumptions about its structure and fixed character. A closer look at recent events suggests otherwise: the Dutch government had to make a U-turn on natural gas and it has been forced to reconsider policies with respect to CO2 and nitrogen emissions. In all cases, citizens and law courts suddenly came into the picture and caused the change. So much for power structures …

Citizenship

Cities are not just complex. They are also aspirational places, full of opportunities for social mobility and personal improvement. The effects go beyond individual lives - just witness the transition from cities as collection of slums to places of comfortable, gracious living. Citizens learn from each other, copy each other, envy each other. Citizenship should therefore cover all aspects of city life, not just the relations with authorities. Citizen action can have many goals and a varied scope. 

Smartness

Some claim that cities haven't really changed much for a number of centuries. This seems certainly true if one looks at e.g. buildings. Many modern cities include parts that were constructed even in the middle ages. Other aspects have changed a lot. Roads, for example, are completely different to what they used to be before the invention of motor vehicles or electric lighting. Physically they may have changed little but culturally they are quite different. Pavements, zebra crossings, traffic lights etc. make us behave differently to earlier users of the same environment. 

One could argue that the old cities are covered by overlays of new technologies and other cultural innovations. In this sense, mart technologies are the latest overlay to be added, still in development. There is, however, a difference between smart technologies and their predecessors (see https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-fourth-revolution-9780199606726?cc=nl&lang=en&), which becomes clear when we go beyond the gadgets of the smart technologies. There we see the data they produce and process, and that these data in turn drive the gadgets. The scale and detail of the data presents unprecedented opportunities for holistic, coherent descriptions of what takes place in cities. These descriptions could help understand and explain cities, explore scenarios more reliably than ever and predict the outcome of our actions with the specificity one has come to expect from modern science. 

Epilogue

So, does the smart city matter? To a large extent it doesn't. As any novel term, it tries to standardize rather diverse developments without being able to control them. The combination of social and technical disciplines it entails poses interesting questions but the answers are less so. Perhaps this is because each question is approached in isolation and with rather limited means, cutting the city phenomena into manageable but unconnected chunks. If there's one thing I've learned about smart cities, buildings and things is that they require considerable effort, persistence and transparent connections to their context. 

Educational limitations

Educational limitations

It's inevitable that I often speak to people working in education, not just because of my profession but also because there are so many people working in education. What strikes me in these talks is that for every optimist (usually young, usually technophile), there are five who bemoan the effects of progress and change.
One could say that education is inherently conservative. It transmits the past and so relies on established approaches and accepted knowledge. But claiming that the past -any past- was better or easier does nothing to help one understand what is happening now, let alone find promising solutions fit for a dynamic world.
Quite a few complaints are recognizable: skills that disappear and knowledge that is lost, while they matter for learning. It's not always clear whether they matter for learning or for specific forms of learning but, in any case, it is evident that there is a mismatch between what people should learn and how they could learn it.
My biggest worry in this respect comes from an ecological perspective: our species -any species- has developed so as to perceive and utilize information from the particular environment we happen to be (https://www.routledge.com/The-Ecological-Approach-to-Visual-Perception-Classic-Edition-1st-Edition/Gibson/p/book/9781848725782). We have become quite good at that but we are also quite good at adapting and augmenting our environments with technologies that range from motor vehicles to writing.
Some suggest that we are reaching the boundaries of our capacities in perceiving and processing information. While I'm reluctant to subscribe to simplistic notions of information overload, it is quite evident that e.g. motorized traffic may be too tough on our attention and working memory capacities (http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/).
The same may apply to education. It may be hampered too many subjects vying for attention in short times and disconnection from experience and utility. Educational approaches that used to work a few decades ago might be outdated, although from personal experience I would argue that they were already outdated.
In conclusion, we may be asking the wrong questions with respect to education today. We may have to reconsider our means and ends, or even accept that education cannot achieve or cover all that it is supposed to do, certainly not in the short periods of formal education.

Dangers of overproduction

Dangers of overproduction 

Association football (soccer) used to be a throwback, lagging behind wider societal and economic developments. Now its at the forefront of change, showing us what the future holds. One can learn a lot from the business of football; in many respects, it is far better organized and more professional than other industries. That's why I follow with interest the merry-go-round of every transfer period: the rumours, the gossip, the moves, the expenditure. It's fascinating to see how mobile football professionals have become and the conditions that trigger mobility, price increases and attraction.
This summer, I was particularly intrigued by the fate of established players: how many high achievers and earners have become surplus to requirements at their clubs, which are desperate to offload them but appear not to be able to do so. In many major clubs, there is at least one big name that has been sidelined with little hope of return or escape.
This used to be the fate of many young, talented players who left the club of their early successes too soon to join another, usually major club, where they encountered higher competition. We used to hear about so-and-so who had been full of promise but nowadays just warms the bench of a big stadium. That many established, successful players have joined them, often despite their astronomical wages, is a new phenomenon.
One reason for that is the overproduction of new talent that has to be sold on. Many lesser clubs rely on this not only for their finances but also for having an ambitious team, hungry for success and personal advancement. Every year we welcome new stars from all continents, players who join the ranks of the highly valued and highly paid. And these new stars are not as naïve and vulnerable as in the past. After all, most have the same agents and managers as the older stars. So, managers can choose on whom to rely and are less dependent on the established players in the club.
This could be construed as a positive development: a cleansing and rationalization of the footballing human resources. On the other hand, however, there is overproduction (and probably not just an epidemic of it), that pushes everything up: transfer prices and volumes, mobility and failure. There are just too many professional footballers at the moment and their number or wages are not expected to drop. If clubs continue to buy and sell at the current rate (and why shouldn't they), we are going to see even more high earners doing very little.
It would be interesting to compare this situation with the housing boom we are currently having in many countries. It appears that there is demand especially for housing and moreover of an increasingly higher quality. So, we are building like mad, driving prices up even for less desirable properties. There's no doubt that we are overproducing because we can. Conditions seem to justify it, just like in football. But what can be the consequences? If the football industry collapses, it will not have the same impact as similar trouble in the housing market.