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. 

Data and information

Data and information

Any search for definitions in scientific literature never fails to puzzle me. In this case, I was looking for definitions of information. What I found was often relative to other terms like data, knowledge and intelligence. Interestingly, rather trying to elucidate the relations between terms, most definitions sought to make sharp distinctions, as well as to downplay one term and elevate another. In particular, data were often presented as raw, unorganized facts, permanent object properties, with little if any meaning - base stuff. Information, on the other hand, was elevated and refined: data processed and organized so as to be meaningful and useful. Frequent examples of information referred to statistical techniques, which clearly could purify data to the extreme.
Such definition reek of biases, e.g. that data are dumb or that knowledge is the proper accumulation of information. As a result, they fail to account for things we know about the world and our cognition, from the way information is communication between physical entities, such as a flower sending information to a bee's eyes, to how human creativity affects information. Coming against such definitions leaves me with more questions than answers. Should I therefore just trust the authority of the authors and impose their definitions on my perception of the world?
The answer can be found in rhetoric and its modes: pathos, ethos and logos. Pathos appeals to our emotions: let's save the environment, for example. Even with limited further explanation, it seems a good idea. In practice, however, it can lead to disasters, like saving one species from extinction and, by doing so, disturbing ecological balance to the detriment of more species. So, pathos needs to be accompanied by logos: good argumentation that helps us understand. Ethos relates to authority, such as an eminent professor telling stuff in a lecture. We tend to believe such authorities. It is important, however, that they also employ logos to convince us by explaining and illustrating their statements.
From the perspective of rhetoric, therefore, we have little to gain from definitions merely based on ethos or pathos. We also need to apply logos, both as developers and as receivers of definitions. Beware of definitions given in a couple of sentences, without further analysis and explanation.