S06E13 of Connection Problem: 3 generations of smart cities

Hey hey,

This is going to be a reasonably short one as I’m both in crunch time and have been ill for a few days. But it’s a busy time for all the right reasons and I’m back on my feet so on we go!

Peter

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If you'd like to work with me or bounce ideas, let's have a chat.

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Personal-ish updates

It’s that time of the year where both project deadlines and proposal deadlines align perfectly. I’m very happy about both, because the projects I’m currently working on are interesting and I’m glad to have been invited to submit a number of especially interesting upcoming proposals. Fingers crossed. It just means typing that little bit faster. Shorter sentences. Less words. You get the idea.

Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is in town. (For the first time? First time in a long time? Dunno.) It brings all the digital rights geeks to town, and I’d love to hang out more with them, and had been planning to immerse myself in IGF for a few days. Instead, for all the reasons above, I’ll be missing almost the whole thing. I'm bummed but it's for good reasons, so no problem there. But if you're into internet governance and digital rights, and in Berlin, and somehow just missed it's ongoing, I highly recommend checking if there are still some tickets available.

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3 generations of smart cities

More by chance than anything I stumbled upon a 2017 interview with Singapore-based architect James Pomeroy. Who, admittedly, I wasn't aware of but at the time was out promoting a smart city mini series he had produced for TV.

I'm paraphrasing & summarizing.

There are 3 different versions, or three different generations, of a smart city:

(1) top-down, tech-driven (Songdo)

(2) bottom-up, socio-culturally driven, focus on individuals (Bandung)

(3) hybrid of top-down & bottom-up, holistic, gov provides framework for citizen participation / goal setting that companies & academia then work towards/within (Barcelona)

I'm not familiar with Pomeroy's other work or his overall positioning on smart city issues, but I find this framing pretty appealing in the way it indicates an evolution of thinking in this space. To me it's amazing how much we see out there in the smart city world sits solidly in the first column.

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A crypto town for crypto bros

Cryptocurrency millionaire plans blockchain smart city in Nevada desert (Dezeen). "Our land in Innovation Park will be a smart city with a decentralised blockchain infrastructure underlying all interaction.” What is it with tech bros and their mono-themed “visions”? If you have a hammer crypto currency, everything looks like a nail ledger issue. Also, this feels pretty old school in the sense of the article quoted above: Top-down, tech-first. First-gen, when we’ve moved way past this.

(As I quipped on Twitter, I get it, you like what you like, and you want more of it. I like ice cream. Does that mean I want an ice cream city? Come on!)

Dezeen kinda seems to be into it: “A potential major advantage of this city model is greater control of privacy of personal information”, they paraphrase another Dezeen Opinion columnist. And you know what? Compared to flat-out surveillance that’s probably possible. Not guaranteed, but possible. But compared to a simple, straightforward human rights regime that guarantees privacy protection and safeguards for anonymity (say, in public space, and/or in payments) it’s a joke. It might be the most privacy-focused option in a tiny, tiny very narrow part of the band of possible futures that otherwise blatantly disregards privacy. But we don’t need to go that route: The actual opportunity space is so much bigger, the possible band of data protection so much more broad than this implies. Why settle for best-privacy-of-the-bad-options when we can just use a framework of good, strong privacy?

It’s all a matter of your frame of reference.

Also, I mean, this dude. Come one: Says Berns, the founder of this render ghost town:

"This will either be the biggest thing ever, or the most spectacular crash and burn in the history of mankind," he told the New York Times. "I don't know which one."

Good to see he’s open about not caring about the consequences, so at least we all know where he stands. But the hubris! If it succeeds, it won’t be a Big Thing; if it fails nobody will care; nor will we learn much from it we don’t already know. But really my money is on the project just fizzling out before the first building is even built, the sun setting on the desert undisturbed by server farms and pick-up trucks and autonomous pizza delivery bots.

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Maintenance for years to come

While I frequently recommend Patrick Tanguay's newsletter Sentiers, I rarely get to quote Patrick directly. But he has a lot of smart and considerate things to say around sustainability and long-term thinking and many other things. And, more to my point, about maintenance:

We’ll be hearing a lot more still about maintenance as consumerism needs to slow down, as cities and all infrastructures need to prepare for, and periodically get back up from, existing and coming climate-caused catastrophes. Products need to go back to being repairable, infrastructure needs to be fixed, ecosystems need to be taken care of and repaired, species protected so they can climb back from the brink. Care, the maintaining of ourselves through old age, will also become a massive task for societies. It’s not something we completely realize yet, but maintenance will be one of the key topics of coming decades.

I've been thinking about maintenance a lot — in my circles, that's a big topic not just on a technical level but also as a kind of counter-culture to move fast and break things. Yet, somehow hadn't thought of it as eloquently as Patrick puts it here, and he's right: Maintenance will be one of the key topics — quick, trend researchers, a mega trend to put in the slide deck! — for decades to come, at any level from societal to product to personal health. Fractal maintenance. There you go.

By the way, the source is a Sentiers spin-off called Dispatch, which supporting members of Sentiers receive. I happily supported Sentiers before Dispatches were dispatched, and I more than happily read those Dispatches today: As always, I highly recommend subscribing to Sentiers, and if you've got a spare $50 in your Paypal account, this membership is an excellent place to put them to good work.

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Avoidable unintended consequences, part 5,635

My Fight With a Sidewalk Robot (CityLab). Very much recommended reading. A student at the University of Pittshburgh who uses a power wheelchair describes a first-hand experience with an autonomous delivery robot that is part of a larger wave of public roll-outs across college campuses in the US — this wave being the one that doesn’t have direct human oversight anymore:

The robot was sitting motionless on the curb cut on the other side of Forbes Avenue. It wasn’t crossing with the rest of the pedestrians, and when I reached the curb, it didn’t move as the walk signal was ending. I found myself sitting in the street as the traffic light turned green, blocked by a non-sentient being incapable of understanding the consequences of its actions.

It’s a prime example of what happens when design teams aren’t diverse enough, user testing not diverse and broad enough, regulation too lax, roll-out too fast. All the things. And increasingly, it’s not users who suffer the consequences but anyone else. It’s externalized risks all the way. (Remember the person killed by an autonomous Uber because Uber’s autonomous cars aren’t trained on jaywalking?)

Which is why I also argue that pilot projects for public spaces need to be planned and evaluated especially well: What’s learned there is based on the intention to be rolled out to other places, after all. So whatever we can get right at that stage will have positive ripple effects to all the other places.

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Miscellanea

📣Job klaxon! Consumer Reports Labs is hiring 8 staffers: technologists, journalists and wonks (BoingBoing). The Digital Lab team at Consumer Reports is brand new and really good. Ben, who heads it, is a good friend and knows his stuff; the team he works within is full of good folks. This is a great org working on important stuff. If you’re on the market and in one of their locales, I’d recommend to check out what they have to offer.

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If you’d like to work with me or have a chat to explore collaborations, let’s chat! 

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Currently reading: The Beauty of Everyday Things (Soetsu Yanagi), Lost Japan (Alex Kerr), Persepolis Rising (James S. A. Corey)

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What's next?

Later this month, Edgeryders Festival (Berlin edition). In December, our very own ThingsCon conference in Rotterdam. For all other presentations and talk as they come in, see the overview here.

Enjoy your day!

Yours truly,
Peter

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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores the impact of emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight firm. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that explores fair, responsible, and human-centric technologies for IoT and beyond. Peter was a Mozilla Fellow (2018-19) and is currently an Edgeryders fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.

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