‘Smart Cities’: Seduction, Simulation, Scepticism
Stephen Graham, Newcastle University
The Seduction of “Enacted
Environments”
(Dana Cuff)...
• High modernist dreams of perfect, real-time, remote control, anticipation, clarity
• Ubiquitous computing/Internet of Things/social media
• ‘Big Data’ and ‘Data Fusion’ • Geodata • Optimisation • Anticipation • Robotisation • Blurs into discourses
surrounding “sustainable cities’, ‘resilient cities’, ‘creative cities’ etc etc.
Figure 1: the cyberne0c city Rela%onship between smart ci%es and IT (Hitachi
2013:14) Hitachi, 2013: 14)
Panoptic Dreams?
“Today’s cities are based on separate domains with no real ability to be managed as an entire entity. City
managers have no single place to get real-time status or historical reports of city events. Older systems are domain-specific and are not concerned with the
consequences on other domains. Daily operations of cities generate vast amounts of data from many different sources but cities often lack the ability to visualize and
extract meaningful information” IBM 2012.
Deterministic. Self-Evident
and Messianic Discourses...
Adam Greenfield: ‘Smart city’ concepts “tend.. to be discussed casually, as if it were self-evident
that all one need do to finally “solve” the city is to weave sensors into the urban fabric by the million, trawl the relevant social networks for geotagged
utterances, and apply just the right analytic algorithms to the ever-mounting tally of terabytes
captured this way.”
Surveillant-‐Simula0on: Data Feeds and Visualiza0on
Scepticism: (1) We’ve Been Here Before (Many Times!)
Michael Benedikt (1991): ‘Cyberspace’ would work by:
"decontaminating the natural and urban landscapes,
redeeming them, saving them from the chain-dragging bulldozers of the paper industry, from the diesel smoke of
courier and post-office trucks, from jet fuel flames and clogged airports, from billboards, trashy and pretentious architecture, hour-long freeway communities, ticket lines,
choked subways... from all the inefficiencies, pollution (chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to
moving information attached to things across, over and under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than
letting it fly free in the soft hail of electrons that is cyberspace."
Scepticism (2): Revivify Cybernetic Fantasies Whilst Camouflaging
Authoritarian and Elitist Transformations
“In marketing materials and press releases for smart city initiatives, we hear about idyllic dashboards,
switchboards, and control rooms, artifices that enable government decision makers to interface with data
streams being produced by the city and simultaneously obscure the process from those people who inhabit it”
Lily Bui (2014) Sensor Journalism Lab
Premediation, Norms and
Anticipatory Surveillance
‘Fusion’ and the ‘Surveillance-Security-Military-Industrial Complex’
Links to a Wider Authoritarian Shift: “What we are handing the administrators of a smart city is a suite of all the tools
they would need to isolate, quash or even prevent whatever conduct they defined as undesirable”
Adam Greenfield (2013) .
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Driver 1: Worldwide SIGINT/Defense Cryptologic Platform
NSA “Dagger Complex” Griesheim, Germany, 2014
Oakland ‘Domain Awareness
Center’ as C4ISR (Command,
Control, Communications,
Computers, Intelligence,
Surveillance and Reconnaissance)
New Military Urbanism and Foucauldian Boomerangs:
Scep0cism (3): Corporate Push into Urban Opera0ng Systems (UOS)
• Hitachi, MicrosoK, IBM, Cisco, Siemens etc. Ava Kofman (2014) “the assump0on that the collec0on of residents’ data is a useful and immensely profitable enterprise”
• “’city OS’ spin-‐offs promise that we can know the city in its en0rety: scaled down to the size of a microchip, dematerialized into data clouds, predictable and itera0ve
• As top-‐down city design becomes a market commodity, we will soon be forced to choose between the urban opera0ng systems we want to inhabit”.
Algorithmic Power: ‘Smart’ Cities are Software-Sorted Cities
Cisco (2002) Describing how premium internet services can now be offered to what they call the ‘transactional/ interactive data class’ of users, they outline how the electronic mobilities of what they term the ‘scavenger class’ will now
be actively impeded based on software- sorting of every single Internet packet.
‘The Scavenger class is intended to provide differential services, or “less-than- Best-Effort” services, to certain applications’, the document suggests. ‘Applications assigned to this class have little or no contribution to the
organizational objectives of the enterprize ... Assigning a minimal bandwidth queue to Scavenger traffic forces it to be squelched to virtually nothing during
periods of congestion’ (Cisco, 2002).
Glitzy and Troubling
Exemplars: Elite, Privatised
Capsules
Foster’s Masdar City, Abu Dhabi; Songdo, South Korea; Eko Atlantic, Lagos “Songdo is as much a protocol as it is a city: other territories can “download” its plans. Its technology was bought by other cities before it had even been built in Songdo itself. Its master plan is being exported to Ecuador; meanwhile, China has purchased kits from similar companies to make its cities more closely resemble Singapore. Nations dissolve into transnational, portable, cities in a box. With simulation emerging as the dominant paradigm, material and lived histories are rendered obsolete” Ava Kofman (2014)
Place not space: Must match scepticism with critical and democratic insurgent practices
• Data democratisation; hacktivism; open code; challenging depoliticizing discourses of techno-rationality
• Expose creeping power of surveillance-security-military-industrial complexes
• Undermine anti democratic control logics of top-down ‘smart city’ paradigms and securitisation/criminalisation of ICT-based activism