Against the smart city (The city is here for you to use) by Adam Greenfield

Author:Adam Greenfield [Greenfield, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Do projects
Published: 2013-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

Very often in the extant smart-city discourse, we find that the obsession with the observation and control of urban processes shades imperceptibly into the desire to observe and control citizen behavior. Singapore, with its notoriously stringent and granular regulation of personal comportment, is frequently 145cited as a model to which emergent smart cities might aspire, and it does seem rather appropriate that Siemens has chosen to locate their City Cockpit — a rather pallid imitation of IBM’s Rio control center, and a simulation at that — in the city-state. 146A distinct Singapore-style paternalism colors the discussion of options available to administrators, even in cases where advocates explicitly acknowledge the limits of centralized and authoritarian models of governance. A report on “digital urban renewal” prepared for Cisco, for instance, draws the distinction between “tight” or top-down approaches to the management of networked cities and a “‘loose’ approach [focusing] on enablement, community involvement and behavioral change.” In context, this passage clearly means to emphasize the benefits associated with the latter (and in context, you want to applaud). But a reader hoping for any genuine affirmation of values like citizen autonomy and self-determination is likely to find their hopes dashed by the balance of the report, which goes right on to list “behavior change” 147among the ends that municipal government might rationally wish to pursue through the use of networked systems.

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