Saskia Sassen

Urbanizing intelligent cities

Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and co-chair of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, Feb 17, 11.

Tagged with planning, urbanism, technology, smart cities

Much of what is put under the “smart city” umbrella has actually been around for a decade or more. Bit by bit (or byte by byte), we’ve been retrofitting various city systems and networks with devices that count, measure, record, and connect.
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The current euphoria, however, centers around a more costly, difficult-to-implement vision. Rather than retrofitting old cities, the buzz today is about building entire smart cities from scratch in a matter of a few years (hence the alternative name “instant city”) at what seems to be an average price of $30 billion to $60 billion dollars—a lot even in devalued dollars. Building such a city at all is a daunting proposition, but I believe the biggest challenge is more conceptual: It is the need to design a system that puts all that technology truly at the service of the inhabitants—and not the other way around.
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The word on the (everyday) street is that the smartest city of them all will be PlanIT Valley, under construction near Porto, Portugal, by Living PlanIT, founded by Steve Lewis, formerly of Microsoft. What makes PlanIT Valley different is that it is more about smart urbanism than smart systems. The concept is to build intelligent networks that combine diverse insertable and removable electronic services. In other words, the organizations charged with building and maintaining hardware and software systems can reconfigure them with reusable components as needs change. In this way, rather than allowing the technology to control the urban environment, the environment shapes the technology. With this “service-oriented architecture,” one aim is to reduce the vast amount of waste in the design and construction industries by extending the lives of the design, the software, and the hardware beyond a single project.
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We need to push this urbanizing of technology further, and in different directions. There are qualities that we in the West have come to associate with urbanity—for instance, a high-density center with crowded public spaces where invisible rules of comity operate, such that bumping into someone else does not become a source of offense, as it might in another locale. Urbanity might well take on different shapes in other cultures, including some unrecognizable to the Western eye. Perhaps we need a new word as a way of opening ourselves to other possibilities. Cityness is one way of opening up the category and allowing for more variability in what constitutes urbanity. This generates a whole field for research and interpretation, and invites us to reposition Western notions of what cities should look like and to explore a far broader range of building technologies and urban spaces.

Wherever I go in the world, I find at least some technologists, urbanists, and artists who are beginning to “urbanize” technology. Cloud9, a Barcelona-based project that mixes science, technology, and architecture is a good example, one that draws all types of people—children, professionals, and tourists alike. When this happens, the city becomes a heuristic space; it talks with the average resident or visitor rather than simply commanding them. The technology becomes visible and explicit and can be understood by any passerby. I have long thought that all the major infrastructures in a city—from sewage to electricity and broadband—should be encased in transparent walls and floors at certain crossroads, such as bus stops or public squares. If you can actually see it all, you can get engaged. Today, when walls are pregnant with software, why not make this visible? All of our computerized systems should become transparent. The city would become literally a publicly shared domain.

The challenge for intelligent cities is to urbanize the technologies they deploy, to make them responsive and available to the people whose lives they affect. Today, the tendency is to make them invisible, hiding them beneath platforms or behind walls—hence putting them in command rather than in dialogue with users. One effect will be to reduce the possibility that intelligent cities can promote open-source urbanism, and that is a pity. It will cut their lives short. They will become obsolete sooner. Urbanizing these intelligent cities would help them live longer because they would be open systems, subject to ongoing changes and innovations. After all, that ability to adapt is how our good old cities have outlived the rise and fall of kingdoms, republics, and corporations.

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Source: What Matters, February 1, 2011

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