‘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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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