newtowntosmartcity

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Week 7: Smart City: Return of the New Town

Nabi Agzamov

na2677

Built and controlled by data, Smart City is a new utopian model for the 21st century New Towns. Greenfield, one of the critics of internet of things, points out, modernist like, arrogance of the corporations that, among other things, claim to predict future by surveillance the present. How powerful is the collected data? The invisible layer digital overlay influence the environment of not only new cities like Masdar, or Songdo abut also established metropolises. However, the accessibility to the technology may not be equally distributed among the population, yet it can affect us all. The complexity of urban environment, or any environment for that matter, cannot be measured or dismissed. Nevertheless, “contemporary portrayals of smart cities smart cities treat landscape as mere backdrop “.

 Although criticism of smartness in generic space, and of “generic time” is more than fair, dismissing the ICT and IoT is simply impossible, for better or worse, it is part of the urban morphology. However, designers will inevitably play major roles in the ways these technological advancements will perform in the urban fabric, and it is crucial for us to ask the right questions. Can the access to the digital systems be “visible” and monitored? How can people speak the language of data? What are the politics, rules and legislature that govern the way the data is collected and used? The ICT relies on the connectivity and feedback of users; how can future relationships be shaped by both parties?

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Week 12: Mattern Urban Intell

gz2239 Ge Zhao

A security operations center (SOC) is a centralized unit that deals with security issues on an organizational and technical level. A SOC within a building or facility is a central location from where staff supervises the site, using data processing technology Typically, a SOC is equipped for access monitoring, and controlling of lighting, alarms, and vehicle barriers.

Yet, COR also signals a new form of participatory civic politics. Citizens visiting COR headquarters can observe COR operations and the data COR collects and displays. Through this demonstration of openness and access, COR serves as a public relations space from which the city attempts to broadcast an image of informational transparency and competent urban administration.

The COR is how this smart city “sees itself, how it portrays that image of ongoing information extraction and control, how it portrays that image back to its residents and an international audience.... A representation producing device and mechanism for the city,” said Wasiuta.

The development of Smart City companies with reframing of the existing power structure. Technology companies are pushing the idea of building future city. On the other hand, government never give up their power of supervise and reinvent discipline.

With regards to UD, the notion of smart cities has become a polarizing ideal/fantasy? Utopia with slick and shiny interfaces with automation bringing about the pinnacles of convenience, or a dystopia where the democratic rights are deprived from citizens in the quest for “the greater good”.

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Week 10: What’s smartness?

gz2239 Ge Zhao

“There is, however, something else the phrase ‘smart city’ refers to, which is the broader and far more consequential drive to retrofit networked information technologies into existing urban places.”

“The final intent of all this computational scrutiny, we are told, is to make every unfolding process of the city visible to those charged with its management; to render the previously opaque or indeterminate not merely knowable but actionable; and ultimately, to permit the ‘optimization’ of all the flows of matter, energy and information that constitute a great urban place.”

I think this quote the principal of smart city. The first aspect of smartness means it can make complex process in certain city function more useful and simpler. By analyzing the traffic data and use programs calculating, and then give adjustment to traffic lights in the whole city, the whole process can both save labor and improve efficiency. The second aspect of smartness is more accurate as dealing with matter, energy and information. The suppleness of city’s function gives administers more possible to work on higher level issues.

The second aspect of smartness is city can deal with matter, energy and information more accurate, more effective and quicker. As the density is increasing, the demand of upgrading the city function is also growing bigger. Instead of only working for physical commuting, nowadays cities should deal with people’s huge amount of data and energy requirement. However, on the one hand, new technologies can achieve more transfer jobs, on the other hand, designers and planners should think of new solutions for hybridizing the exchange of information and energy.

For the project proposed by IBM, the smartness can help citizens solving tons of daily issues and make life easier. By all of these, improving connections is the main goal. Citizens can share and exchange information, and as the increasing of transforming frequency, people can make work more effective and get more helps.

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Week 6: New town planning of Tehran and Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam

Yang Liao

yl3544

New town, urban renewal, satellite town plans were treated as examples of failures but they had intense ideological ideas. Which of course didn’t work out always.

“They were the symbolic enemies that were needed to forge a new consensus of participative design contextualism that were needed to forge a new consensus of participative design from the nineteen seventies onwards” (Page 46) basically this kind of planning caused a huge shift in the way that we think about architecture now.

Forces other than architecture, when applied to a building can tell you the success or failure of a building, not just the architecture itself.  

The design of Toulouse de Mirail came from the ideologies of the architect in terms of how it was to be used, from organic metaphors but the buildings were row of rectangles, like tetris.

Toulouse de Mirail fell into disrepair, immigration, unemployment, crime, alienation, frustration and riots.

The generation of architects now measure the success of architecture by the degree to which it actually improves society.

While this is thought of as a new concept, it is not, it’s exactly what the architects and planners had thought of before in the seventies.

There is a “direct and linear connection between the form architecture takes and the form society takes” (page 48).

Architecture is generally seen as a means of changing the society, making it better but also as a representation of an already changed society. Architects think society can be controlled by architecture but that's not always the case.

The architectonic interpretation of society as a permanent reconstruction, a part of the country's culture is made permanent, or the thought of a future becomes permanent etc.

Tehran, every aspect of the country was considered engineerable, America mostly paid for the advancement of the capital. It was full of foreign consultants and foreign architects, When the government was overthrown, the Islamic government came to power they were out of funds. To make up for this, they sold parts of the city that were inteded to be parks to locals with money. The city was essentially cannibalized to create space and funds for the city. The original grid was kept.

The Bijlimermeer was designed and created to show how people should be housed. They had a clear ideological intention.  It was thought that it would be diverse plan. The absence of the urban design plan in the automatism of urban growth do we recognize the organic growth of the Bijlimer. The fact that the urban planning was so uncontrolled and allowed the project to form naturally shows how up-to-date the project is.

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Week 11: City In A Box

gz2239 Ge Zhao

“In fact, the hexagonal beehive structure underlying the infrastructure was chosen because it is nature’s most efficient form. The pre-fab buildings are also an exercise inefficacy. In many ways, it’s very clear that is a city built by technologists for technologists. ”

As urban designer and architects always try to predict how future smart city will look like, but the efficiency might be the main factor leading to the shape and planning of smart urbanism. As the increasing of living density and decreasing of resource, designers are working on using data to analysis and predict the most effective way to utilize infrastructure as well as space. However, inherited from modern city formation, the property and rights of lots and buildings highly limited the realization of a smart way to share space and share energy. Everyone just tries their best to make use of their owned right to get more value.

To untied this dilemma, smart city proposal should broadcast from using data analysis to find a coexist method for different stakeholders to get the most valuable results. For example, Uber is a data based sharing economy. By making the best use of every vehicle in the city and combining different trips in the most efficient solution, sharing car saved energy, created jobs and release traffic pressure. In terms of space sharing, Airbnb is also the case of increasing the capacity of spatial occupied rate. After having new function and new programs in the cities and buildings, the form of buildings and space should also be designed due to these new-born businesses. Like the design group of WeWork, the new types of apartments and offices should meet the needs of efficiently sharing. The same as BIG’s first Manhattan project, VIA 57. They hugely increased the percentage of sharing spaces. This could be a part of the future smartness.

It seems smart city has already started forming by sharing economy, but as architects how can we make space sharing as smart as vehicle sharing? Instead of proposing a new concept, the future design methodology should be based on a huge amount of data analysis. Designer should work with programmer to figure out the principle under the data residents created. By understand people’s behavior and trajectory in urban context, there will be a huge opportunity to develop smartness and efficacy in future cities.

[newtowntosmartcity]

Week 6: A Balance between Profit and Design

Yan Pang/ yp2422

The founders of Columbia earned some profits and meanwhile the city made normal residents live in a super block. In one aspect, the construction of Columbia restrained the unlimited pursuit of profit by controlling residential density, building substantial public infrastructures and keeping a large area of natural landscape; on the other hand, in the process of maximizing the benefits, Rouse Company did take some actions that should be praised.

1. Product diversification

The multiple buildings and amenities including trading, manufacturing, retail, office and entertainment met the needs of people in different class. Residents could work, relax and enjoy life here.

2. Focusing on public buildings

The area of commercial district was more than 20%, same to the public space. Although the number of independent house decreased, Rouse Company could earn more profits by utilizing public architectures and improve the convenience and quality of residents.

3. Sharing the environment

The develop and sharing of lakeside environment brought the increasing of real estate price, which was much higher than just selling independent house around lake.  

 As the major developer and management of Columbia, Rouse Company give an excellent example how a master plan of urban planning should be actually operated and constructed, bringing mutual benefit on themselves and residents. It is this kind of operation that Tehran should learn from, not the simple duplication of Los Angeles ot any other American Metropolitan with out local context. The billions from cannibalizing the master plan had to be used to pay the massive municipal officials and immense prestige projects, which could not bring a sustainable profit back. In fact, a so-called good plan which aimed to provide the counter-form for a society that was the opposite of what the ayatollahs believed in should also make a huge amount of profit, besides only generate the biggest urban growth.

[newtowntosmartcity]

IDEAL City

zq2148

In 1947, India became independent from British colonization. The price of the freedom is the separation of Pakistan and India. The border was drawn in the middle of Punjabi in which the capital was given to Pakistan, leaving the Indian side of Punjab without a capital city. A new city was much needed. With a hope of showing the independency of India, the Prime Minister Nehru alleged that the new city was supposed to become the mark point of getting rid of the British colonial period and embracing the future. Le Corbusier was not chosen at first. Before he took over the plan, it was Albert Mayer whose work is the foundation of Corbusier’s own idea. The plan is a huge grid system in-between which is the self-operated unit with its own road network. Sector 22 was the firstly built unit for governmental employees, when the two scenarios of Chandigarh started to happen - Corbusier’s iconic Palace of Assembly, and massive housing for new residents. Looking like a Mondrian painting from the aerial view, Chandigarh is not typical Indian and is still maintaining the characteristics of Corbusier. It has very outstanding architectures, independent urban system, highest GDP and modernest lifestyle in India. Is it the real ideal city? How does the ideal city look like? Sharing the same features as the failing Neighbor Units, while Chandigarh became a textbook of new town. On the one hand, Chandigarh as a major city is more sustainable than British new towns and has more resources than suburbans, one the other hand, the demographic constituted of governmental workers determined it would attract enough middle class, ensuring the social stability. Even though Chandigarh ended up being a textbook of new towns, the specific reasons were seldom pictured. It is not hard to imagine if the same strategy was being implemented in another city, the result would be actually unpredictable. The biggest ambitions of human beings is that we believe we are creators.  

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Technology Sugarcoat

zq2148

Reading Response to ‘Against the Smart City’ by Greenfield

Both as ways to improve the quality of life and distribute the social resources more evenly, the notion of smart city shares a lot of similarities with new town. In accordance of the needs, two kinds of smart urbanism is pictured. One is that a city building from scratch is packaged with the smart system, another one is to embed the system into the existing urban condition. Obviously the first one is more favored than the latter. Either in the case of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi or the Songdo City in South Korea, building a smart city from scratch means opportunities in capital, controllability in implementation. However sugarcoated by technologies and amenity, smart city comes up shorts because of concentrating the power to the centralized systems. Also, it could be easily duplicated if it is commercialized and sold around the world once we create the ideal smart city prototype. Being generic is the nightmare of future city but it is actually reasonable if this is the most efficient way of running the world, since the price of adapting to a non-generic urban framework is way to expensive. As is depicted, the futuristic community constrains the behavior of human beings, and the system has more priority than individuals. Is it possible that smart city is just the sugarcoat of marketing new towns? How will it look like if we take off all the smartness of Masdar City? Isn't it another failing ambition of gigantic projects? Few thoughts about the future of the city - speaking of efficiency, collective individuals are doing better than centralized system.

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Week 6, Unnecessary Effort

zq2148

Putting aside the misleading conflict between islamic culture and modern urbanism, the fall and rise of Tehran project actually left a question upon the necessity of urban design. The American dream of the governors broke down under the unexpected financial situation, therefore, the right to build the city was turned to the citizens. With the engagement of American architects, Tehran already had a very detail masterplan, however the process got disrupted due to the financial shortfall during the war. Tehran thus become a hybrid case that the highly free autonomy exists in the built girds. Depending on the beautiful mistake, Tehran actually found a good way to fit into the context and avoid to become another California. Looking at the far away in Netherlands, during the practicing period of Corbusier’s Radiant City, Amsterdam decided to follow this example and as a solution for the great housing shortage for the post war baby boom generation. However, the original plan for the Bijlmermeer was also never completely executed due to budget cuts. In the meanwhile, with the breaking down of colonialism, the middle class didn’t arrive as planned, and instead, the Bijlmermeer attracted those with no other options. Over time, the Bijlmermeer became “a single-class, low-income and unemployed, ethnically diverse and increasingly non-white urban enclave”. The image of the Bijlmermeer as the city of the future deteriorated: the dream of a functional town became a nightmare of vacant dwellings, drug abuse and a crime ridden area. It was decided to construct the rest of the Bijlmermeer differently. The urban principle of the closed building block was applied again. Since the 17th century canal belt of Amsterdam, this building typology has always been very successful in Amsterdam. The solution worked well and saved bijmer. But is it really a new town case? Returning to the conventional mixed-use community is more like a compromise to the failing history. How far and how well can a project with a singular link between government and designers go?

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Cities as experiences and not indicators of them

Sreyash Dasgupta I sd3000

In response to Rob Kitchin “ Smart Cities and the Politics of Urban Data”

The smart city urban fabric infrastructure, and networked digital devices are monitored, and managed using ICT infrastructure and technology, while at the same time looks at adoption of policies to reshape every aspect of a city’s regulatory and economic development using technology inspired innovation.

However, smart cities look at governance that can only be ‘measured and monitored’. What about the issues regarding culture, politics, social interaction that shapes the urban environment that is not within the ‘limited selection and processing of data’? The technology driven environment of the smart city is overly driven by large corporations and their interests, where the data can be sourced and sold to the governments. This creates a city, where every aspect of an individual can be marketed and/ or sold for profits. Incorporating technology into every aspect of a city’s infrastructure also exposes it to viruses and possibilities of crashes and security breaches. Any technology has a possibility to fail. With cities growing, so would the technical complications of running the systems that run the city. If the system fails, the only way around is to fix/reboot the system. This leads to higher costs of maintenance and time. Instead shouldn’t cities incorporate resilient systems of infrastructure that would create efficiency?  Any software is based on feeding data to allow for processing. This leads to the question- who feds the data? Is all data absolute and without errors or round offs? Mis-feeding data into the system could result in highly unfair and unequal societies. Can this result in politics associated with data collection and distribution?  Surveillance of every aspect of the city to collect data, also means that this may lead to hampering privacy, confidentiality, freedom of expression etc.

While smart cities are being proposed and developed across the world, these questions put forth by Kitchin, proves that the multiple, complex nature of the systems associated within cities cannot and should not be broken down into mere facts for data generation and should aim at understanding the intertwined nature of context and politics- cities are places to live and experience, and are not mere indicators of them.

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Week 06: Unplanned urban design

Sreyash Dasgupta I sd3000

In response to:

Morton Hoppenfeld “The Columbia Process: The Potential For New Towns,” in David Lewis, ed., The Pedestrian in the City (1965)

Wouter Vanstiphout “Ideology as an Achilles Heel: Visionary Urban Planning in Amsterdam and Teheran,” in Provoost, ed., New Towns for the 21st Century,

 Michelle Provoost “Exporting New Towns: The Welfare City in Africa,” in Swenarton, Avermaete and van den Heuvel, eds., Architecture and the Welfare State (2015)

“Everything in history happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce..” The failure of the plan for the Toulouse Le Mirail, climaxed at 2005, being all concrete- no life, leading to immigration, unemployment, crime, frustration, riots, showed that architecture repeatedly through history dreamt about the ‘social engineering’ of society.

Architecture was reduced to a mere linear interpretation of society. As Vanstiphout says-“by building a historic looking city center, people hope to produce authenticity of the historic city.” Is this not a way of cheating oneself to create ‘social’ architecture?

The Gruen plan in Tehran, worked out in critical detail, with precise planning regulations about open space, housing densities, infrastructure as an ideal for the society, taken over by private developers and sold off plot by plot, resulting in great profits, became, in only a few decades, one of the most chaotic, densely built, yet fascinating cities in the world.

In Amsterdam, the satellite suburb Bijlmermeer, was built as an ideological statement about how people should be housed. Planned green spaces, accessibility conditions, common spaces, the plan of Bijlmermeer was influenced by East German and Russian planning manuals, and by Toulouse Le Mirail (which eventually failed), and Le Corbusier’s La Ville Radieuse. However, because of immigration, and delayed influx of residents, the suburb soon became Netherland’s first Third- World City. That is when it actually started to develop, with demolition of high rises, where illegal residents resided, and allocating new dwellings to the residents of Bijlmer.

Society changes, and thus architecture should be flexible and should be in a constant process of change, instead of being rigidly based on idealistic plans and mere reflections of an ideal of a society at one point in history.

 As Mr Jim Rouse, envisioner of the planned county of Columbia put it- “It’s not an attempt at a perfect city or a utopia, but rather an effort to simply develop a better city, an alternative to the mindlessness, the irrationality, the unnecessity of sprawl and clutter as a way of accommodating the growth of the American city,”

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Black Mirror - "Dashboard seeks to act as a translator, not simply a mirror"

Paul Xiaopu Wang xw2441

In Rob Kitchin, Tracey P. Lauriault and Gavin McArdle's writing "Smart Cities and the Politics of Urban Data", they summarise Smart Cities position in urban governance before offer their criticism in data’s default state of vulnerability and mix-influences in political agenda.  

While smart cities are all promoted across the globe for being the utopian state of urbanization, helping citizens to become more creative, sustainable, knowledgeable, and efficient, Kitchin argues that the economy highly ties to the direction of the city development and how big data are used in politically charged societies. He brings back the old controversy on how data is formed, framed, presented and viewed by people rather than by idealized neutral algorithms. Complex urban data simply cannot be optimized to absolute abstractions of 1/0 mechanisms. The growth of computation power, in the authors’’ view, only improve the efficiency of management rather than provide real capability of solving deep-rooted structural problems underpinning them. Increasing tech dominance in Smart City planning unproportionally distribute power and opportunity to people who often have already seized enough power and interested in private profit. Long-term contract between tech provider and the city, as the nature of Smart City development, also create monopoly positions. (Hill, 2013). The critique lands at the predictive profiling, social sorting and anticipatory governance before resonates in the politics of urban data. “...The fear is that, far from being a liberatory and empowering development, smart cities may well lead to highly controlling and unequal societies in which rights to privacy, confidentiality, freedom of expression and life chances are restricted.” Kitchin, Lauriault and McArdle note.  

Data are always situated and contextualised

The detailed case study of the Dashboard project reveal the central debate over how data can produce bias opinion base on who is in power manipulating the outcome in the new era of managerialism. The act of reduction and simplification during the data representation state eliminates the city’s history, its political economy, the wider set of social, economic and environmental relations that frame its development and its interconnections and interdependencies that stretch out over space and time.(Cities are open, not closed systems; Craglia et al., 2004; Mori and Christodoulou, 2012) There isn’t perfection nor absolute, the interpretation of any sort of benchmarking and indicator request an appreciation of the level of uncertainty inherent in the data and analysis effects. Last but not least, Dashboards not only represent urban systems, but actively help produce them.

Perhaps, the true “Real-time” overview of the city through dashboard should account the influences, errors, emotions, uncertainty, and its hackable nature. Rather than perfecting the technology and algorithm, the dashboard could ground itself through the imperfections, the closest feature it has that reflect human beings.  

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WEEK 9 ...the Real Future?

zq2148

Speaking of Hudson Yard, as the largest private real estate project in the US ever, it is also the milestone of smart urbanism in the whole country. The smartness of the system is implemented through scales, from strategically maximizing the usable area above the rail yard, to the very detail that even the soil is designed to efficiently collect stormwater from surface to storage tank. And with the on-site power plant and a pneumatic trash removal system, Hudson Yard becomes a self-sustained engineered city. Sensors and data capturing systems are embedded into the building facade to monitor the living condition of the residents, thus distributing the resources more efficiently. Hudson Yard is built as a smart phone, where all we can see is the rendered amenity, while the functioning system is hidden behind the neat interface. We are close enough to the little sensor behind the control panel, in the meantime we are still far away from the answer that what all these datas and systems can bring us. Not talking about the problem of privacy which has become cliche in the dispute of smart urbanism, the case of Hudson Yard is more about the mismatch between the expectation and the reality. As it is addressed that smart technologies can be a technical solution to social problems, here the smart technologies are mainly commercialized as innovative engineering methods marketing by corporations. As a real estate project building from scratch, it is the future of the city, and it is expensive to book a reservation. Of course the notion of smart urbanism is way boarder than what’s happening in Hudson Yard, but this is the most readable way to allow people understand it by showing something physical and experienceable. Jumping out of the commercial realm, the eagerness to manipulate datas as if they can bring us to the destination of humanity is still marching on…

[newtowntosmartcity]

Week 9: Informatics Infrastructure

Huaxia Wu_hw2560

According to its website, Hudson Yards “is the largest private real estate development in the history of the United States, and the largest development in New York City since Rockefeller Center.”

The numbers, put simply, are massive: 14 buildings, across 28 acres; over 17 million square feet of residential and commercial space; and a projected 125,000 people living, working or visiting each day.(http://cityandstateny.com/articles/the-future-of-the-boroughs-manhattan/hudson-yards-offers-a-glimpse-into-the-future-of-new-york-city.html)

When we talking about such a historical construction, a techtopia, can we feel that from this buildings clusters? I really doubt that. How does this new technologies and data driven urban planning shape the space we live in? Even when we go the the office of side walk lab, the office is brand new but not that smart as I think. Is this the shortage of the absence of urban designers? Sure, when there is wifi in every inch of Hudson Yards, people behave differently. But how the public space do with this?

“What is particularly unique about Hudson Yards, though, is that the entire neighborhood, quite literally, is being built by one real estate firm: Related Companies. And, as a result, the New York-based company is the “master developer” of Hudson Yards; an entity with near-complete control of what goes up in the sky. The two are inexplicably tied together, so much so that Hudson Yards is not just a new neighborhood, but also a company brand. (To think: What other neighborhood has its own flashy, made-to-be-marketed website?)”

Also, much of its smartness is about how to collect data and analyze it to better understand how city works while these data resources are limited. When we say that Hudson Yards is the template for future city, maybe just about similar Hudson-Yarders. I think the data here can not represent people live in Queens or Poughkeepsie.  Sometimes, I think its funny to use the emotionless data to represent the lively people, and put that as the public participation. At the same time, I think this might be the efficient way to let everybody ‘talk’ and to be ‘heard’.

[newtowntosmartcity]

Smart Cities: for public security

dp2839/ Dongfang Pang

In response to "Smart Cities and the Politics of Urban Data," Smart city seeks to implement information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve the efficiency and sustainability of urban space while reducing costs and resource consumption.  when talking about surveillance, smart city are using technologies to monitor the citizens through the strategic placement of sensors, collecting data on many different factors of urban life. we risk losing the overlooked benefits of inconvenience. If you began to feel that you lived your life under observation, would that shape your identity? Would you be less likely to try new things? Would you find it harder to develop true intimacy with a limited number of people? Would you be more afraid to act politically, for or against particular causes? What is privacy? State of limited access to certain aspects of ourselves, things we control, and areas of our lives in order to preserve them from unwanted intrusion 

– Right to be left alone 

– Distinct from anonymity (concealing identity), confidentiality (parties agree not to divulge information)

 – Can be defined by both knowledge (absence of undocumented knowledge about a person) and/or control (absence of interference in one’s ability to make decisions) 

Public security is a growing problem for cities worldwide. iIt is generally agreed that when people make decisions to provide personal information, they need to know what will be used, what it will be used, what steps will be taken to protect their confidentiality and integrity, what is the consequence of providing or concealing information, and They may have any relief. Whenever such information is collected, the individual should tell these things - not sticking to the rules of the small print but straightforward in plains they can understand the language.In Data Harvest, there is one question can be asked, how sharing research data can yield knowledge, jobs and growth? I believe there should be a trust between customers and business, it is the same thing in Internet world, should also be a trust between visitors and data collectors. For data collectors, it is important for them to how to use these data. Also one possible potential solution for leaking privacy information, one is to anonymisation of personal data. 

In terms of thinking new technology helps knit together a private Internet of Things to provide police and emergency services with new technologies to fight crime and make cities safer. The relationship between the public and the individuals. investigations altogether. However, new technology is starting to become available to help police combat crime more effectively.

[newtowntosmartcity]

week 9 smart city/data mining

dp2839/ Dongfang Pang

Economic and technology development has improved urban activities and transformed our lives. As designers, thinking how to get designs involved with new technology is important. Also as climate changing, Smart physical spaces are also instrumental in the support of a safe and savvy community. Build resiliency, make adaptations for cities and help making a smart city becomes to be resilient too.  Hudson yard as an amazing example.  New York’s Hudson Yards. The 28-acre “city within a city” on Manhattan’s west side, is the largest private real estate development in the history of the US. Hudson Yards, targeted for completion in 2025 aims to be the first fully instrumented and quantified neighborhood lab. It is an incredible engineering, science and architecture achievement. There are specialists are in real estate development, city government, architecture, construction, software, hardware and civil engineering, and business.

I was working with Hell’s Kitchen site during summer studio, pretty familiar with Port Authority Bus Terminal, the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, the cavernous Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, and even” spanning seven blocks from 30th to 34th Street, between 10th and 12th Avenues “ the author mentioned in her article.

Try to image our cities in 2025, how smart our cities can be in 2025? For instance, smart city buildings will be dynamic, intelligent and reactive to what’s happening around them. Operation and management should also be take full care of.  CUSP wants to ‘instrument New York City’ and ‘transform the city into a living laboratory and classroom.’ Hudson Yards as Open-Air Urban Lab. CUSP also designed the Smart citizenship, which is equated with monitoring and managing one’s relationship to the urban environment —operationalizing the cybernetic functions of the smart city.

There are things that have not been clarified, for instance there seems to be an unclear definition of data collecting and privacy. In my opinion, many people do not understand that this may be a moral dilemma because they are not aware that it may lead to personal potential harm. Web data mining can lend information to other businesses, and sometimes can be used free of charge. Users do not know how to collect information about their use. Their personal information may be misused, or used as a destination other than one. Therefore, it is unethical to use Web data mining to violate people’s privacy.

It is also an important ethical issue with Web data mining is that if someone does not know what information is being collected or will be used, she / he has no chance to agree or refuse to agree to its collection and use.

On the other hand, when the group profile is used as a basis for policy making and policy making, or if the configuration file is known to be public knowledge, human personality is threatened. People will be treated as group members rather than individuals. When the configuration file contains a sensitive nature of the data, it may be unethical because people can be discriminated if they are marked as having certain characteristics for the individual.

[newtowntosmartcity]

Week 9: Urban Data Science: Angel or Evil

Kun Qian   kq2137

In the context of digital revolution and global urbanization, it is urgent to apply data science and technology into the process of building urban environment. Hudson yards, as the test ground of urban data science in New York City, is expected to integrate a “smart” system of sensors and apps into its built environment.

The bright side of what this smartest soil offers is higher efficiency of daily life and better management of the urban environment: electric energy and water, are wisely managed, people have the access to the electrical and thermal control of the rooms in the building, and these together provide data back to the technology platform to make the neighborhood more responsive.  

The application of urban data is not only promising to bring above benefits but also may blind our eyes on its implicit problems. Here are some points of its dark side.

In the process of collecting data, the scope of people who the sensors and apps can reach is not exactly the true one of the target users. People those who do not have smart phones and have no access to receive an email may be neglected by the developers.

In the process of data mining and analyzing, understanding the dataset itself is a very essential part. Data collected from people is not necessarily their true willingness. People’s decisions differ when they are made from different situations. Taking the environment of data collection and people’s mental state into consideration would largely reduce resistance for this process.

Last but not the least, utilizing data on the terminal devices is the most crucial step. How the interaction of the service and the users should be realized through the devices is exactly how the smart city technologies can change our lives. And the user experience of the device defines the success of the solution.

Payphone (old) _ LinkNYC (smart)

Google Glasses (smart) _ VR Glasses (smart)