Urban Comm roundup: Smart cities, hostile architecture, and placemaking

Smart Cities

• Writing for Forbes, Rich Karlgaard reports on the smart-city champions, i.e. the countries and companies poised to benefit from the smart city boom:

I see three categories of winners. The first will be suppliers of digital technology, from high-speed telecom, cloud services and digital security to apps, for example, like Uber’s and Airbnb’s that use physical resources with greater efficiency. But these can get you only so far.

The second category will be traditional industry reborn. The trick will be to find breakthroughs in materials, construction and transportation–updates to the blood-and-sweat stuff that built the great cities of the 20th century. Will the winners be known names, such as GE, Mitsubishi, Tata and Samsung, or new players?

A third category will be the smart cities themselves. Leaders will likely create services that can be used to teach other cities, so their expertise will have value beyond the benefits enjoyed inside the cities. Smart cities will enjoy premium brands in a tough global economy, and they will attract talent. A great example is Singapore.

• Focusing on India's smart cities initiative, Arindham Guha outlines "three broad categories of investments in infrastructure and technology, all of which are required for delivering 'smart' urban services":

The first category is what we can call basic infrastructure—water or sewerage pipelines would fall under this group. Unlike developed countries, most Indian cities have significant shortages in this area.

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[The] second category of technology investments in a typical smart city, which we can broadly call network level infrastructure. These are essentially a set of devices or sensors installed at specific points in the city-wide network which are used to monitor parameters related to service delivery.

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Integrating information and communication technology (ICT) solutions constitute the third and final component of the smart city technology architecture. These solutions can be of two types. One set of ICT solutions usually help the city administration manage their internal functions like finance and accounting, human resources etc. The other set of ICT solutions are usually used to analyse data collected through network level sensors to generate potential decision options for the city administration to provide seamless and efficient urban services.

• CNBC contributor Nyshka Chandran asks, "Are India's smart cities too ambitious?":

"Smart city" remains loosely-defined in India and around the world, but many say the adoption of technology is a crucial element. Ambitious initiatives to build "smarter" cities include the use of data and digital infrastructure to manage energy and water usage to the creation of intelligent transport networks, according to a Brookings report earlier this year.

However, India will likely focus on fixing the lack of basic amenities and infrastructure such as housing, water supply, sanitation, and electricity in existing urban regions.

• Darren Pauli at the Register warns "your city's not smart if it's vulnerable":

"Real world hacker" Cesar Cerrudo has blasted vendors, saying they're stopping security researchers from testing smart city systems, and as a result they're being sold with dangerous unchecked vulnerabilities.

The warning will be detailed at RSA San Francisco this week, and comes a year after the IOActive chief technology officer found some 200,000 vulnerable traffic control sensors active in cities like Washington DC, London, and Melbourne.

Vendors don't want their kit tested, Cerrudo said, although there are now 25 major cities across the world taking the lead in deployment, such as New York, Berlin, and Sydney.

• AlterNet's Allegra Kirkland considers the "troubling social and political consequences" posed by smart cities:

Smart cities are loosely defined as urban centers that rely on digital technology to enhance efficiency and reduce resource consumption. This happens by means of ubiquitous wireless broadband, citywide networks of computerized sensors that measure human activities (from traffic to electricity use), and mass data collection that analyzes these patters. Many American cities, including New York, Boston and Chicago, already make use of smart technologies. But far more radical advances are happening overseas. Masda in Abu Dhabi, and Songdo, in South Korea, will be the first fully functioning smart cities, in which everything from security to electricity to parking is monitored by sensors and controlled by a central city "brain".

The surveillance implications of these sorts of mass data-generating civic projects are unnerving, to say the least. Urban designer and author Adam Greenfield wrote on his blog Speedbird that this centralized governing model "disturbingly consonant with the exercise of authoritarianism." To further complicate matters, the vast majority of smart-city technology is designed by IT-systems giants like IBM and Siemens. In places like Songdo, which was the brainchild of Cisco Systems, corporate entities become responsible for designing and maintaining the basic functions of urban life.

Hostile Architecture

• In an article for the Guardian, Alex Andreou considers the broader implications of anti-homeless spikes and other forms of defensive architecture in urban spaces:

From ubiquitous protrusions on window ledges to bus-shelter seats that pivot forward, from water sprinklers and loud muzak to hard tubular rests, from metal park benches with solid dividers to forests of pointed cement bollards under bridges, urban spaces are aggressively rejecting soft, human bodies.

We see these measures all the time within our urban environments, whether in London or Tokyo, but we fail to process their true intent. I hardly noticed them before I became homeless in 2009. An economic crisis, a death in the family, a sudden breakup and an even more sudden breakdown were all it took to go from a six-figure income to sleeping rough in the space of a year. It was only then that I started scanning my surroundings with the distinct purpose of finding shelter and the city’s barbed cruelty became clear.

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Defensive architecture acts as the airplane curtain that separates economy from business and business from first class, protecting those further forward from the envious eyes of those behind. It keeps poverty unseen and sanitises our shopping centres, concealing any guilt for over-consuming. It speaks volumes about our collective attitude to poverty in general and homelessness in particular. It is the aggregated, concrete, spiked expression of a lack of generosity of spirit.

Ironically, it doesn’t even achieve its basic goal of making us feel safer. There is no way of locking others out that doesn’t also lock us in. The narrower the arrow-slit, the larger outside dangers appear. Making our urban environment hostile breeds hardness and isolation. It makes life a little uglier for all of us.

• Hannah Butler at Non Profit Quarterly reacted to Andreou's article with additional thoughts on "the fierce hostility of the urban landscape":

Creating urban spaces that reject human interactions affect us all. Not only do they prevent the homeless taking refuge; neither can the young mother find shelter from the rain or the elderly man a space to rest. It creates a physical manifestation of a hostility that we could all stand to be without, rather than encourage. These problems are not limited to New York City or to London, but are in fact a stubborn part of the architecture of modern city life, whether indented or accidental. However, they aren’t intractable.

• In a post on Medium, Justin Schumacher writes about the balance between security and liberty in relation to architecture:

Early on, the British did much as we have done since 9/11, installing barriers and bollards anywhere they might save some lives. But as the years passed, their approach became much more nuanced as they realized that over-securitizing public spaces drives away the public, which increases crime. This appears to happen in part because security features lead people to believe that crime is commonplace and increasing even if it is rare and decreasing, and in part because simply seeing security features causes anxiety and discomfort.

Placemaking & Tactical Urbanism

• Referring to it as a "rhetorical gimmick," James Russell says "enough of bogus 'placemaking'":

Unfortunately, Placemaking, as promulgated by its chief advocate, the nonprofit Projects for Public Spaces, is largely bogus, even though PPS rather presumptuously claims it “has the potential to be one of the most transformative ideas of this century.” After you hack through thickets of slogans and vagaries, Placemaking seems to comprise a community-driven process for designing public spaces (streets, sidewalks, plazas, squares, campuses, parks, and so on) that are mixed use, host a variety of activities for diverse audiences, and are well-connected to the larger city or town. All this has been mom & pop, apple-pie stuff in urban planning circles for decades, derived from the valuable 1960s work of the urbanist and author Jane Jacobs and the urban planner William H. “Holly” Whyte. The same ideas energized the 1990s New Urbanism that gave us Neo-historical neighborhoods, a few of them actually good.

Sadly, Placemaking could only gain currency because our building and development processes create so little that is inviting and memorable. America’s default is to assemble standardized real-estate products along roads engineered for auto throughput, and call it a day. Placelessness is so ubiquitous and such second nature that it is actually hard to think about what it takes to make a building or streetscape that’s appealing, that feels as if it belongs.

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What are the lessons here? Making great places is a more organic and less mechanical process than PPS makes it out to be. Yes, the public must be involved, and yes some places should be active social mixing bowls. But some places—especially extraordinary natural features—should be left alone. In others, we should recognize that what is unique is sometimes strange (like Gasworks’ rusting ruins). Recall that the rail line that hosts the High Line Park escaped demolition only because two intrepid people cared.

• Annah MacKenzie of the Project for Public Spaces recently reiterated the organization's stance on space vs place:

Let’s start with Public Space. Outlining the role and value of public space has long been a subject of academic, political, and professional debate. At the most basic level public space can be defined as publicly owned land that, in theory, is open and accessible to all members of a given community—regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age, or socio-economic level.

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Places, on the other hand, are environments in which people have invested meaning over time. A place has its own history—a unique cultural and social identity that is defined by the way it is used and the people who use it. It is not necessarily through public space, then, but through the creation of places that the physical, social, environmental, and economic health of urban and rural communities can be nurtured.

• Writing at The City Fix, Alex Rogala describes how "tactical urbanism is shaping cities for people, by people":

As many people increasingly rely on data-driven apps and platforms like Google Maps to navigate their cities, some skeptics have worried that our streets are losing their traditional element of chance, surprise, and mystery. Kopfkino (roughly, “head theater” in German) is a project to revitalize those aspects of the urban experience. Using a shopping cart as their base, a group of friends in Istanbul built a portable projector that casts users’ faces onto building facades when they peer into a laptop camera. Kopfkino invites the curious passerby to pause from his or her regular routine and discover a new experience in a familiar place.

DIY projects in public spaces like Kopfkino are popping up all over Turkey. However, unlike some other examples of tactical urbanism, Kopfkino likely wasn’t intended to be replicable or scalable. The point, however, is to challenge what it means to encounter other people in public space, and to revisit the idea that every city offers an individual and unique experience.

• Tactical urbanism is the subject of a current MoMA exhibition entitled Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities. In an essay posted at the MoMA website, Neil Brenner asks, "is 'tactical urbanism' an alternative to neoliberal urbanism?":

Especially in light of the stridently anti-planning rhetoric that pervades many tactical urban interventions and their tendency to privilege informal, incremental, and ad hoc mobilizations over larger-scale, longer-term, publicly financed reform programs, it seems reasonable to ask in what ways they do, in actuality, engender any serious friction against the neoliberal order, much less subvert it. In some cases, tactical urbanisms appear more likely to bolster neoliberal urbanisms by temporarily alleviating (or perhaps merely displacing) some of their disruptive social and spatial effects, but without interrupting the basic rule-regimes associated with market-oriented, growth-first urban development, and without challenging the foundational mistrust of governmental institutions that underpins the neoliberal project. The relation between tactical and neoliberal forms of urbanism is thus considerably more complex, contentious, and confusing than is generally acknowledged in the contributions to the debate on Uneven Growth. As illustrated in the list below, it cannot be simply assumed that because of their operational logics or normative-political orientations, tactical interventions will, in fact, counteract neoliberal urbanism. No less than five specific types of relation between these projects can be readily imagined, only two of which (1 and 5 in the list) might involve a challenge to market-fundamentalist urban policy. There are at least three highly plausible scenarios in which tactical urbanism will have either negligible or actively beneficial impacts upon a neoliberalized urban rule-regime.