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Ben Snaith

The Smart Enough City by Ben Green - 0 views

Cities Books Smart-Cities

shared by Ben Snaith on 12 May 20 - No Cached
  • The age of the “Smart City” is upon us! It’s just that, we don’t really know what that means. Or, at least, not yet. —The Boston Smart City Playbook (2016)
  • To technologists, cities are a collection of straightforward optimization problems for which more data and computing power can only be helpful—who could argue with making traffic flow better and delivering services more efficiently?
  • Although presented as utopian, the smart city in fact represents a drastic and myopic reconceptualization of cities into technology problems. Reconstructing the foundations of urban life and municipal governance in accordance with this perspective will lead to cities that are superficially smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequity. The smart city threatens to be a place where self-driving cars have the run of downtowns and force out pedestrians, where civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, where police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and where governments and companies surveil public space to control behavior .
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  • The cycle operates in three stages. First, tech goggles create the perception that every issue can and should be solved with technology. This perspective leads people, companies, and governments to develop and adopt new technology intended to make society more efficient and “smart.” As municipalities and urban residents adopt this technology,
  • their behaviors, beliefs, and policies are shaped by the misguided assumptions and priorities embodied in these artifacts—reinforcing the perspective of tech goggles and bolstering the technologies shaped in their image. Through this process, alternative goals and visions that are not grounded in technology become harder both to recognize and to act on. The perspective of tech goggles becomes more deeply entrenched in our collective imagination.
  • Cities cannot escape the need to grapple with values and politics by adopting newer and more efficient technologies. The ways in which we develop and deploy smart city technologies will have vast political consequences: who gains political influence, how neighborhoods are policed, who loses their privacy. Yet tech goggles cause their devotees to perceive complex, normative, and eternally agonistic political decisions as reducible to objective, technical solutions. By conceptualizing urban issues as technology problems, smart city ideologues lose sight of these issues’ normative and political elements. In turn, they evaluate solutions along technical criteria (such as efficiency) and overlook the broader consequences.
  • Cisco’s Urban Innovation team explains, “The debate is no longer about why a Smart City initiative is good for a city or what to do (which available options to choose), but instead about how to implement Smart City infrastructures and services.” 16
  • Contrary to the fables told by smart city proponents, technology creates little value on its own—it must be thoughtfully embedded within municipal governance structures.
Ben Snaith

You Can't Fight City Hall. But Maybe You Can Fight Google. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onto-sidewalk-labs-google.html

Cities Smart-Cities Sidewalk-Labs Alphabet Privacy Citizen-Engagement Protest Government

shared by Ben Snaith on 12 May 20 - No Cached
  • The message of Mr. Balsillie and other prominent critics is blunt: They argue that foreign tech investment in Canada ultimately sucks knowledge out of the country, creating a net drain on the economy. Mr. Balsillie described Sidewalk’s Toronto plan as a move by Google to use data from people’s lives in the physical world in the same way it now exploits their online lives — an assertion that Sidewalk vigorously denies
Ben Snaith

Citizens willing to share data for better services, report suggests - Smart Cities World - 0 views

www.smartcitiesworld.net/...-services-report-suggests-5058

Privacy Data Government

shared by Ben Snaith on 12 May 20 - No Cached
  • Despite this, the majority (84 per cent) of respondents said they are open to sharing their personally identifiable information with a government department in exchange for a more personalised customer service experience.
  • Over three-quarters (78 per cent) of citizens said they see benefits to using virtual agents – artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled customer-service assistants or chatbots – to receive services from government agencies, and 47 per cent said they would like to complete some transactions using virtual agents.
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