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“Cities Are Highly Complex Organisms”

June 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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It’s easier for builders to draw Utopia on a blank slate, what with all the imperfections that developed cities already possess, but urban centers that have grown organically from the bottom up offer lots of hidden stability. Perhaps because of new smart technologies and China’s top-heavy urbanization, some are still trying to create Shangri-La from scratch. Case in point: Songdo and Masdar, smart insta-cities that are supposed to show the rest of us the way it should be done. Things haven’t gone according to plan, however, because cities are at least as much biological as technological.

In a Demos Helsinki post, social psychologist Mikko Annala presents reasons why smart cities are antithetical to successful urban living. An excerpt:

2) SMART IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAN

Unlike it is often made to seem in the hyped-up press, smart cities like Songdo and Masdar are seldom celebrated by the people who live in them – at least not in the way they were expected to. For example Songdo was envisioned as a futuristic international business hub, drawing residents from all over the world. Instead, it is now almost exclusively made up of Koreans:99 percent of homes are sold to locals. Similarly, it cost 22 billion dollars to build Masdar,but it is now barely occupied and more than halfway from reaching its ambitious emission reduction goals.

”When we plan, we tend to think that we understand people and what they want and need. We don’t”, Annala explains. ”Cities are highly complex organisms.” According to Annala, turning cities smart will require systematic engagement of those who are expected to live in these environments. ”Without end-user testing and systematic learning, it is practically impossible to plan a smart city that is loved by its inhabitants.”•

Masdar City abandoned its plan for a fleet of driverless, electric pod cars to replace gas-guzzling taxis.

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“The Idea Of Everyone Being Connected To Everything All The Time Might Sound Like A Dystopian Nightmare”

May 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the early attempt to quantify community in the The Woodlands to the sensor-centric, next-level Songdo, smart cities are an accepted (if vaguely defined) aspect of urban experimentation. But only one state, Singapore, is attempting to be a “smart nation.” It never truly was Disneyland with a death penalty, as William Gibson dubbed it in 1993, but it is a city-state saturated with smartphones, seemingly comfortable with surveillance. This ease with connectivity and quantification is one reason why the island nation feels it can transform itself into a techno-topia free of traffic jams and other such urban annoyances. From Anthony Cuthbertson at International Business Times:

The idea of everyone being connected to everything all the time might sound like a dystopian nightmare for some, but {Infocomm Development Authority head Steve] Leonard and [Prime Minister Lee] Hsien Loong believe it is key to creating a healthy and happy society.

Whether or not the citizens of Singapore have much of a say in the matter is another question. The country’s autocratic style of government has faced criticism in the past for stifling freedom, however it has also been recognised for overseeing Singapore’s remarkable economic growth over the last 50 years. If the ambitious smart nation vision is ever to be realised, it will play a key role. 

“Our advantage is that we are compact, we have a single level of government, we can decide efficiently, we can scale up successful experiments and pilots without any delay,” Lee said in a speech in April.

“Also we are able to take a long term view and see through big transformations to the end until they bear fruit for our citizens.”

There are legitimate issues that Singaporeans might have when faced with the prospect of living in Lee’s new nation, most notably those of privacy and security. For Leonard, this is the biggest challenge currently faced. 

When asked what the biggest hurdle is in implementing new technologies, it isn’t laws or regulation, it’s mindset.•

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Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

October 4, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, U.S. nurses announced they are unpreparen to handle Ebola patients and...

This week, U.S. nurses announced they are unprepared to handle Ebola patients and…

...him.

…him.

 

  • Homo sapiens will likely be just one kind of human in the future.
  • Jeff Bezos hasn’t yet begun reinventing the Washington Post.
  • The phone call is being reimagined for today’s endless media stream.
  • Defense has allowed star-less baseball teams to thrive.

“The City Was Built For A Future That Hasn’t Yet Arrived”

September 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve previously posted about Songdo, the high-tech insta-city being raised in South Korea, a top-down attempt to bring about tomorrow today. As the aerotropolis reaches the halfway point of its build, Ross Arbes and Charles Bethea of the Atlantic surveyed what might, perhaps, be the future, imperfections and all. An excerpt:

“Like most travelers, we spent our first night there in a hotel. Viewed from the 12th floor of the brand new, environmentally conscious Sheraton Incheon Hotel (the first LEED-certified hotel in South Korea), Songdo resembled an architect’s model. Unlike the crowded and colorful streets of Seoul, the scene below was polished, spacious, sparse—not quite artificial, but not quite broken in yet either. It was more like the manifestation of a designer’s master plan than an evolved metropolis, with layers of lived-in depth. In the middle of the city—which, at 13,195 acres, is almost half the size of Boston proper—sat the 101-acre Central Park, where a few joggers enjoyed the morning sun. North of the park, a number of undulating, blue-glass skyscrapers towered over us. Beyond stood rows of plain concrete buildings and, farther still, large plots of dirt. Construction cranes swung in all directions.

Venturing into the busiest section of town for dinner, we struck up a conversation with an Australian pilot-trainer who spends two weeks a month in Songdo. ‘Is this the city of the future?’ we asked. ‘I wouldn’t quite call it that,’ he said. ‘Of course, this is a great place to be. And it’s unbelievable that it was all just a pile of sand 10 years ago.’

The city was built for a future that hasn’t yet arrived. Songdo’s wide sidewalks and roads—evoking a movie set—are still waiting for pedestrians and cars to fill them. (A number of music videos and television shows, most notably Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style,’ have indeed been filmed in Songdo, taking advantage of its relative vacancy.) The quiet was almost eerie.

But this quiet lends itself to some nice surprises: You can hear birds, for instance. (Try that in Seoul.) An impressive 40 percent of the city will be park space—one of the highest percentages in the world, in keeping with Songdo’s design as a green city. (New York City, by comparison, leads the United States with almost 20 percent green space.) There are bicycles everywhere: A significant portion of the residents are bike commuters, and they park their rides in long neat rows in front of their apartment buildings at night. There are lovely pedestrian thoroughfares flanking clothing boutiques and restaurants with outdoor seating. There are even small plots of land for urban farming, many of which were given to Songdo’s former fishermen as reparation for the destruction of their fisheries. (Some now subsist as farmers.) Squinting at the green space, you could almost mistake the city for Portland, Oregon. Almost.“

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“Urbanites Become Consumers Of Choices Laid Out For Them By Prior Calculations”

December 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Cities, wonderful though they are, can be scary and confusing, but they’re better imperfect than being completely smart and quantified, argues Richard Sennett in the Guardian. He would rather live in Rio’s welter than in Songdo’s planned perfection. An excerpt:

“The debate about good engineering has changed now because digital technology has shifted the technological focus to information processing; this can occur in handheld computers linked to ‘clouds,’ or in command-and-control centres. The danger now is that this information-rich city may do nothing to help people think for themselves or communicate well with one another.

Imagine that you are a master planner facing a blank computer screen and that you can design a city from scratch, free to incorporate every bit of high technology into your design. You might come up with Masdar, in the United Arab Emirates, or Songdo, in South Korea. These are two versions of the stupefying smart city: Masdar the more famous, or infamous; Songdo the more fascinating in a perverse way.

Masdar is a half-built city rising out of the desert, whose planning – overseen by the master architect Norman Foster – comprehensively lays out the activities of the city, the technology monitoring and regulating the function from a central command centre. The city is conceived in ‘Fordist‘ terms – that is, each activity has an appropriate place and time. Urbanites become consumers of choices laid out for them by prior calculations of where to shop, or to get a doctor, most efficiently. There’s no stimulation through trial and error; people learn their city passively. ‘User-friendly’ in Masdar means choosing menu options rather than creating the menu.”

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“Our Interactions With The People And Objects Around Us Will Be Turned Into Data That Computers In A Control Hub Will Analyze”

August 6, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I recently posted something about the South Korean insta-city, Songdo, billed as the world’s first “smart city,” which will be embedded with technology that will constantly collect and respond to streams of data. In “The Machine and the Ghost” in the New Republic. Christine Rosen begins her excellent consideration of the rise of the machines with a description of Songdo:

“JUST WEST OF SEOUL, on a man-made island in the Yellow Sea, a city is rising. Slated for completion by 2015, Songdo has been meticulously planned by engineers and architects and lavishly financed by money from the American real estate company Gale International and the investment bank Morgan Stanley. According to the head of Cisco Systems, which has partnered with Gale International to supply the telecommunications infrastructure, Songdo will ‘run on information.’ It will be the world’s first ‘smart city.’

The city of Songdo claims intelligence not from its inhabitants, but from the millions of wireless sensors and microcomputers embedded in surfaces and objects throughout the metropolis. ‘Smart’ appliances installed in every home send a constant stream of data to the city’s ‘smart grid’ that monitors energy use. Radio frequency ID tags on every car send signals to sensors in the road that measure traffic flow; cameras on every street scrutinize people’s movements so the city’s street lights can be adjusted to suit pedestrian traffic flow. Information flows to the city’s ‘control hub’ that assesses everything from the weather (to prepare for peak energy use) to the precise number of people congregating on a particular corner.

Songdo will also feature ‘TelePresence,’ the Cisco-designed system that will place video screens in every home, office, and on city streets so residents can make video calls to anyone at any time. ‘If you want to talk to your neighbors or book a table at a restaurant you can do it via TelePresence,’ Cisco chief globalization officer Wim Elfrink told Fast Company magazine. Gale International plans to replicate Songdo across the world; another consortium of technology companies is already at work on a similar metropolis, PlanIT Valley, in Portugal.

The unstated but evident goal of these new urban planners is to run the complicated infrastructure of a city with as little human intervention as possible. In the twenty-first century, in cities such as Songdo, machine politics will have a literal meaning—our interactions with the people and objects around us will be turned into data that computers in a control hub, not flesh-and-blood politicians, will analyze.

But buried in Songdo’s millions of sensors is more than the promise of monitoring energy use or traffic flow. The city’s ‘Ambient Intelligence,’ as it is called, is the latest iteration of a ubiquitous computing revolution many years in the making, one that hopes to include the human body among its regulated machines.”

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“It Has Been Hailed Since Conception As The Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow”

July 24, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Northeast Asia Trade Tower, New Songdo. (Image by Wikipedia.)

The result of Greg Lindsay’s collaboration with John D. Kasarda, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, grew from a 2010 article the journalist wrote for Fast Company about New Songdo City, South Korea’s ambitious airport-centric, insta-city. The opening:

“Stan Gale is exultant. The chairman of Gale International yanks off his tie, hitches up his pants, and mops the sweat and floppy hair from his brow. He’s beaming like a proud new papa, sprung from the waiting room and handing out cigars to whoever happens by. Beckoning me to follow, he saunters across eight lanes of traffic toward his baby, delivered prematurely days before.

Ten years ago, Gale was a builder and flipper of office parks who would eventually become known for knocking down the Boston landmark Filene’s Basement and replacing it with a hole in the ground. But Gale’s fate began to change in 2001 with a phone call from South Korea. The Korean government had found his firm on the Internet and made an offer everyone else had refused. The brief: Gale would borrow $35 billion from Korea’s banks and its biggest steel company, and use the money to build from scratch a city the size of downtown Boston, only taller and denser, on a muddy man-made island in the Yellow Sea. When Gale arrived to see the site, it was miles of open water. He signed anyway.

New Songdo City won’t be finished until 2015 at least, but in August, Gale cut the ribbon on the 100-acre ‘Central Park’ modeled, like so much of the city, on Manhattan’s. Climbing on all sides will be a mix of low-rises and sleek spires — condos, offices, even South Korea’s tallest building, the 1,001-foot Northeast Asia Trade Tower. Strolling along the park’s canal, we hear cicadas buzzing, saws whining, and pile drivers pounding down to bedrock. I ask whether he’s stocked the canal with fish yet. ‘It’s four days old!’ he splutters, forgetting he isn’t supposed to rest until the seventh.

As far as playing God (or SimCity) goes, New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasília 50 years ago. Brasília, of course, was an instant disaster: grandiose, monstrously overscale, and immediately encircled by slums. New Songdo has to be better because there’s a lot more riding on it than whether Gale can repay his loans. It has been hailed since conception as the experimental prototype community of tomorrow. A green city, it was LEED-certified from the get-go, designed to emit a third of the greenhouse gases of a typical metropolis its size (about 300,000 people during the day). It’s an ‘international business district’ and an ‘aerotropolis’ — a Western-oriented city more focused on the airport and China beyond than on Seoul. And it’s supposed to be a ‘smart city,’ studded with chips talking to one another, designated as such years before IBM found its ‘Smarter Planet’ religion.”

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A Cisco video about Songdo:

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