 My talk is another city is possible, and I'm delighted to follow Richard Excuse me. I feel that Richard has put the first torpedo beneath the waterline of this very silly idea the smart city And I'd like if I may to attempt to put a second beneath the waterline See if we can't sink this thing before it aborns itself So I work in the technology sector. I've worked in the technology sector for about a dozen years now And I started a practice in New York City about a year and a half ago called urban scale and we work at the intersection of Technology and urbanism and in this sector what you will very often hear is this notion the smart city the smart city the smart city And I'm not particularly bright So I found myself beating my head against this notion and I realized that I really didn't understand what this thing The smart city was what it was supposed to be And I thought you know who better to ask than the institutions the enterprises the organizations that are delivering this thing called the smart city So I went on the websites of some of the larger enterprises that we associate with this idea And I subjected their marketing materials to a close reading and In this close reading I was attempting to answer a couple of questions. I was I was trying to figure out what the smart city is When it was supposed to happen Where is going to be installed for whom its benefits were supposed to be deployed and Why why a smart city and why now? So I'd like to walk you very quickly through some of the things that I encountered on these websites is very interesting This is IBM's description of the smart city It's technology that synchronizes and analyzes efforts among sectors and agencies as they happen giving decision makers Consolidated information that helps them anticipate problems and manage growth and development in a sustainable way that minimizes disruptions and helps increase prosperity for everyone Cisco's description and mind you I find this to be the least Objectionable of all of these descriptions Those of you in the audience are from Cisco. You should pat yourselves on the back Cisco describes the smart city is the seamless integration of public and private services So both public and private delivered across a common network infrastructure to individuals Governments and businesses so in about the right order of priority as far as I'm concerned Siemens describes the smart city thusly several decades from now Cities will have countless autonomous intelligently functioning IT systems that will have perfect knowledge of users habits and energy consumption And provide optimum service the goal of such a city is To optimally regulate and control resources by means of autonomous IT systems I think we're beginning to get an idea what this place the smart city is all about Then there's this organization living planet They described the smart city as a complete picture of building state usage and operations continually maintained allowing constant optimization of energy resources environment and Occupant support and convenience systems So, you know when you thought that you're going to the corner shop or a dive bar or a museum what you're really enjoying was Occupant support and convenience system. I just want you to think about that for a second I'm living planet also is probably the most honest in their description of what the smart city is They describe it as the missing link between the real estate and the technology sectors and I think that's probably the winner So I think we can get an idea now of what the smart city is I mean it's something that I think we can associate in in form and substance with some of the ideas that this man had Le Corbusier the famous Modernist high modernist architect and urbanist of the 20th century and particularly his notion of the virides a City which was deployed for a visual order an optical order a God's eye perspective here We see this taken up in the ground plan of Brasilia although he didn't work on it himself Obviously his ideas were extraordinarily influential here This is a city which is organized for one purpose and one purpose alone The purpose is watchfulness from above and I want you to hold on to that idea as we move through the rest of these ideas Well in all of the material I was exposed to there was definitely a notion of when When the smart city would be something that we would get to play with and in in the proximate future The the technologists Paul Dirich and Genevieve Bell have this notion of technology always taking place in a future That's just around the corner the proximate future 19 minutes into the future a time where we can avoid Accountability for any of the conjectures or claims that we're making because they're not quite here yet They're always in the sort of time of suspension. It's time of futurity What where is the smart city going to happen? It's gonna happen primarily on Greenfield sites as Richard points out in what delis called any space whatever space Unconditioned abstract space at degree zero with infinite potentials for interconnection But no history no texture no memory For whom is the smart city being devised and here? I'm gonna respectfully depart from Richard's take on things I think it's clear that in a place like the the operation center the intelligent operation center that IBM built for the city of Rio What we see is that optical order consecrated to the purposes of administration The smart city is deployed all of these technological resources are deployed for a managerial elite not aimed at the people themselves And I can tell you having come from Several weeks of involvement with Occupy Sandy in New York City that the people themselves in a horizontal leaderless Organization are able to make better use of informational resources than either FEMA the federal government or the accredited charity The charitable organization the Red Cross So I wonder in the smart city why we're deploying all of this information strictly for the convenience of a few when we Could deploy it equally easily for everybody The why of the smart city well as we've seen from these marketing statements the idea is to optimize resource utilization and Minimize disruptions and I think we've already seen in Rio That when we speak of minimizing disruptions what we mean is limiting the practice of democracy in the streets So ladies and gentlemen, this is the smart city For all of these issues, I think the real problem with the smart city is that it has nothing to do with cities This notion of the smart city is an abstract terrain for the operations of market enterprises It is a market It is a place where organizations have chosen to deploy the off-the-shelf and turnkey technologies They developed for other purposes in an urban context that really doesn't engage with them in the scale or in the manner That they were devised to accommodate and We can see this in the marketing materials again when we speak of the goal of such a city It's very curious to me to speak of a city is having goals. What is the goal of Cleveland? What is the goal of Ankara? I don't believe that cities have goals. I think again I want to reflect on that terrifying piece of English language Occupant support and convenience systems. This is the mindset that we're bringing to these places. I Would like to argue to you that another city is in fact possible a city that in my heart I associate with another thinker the 20th century my hero Jane Jacobs and her thoughts about the development of spontaneous order from below and a development of organic order in place that accommodates and builds itself in fact upon all that messy history built up over time By an infinity of small acts and so instead of the smart city as it's being offered to us I would argue to you that we can use the same underlying techno social potentials to build entirely different kinds of experiences my friend and colleague Anthony Townsend is in fact identified five technological preconditions for this he says that if we have broadband connectivity and Cheap or ultra low-cost smart personal devices if we have a commitment to open municipal data and Cheap and accessible public interfaces and if we have a robust cloud computing infrastructure We can in fact build Technological experiences in 21st century cities that respond far more to the sorts of claims that I would make about what makes Urban life worthwhile and what makes the constitution of a metropolitan and a cosmopolitan self. I would like to remind us that Cities are like soilent green. They're made of people and in this case these people in terrier square or these people in Madrid These people in Montreal or these people in my home city of New York Indeed, this is my favorite picture From Occupy Dam square in Dublin. These are people making the 21st century in real time with the technologies that Anthony identifies as a precondition So I would argue to you that the terrain that we need to operate on is not the abstract unconditioned space at degree zero It's not just any city at all It is in fact this city wherever this city happens to be with all of its texture all of its history all of its quiddity Not at all in some futurity, but now and certainly not just for administrators But for all of us The smart city is we've already come to recognize it excuse me The smart city is we've already come to recognize it is a discourse and a rhetorical production But it is certainly not an inevitability It is merely one selection from a sheaf of techno social possibilities And I would argue to you that at this point in history It's both incumbent upon us and it remains clearly a great potential that we can do better I thank you very much for your time and your attention