What About Smartness?

Abstract

While increasingly the world around us is becoming “smart” – from smart phones to smart meters – in no other field of human endeavor has the allure of the “smart” paradigm been as forcefully experienced as in the built environment. From smart city initiatives to the brave new world of the Internet of Things (IoT) that increasingly colonize our cities and buildings, visions of smartness in architecture and urbanism have been mostly associated with networked information technologies and digitally enabled devices. The term “smart” has become the catch-all phrase to indicate the advent of a charged technological shift that has been propelled by the promises of a safer, healthier, more convenient, and more efficient form of living. But behind this apparent consensus many contradictions and open questions emerge.

What is the “smart city”? And what is “smart architecture”? While the answer to these questions remains elusive, this editorial argues for a broad understanding of “smartness” in architecture and urbanism, one that includes both technology and context, data and expertise. Specifically, this editorial reflects on the widening chasm between discourse and practice, or the conventional and the technological idea of the built environment, as espoused by humanists and technologists. Ultimately, it is argued that, far from being mutually exclusive, these positions are in fact complementary and that technologists and humanists should develop the necessary common ground to engage and develop a broader and fuller view of our cities and buildings.

Keywords:

• smart systems
• architecture
• urbanism
• humanism
• technology

Eindhoven Smart

To engage with the smart transformation and discuss the issue of “smartness” in architecture and cities, the editors of this special issue organized in November 2018 the 15th Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) International Conference titled “Smartness? Between Discourse and Practice” at the Department of the Built Environment of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). More than a hundred scholars from over 30 countries flocked to TU/e’s campus, on the northern edge of the city’s center. On their way there, their movements and actions were continuously monitored and analyzed, much like the movements and actions of everyone else in this Dutch city.

Eindhoven, like many other cities, has embarked on an ambitious quest to become “smart.” And much like many other cities, Eindhoven, has professed to not only become a “smart” city, but a leader in the development and implementation of “smart” urban solutions. The city’s grand aspirations are best expressed in the multitude of digital infrastructure projects, sensor-based connected platforms, and living-labs operated by the city and its (commercial) partners, as well as the city’s leadership in the public-private consortium Brainport Eindhoven and the Brainport Smart District development currently being built in the city’s outskirts.¹

Throughout Eindhoven’s urban fabric the presence of sensors has been nothing short of ubiquitous, recording and streaming a variety of data across the city’s extensive fiber network to several platforms and systems – ranging from the concentration of Carbon Monoxide and Nitrogen Oxide, to temperature, humidity, sunlight and sound – to provide a real-time image of the city’s conditions. But beyond sensors collecting environmental data, other, potentially more problematic, sensors have also been introduced to the city’s digital infrastructure.

In 2016, a network of digital advertisement boards – or Citybeacons, as these devices have been dubbed – were installed across the city, promising free fast Wi-Fi connections to everyone and “relevant contextual content [to] drive interaction, bringing people and city closer together.”² What most Eindhoven visitors (and residents) are unaware of, however, is that beyond their sleek, approachable and seemingly innocuous design, Citybeacons host a range of sensors and technology harvesting an unfathomable amount of data. Besides providing free Wi-Fi, these beacons also contain several chips for real-time location tracking such as NFC, RFID and iBeacon chips, as well as an array of cameras that includes “two audience tracking cameras” that can “generate an image of the crowdedness of a specific area” while also “distinguish[ing] between men and women, and age” and “how someone is behaving.”³ But their individualization of crowd-tracking goes well beyond age or gender, as Citybeacons are equally capable of Wi-Fi tracking, through which every smartphone (whether it is being actively used or not) is uniquely identified and tracked around the city. Although the smartphones’ contents remain private, by surreptitiously tracking their location, the network of Citybeacons can potentially provide what the lead city manager responsible for the implementation of this project, Richard Ponjee, has described as a “a kind of anonymised directory of people in the city,” where “the manager can [potentially] follow every phone in the city center of Eindhoven,” and with it, follow every person in it.⁴

Despite the city’s manager enthusiasm, few seem to be aware of the tracking capabilities already embedded in Eindhoven’s public spaces. This condition becomes evident in the visual essay “Hidden in Plain Sight,” as it traces the architectural and urban “smart” apparatus in Eindhoven. Laying bare the construction of the city’s ethos of innovation and “smartness” to question its citizens’ engagement with – and awareness of – their (newly “smart”) environment. Sensors and other data-collecting devices thus become the most visible expression of the city’s pursuit of a “smart” future.

In Eindhoven and elsewhere, smart systems have often been conflated with an all-pervasive data regime in which everything and anything can (and will be) measured, encoded, and analyzed. Where people and their actions become nothing more than data points that are relentlessly tracked. Effectively, visions of “smart” architecture and urbanism have been mostly associated with networked information technologies and digitally-enabled devices integrated into the fabric of cities and buildings, generating continuous streams of data that dynamically feed into management systems and control rooms. The accumulation and analysis of these data streams is intended, we are told, “to make every unfolding process of the city [and the building] 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.”⁵ With these technologies, cities and buildings are to become all knowable and controllable in new, dynamic, reactive ways, quickly responding to changing conditions “on the ground”.

The basic premise seems to be quite simple: with enough data generated, cities and buildings will no longer simply react, but will instead develop and improve models for future development and more comfortable living. Through these claims, there has been a forceful (and labored) association between “smart” cities, “smart” architecture and data. Data that can – and must be – harvested on a massive scale, that once probed can provide new insights into how our living patterns are to be understood.

Thérèse Tierney’s contribution to this issue provides a uniquely comprehensive discussion of the possibilities and transformations fostered by the collection of data through the mass deployment of such smart systems across urban fabrics. Using Stack Theory, Tierney examines the implications of Toronto’s contract with Google’s Urban Technology division (Sidewalk Lab) for the development of a new district, particularly questioning the transformation of personal and environmental data into an economic resource and what comes with it.

Along with the other contributions, this special issue thus seeks to question any narrow understanding of “smart” – particularly in urban and architectural practices – by pushing beyond the popular, yet vague, notion of “smartness.” It does so by discussing how architects, urbanists, and scholars have an increasing responsibility to rethink the implications of the “smart” paradigm in the spaces we occupy. After all, as much as the notion of “smart” has been continuously associated with the digital realm and described in the most abstract of manners, the assumptions embedded in it still have the most material expression as it is instrumentalized to reshape the way cities and buildings, people and habits are organized.

What Makes Architecture and the Urban “Smart”?

Throughout history, buildings and cities have undergone major transitions and transformations. Today, the “smart” transition is in full swing and is already fundamentally remodeling the built environment as we know it. While increasingly the world around us is becoming “smart” – from smart meters to smart production, from smart surfaces to smart grids, from smartphones to smart citizens – in no other field of human endeavor has the allure of the “smart” paradigm been as forcefully experienced as in the built environment.⁶ If on an urban scale, the deployment of “smart city” initiatives has experienced exponential growth in the past decade (with the most prominent example being the increased deployment of urban living labs), on an architectural level, the brave new world of connected devices, commonly labeled as the Internet of Things (IoT), is increasingly colonizing our buildings and indelibly shaping our relation to the spaces we inhabit.⁷

Effectively, the majority of politicians, planners, architects, civil servants, security specialists, technologists, and corporation representatives seem to agree that the smart transition of cities is self-evident and inevitable. Likewise, when applied to architecture and the city, the term “smart” has become the catch-all phrase to indicate the advent of a charged technological shift that has been propelled by the promises of a safer, healthier, more convenient, and more efficient forms of living. But behind this apparent consensus many contradictions and open questions emerge.

To enter a critical reflection of “smartness” we must pose three sets of interrelated questions regarding definitions, aspirations, and actors.

First, we must try to answer the questions: What is “smartness”? What is the “smart city”? And what is “smart architecture”? This first set of questions seems difficult to answer as the term “smart” brings together a broad range of different challenges, stakeholders, timeframes, spatial scales, and technologies. And it is precisely this vagueness and lack of definition that has enabled the success story of the “smart” term – in architecture, urbanism and beyond – as it became a welcomed projection surface for a broad range of expectations. As many have noted, “smart” in architecture and urbanism has been a traditionally difficult term to define. Anthony Townsend argues “‘[s]mart’is a problematic word that has come to mean a million things” and that there is “no consensus” about what the term actually means. Townsend defines “smart cities” as “places where information technology is combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects, and even our bodies to address social, economic, and environmental problems.”⁸

Already in the 1990s Manuel Castells identified the force that network technologies and pervasive computing can play in the reshaping of societies.⁹ More recently, Antoine Picon has suggested to avoid the pitfall of opting for an overly narrow definition of “smart” city [and “smart” architecture] centered purely on the use of digital technologies – an often covert technological determinism.¹⁰ The proliferation of the use of the “smart” term within architecture and urbanism without an agreed-upon definition has commonly led to confusion.¹¹ But instead of attempting to define “smart” architecture and “smart” cities Townsend shifts attention to the more fundamental question what do we want “smartness” to be? Specific examples of what “smart” architecture and cities might occupy a broad spectrum, from autonomous driving, to on-demand sharing services, independent elderly living, democratic participation, local search and review services, safety monitoring, efficiency monitoring and control, and many more. The contributions in this special issue provide further concrete and substantial examples of what it is that could make architecture and the urban “smart” beyond the dominant narrative.

Thomas Forget, for example, finds in the New York City subway a dynamic system of connectivity created by a richly layered – yet crumbling – material landscape where the means and ends of “smart” mobility can be uniquely questioned. Supported by a cinematic investigation, “Off the Map” reflects on the patchwork of initiatives that, layer by layer, introduce the “smart” paradigm to our everyday lives. Conversely, William Renel discusses how digital technologies like microphones, pressure sensors, data logging sound level meters, and sound stickers can be used to create sound maps and, thus, explore sonic exclusion in the design and management of urban spaces.

The second set of questions centers on what is smartness for? What is it intended to achieve? Many definitions of smart city are commonly related to “smart economy, smart mobility, smart environment, smart people, smart living, and smart governance,” while smart architecture is commonly presented as attempting to achieve what Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has dubbed the new universal trinity of comfort, security, and sustainability.¹² But the vagueness of the notion of smart cities and smart architecture and the variety of specific interpretations makes it difficult to unpack what smartness aims to achieve. For Picon, for example, “smart” city and “smart” architecture appears “to be both an ideal and process.”¹³ As an ideal, the combination of humans, machines and algorithms, promises improved “learning, understanding and reasoning” regarding buildings and cities in the quest for optimization and improved functioning. But this ideal comes along with many contradictions. As a process, the “smart” city and “smart” architecture are in constant development, in which numerous diverse actors are experimenting how to entangle humans, machines and algorithms to their own ideals.

The aims of specific smart projects are multifold and sometimes ambiguous as the arena of “smart” actors cannot be meaningfully reduced to the contrast between, on the one hand big tech companies like IBM, Cisco or Siemens, which are conquering new markets, and on the other grassroot movements, hacking away available data for the benefit of local communities. Instead, as “smart” systems typically involve a broad variety of different stakeholders, the question of their aims is best addressed by understanding who the stakeholders are, those who are directly or indirectly entangled.

That is precisely what Jason Shun Wong examines in his contribution “Driverless Government: Speculations on Parametric Urban Governance,” as he explores the possibilities of using digital systems to provide the greater agency in political governance to (currently) underrepresented groups and constituents. By mixing the political, digital and physical, Wong imagines an alternative, hybridized, multimodal representative democracy in which AI representatives are leveraged to advocate on behalf of the citizenry.

Wong’s speculation leads over to the third set of questions exploring the stakeholders and their interests: who is it for? who does it actually benefit, and in what way? “Smart” architecture and “smart” cities entangle a wide range of different stakeholders, that each has specific interests, forms of involvement, possibilities and responsibilities. These can be summarized, as Picon and Thomas Shay Hill have done, in five key groups: The first group of stakeholders is the major tech companies that develop, produce, and sell much of the technical infrastructure. The second key group is urban governments that seek to benefit from data collection and analysis to improve municipal services. The third group is the cluster of startups and urban activists that take advantage of publically available data for a wide range of community applications. The fourth key group is the users of cities and buildings that engage with smart services. The fifth and last influential group of stakeholders is academics that develop theories, methods, technologies to either reflect on or develop the smart projects.¹⁴ It is in specific localized projects that (some of) these diverse stakeholders become entangled. They might take an active role in shaping these projects or might be implicated in more passive ways. Thus, the question how “smart” approaches influence one’s life and who might benefit or lose in a specific project cannot be answered generally but requires unpacking in its specific context.

Willemien Laenens, Ilse Mariën, and Nils Walravens have conducted such unpacking in their contribution by examining the development of a “Participatory Action Research for the Development of E-inclusive Smart Cities” in the smart city masterplan for the Brussels-Capital Region. Through the Brussels example, they pose broader questions with regards to accessibility, power structures, inclusions, and exclusions in order to investigate the new forms of agency emerging in the light of these “smart” systems.

Even as new forms of agency are established through “smart systems,” the very use of the term “smart” in architecture and urbanism remains problematic. Specifically, as the term has generally been equated with the deployment of technological systems – and with them, an entire new conception of architecture and urbanism as enabled by technology and the collection of data – an oppositional duality has been established. In short, by labeling technology’s claims on architecture and the city as “smart,” implicitly what preceded is conversely “dumb.”

While seemingly minor detail, the significance of such implicit opposition should not be underestimated. In fact, it served to further reinforce the veritable paradigm shift in which the collection and analysis of massive amounts of data (in any and all fields of human knowledge) is displacing the authority of accumulated expertise in those fields. The claims for the supremacy of data over expertise was perhaps best articulated in 2008 by then editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, who maintained that we are now living in “a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear,” being that this new paradigm “forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later.”¹⁵ In short, Anderson claimed that the accumulation of big (enough) data, ubiquitous computing, and algorithms, could “potentially generate more insightful, useful, accurate, or true results than specialists or domain experts who traditionally craft carefully targeted hypotheses and research strategies.”¹⁶

With such a dogmatic belief in the power of data, the term “smart” has been increasingly instrumentalized to shape the general perception that the way architecture and urbanism had been working for millennia was outdated and ineffective, and that only through the collection and analysis of copious amounts of data could a new approach to buildings and cities be established. Therefore, the use of data – or to be more precise, the amount of data – became the main differentiator between the two approaches to architecture and urbanism, that is, between “smart” and what preceded it.¹⁷

Between practice and discourse

Between the discourse and practice of the smart city, as well as the widening chasm between the conventional and the technological idea of architecture and urbanism, we are left questioning how and where do these positions meet. Driven by claims of efficiency, neutrality and the apolitical character of data, little by little architecture and the city has been subjugated by technology, with the claims of statisticians, data scientists, and technologists displacing previous claims by architects and urbanists. Ultimately, this dissonance between disciplinary discourse and the deployment of smart systems gives rise to the perception that “[t]he tech world’s gradual colonization of architecture” and the city is occurring “without the collaboration of its host,” and “[a]s technology triumphs, architecture is simply left behind.”¹⁸

Instead, most discourse – and practice – on “smart” cities and architecture is not driven from within but from without. Specifically, it has been mostly driven by massive ICT corporations and vendors like Cisco, Siemens, Microsoft, IBM, Hitachi, and others, as they peddle technology solutions to address the “real and urgent problems such as those related to health and aging, traffic congestion and environmental quality.”¹⁹ The future direction of the spaces we inhabit – be it within cities or buildings – is largely being shaped by prevalent discourses and practices as well as specific agendas, often without much critical discussion on the potentially pernicious effects that these systems may have. Therefore, it is more important than ever to critically engage with “smart” city and architecture interpretations and intervene with alternative proposals to bring about transformations that are not just inclusive but also necessary and desirable.

In their contribution, Carlos Smaniotto Costa and George Artopoulos propose, for example, how digital tools have the potential to become crucial instruments in inclusive transformation. Specifically, how they can be instrumentalized towards participatory processes simply by acting as a catalyst for engaging the citizenry with their environment. Similarly, in “Hem Realities: Augmenting Urbanism Through Tacit and Immersive Feedback,” Andrew Stiff and Gretchen Wilkins discuss their project in Ho Chi Minh City in which Augmented Reality (AR) was instrumentalized to provide visualizations of the varied history of the city’s hem alleys. More than that, they propose that the use of these tools can provide a new form of remembering, in which Ho Chi Minh City’s historical, informal and formal social patterns, particularly their expression on the city’s alleys, can be activated towards a more inclusive “smart” future.

Arguably, as these and other contributions to this issue demonstrates, a crucial first step in such a critical engagement would be for architects, urbanists and scholars to take up positions and renew their claims on the city and architecture as to dispose of the growing notion that in the current data-driven regime “[c]orrelation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.”²⁰ Only then will it be possible to productively oppose the blind belief that in this brave new data-driven understanding of the world, expertise and context no longer matter, and with it avoid an eventual hollowing out of any architectural and urban discourse.

A better alternative to overcome this opposition, perhaps would be to reconcile its factions, that is, for technologists and designers to combine their expertise to devise a fuller understanding of the world. By combining the broader patterns surfaced by technology-driven analytical models with the accumulated knowledge developed by designers and scholars, a new understanding of cities and architecture could be developed. One in which performance and esthetics, efficiency and meaning, could be equally valued, but mostly, an understanding that doesn’t forget that those data-points are not just abstract data models, but real spaces occupied by real people. Now, more than ever, it is time for designers and data-engineers, technologists and scholars to come together and work towards the common good.

Designing for context

Koolhaas has suggested that the “smart” transition in architecture has largely been neglected by architects, in fact, that “smart” systems are “catalyzing a nearly invisible shift […] that is nevertheless far more profound and ubiquitous than the stylistic trends that have been the primary effects of digital technology” in architecture, thus, far.²¹ Conversely, from an urban perspective Daniel Hoornweg has argued that “[a]n important aspect of smart – or technologically advanced – cities is that as much as we shape technology, technology shapes us as well” since “[w]ired cities, cool municipal apps, open data platforms, and social media are changing us and the way we live in cities, and as this develops further there will be unintended consequences: good and bad.”²²

Effectively, the promise of “smart” systems is not without bias, since these do not exist in isolation from the conscious and unconscious ideas, techniques, technical components, people, and contexts that have conceived and produced them. Similarly, data is never “just” data. Its collection is never the unbiased, factual and neutral description of an occurrence or phenomenon that “smart” city and architecture proponents purport it to be. Furthermore, description is not explanation, as data sets rarely explain what motivates observed behaviors. Just because a phenomenon can be described through data, it does not mean that it can also be explained, much less understood, entirely through that data. Therefore, some have argued that when buildings and cities become conflated with phenomena that can be measured, often what is missed is context.²³ And it is here that design professionals and scholars can act as linchpin, by translating abstract models and providing contexts.

Before that could happen, however, it is necessary to fundamentally reassess existing practices, since the lack of context in the development of “smart” solutions in the built environment is not accidental, but rather purposeful. Especially, since many “smart” architectural and urban systems are generic by design so as to be presented as universal solutions.

In his contribution, Dimitris Papanikolaou questions generalizing assumptions regarding, in this case, the efficiency of “smart” mobility-on-demand (MoD) systems. Effectively, Papanikolaou argues that to adequately respond to the question of sharing versus owning, context matters most than most care to acknowledge. As he demonstrates, factors such as urban form, land use distribution and user behavior must be considered as much as technological and operational factors.

However, most of these and other “smart” systems do not consider any sort of historical or spatial specificity, or even any sort of differences between geographies and cultures, so as to be scalable and movable. A homogenizing force in which a “one-size fits all” approach is favored, with buildings and cities being treated as mere generic markets or marketable entities. More so as most discussions are centered around not how a given technology or application can benefit a given building, city or people, but rather, what can be learned, added and reproduced ad eternum across the world.

In their contribution to this issue Evelien de Hoop and her colleagues examine the narratives that support the implementation of smart visions in six development projects across Europe. “Smart as a Global Vision? Exploring Smart in Local District Development Projects” discusses how the global imaginaries of the “smart” city are translated to meet local specificities, needs and agendas, highlighting how knowledge is often instrumentalized to include and exclude certain “smart” visions from these development projects, thus translating general visions into specific conditions.

Although at a different scale, a similar translation is discussed by Maria Ludovica Tramontin and Kristine Mun in their contribution. In “Empathic Agencies in Urban Design: Inter-Activity of Mirrors & Mirror Neurons” they present – and problematize – a project which reactivated the humble shop window of a historical Hat Shop in Sardegna as an active component of urban experience through the use of AR. By overlaying a digital layer over strategically positioned objects in the window, the shop window became the stage for a poetic and imagined experience of the self, far from the usual claims of efficiency and optimization and articulating the possible breadth of “smart” architectural and urban systems in which they reveal their greatest potential.

Despite a growing trend in challenging prevailing assumption and identifying the various issues associated with “smart” systems in cities and buildings, these systems are here to stay. To go beyond using data to improve existing processes or make them more efficient, the question becomes how can architecture and urban professionals and scholars become engaged once again and respond to these challenges? While merely tentative and inevitably incomplete, this special issue – as well as its preceding conference and the edited volume “Architecture and the Smart City” – provides some insights to some possible directions, primarily, by arguing for narrowing the gap between architects, urbanists and technologists.²⁴ Not by reinforcing boundaries, but by blurring them. Not by narrowing definitions, but by expanding them. Not by providing definitive answers, but instead by posing new questions.

This issue thus explores architectural and urban “smart” discourses and projects by engaging with a “broad understanding” of smart technologies, that is, one that conceives them not merely as “efficiency-oriented practices, but [as practices that] include their contexts as these are embodied in design and social insertion.”²⁵ Such a broad understanding includes not just technology, but also its contexts: questions of responsibility, accountability, ethics, participation, knowledge (necessary to both produce and participate), and many more. This way, “smart” concepts can be explored and interpreted in specific contexts. An understanding that can only be developed through the combined expertise of designers and technologist, so as to develop a fuller view of these systems and their effects.

From Systems to the Urban to Objects

The various contributions to this issue provide a glimpse of the breadth of ideas and solutions that are already being deployed in our cities and in our homes. Not only how architecture and urbanism is engaging with “smart” systems, but also how those systems can achieve much more than the narrow vision that is promoted by the smart-industrial complex today.

In isolation nothing can be understood, and this includes architecture, urbanism, and technology. To develop a broad understanding of smart technologies, the articles in this issue explore a variety of projects and practices in their various contexts. To develop a shared understanding of how “smart” can be conceived and enacted through specific practices, contributions in this issue have been organized in a fluid juxtaposition of three clusters with varying focus, namely systems, the urban and objects. The articles shift from the generic to the specific. As an abstract conceptual model, the idea of the cluster explicitly rejects a mode of thinking that rests on separately layered realities of, in this case, systems, the urban, and objects. Instead, it welcomes and encompasses the idea of heterogeneous characters and relational associations co-shaping one other. Effectively, systems, the urban and objects are drawn together, interrelated and continuously shaping one other in design practice. While the articles in this issue are all related to systems, the urban and objects, they not only address these notions differently but also with different forms of emphasis. Ultimately, their combination and organization in this issue reflect the existing multitude and ambiguity of the architectural and urban “smart.”

If “Systems” are considered here to provide overarching views of abstract frameworks and tools that enable particular conceptual expansions within smart cities, buildings and governance, “the Urban” articulates the impact of applied technologies on cities, buildings and people by questioning the potential for self-organization, resilience, and empowerment. These are complemented with the notion of “Object,” as it encompasses the varied attempts to gauge the impact of technology at micro and everyday scale. Combined, these clusters provide an organization that mimics the fluid nature of these very dimensions in the discourse and practices of smart architectural and urban systems. Thus, rather than a unified idea of the “smart” city or the “smart” building there are multiple versions of “smart” cities and “smart” buildings. To better understand these, this issue explores diverse interpretations and practices by giving meaning to specific practices – what architects, planners, politicians, ICT specialists and others actually do (or have done) with the term “smart” in the daily context of their design studios, offices, spreadsheets, and control centers.

While these articles do not contend to provide any easy answers, they do intend to open up a variety of questions. More than anything, they hold up current “smart” practices and discourses to scrutiny, bringing to light the profound and ubiquitous, yet nearly invisible, shift caused to architecture and urbanism by “smart” systems today.²⁶ In so doing, they provide the possibility for alternative engagements since, “practice, unproblematized, risks reproducing established identities and political forms, confirming the present rather than accentuating its limits.”²⁷ Now is the time to go beyond those limits and instead critically problematize how “smart” practices can contribute to solving some of our pressing socio-spatial challenges beyond them: from sustainability to the transformation of work, from climate change to the increasing economic and social inequality, from new forms of governance to the impact of urbanization.

Notes

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sergio M. Figueiredo

Sergio M. Figueiredo is an architect, author, curator and historian. He is an Assistant Professor of Architecture History and Theory at TU Eindhoven, where he founded the Curatorial Research Collective (CRC), a fledgling curatorial and research group. He is also the chair and head curator for CASA Vertigo, the exhibition department of TU Eindhoven’s Department of the Built Environment. Having contributed to several publications and conferences, his work focuses on architectural institutions and exhibitions, particularly how they shape (and are shaped by) architectural culture. His first book, The NAi Effect: Creating Architecture Culture, was published in 2016 by nai010 publishers.

Sukanya Krishnamurthy

Sukanya Krishnamurthy is currently a Chancellors Fellow/Senior Lecturer at the School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh. Her focus lies at the interface between urban and social geography, where her scholarship analyses how cities can use their resources and values for better sustainable development. Key interests include place-making and participatory approaches, urban cultures and representation, society and smart urbanism. Over the last years, she has brought these interests together within child-friendly planning, participatory processes within Living Labs, urban development and management of informal areas, and enabling agendas of context-driven planning. She serves as board member on various civic society associations (Apolitical, Play Scotland) and is also a member of Dutch and EU research evaluation commissions.

Torsten Schroeder

Torsten Schroeder is an architect, researcher and design advisor. Currently he is Assistant Professor of Sustainability in Architectural Design at TU Eindhoven. His key research interests are sustainability, resilience and circular economy within architecture and cities and he focuses on translating these three concepts into comprehensive design projects. Torsten co-founded and co-directs the Archi Lab, a university-based architectural and urban think tank dedicated to exploring, creating and developing future concepts and scenarios. He obtained his PhD in the Cities Program at the London School of Economics and Political Science, winning the prestigious RIBA PhD research award in 2015.

Notes

1 For more information see on these partnerships and projects, see https://brainporteindhoven.com and https://brainportsmartdistrict.nl/en/

2 CityBeacon Europe, “Smart City Platform for the 21st Century,” http://www.citybeacon.info/index.html#services (accessed March 4, 2019).

3 Merlijn van Dijk, “Smart Society Eindhoven: Endless Options for the Citybeacons,” Innovation Origins (blog), https://innovationorigins.com/smart-society-eindhoven-endless-options-citybeacons/ (accessed December 29, 2017).

4 van Dijk, “Smart Society Eindhoven.” Currently, Dutch privacy law does not yet allow for the collection and storage of Wi-Fi tracking data, but the same city manager considers that to be a mere legislative hurdle, which the citybeacons project is already assisting to overcome, therefore expecting Wi-Fi tracking to be permanently switched on and its information to be stored in the near future.

5 Adam Greenfield, Against the Smart City, 1.3 edition (Do Projects, 2013), 14.

6 According to the European Network of Living Labs, over 440 urban living labs have been established in the past few years, https://enoll.org/about-us/.

7 Vito Albino, Umberto Berardi, and Rosa Maria Dangelico, “Smart Cities: Definitions, Dimensions, Performance, and Initiatives,” Journal of Urban Technology 22, no. 1 (2015): 4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2014.942092.

8 Anthony M. Townsend, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2014), 15.

9 M. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

10 A. Picon, Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (Chichester: Wiley, 2015), 24.

11 Rudolf Giffinger and Haindlmaier Gudrun, “Smart Cities Ranking: An Effective Instrument for the Positioning of the Cities?,” ACE: Architecture, City and Environment 4, no. 12 (February 25, 2010): 14–15. https://doi.org/10.5821/ace.v4i12.2483; Rem Koolhaas, “The Smart Landscape: Intelligent Architecture,” artforum.com, https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201504&id=50735 (accessed April 2015).

12 Koolhaas, “The Smart Landscape.”

13 Picon, Smart Cities.

14 Antoine Picon and Thomas Shay Hill, “Is the City Becoming Computable?” in Architecture and the Smart City, ed. Sergio M. Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurthy and Torsten Schroeder (London: Routledge, 2019), 29–42.

15 Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008, https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/.

16 Mark Graham, “Big Data and the End of Theory?” The Guardian, March 9, 2012, sec. News. https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/mar/09/big-data-theory. According to Mark Graham this revolutionary notion “has now entered not just the popular imagination, but also the research practices of corporations, states, journalists and academics.”

17 Well before the advent of “smart” paradigm, both architecture and urbanism relied on contextual, empirical, and general information to understand, engage, and design cities and buildings, just not at the scale recently enabled by ubiquitous computing.

18 Koolhaas, “The Smart Landscape.”

19 Maarten A. Hajer and Ton Dassen, eds., Smart about Cities: Visualising the Challenge for 21st Century Urbanism: “We Need a Globally Networked Urbanism” (Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2014), 14–15.

20 Anderson, “The End of Theory.”

21 Koolhaas, “The Smart Landscape.”

22 Dan Hoornweg, “Smart Cities for Dummies,” Text, Sustainable Cities, http://blogs.worldbank.org/sustainablecities/smart-cities-for-dummies (accessed November 30, 2011).

23 Jon Reades, “Big Data’s Little Secrets (Part 1),” Placetique: People, Data, Palce (blog), http://www.reades.com/2013/05/31/big-data-little-secret/ (accessed May 31, 2013).

24 Sergio M Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurhty, and Torsten Schroeder, eds., Architecture and the Smart City (London: Routledge, 2019).

25 Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), xiii.

26 Koolhaas, “The Smart Landscape.”

27 Nicholas Thoburn, Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 158.