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A few weeks ago, Google’s subsidiary Sidewalk Labs showed plans of her model city in Toronto: A networked district with modular building units is to be built on eastern waterfront port area, which can be redesigned in retail or residential areas. Let. Taxibots people from A to B 14km, supply robots autonomously supply packages, garbage robots in underground tunnels to take over waste management and recycling. Cameras equipped with artificial intelligence are designed to monitor flow of traffic and to control pedestrian traffic by using dynamic signals, flexible street furniture and instructions from smartphone apps. It is said that city should not be built from “drawing board” but from “Internet”. As part of link NYC project, Sidewalk Labs in New York has already converted 7,000 discarded phone cells into internet spots.
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On first drafts, a tech idyll can be seen as in Google’s headquarters, where people live (and work) in glassy, light-flooded spaces. In between blocks of buildings, re are floating lanes, roof gardens dam buildings, families stroll along promenade of an artificial lake, where anglers and kayakers spend ir free time; A Hydraulikarm container and tree trunks are stacked on a construction site. The Ecotopia reminds of novel of same name by Ernest Callenbach from year 1975, in which a “stable state” of bioregionalism emerges in former territory of Oregon, Norrn California and Washington, in which each territory provides self-sufficiency.
Technology companies are currently very fond of developing model cities. The Japanese electronics company Panasonic is building in Berlin-Adlershof residential district future Living Berlin, an ensemble of 69 residential units, whose current and heat flow is to be automatically regulated in a circulatory system. Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates recently acquired a land line in Arizona, where a high-tech city is to be built on an area of 20 square kilometers, with highly-speed networks, data centers, and autonomous vehicles. And in desert sands of Saudi Arabia, a 500 billion-dollar mega-city (Neom) is to be stomped out of ground in next few years under technical direction of former Siemens boss Klaus Felder, where passenger drones run and houses from 3- D printer.
Urban planning as pure programming
For tech groups, cities are a kind of laboratory in which social utopias and social experiments can be tested. Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff, former deputy mayor of New York and chief of Bloomberg LP, said at a 2016 conference: “If you were able to build a city from scratch, you could also develop existing concepts of social policy and Reinvent political leadership and test completely new ideas of data-driven management. “
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But what about citizen in smart city? Is he just guinea pig of a gigantic field trial? A running meter? A data packet? In optics of social engineers, city’s events appear like a SIM-city simulation: In a lattice-like grid, building is shown for industrial and residential areas, a few power plants are high, cables and power lines are set, and parameters of In community: taxes, waste management expenditure, education budget, etc. Urban planning is pure programming. A few mouse clicks, model city is done according to modular principle.
In this simulation, citizens are merely avatars, who follow defined trajectories and thus a determinism. Because of every activity – taxi rides, restaurant visits, pedestrian walkways – it is possible to deduce regularities which are n made into calculation basis of furr simulations. Because person X shows up here and produces certain data points, it will follow exactly those vectors next day. It is a purely mamatisiertes, computerisierteres cityscape. The city of Boston, for example, has a city score where data analysts can see “performance” of city in real time: how many potholes re are, how traffic lights work, how many visitors are currently in libraries and even Likelihood of shootouts or demonstrations. In this logic, violence or political protest are merely events that are calculated as wear according to mamatical models.
The architects in Silicon Valley, especially followers of social Physics School of thought at Alex Pent-up, are inspired by idea that social interactions can be calculated and predicted using big-data methods. The aggregate company will be calculable as electricity demand. In this socially deterministic, mechanistic worldview, resident is merely a computer that is connected to a mainframe with networked city. Therefore, neo-liberal rhetoric also stems from “performance” of city, as if urban life had to be subject to any measurability criteria. The intellectual, who makes notes in Street Café (analogue), would refore be unproductive because he does not generate any data at all.
