The Case for 'Dumb' Cities | Hacker News Reader

The Case for 'Dumb' Cities

nytimes.com

28 pointsmitchbob12 comments

The proliferation of 'smart-' things is the equivalent of deferring everything to runtime, and throwing out design and planning and replacing it with a reactive (or perhaps more accurately reactionary) approach.

Interpreted languages are nice, but compiled languages have enormous advantages, especially when problems are well understood. City planning, the design of public spaces, thoughtful zoning, etc. is like the compiler. If you want an efficient city, you probably don't want it to only run as an interpreter.

Somehow this evokes the depths of American anti-intellectualism for me. "We don't need to understand anything, we can just measure it and then understand it!" without so much as a pause to wonder whether an understanding of the problem might already exist in such a way that it can be incorporated into the design, and further, that if you don't already understand 'it' then there is a good chance that you will end up building a device that measures the wrong things and that you can't change easily.

great comment and analogy

Cities are chaotic, complex creatures. Anyone who claims to understand them is more or less just working from the gut; and anyone who claims to "solve" them via technology, planning, or otherwise is fooling themselves.

The history of city planning is littered with failed examples. In America, freeing everyone from the vapors by separating them in the free, open countryside mostly led to people being trapped in their cars in traffic because they had to drive to get anywhere. Demolishing slums and shoving everyone into spacious housing projects mostly led to isolation and ghettoisation. And even the mere act of requiring parking has separated everything with inhospitable parking lots, making it a requirement to drive to do anything.

Arguably the most successful large cities did very well with low amounts of planning; Manhattan's famous grid was literally imaginary roads plotted onto a map, without a care for what would fill in the gaps. Planned cities are like the manicured lawn; they look pretty but they don't really support any actual life. The wilderness is chaotic and messy but it supports incredible biodiversity.

I agree completely. Planned communities (top down?) have failed repeatedly (for a variety of reasons). The kind of planning and design I am talking about is the design of local rules (bottom up?), such as the order in which you put cars, parked cars, bycicles (and friends), and peds. Another example would be about the zoning around university campuses and how they interact, or don't with public transportation. The difference between US vs EU for these two cases and the results of the differences is quite revealing.

in other words, designing a smart city is actually just as much top-down as any planned community. and what we really need is for each community to decide for themselves which technology they pick to improve their lives

desire paths, but for urban planning. Plus, the whole development model since post-ww2 has basically been a veiled ponzi scheme

that's an assumption, but we don't know if it is true. we have yet to actually see a smart city, and until we do we can't know how it will work out.

we only know the effect of some of the pieces. we know about the effects of surveillance. of insecure technology, data leaks, etc. in other words, what we do know is that the technology is not ready yet for a smart city to be safe.

but apart from that we don't know how it will work out beyond that. for that we need to experiment. someone needs to participate in that experiment so we can learn from it.

is it time already to experiment now? i don't know. we could wait for the technology to be safer. but do we know what the actual threats are? even that we need to test out.

We have an attempt at a smart city already, and it hasn't gone well: https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/06/sleepy-in-songdo-koreas...

it doesn't seem that the smart aspect of it is the problem there though, but rather bad planning and the expectation that smart alone would attract people to move there.

the discussion continues here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20475258

turns out there is quite some criticism about the article

The author makes a rather arbitrary distinction between "dumb" and "smart" technologies - trains are now considered "dumb" technology? I live in Tokyo and that was never my impression, they're as smart as it gets and the infrastructure is constantly being updated with new tech as we speak. (My brother works for Japan Railways btw.)

It's as if the author (with a background in civil engineering not CS) deems everything that she has a good understanding of as "dumb", and everything she's relatively unfamiliar with as "smart", i.e., useless. While I'm no fan of projects like Google Quayside and wary of increasing corporate influence on urban policy, you can't point fingers at fringe ideas like smart garbage cans and use that to outright dismiss the role of IT in urbanism; we don't browse through weputachipinit [1] and conclude that all IoT is worthless do we. If she can look into things like Japan's earthquake notification system [2] and still claim that "smart" solutions don't add value to cities, then we can talk.

[1] https://weputachipinit.tumblr.com

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japa...

Perhaps I'm biased by my own experience here in Tokyo, but I feel that a lot of criticism against smart cities - while not at all without merit - smack of civil engineers, urban planners, architects and the like claiming territorial rights, attempting to keep "outsiders" like IT people stepping onto what has traditionally been their turf. We need less of such feudal mentality, and more interdisciplinary collaboration; more urbanists need to start speaking the language of IT and vice versa.

I completely get that it's entirely normal for people to get anxious about changing science, technology, and societal norms. And I also appreciate that, as the rate of change increases, we should expect to see greater anxiety from a larger segment of the population.

But, I have to say that I'm somewhat surprised to see even folks in the tech industry arguing against the current pace of advancement.

Obligatory SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/future

See also Rethinking the Smart City by (Silicon Valley's infamous detractor) Evgeny Morozov and Francesca Bria.

https://onlineopen.org/media/article/583/open_essay_2018_mor...

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