Watch: Adam Greenfield on the Dangers of Smart Cities.
reSITE: What are smart cities anyways? Where are they? For whom are they intended? By whom were they developed? Adam Greenfield challenges the popular concept of “smart cities”, warning against the danger it posses of strictly central planning.
While smart cities are often designed to be about consumption, convenience, and security but Adams think that such a state will exist only for few, for the rest it will be a permanent state of exception. He argues that as a discourse, smart cities have nothing to do with cities, treating our urban environments as a market commodity.
He believes that in setting out to design the technologized cities of the 21st century, wherever the public generates data, it also has meaningful access to and ownership of that data. Adams’ lecture offers food for thought for all of us who never got to consider the possible negative sides of smart cities and how they could come to consider democracy as a disruption of the functional city.
Adam Greenfield is an American writer and urbanist that has written and consulted widely on issues at the intersection of design, technology, and culture, with an increasing focus on how these things interact in (and condition our experience of) cities over the last two decades. He is also the author of several titles including “Against the Smart City” and “Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life”. He has co-taught graduate-level courses at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and the Urban Design program at the Bartlett School of Architecture (with Usman Haque). He is currently working toward a Ph.D. in the Cities Programme of the Sociology Department at the London School of Economics. Adam spoke at reSITE 2014: Cities and Landscapes of the New Economy.
NWO. Beast system. End of story.
Smart cities. Dumb people. Dumb country.
Why is is it that the word smart tends to be the opposite of it’s real meaning? Smart as defined by progtards tends to be dumb, dumber and dumbest, but it has good intentions (the road of good intentions leads to Hell) to be smart but it doesn’t because of the law of unintended consequences. Think so called smart cars and hybrids, electric POS’s like Tesla’s etc. which are are so obviously dumb but liberals love them because they’re so cute and environmentally friendly and are made to save the world from us evil people who believe in truth, justice and the American way. Every word the left uses generally has the opposite meaning of what it really means and confuses far too many people who have been brainwashed by their evil intentions to manipulate how people think about things. Other weasel words with the opposite meaning are pro choice (pro death) and pro life is anti life or anti science to the left because it’s in opposition to their evil world views. And I could go on and on with far more examples of their death wish mentality.
I am starting to look like and act like John the Barbarian in Brave New World.
Smart cities are nothing more then technology enabled spying on the proles. Everything a person does, says, eats, dates, is recorded. It’s total population control packaged under the guise of “convenience”.
Smart cities = Surveillance Cities
Cheaper than paid informers.
izlamo delenda est …
And I stood in wonder about what my 9th grade algebra teacher meant by saying there will come a time when information will be the biggest economy.
That was 1971.
She was quite prescient.
geoff the aardvark,
They are called smart things because they are smart relative to the dumb idiot who uses them.
A smartphone’s user knows no phone numbers.
A smart car’s driver shouldn’t have a license.
A smart trashcan user doesn’t know when a trashcan is full.
A smart homeowner can’t remember to turn off lights or raise the thermostat when it’s cold.
etc.
So even an inanimate object can be smarter than all the degreed dumbed-down, pearl-clutching, bead-strumming, self-absorbed, spoon-fed, celebrity-obsessed, White guilt-ridden, Birkenstock-wearing, bottled-water-drinking, panty-wetting, Politically Correct, short-attention-span, kumbaya-singing, Xanax-disabled, sheet grabbing, pillow biting, moisturizing-metro-sexuals!
What the hell is an ‘urbanist’?
A newly made up word describing some one who lives in an urban area. I have a 2nd (worthless) degree in Sociology EWU 1980 so I can figure that one out. Thank God that I bombed the GRE and never pursued a Masters Degree in sociology back in the early 80’s.
Installed RING doorbell. Crime notifications 24 hours a day from other RING customers. Had to wonder: Why aren’t the police and the media reporting all this? Like the MSM getting orders from the White House, do the Portland Police and local news outlets get their marching orders from Mayor Wheeler’s office? We moved.
Cloud cities built by Dirt people.
An “urbanist” is one who studies cities.
I took an “Urban History” course once, and it turned out to be very interesting (not enough to devote my life to it, but interesting, nonetheless).
izlamo delenda est …
Watching British crime programs is eye opening.
There is hardly an area that is not under surveillance, government or private. And they seem to be able to demand private surveillance as they decide it’s needed. They ask to see your ‘diary’ which seems to be a planner/journal, ask for tea while they step inside your home to ask questions. It seems also that if there are two detectives, one can wander about your home while the other asks questions. And their Miranda’ wannabe is horrendous.
British citizens are not free. Horridly taxed for the communal good. And they seem so polite.
This guy is just beginning to be aware but he is still the typical intellectual turning simple concepts into complicated quagmires. Adam Smith covered this in 1759 when he wrote The Invisible Hand. And people with God-based values don’t need top-down control or any control for that matter.