Lubna Alli

Reading: 

Smart cities and urban data platforms: Designing interfaces for smart governance.

Barns, S. (2018).

The word smart city is becoming a buzzword that is thrown around these days—and its seems like everybody wants the inside scoop. It is not just about the benefits that it provides on the ground for citizens and the people of the masses, it continues to be suggested as an organizational tool to run the places we call home more smoothly. Think about it as a your family’s smart home system, but on a much grander city-wide scheme. On demand transport, intelligent water management, responsive lighting, and distributed energy resources are rapidly replacing the legacy of infrastructure and service delivery models that have served the cities of the twentieth century, all of which all benefits that Barns brings up in her research that pushes for the implementation of urban data platform interfaces. What this fancy language posits is her belief in the power of organizing the city through a central data interface that can manage all the different facets of city governance. Again, much like how your Nest Smart Home products all link up and are controllable from one central device, but at a much larger city-wide scale (CityScore being a pre-existing citywide example used in Boston). She concludes this discourse by emphasizing the need for public private partnerships between governments and tech firms to make this seamless transition, most specifically on urban policy and practise as a major challenge for city dashboards in a world of data-driven services and smart cities. Essentially, we (informants working in the city building space) need to keep up with the pace at which technology is moving, because it will not wait for us and it will only cause more trouble playing catchup in the long run. This notion of the shift from the platform economy to the city as a platform is one that may pose implications around equity, mass capitalism, and an overall emphasis on numbers, which often places empathy and stories on the back burner in favour of empirical evidence. Who has access to the city? What about digital justice? Indigenous communities that have to worry about lifting their boiling water advisory first before they can think about affording the luxury of internet access? This may seem like a perfect plan in the perfect world to those whose worlds are exactly so, relative to others. The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor. We know this. Poverty is systemic, so by this logic, how can city dashboards be reframed to avoid the mishaps of such computer based error?