It’s not that strange that the prefix “smart” is starting to gain ground in our increasingly technological everyday life. If smartphones broke all sales records, why couldn’t the same happen with a car, which until recently was just another mundane object? This must-have gadget, which no one really understands how it works inside but performs miracles and “makes our life easier,” has in a few years become the ultimate fetish. Recently, we learned that it will soon be accompanied by smartwatches and other wearables (computers that you wear), which are being hyped as the next big thing. However, it seems that this smart trend doesn’t stop at personal accessories.
Under the coded and marketing term smart cities, designs for the technological transformation of cities are being funded and implemented. Besides urban planners, who along with real estate mafias have always had the primary role in the central/state planning of urban renewal, techno-scientists and companies in computing and communications are coming to put their own touch on the urban landscape, always pointing towards the future…
We copy excerpts from an official document of the European Commission titled “Smart cities and communities – European Innovation Partnership”…
“With the Europe 2020 program, a comprehensive strategy has been put forward for adopting smart, participatory and sustainable development in Europe and providing a framework for the European Union to emerge strengthened from the current general-accounting and economic crisis. Innovation has been placed at the heart of the 2020 strategy, as Europe’s competitiveness and the ability to create new jobs depends on promoting innovation in products and services. It is also the best means of addressing major social challenges, such as climate change and energy efficiency […]
[…] The European Innovation Partnership “Smart Cities and Communities” is a collaboration concerning the sectors of energy, transport, and information and communication technologies, aiming to serve as a catalyst for progress in areas where energy production, distribution, and consumption; mobility and transportation; and information and communication technologies (ICTs) are closely interconnected and offer interdisciplinary opportunities for improving services while simultaneously reducing energy and resource consumption as well as greenhouse gas emissions and other polluting emissions. […]
[…] SCC focuses on industry-led innovation as the key to achieving economic and social change in urban centers and promotes actions throughout the innovation cycle in many areas of production.
[…] European cities must be points of advanced social progress and environmental regeneration, as well as points of attraction and drivers of economic development that will be based on a holistic and integrated approach in which all aspects of sustainability are taken into account […]”
Efficiency, competitiveness, innovation, sustainability and plenty of doses of environmental sensitivity and concern for climate change. This is a series of terms and conditions that one will find reading any small or larger manual for creating a successful business. Why the same terms should characterize a “smart city” of the future as the driving force of economic development is not difficult to answer. The rhetoric of capitalist development has always been monotonous and boring and whatever it may be, it is not famous for the wealth of its language! Nevertheless, this text which at first glance more resembles an experiment or wishful thinking, shows the direction of this expected development.
Emphasis is placed on the diverse functions of the city as services that should (as they relate to information and communication technologies) transform cities into “points of advanced social progress and environmental regeneration, as well as points of attraction and drivers of economic development that will be based on a holistic and integrated approach”. The leap from city-services to city-as-a-service actually entails two simultaneous processes. On one hand, it introduces the further commodification of urban infrastructure, as these are technologically restructured. On the other hand, it conceptualizes the city itself as a unified service provided to residents and all kinds of visitors. From our perspective, we could describe such a transformation process as the general tertiarization of the city, drawing an analogy with the tertiarization of production.
The universal perception of lifestyle as a continuous provision/consumption of services certainly opens new profitable fields for capital; that’s why the initial invested amounts are by no means negligible. EU initiatives such as the European Innovation Partnership “Smart Cities and Communities” have been running since 2012 and are funded with substantial grants from community support frameworks. Indicatively, the budget of the SCC program for research and implementation of pilot programs in collaboration with universities and companies amounts to 92,320,000 euros. The funding comes from the new community support framework for research and innovation, named Horizon 2020. At the same time, companies of smaller or larger size, prominently IBM with its “smarter cities” project, have already formed collaborations with public authorities at regional or local government levels, and have proceeded to the first implementations of technological applications in various cities around the world.
In this new and continuously evolving example, companies, state organizations, and academic institutions each play their complementary role. Supporters of development across the spectrum strive to establish it ideologically. The dual narrative of development/exit from crisis constantly surfaces in the rhetoric of both right and left as the anticipated condition in a near future that will restore the economy’s rhythm… However, regardless of how any vision of development is pursued, it primarily concerns the expansion and consolidation of capitalist/commodity relations into increasingly broader social fields and more aspects of life. As we will see below, this process of the colonization of urban life by capital neither occurs nor is possible without its own “collateral losses.”
According to the achievements so far, we can see that a smart city includes many levels of implementation. At the center is the development of infrastructures related to the so-called information and communication technologies (Information and Communication Technologies – ICTs).
In a more comprehensive form, the expansion and unified use of interconnected business infrastructures, home networks, transportation networks, and networks of leisure services – lifestyle and consumption – can create a single virtual space for whoever can and wants to be constantly online. First and foremost, however, connectivity must be ensured at all times and at any point in the urban environment as the basic lever for the growth of these infrastructures and the services that rely on them.
The wireless sensor network
All modern information/telecommunication devices produce data and create activity log files (log files) and communication records between them. All of these constitute information that is unreadable to an everyday computer or mobile phone user, but exploitable by telecommunications and information technology companies and state (secret or non-secret) services, using software that extracts data from log files and represents it in virtual environments friendly to the recipient of this information.
Electronic computers and telecommunications devices are already networked and therefore it is already possible to use the data or metadata related to their use (e.g. telephone call data such as duration, origin and destination). It is therefore already possible to accumulate this data in central storage infrastructures and analyze it.
What would happen, however, if any object used daily could also produce and provide information related to its usage to the network? Could all previously “dumb” everyday objects become “smart” in this way? How smart these objects actually become is not of great importance. What really matters is that through their usage, they could produce data as capital for exploitation! Although this is not yet directly feasible1, the basic infrastructure of smart cities consists of the planned installation of a wireless sensor network that provides data from various points in the city to a central system.
Sensors for measuring water consumption, electricity and natural gas, cameras, sensors on traffic control signals, sensors that measure the fullness of waste bins, in order to make the work of collecting them more efficient, have already been installed in many cities where the benefits of using these technologies are being studied.
The example of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is characteristic. With the backdrop of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, IBM undertook the implementation of an Intelligent Operations Center where data from sensors scattered throughout the city are analyzed in real time, aiming to manage crises and emergency situations; from floods and landslides to public order issues. In this center, all city services as well as state ministries, transportation companies and other private firms are coordinated.
However, it’s not enough to simply have some complementary infrastructure and sensors for a city to earn the title of smart! After all, Wikipedia informs us that the term smart city goes beyond the older terms intelligent city or digital city, which were attributed to cities with technologically upgraded infrastructure. The concept of a “smart city” must seriously consider its residents as the social/human capital of the city, in terms of efficiency and competitiveness. The economy, they say, should be based on knowledge and knowledge-based entrepreneurship, aiming for social and environmental sustainability.
Citizens as sensors
The words of Rick Robinson, executive architect of Project Smarter Cities at IBM’s European software division, are characteristic:
“The behavior of the city has to do with the behavior of its residents. Nothing is going to change except if the systems can become the lifelines of their lives.”
In Santander, Spain, residents have real-time access to data about road closures, parking availability, and bus delays. In London, the city provides nearly 500 sets of information on an internet dashboard displaying various data from air pollution and weather to crime statistics by area. It even provides a city happiness index!
Electronic displays regarding bus arrival times are something relatively widespread. A step further, it is technically feasible to locate the exact position of the bus, using gps and a mobile application for each passenger, who wants to be efficient while moving around the city and not run unfairly e.g. to catch a bus.
The words of manager-academic Dr. Hudson Smith (director of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London) are something like half-prediction, half-reality:
“The next step after detecting London’s buses will be detecting people, giving the city the ability to know where each individual is located.”
Modern mobile phones, the least they can do is function as simple phones. In fact, the citizen-sensor type is not going to be built from scratch. Smart-phones constitute the appropriate equipment both for receiving information from the smart sensor network to the smartphone and for feeding data from the smartphone to a central management system that needs to process and analyze this data. We ignore in reality how many users of mobile networks are already being used as such “sensors” providing (for example) their geographical location at any given moment unintentionally or even consciously.2
The location data is perhaps the most important, but it constitutes only a piece of the data that can be provided by a user of such a device.3
The activation of the citizen-sensor type includes other techniques as well. For example, users-customers of city services are called upon to provide data regarding their satisfaction with one or another service or regarding malfunctions they have identified in one or another system or infrastructure, etc. However, the already available applications do not stop even there.
The technology company Capgemini, using statistics from the European Commission according to which children up to 12 years old walk on the street more than any other age group, managed to promote, in collaboration with the municipal council of Oslo, an application for children. The application is designed as a game and child-users are called upon to take on the role of a secret agent. They should use this application to report anything that may seem dangerous or suspicious to them on their way to school. Under certain conditions, this poorly inspired “game” could evolve into solid trolling-farce by the children against the city authorities. On the other hand, something like this could also have the corresponding consequences for the child who would repeatedly misuse this rogue-game. And in this case, it is not a simple game-over in tetris! Regardless, the issue of security and crime prevention is taking on an increasingly central role in the design of “smart cities”. Why this is happening is what we will try to approach next…
Before this, however, we should step down a bit from the cloud of visions and see the real ‘technical’ difficulties in implementing this grandiose plan.
Looking around in cities such as Athens and Thessaloniki, one would reasonably wonder: Well now! Is it possible for all these things to be implemented on a large scale with the existing infrastructure? Is it possible for them to enchant us with the vision of a green-energy efficient city, where without bottlenecks everyone will move carefree on the road with smart transportation means, ecstatically cuddling their smartphones in an incredible exchange of information?
And yet, what could be more beautiful than an excellent idea for the future? All you faithful – of development – approach! After all, new jobs will open up: Traffic Control Systems Administrator, Criminal Activity Prediction Consultant, Green building engineer and other such heavy-duty titles (of our own invention, for now!) will start appearing in the small ads! The visionaries of these technologies, moreover, promise that in future cities there will be no need for traditional workers, but only the town halls will be full of programmers who can create algorithms, in order to statistically identify patterns and models in the data.
Followers of capitalist development are certainly captivated by such visions. The more “left-wing” among them could give a +1 Like even for the vision of the “green city” that does not waste its resources.
There should be no great hurry, however. The cities, since they are still in a state of unconsciousness and foolishness, may prove to be extremely stubborn.
Copying again from the commission document we mentioned at the beginning…
“For example in Europe, new buildings represent only 1% of the housing stock annually, while new cars registered annually are less than 10% of the total vehicles, which means that the introduction of new technologies will take time. Resources for experimentation in Europe are rather inadequate, so flexibility and adaptation will be required…”
Indeed, the problems that can arise in implementing such a large idea are many: The buildings may prove too old to accommodate smart systems, the aging electrical and water supply networks may allow the installation of sensors, but they too carry many years on their shoulders. And if these sensors show continuous faults, they will again require workers (of the old school!) to repair them. The maintenance cost will likely increase as these faults will be detected more frequently and accurately, requiring immediate repair. As for vehicles, one only needs to look at the sales indicators of the automotive industry in recent years. Tragedy!
We therefore have a long way to go in terms of urban hardware upgrades. Google, known and exceptionally talented, recognizing this reality, has made the appropriate “smart” leaks to the media from a marketing perspective, regarding the creation of its own cities from scratch. In this case, the problems and difficulties presented by old infrastructure are avoided. Even more important, however, is the fact that the residents of such a smart city will de facto be in the position of a customer/consumer who has purchased a specific lifestyle.
At this point, one might wonder: If infrastructure such as electricity, water, sewage networks, and transportation constitute fundamental and complex challenges for this hyper-technological modernization of cities, what happens to the people who live in them? Viewing city residents as the human/social capital that opens up new profitable horizons ignores, or more accurately seeks to conceal, the fact that city dwellers do not form a homogeneous entity. However, it would be extremely naive to underestimate the fact that this omission is a necessary (for the authorities) reversal of the demand for even more surveillance, for even greater control over the movements, behaviors, and relationships that emerge within the metropolitan field. Indeed, surveillance cameras in transportation networks, on streets, and in stores already form a backbone of sensors integrated into most major cities of the Western world.
From a promotional brochure of Boston University titled ‘Urban Life 2.0’ and subtitled ‘Creating the Smarter City’, one can read among other things the following:
“Every week, more than 30 million surveillance cameras produce approximately 4 billion hours of video, a volume far too large for human analysts to process. Even in cases where software is used to scan data for detecting suspicious behavior, it appears to be ineffective in densely populated urban areas…
…Instead of classifying and detecting objects in a video stream, the new technique detects motion in a video, calculates the motion statistics for each pixel over time, and uses statistical methods to identify anomalous pixels. The data collected from these anomalies can then be detected by conventional software systems.
Researchers are working to improve the accuracy of recognizing specific activities – identifying actions involving movement, such as walking, dancing or greeting gestures from digital video signals recorded by cameras. They have developed a new skeleton for activity recognition which continuously outperforms state-of-the-art methods and, due to its low requirements for storage space and processing power, is suitable for real-time use…”
On the same wavelength, an IBM report (Becoming a smarter city: Six public safety projects that deliver quick results) about the benefits of implementing the monitoring technologies it has developed and applied in various cities around the world (which are often not specified in the text!) provides a description of smart surveillance. After necessary emphasis on the risks of terrorism, natural disasters, and generally emergency situations that can arise on a large scale, IBM’s engineers and advertisers explain:
“More and more cities are already facing a lack of resources, and monitoring public spaces is now considered essential for them to remain safe and accessible. Unlike traditional video surveillance solutions, which burden people with the task of searching through massive amounts of data, smart surveillance solutions use information (intelligence), automation, and analytical methods as leverage for prevention, immediate detection, and response to suspicious events.”
IBM’s solution for smart surveillance, Video and Correlation Analysis Suite (VCAS), analyzes video footage as events unfold, in real time. It dynamically integrates and correlates events from all types of cameras, sensors and detection systems, and sends alarm notifications when predefined security thresholds are exceeded. Video sequences are continuously analyzed in combination with location-based vigilance maintenance, so that human and object movement and activities are monitored over time in comparison with established norms and standards.
All activities are catalogued and indexed, allowing operators to initiate a targeted search for specific events by combining search criteria such as time, area, attire, or the color of an object and personal characteristics of an individual. The ability to retrieve results in a matter of seconds is revolutionary for the investigative process, exposing perpetrators and threats before any damages escalate…”
What is actually the measure that determines these norms based on which pixel-by-pixel monitoring of activities in the urban environment is justified? The perception of city dwellers as capital can certainly include a range of expected movements, behaviors, knowledge, and preferences that can be analyzed and measured as desired behaviors. The threshold level of unexpected, undesired behavior in this case is determined by the degree of controllable everyday life within the predefined paths of merchandise and spectacle, with networking as the common foundation and the necessary complement being the collection, aggregation, and analysis of data. Perhaps this also explains the mysterious correlation at the beginning of the aforementioned excerpt between “lack of resources” and the “need for surveillance of public spaces.” It is an indirect formulation of the idea that not everyone fits, that some should be characterized as incompatible with the norms and standards of modern access to the city’s limited resources. After all, the global economic crisis continues, and the poor will become increasingly bothersome in their presence on the streets.
The encoding and digitization of bodily movements, social behaviors and social relations, presupposes the existence of bodies, behaviors and relations that are already disciplined within the framework of the commodification of life and the practical perception of every activity as a provision/consumption of services mediated by more or less advanced technological means. In the same way that the citizen-sensor does not need to be created from scratch, the citizen-consumer of goods and services is already an existing and exploitable figure by the new paradigm under formation. Therefore, all this is not something new. From our side, we argue that the incorporation of technology (literally and metaphorically) into everyday life, with the widespread use of smartphones being the leading (for now) example, accelerates the processes of these transformations and intermediate experiments.
However, for those who walk through the city with their senses open to what is truly happening around them, it immediately becomes clear that the most important (and most beautiful!) element of the city is its increased randomness; it is life that moves, often times, outside the predetermined paths of consuming goods and services. In the streets of cities, life exists beyond and outside the overuse of transportation and telecommunications. It is those people who move through the streets walking outside of work spaces and hours, those who sit in street corners or low along the curbs discussing who-knows-what, and it is the children of immigrants who remain to give life to parks and squares. Additionally, it includes those who still refuse, even half-consciously, to commodify their lives. Such a list, fortunately, has no end. The multiple subjectivities that continue to express themselves in the streets of cities through movements, behaviors, knowledge, and relationships are due to the coexistence of people from every corner of this damned planet. This is the multinational working class that, in the streets of cities, finds the ground to share the wealth of its knowledge and experiences without the mediation of goods, spectacles, and the fetishistic techno-communication of social media. And if, within the streets of cities, the collectivization of proletarian resistances and denials constitutes (for analysts) even a small possibility among others, then such a thing must be prevented at all costs… The alleged fight against crime, which 99 times out of 100 uses terrorism as a pretext, becomes here too the ideal (?) alibi that still seems to sell to the complacent consciences of first-world citizens.4
And so, the dream of the technologically governed city becomes in reality a nightmare where all activities must either conform to norms or be marginalized and directed to easily controllable points with traditional methods of public order, where brute force does not emerge as a “desirable” but as an already given reality. Let one consider concentration camps as such places, which have already existed for many years.
Every large-scale urban regeneration promised by authorities and their states necessarily includes a process of devaluation/destruction/elimination of both large-scale aging infrastructures and the social/class subjects who are on the streets of cities and appear incompatible with the norms of the new paradigm; but also conversely (and precisely because they move through the streets) they have expanded capacities to resist the extension of the plunder of their lives by capital, even if this seems impossible and distant.
Let us also remember that the historical process of destruction/extinction of people and infrastructures elsewhere has for years found its own smart technology. The “smart bombs” that have been exploding for years targeting the populations of Asia and Africa, the “smart” surveillance and extermination technologies at borders, and the “smart” monitoring methods in global metropolises form a technological line that reveals the dual nature of crisis/restructuring. Those who promise development in one way or another, and sell visions of smart cities, are simultaneously doing ideological work. They conceal within the flood of glossy images of the future the fact that the same means that appear neutral—as the natural evolution of technology—are tools both of restructuring and of crisis/destruction. This is not about the good or bad use of one or another technology. The connection between these two processes is historically determined and organic, as an indispensable precondition for the continuation and expansion of capitalist/commodity relations within societies.
P.S.: In this story too, the supposed enemy is ahead of the game, a figure of an urban hacker, portrayed as public enemy number one. From our side, we do acknowledge the existence of cyber warfare conducted between corresponding state services, which adds another piece to the puzzle of modern warfare. This is exactly why we remain cautious and regard this type of “enemy” as potentially manipulable and controllable. Therefore, for all of you who have started to reconsider the technological restructuring of cities, we strongly advise you not to hold your breath waiting for such a super-hero. Besides, as we wander around cities, caressing screens out of helplessness or compulsion, time flows against us.
Rorre Margorp
cyborg #01 – 10/2014
- The research company Gartner estimates that by 2020 there will be 26.5 billion devices connected to the network, corresponding to an industry of 1.9 trillion dollars. The so-called Internet of Things, as well as the terms Big Data and Cloud, are buzzwords that relate in one way or another to our subject. Just like the buzzword smart cities, all three aforementioned terms have long since occupied a significant portion of mainstream journalism presenting technological innovations, and we will increasingly encounter them as the next big thing related to the application of the corresponding technologies. The demystification of these grandiose buzzwords and their grounding in capitalist reality will surely be part of our repertoire. ↩︎
- The location data comes from three sources. The first – inevitable – is the mobile phone antenna-transceiver to which each user connects and can provide information about the broader area from which it is possible to receive the signal of that particular antenna. The second is the IP address acquired by each portable device that connects to the Internet via wifi. In this case, the range of the wireless access point (smaller than that of the mobile phone antenna) further restricts the radius within which a user connecting to this access point can be located. Finally, there is the GPS, which, when not activated, should not provide any information. However, when activated, it provides (by transmitting and receiving signals from satellites) the coordinates of that specific transceiver with exceptional accuracy (a high-quality GPS provides accuracy better than a radius of 3.5 meters). Of course, it is known that declaring one’s location using the built-in GPS in mobile phones and social networks (such as checking in on Facebook) is common practice for many users who want to accurately share where they are and what they are doing at a specific moment. ↩︎
- And if the dialogue about privacy drags on to remind us that no one is safe, a possible answer has already been given in advance: Sharing personal data, they say, should be done voluntarily by users, it should be integrated into their lifestyle and constitute each person’s individual investment in shaping the online-social connections that will bring a competitive individual, in a better position to make effective and efficient decisions both for work and for their daily life. For the rest… Well, at the end of the day, if someone doesn’t want to enter the shiny competitive world of this sharing, the world won’t collapse. If needed, their data will be obtained either ‘secretly’ or legally. But regarding this issue of ‘privacy’, we will surely be given many opportunities to return to it in the future. ↩︎
- In fact, the increasingly state-controlled organized criminal activity finds its spaces and times as a service provider of the black-criminal economy. The planned relocation of one or another square here, further away, or even much further, in a coordinated manner and under the auspices of the police and local protection circuits, testifies that such activities are not the target of smart city surveillance. Moreover, these activities are neither random nor unpredictable. The harsh rules and norms in all kinds of mafias are imposed by violence from their own bosses, especially when broader interests are at stake (e.g., real estate mafias), involving the downgrading or upgrading of a given area. ↩︎