‘Smart Cities’: Seduction, Simulation, Scepticism A presentation made at the 2015 Transmediale festival in Berlin, February 1st

1. ‘Smart Cities’:
Seduction, Simulation, Scepticism
Stephen Graham, Newcastle University

2. The Seduction
of “Enacted
Environments”
(Dana Cuff)...
• High modernist dreams of
perfect, real-time, remote
control, anticipation, clarity
• Ubiquitous computing/Internet
of Things/social media
• ‘Big Data’ and ‘Data Fusion’
• Geodata
• Optimisation
• Anticipation
• Robotisation
• Blurs into discourses
surrounding “sustainable cities’,
‘resilient cities’, ‘creative cities’
etc etc.
Figure
1:
the
cyberne0c
city
Rela%onship
between
smart
ci%es
and
IT
(Hitachi
2013:14)
Hitachi,
2013:
14)

3. Panoptic
Dreams?
“Today’s cities are based on separate domains with no
real ability to be managed as an entire entity. City
managers have no single place to get real-time status or
historical reports of city events. Older systems are
domain-specific and are not concerned with the
consequences on other domains. Daily operations of
cities generate vast amounts of data from many different
sources but cities often lack the ability to visualize and
extract meaningful information” IBM 2012.

4. Deterministic.
Self-Evident
and Messianic
Discourses...
Adam Greenfield: ‘Smart city’ concepts “tend.. to
be discussed casually, as if it were self-evident
that all one need do to finally “solve” the city is to
weave sensors into the urban fabric by the million,
trawl the relevant social networks for geotagged
utterances, and apply just the right analytic
algorithms to the ever-mounting tally of terabytes
captured this way.”

5. Surveillant-­‐Simula0on:
Data
Feeds
and
Visualiza0on

6. Scepticism: (1) We’ve Been Here Before (Many Times!)

7. Michael Benedikt (1991):
‘Cyberspace’ would work by:
"decontaminating the natural and urban landscapes,
redeeming them, saving them from the chain-dragging
bulldozers of the paper industry, from the diesel smoke of
courier and post-office trucks, from jet fuel flames and
clogged airports, from billboards, trashy and pretentious
architecture, hour-long freeway communities, ticket lines,
choked subways... from all the inefficiencies, pollution
(chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to
moving information attached to things across, over and
under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than
letting it fly free in the soft hail of electrons that is
cyberspace."

9. Scepticism (2): Revivify
Cybernetic Fantasies
Whilst Camouflaging
Authoritarian and Elitist
Transformations
“In marketing materials and press releases for smart city
initiatives, we hear about idyllic dashboards,
switchboards, and control rooms, artifices that enable
government decision makers to interface with data
streams being produced by the city and simultaneously
obscure the process from those people who inhabit it”
Lily Bui (2014) Sensor Journalism Lab

10. Premediation,
Norms and
Anticipatory
Surveillance

11. ‘Fusion’ and the ‘Surveillance-Security-Military-
Industrial Complex’

14. Links to a Wider Authoritarian Shift: “What we are handing
the administrators of a smart city is a suite of all the tools
they would need to isolate, quash or even prevent
whatever conduct they defined as undesirable”
Adam Greenfield (2013)
.

15. Regional
Caracas Havana
Tegucigalpa Panama Cir5
Geneva Boguia.
Attens MeNien
Rome Brasilia
Quith Managua 1-Fague.
an _1 nsie
KinRhaca Sufis -
Lusaka Bangkok
New Dull
Berlin r'Flinn Guatemala
rana RESC
Phnom. Pr nh
Frankfurt SaTaievn dam
IL Paz 111-11114t7
Zagreh Vienna Annex. Reston
Fluclaput
Prague Paris
lienna. Rang pun
oFORNSAT
STELLAR
SOUNDER
SNACK
MOONPEN
NV
LADYLOVE
INDRA
IRON SAND
JACKKNIFE
CARBOY
TIMBERLIN
High Spood
Optical Gable
Covent,. Clandestine
r Coorperative Lar
Accesses
20 Amen Proirems
Worldwide
-1 Classes of Accesses
• 3rd PARTY/LIAISON
:3C. GE) untriW
• REGIONAL
9D SCS
ONE
50.000 World-wide Implants
LARGE CABLE
20 MaJor Accesses
• FORNSAT
12+40 Regional
TOP SECHET//COMINTI/REL TO USA, ALPS, CAN, GBR, NZL
TOP SECRET/ICON/INT/MEL TiO USA, ALPS, CAN, GEM, NZL
I- TO Pin'
Driver 1: Worldwide SIGINT/Defense Cryptologic
Platform

17. NSA “Dagger
Complex”
Griesheim,
Germany,
2014

18. Oakland ‘Domain
Awareness
Center’ as C4ISR
(Command,
Control,
Communications,
Computers,
Intelligence,
Surveillance and
Reconnaissance)
New Military
Urbanism and
Foucauldian
Boomerangs:

21. Scep0cism
(3):
Corporate
Push
into
Urban
Opera0ng
Systems
(UOS)
• Hitachi,
MicrosoK,
IBM,
Cisco,
Siemens
etc.
Ava
Kofman
(2014)
“the
assump0on
that
the
collec0on
of
residents’
data
is
a
useful
and
immensely
profitable
enterprise”
• “’city
OS’
spin-­‐offs
promise
that
we
can
know
the
city
in
its
en0rety:
scaled
down
to
the
size
of
a
microchip,
dematerialized
into
data
clouds,
predictable
and
itera0ve
• As
top-­‐down
city
design
becomes
a
market
commodity,
we
will
soon
be
forced
to
choose
between
the
urban
opera0ng
systems
we
want
to
inhabit”.

22. Algorithmic Power: ‘Smart’ Cities
are Software-Sorted Cities
Cisco (2002) Describing how premium internet services can now be offered to
what they call the ‘transactional/ interactive data class’ of users, they outline
how the electronic mobilities of what they term the ‘scavenger class’ will now
be actively impeded based on software- sorting of every single Internet packet.
‘The Scavenger class is intended to provide differential services, or “less-than-
Best-Effort” services, to certain applications’, the document suggests.
‘Applications assigned to this class have little or no contribution to the
organizational objectives of the enterprize ... Assigning a minimal bandwidth
queue to Scavenger traffic forces it to be squelched to virtually nothing during
periods of congestion’ (Cisco, 2002).

23. Glitzy and
Troubling
Exemplars:
Elite, Privatised
Capsules
Foster’s Masdar City, Abu Dhabi; Songdo, South
Korea; Eko Atlantic, Lagos
“Songdo is as much a protocol as it is a city:
other territories can “download” its plans. Its
technology was bought by other cities before it
had even been built in Songdo itself. Its master
plan is being exported to Ecuador; meanwhile,
China has purchased kits from similar companies
to make its cities more closely resemble
Singapore.
Nations dissolve into transnational, portable,
cities in a box. With simulation emerging as the
dominant paradigm, material and lived histories
are rendered obsolete” Ava Kofman (2014)

24. Place not space: Must match scepticism with
critical and democratic insurgent practices
• Data democratisation;
hacktivism; open code;
challenging depoliticizing
discourses of techno-rationality
• Expose creeping power of
surveillance-security-military-
industrial complexes
• Undermine anti democratic
control logics of top-down
‘smart city’ paradigms and
securitisation/criminalisation of
ICT-based activism