A Different Context for Smart Cities?

While I understand the importance of creating healthier, happier and more sustainable cities. “Contextual Sensing: Integrating Contextual Information with Human and Technical Geo-Sensor Information for Smart Cities” by Sagl, Resch and Blaschke seems to leave a lot unsaid. The authors talk about ‘smart citizens’ becoming bigger contributors to city dynamics but a lot of technological advancement so far has been in making it ubiquitous and as seamlessly fit into our lifestyle as possible so it is easy to ignore. It is very interesting to see the dissonance in presentation of information from Worthy’s article on “The Impact of Open Data in the UK: Complex, Unpredictable, and Political” where he describes how interaction with open data varies across heterogeneous groups. It brings to mind question such as: What would the ‘average’ citizen’s awareness of the smart city actually be? Would smart city data be open data? Who would use it? Furthermore, the feedback loop between smart citizens and beneficiaries seems to imply that people will become more externally engaged with their surroundings (17024), yet over time people have been narrowing their scope of interaction, especially in so-called third spaces, to their personal devices. I think there is some sense of taking for granted that all these environmental interactions will continue to exist with the increased saturation of technology in our lives.

Sagl et al. also remind me of our previous class discussion on big data. The authors deliberately state that more data does not necessarily provide better results (17017). However, when they state that “…in contextual sensing a larger quantity of data may allow contexts that have not previously been thought of, or have not previously been considered relevant, to be better understood and taken into account (17017)”, they also seem troublingly close to the trend of aimlessly analyzing masses of data that spits out patterns without scientific methods of inquiry. I think it would be very interesting indeed to have a skeptic of open and big data to analyze smart city trends. I do have to say that some of my questions are outside the scope of this article but the tangents to be explored are potentially more interesting.

-Vdev

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