[Urbanstudy] Beware the Posthuman Future of Smart Cities and Surveilled Beings

[Vinay Baindur]

http://thewire.in/2015/10/18/beware-the-posthuman-future-of-smart-cities-and-surveilled-beings-13219/



Beware the Posthuman Future of Smart Cities and Surveilled Beings
By Pramod K. Nayar <http://thewire.in/author/pramod-k-nayar/> on 18/10/2015
<http://thewire.in/2015/10/18/beware-the-posthuman-future-of-smart-cities-and-surveilled-beings-13219/>

Smart Cities might offer one set of technologically determined solutions to
human and social problems but smartification may also come at a great cost
to one’s subjectivity as a citizen.
[image: "Where ever the workman is utterly enslaved, the parts of the
building must of course be absolutely like each other", said John Ruskin,
predicting the fate of Classicism in the 20th century. Museo della Civiltà
Romana. Credit: seier+seier/Flickr CC BY 2.0]
<http://i0.wp.com/128.199.141.55/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/854891836_39eddaf56c_b.jpg>

*“Where ever the workman is utterly enslaved, the parts of the building
must of course be absolutely like each other”, said John Ruskin, predicting
the fate of Classicism in the 20th century. Museo della Civiltà Romana.
Credit: seier+seier/Flickr CC BY 2.0*

The list is out. Now we know which cities will turn ‘smart’ in the next
decade. In June 2015 Ministry of Urban Development published ‘Smart Cities:
Mission Statement and Guidelines’ with the stated objective of promoting
‘cities that provide core infrastructure and give a decent quality of life
to its citizens, a clean and sustainable environment and application of
“Smart” Solutions’.

The Mission Statement underscores safety – for women, children and the old.
It has plans for waste collection and management. It insists that
electricity and safe drinking water be supplied adequately and assuredly.
It notes that there has to be housing for the poor. Even in terms of
processes, the Mission Statement gets one thing right: citizen
participation and a consultative procedure that involves feedback and
opinion-seeking from stakeholders like residents and users. Nobody would
quarrel with this set of infrastructural objectives, given the rapidly
deteriorating quality of life in India’s cities and towns. In fact, there
is much to be praised in this vision of the 21st century Indian city.

Yet some sense of disquiet creeps in when you look at the document.

I am not even addressing here the anxieties of self-propagating
technologies possessing what Susan Blackmore has characterised as ‘temes’
(the technological equivalent of ‘memes’), where machines collect
information, process information and respond to information, take decisions
and replicate information all *without* human intervention. The replication
and sharing of information collected by sensors and intelligent machines,
Blackmore pointed out in her 2008 TED talk
<https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCUQtwIwAWoVChMIzL-zps7CyAIVDh2OCh37SA1J&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ted.com%2Ftalks%2Fsusan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes&usg=AFQjCNFKWgepaphQvf2sKsAitt8zfdAm7Q&sig2=0cjbaEreMJhFwW1KSBBzKg>,
makes humans redundant. Temes are grounded in the machine’s *evolution*…
This stuff of sci-fi I shall leave right here.

*The future of the past*

Before addressing the future smart city, I shall first address its past.
Does the retrofitting of cities as smart cities affect their heritage in
any way? Antiquated buildings and streets dot the cityscape across India.
Market areas and places of worship have extraordinary local histories and
linkages that, while not databased, have been a part of the collective and
cultural memory of the place for decades in most cases. These do not have
sensors to measure footfalls and usage, but what they do possess is organic
connections with the cultural space of the locality – unique, distinctive,
and with their own stories often spread across generations. Affective
memories of a place, constructed across generations of users, is a form of
monitoring and social bonding that information will seek to replace in the
smart city.

The construction of Metro transport systems have run into trouble over
their deleterious effects on heritage. The Mission Statement has nothing to
say about the protection of heritage spaces though it is heritage that
renders cities distinctive. Would smartification account for historical
differences and lineages of the city or, through technological
smartification, render them all fungible as soft cities, interchangeable
with each other, like the airports across India today? Whether
smartification would entail the invention of a new genealogy for the city
is a concern heritage specialists might have.

*Technological determinism*

Striking is the Mission Statement’s technological determinism cast as
social-spatial policy. Every square mile of the city will have smart
solutions in the form of sensors and ICT structures that will continuously
record usage and problems – water use, air pollution, amount of garbage
accumulated – and offer solutions already ‘set’ in the databanks.

Writing about urban surveillance after 9/11
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.00473/abstract>, the
sociologist David Lyon remarked: ‘Technological fixes are the common
currency of crisis in late modern societies. They take precedence over
other, more people-centered, policy solutions’. Smart City policy suggests
a reliance on machinic processes and logic rather than human ones, thereby
further eroding the capacities of humans to take decisions. Human decisions
are taken on the basis of a set of values assigned to social problems, and
smart solutions do away with this step, instead proposing that the data
generated will offer a set of pre-determined solutions founded on
algorithmic rather than value- or even ethics-based logic. In a recent
piece on smart cities, MA Siraj quotes Rahul Mehrotra
<http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-propertyplus/smart-but-humane-cities/article7666111.ece>,
chair of the School of Design and Urban Designing at Harvard, who says:
‘they [smart cities] do not consider the human as a part of this equation …
people say a smart city is one that uses technology to create connectivity
and efficiency’. This technological determinism also governs notions of
safety.

The Mission Statement speaks of safety components that include ‘replacing
overhead electric wiring with underground wiring, encroachment-free public
areas’. Given the high rate of pollution, overcrowding of public transport
and streets, the road accidents, none of which are connected to the above
list in the Mission Statement, would it be left to technological devices
and feedback systems to determine safety – for instance crowd control
devices and sensors? If so, do we have any information about the nature and
magnitude of risks involved in the very components of smart cities, like
radiation from ambient sensors, surveillance mechanisms and transmission
towers? Let us not forget that the debate around cellphone towers has not
been closed, and the smart city appears to amplify radiation, of various
kinds, around us through more devices and transmissions.

*Just technology*

Assuming that humans have always co-evolved with technology and that we can
no longer, in the posthuman age, see technology as prosthesis to the body,
there still remains the question of adaptation and self-reinvention of the
human with advances such as the ones the smart city project envisions. This
translates into the divide between digital natives and digital migrants,
the former being those born into the digital era and for whom smart phones,
sensors and haptic technologies are routine, while the latter are members
of an earlier generation who need to *learn* the use of these technologies.
What is the individual and social cost of such a reinvention? And what if
people who are routinely, structurally helpless, such as the infirm and the
old, find it difficult to adapt to the ambient surveillance/sensor climate?
Would their inability to navigate smart meters, smart waste disposal
mechanisms and tele-health services render them more vulnerable and their
actions open to interpretation as ‘suspicious behaviour’ by the machines
monitoring them? This means, effectively, to ask whether smart cities
empower people or force them into models of behaviour and responses?

Would technologically smart cities and spaces be discriminatory or just?
Are efficiency and productivity the sole social concerns? Or can technology
be utilized to make society more inclusive? These questions are essentially
not about technology *per* *se* as much as about responsible and inclusive
innovation. If, as the Mission Statement claims, ‘smartification’ would be
participatory then there is a possibility that inputs about socially just
and desirable outcomes of innovation might be taken seriously. This is
where the next key concern arises.

*From function creep to surveillance*
[image: Credit: Eduard V. Kurganov/Flickr CC 2.0]
<http://i2.wp.com/128.199.141.55/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/8966893120_1e06b211a6_k.jpg>

Credit: Eduard V. Kurganov/Flickr CC 2.0

Research on smart cities in Europe and elsewhere indicates that these are
data-intensive spaces
<http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/66/9/10.1063/PT.3.2110>,
and therefore surveillance structures dominate the cityscape
<http://spp.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/6/717.abstract>. With every
aspect of everyday life being monitored by ambient sensors and
data-gathering devices, the anxiety over any smart city’s information
architecture is two-fold: what privacy policies, if any, are to be drawn up
before the execution of the project and who owns and/or has access to the
data collected?

Data gathered in any one domain might be used by powers and authorities in
another domain.

‘Function creep’ is the appropriation of data ostensibly gathered for one
purpose but employed for entirely different purposes. For instance, if the
smart meter records water usage in a household and then the company sells
this data to suppliers of purified water, this is function creep – a
consequence of the intensified surveillance culture of smart cities.

The intensified surveillance put in place by smart machines redefines the
use of space but has consequences for the human *users* of space.

Surveillance is a part of late 20th century’s ‘splintering urbanism’
<http://www1.caminos.upm.es/sic/files/04_seminarios/1_Sem/05/descargas/6_Splintering%20urbanismGraham%20and%20Marvin.pdf>.
It generates interdictory spaces where the mobility of people is controlled
through legal, state or corporate provisions that determine the use of
space. Interdictory spaces are produced by surveillance in which an
individual’s use of space is mediated through multiple processes of
monitoring and identification. With sensors, barriers demanding RFID tags
and CCTVs, they have to be experienced and negotiated by individuals in
particular, legitimate ways – or else run they the risk of being reported
for suspicious behaviour. In other words, these spaces are modes of social
sorting and of governance in the guise of efficiency, safety and
productivity. One’s subjectivity as a citizen is contingent upon a
practised or naïve, seamless or bumbling navigation of a host of devices,
paths and processes
<http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/sociology/political-sociology/citizenship-and-identity-age-surveillance>
in that space. With smart machines and surveillance mechanisms in place,
behaviour that is not identical or predictable will likely be seen as
suspect.

It should be evident, then, that Smart Cities might offer one set of
technologically determined solutions to human and social problems. But
numerous questions need to be answered and policy guidelines put in place
as safeguards, unless we have decided that we can all be posthuman now.

*Pramod K. Nayar is a Professor at the **University of Hyderabad*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup_mail.sarai.net/attachments/20151018/7edfaced/attachment-0001.html>