
The Case for 'Dumb' Cities - mitchbob
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/opinion/smart-cities.html
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hyperion2010
The proliferation of 'smart-' things is the equivalent of deferring everything
to runtime, and throwing out design and planning and replacing it with a
reactive (or perhaps more accurately reactionary) approach.

Interpreted languages are nice, but compiled languages have enormous
advantages, especially when problems are well understood. City planning, the
design of public spaces, thoughtful zoning, etc. is like the compiler. If you
want an efficient city, you probably don't want it to only run as an
interpreter.

Somehow this evokes the depths of American anti-intellectualism for me. "We
don't need to understand anything, we can just measure it and then understand
it!" without so much as a pause to wonder whether an understanding of the
problem might already exist in such a way that it can be incorporated into the
design, and further, that if you don't already understand 'it' then there is a
good chance that you will end up building a device that measures the wrong
things and that you can't change easily.

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bobthepanda
Cities are chaotic, complex creatures. Anyone who claims to understand them is
more or less just working from the gut; and anyone who claims to "solve" them
via technology, planning, or otherwise is fooling themselves.

The history of city planning is littered with failed examples. In America,
freeing everyone from the vapors by separating them in the free, open
countryside mostly led to people being trapped in their cars in traffic
because they had to drive to get anywhere. Demolishing slums and shoving
everyone into spacious housing projects mostly led to isolation and
ghettoisation. And even the mere act of requiring parking has separated
everything with inhospitable parking lots, making it a requirement to drive to
do anything.

Arguably the most successful large cities did very well with low amounts of
planning; Manhattan's famous grid was literally imaginary roads plotted onto a
map, without a care for what would fill in the gaps. Planned cities are like
the manicured lawn; they look pretty but they don't really support any actual
life. The wilderness is chaotic and messy but it supports incredible
biodiversity.

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hyperion2010
I agree completely. Planned communities (top down?) have failed repeatedly
(for a variety of reasons). The kind of planning and design I am talking about
is the design of local rules (bottom up?), such as the order in which you put
cars, parked cars, bycicles (and friends), and peds. Another example would be
about the zoning around university campuses and how they interact, or don't
with public transportation. The difference between US vs EU for these two
cases and the results of the differences is quite revealing.

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em-bee
in other words, designing a smart city is actually just as much top-down as
any planned community. and what we really need is for each community to decide
for themselves which technology they pick to improve their lives

~~~
notfromhere
desire paths, but for urban planning. Plus, the whole development model since
post-ww2 has basically been a veiled ponzi scheme

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scottishcow
The author makes a rather arbitrary distinction between "dumb" and "smart"
technologies - trains are now considered "dumb" technology? I live in Tokyo
and that was never my impression, they're as smart as it gets and the
infrastructure is constantly being updated with new tech as we speak. (My
brother works for Japan Railways btw.)

It's as if the author (with a background in civil engineering not CS) deems
everything that she has a good understanding of as "dumb", and everything
she's relatively unfamiliar with as "smart", i.e., useless. While I'm no fan
of projects like Google Quayside and wary of increasing corporate influence on
urban policy, you can't point fingers at fringe ideas like smart garbage cans
and use that to outright dismiss the role of IT in urbanism; we don't browse
through weputachipinit [1] and conclude that all IoT is worthless do we. If
she can look into things like Japan's earthquake notification system [2] and
still claim that "smart" solutions don't add value to cities, then we can
talk.

[1] [https://weputachipinit.tumblr.com](https://weputachipinit.tumblr.com)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_\(Japan\))

Perhaps I'm biased by my own experience here in Tokyo, but I feel that a lot
of criticism against smart cities - while not at all without merit - smack of
civil engineers, urban planners, architects and the like claiming territorial
rights, attempting to keep "outsiders" like IT people stepping onto what has
traditionally been their turf. We need less of such feudal mentality, and more
interdisciplinary collaboration; more urbanists need to start speaking the
language of IT and vice versa.

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_Nat_
I completely get that it's entirely normal for people to get anxious about
changing science, technology, and societal norms. And I also appreciate that,
as the rate of change increases, we should expect to see greater anxiety from
a larger segment of the population.

But, I have to say that I'm somewhat surprised to see even folks in the tech
industry arguing against the current pace of advancement.

Obligatory SMBC: [https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/future](https://www.smbc-
comics.com/comic/future)

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clydethefrog
See also Rethinking the Smart City by (Silicon Valley's infamous detractor)
Evgeny Morozov and Francesca Bria.

[https://onlineopen.org/media/article/583/open_essay_2018_mor...](https://onlineopen.org/media/article/583/open_essay_2018_morozov_rethinking.pdf)

