Rethinking smartness

  • Like many metropolitan centers around the world, Berlin aspires to be a "smart city." Making a city smart usually involves constructing a dense net of sensors, often embedded in and around more traditional infrastructures throughout the urban environment, such as transportation systems, electrical grids, and water systems. The process also requires the city to solicit the distributed input of its inhabitants through active technological means, such as smart phone apps. Finally, the city employs high-end computing and learning algorithms to analyze the resulting data, with the goal of optimizing urban technical, social, and political processes. Yet, perhaps counterintuitively, a smart city is not synonymous with a utopian - or even a specific - form of the city, which would then remain stable for the foreseeable future. In this sense, the smart city is quite unlike utopian cities as they were imagined in the past, when it was presumed that a specific form - such as Le Corbusier's "Radiant City" or the concentric circles of Ebenezer Howard's garden cities - would enable a specific goal, such as integration of humans into natural processes, or economic growth, or an increase in collective happiness, or democratic political participation. Rather, a city is "smart" when it achieves the capacity to adjust to any new and unexpected threats and possibilities that may emerge from the city's ecological, political, social, and economic environments (a capacity that is generally referred to in planning documents with the term "resilience"). In short, a smart city is a site of perpetual learning, and a city is smart when it achieves the capacity to engage in perpetual learning.

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Metadaten
Author:Orit HalpernORCiDGND, Robert MitchellGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-720561
URL:https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2023/02/07/orit-halpern-robert-mitchell-rethinking-smartness/
DOI:https://doi.org/10.13151/zfl-blog/20230207-01
ISSN:2748-5072
Parent Title (German):ZfL Blog : Blog des Leibniz-Zentrums für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin
Series (Serial Number):ZfL Blog : Blog des Leibniz-Zentrums für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin (07.02.2023)
Publisher:Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin
Place of publication:Berlin
Document Type:Part of Periodical
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2023/02/07
Date of first Publication:2023/02/07
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2023/02/08
GND Keyword:Smart City; Stadtplanung; Neoliberalismus; Maschinelles Lernen
Volume:2023
Issue:07.02.2023
Page Number:4
First Page:1
Last Page:4
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 30 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie / 300 Sozialwissenschaften
8 Literatur / 80 Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft / 800 Literatur und Rhetorik
Sammlungen:CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft / Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin
Zeitschriften / Jahresberichte:ZfL Blog : Blog des Leibniz-Zentrums für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung-Nicht kommerziell-Keine Bearbeitung 3.0