Happy Nice Mall

What’s interesting about both early and current visions of urban sensing networks and the use that can be made from the data they generate is how close they are to Constant’s concept of what such technologies will bring, and yet how far apart. Technological images of the new Babylon were a vision of a smart city immortality It’s been marked by large-scale data extraction to drive revenue streams through everything from parking and shopping to healthcare and utility monitoring. New Babylon was decidedly anti-capitalist; It was shaped by the belief that widespread and conscious technologies will one day free us from the heavy burden of labor.

War and sensors

Doomsday news from Mariupol, Kharkiv, Izium, Kherson and Kyiv since February 2022 seems far from IBM’s smart urbanism. After all, smart sensors and advanced machine learning algorithms can’t match the brute force of the unguided “dumb bombs” raining down on Ukrainian city centres. But these gruesome images from smoldering cities should also remind us that historically, these sensor networks and systems themselves derive from the context of war.

Unbeknownst to Constant, the “environmental” technologies he envisioned to enable the new player city were actually emerging at the time his vision was taking shape – from Cold War-based research at the US Department of Defense. This work culminated during the Vietnam War, when the U.S. Army dropped nearly 20,000 battery-powered wireless acoustic sensors and furthered General William Westmoreland’s vision to stop supply chains flowing from north to south along the Ho Chi Minh Road. real or near real-time surveillance of any kind.” In fact, what the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) would later refer to as “network-centric warfare” was the result of billions of dollars in funding to support distributed wireless network development research at MIT and Carnegie Mellon, among other elite US universities. sensor networks—technology that now provides “more lethal” power for the military’s smartest technology.

MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES

It is well known that technologies originally developed by DARPA, the renowned organization responsible for “catalyzing the development of technologies that preserve and enhance the capabilities and technical superiority of the US military” (as a congressional report put it), have been successfully repurposed. civilian use While technologies such as Siri, dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and micro hard disk are now features of everyday life, ARPANET has finally become the Internet. What is less well known is that DARPA-funded technologies also end up in the smart city: GPS, smart lighting systems, and mesh networks for power grids, and chemical, biological, and radiological sensors, including genetically engineered plants that can detect threats. This link between smart cities and military research is very active today. For example, a new DARPA research program called CASCADE (Complex Adaptive System Composition and Design Environment) clearly contrasts “manned and unmanned aerial vehicles” that “share data and resources in real time” through connections over wireless networks, and “critical infrastructure systems” of smart cities – “water, energy, transport, communication and cyber”. He states that they both apply mathematical techniques of complex dynamical systems. A DARPA tweet makes this connection more provocative: “What do smart cities and air warfare have in common? The need for complex, adaptive networks.”

Both of these visions—the battlefield equipped with sensors and the instrumented, interconnected, smart city made possible by the technologies of distributed sensing and big data mining—seem to lack a central component: human bodies, whether they are the first things that must always be sacrificed. on the battlefield or data extraction machines of smart technologies.

Spaces and environments equipped with sensor networks can now detect environmental changes such as light, temperature, humidity, sound or motion moving in a space. In this sense, networks are like bodies in that they are aware of the changing environmental conditions around them—measuring, discriminating, and responding to these changes. But what about real people? Do we have any other role in the smart city other than to serve as viable data stores for us? In his 1980 book Daily Life PracticeJesuit social historian Michel de Certeau suggested that resistance to the “heavenly eye” of power from above must be met by “ordinary cultivators of the city” living “below”.

When we assume that data is more important than the people who created it, we reduce the scope and potential of what various human bodies can bring to the “smart city” of today and tomorrow. But the true “smart” city isn’t just made up of goods flows and information networks that generate revenue streams for the likes of Cisco or Amazon. Intelligence comes from diverse human bodies of different genders, cultures and classes, whose rich, complex and even fragile identities ultimately make the city what it is.

Chris Salter is an artist and professor of immersive arts at the University of the Arts Zurich. his newest book, Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our Daily LivesJust published by MIT Press.