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UBIKQUITY & THE ILLUMINATED CITY TIMMEREN HENRIQUEZ REYNOLDS
Ubikquity &
the Illuminated City
From Smart to Intelligent Urban Environments
Written by Prof.dr.ir. Arjan van Timmeren and Laurence Henriquez
Designed by Alexandra Reynolds
1
UBIKQUITY AND THE ILLUMINATED CITY
From Smart to Intelligent Urban Environments.
Authors:
Arjan van Timmeren
Laurence Henriquez
Designed by:
Alexandra Reynolds
1 st edition 1800 copies

2 nd edition 1200 copies
TU Delft publication
Printed on 100g white FSC Mix Credit
This book is the basis of the Foundation Day Lecture ‘Intelligent Cities. Moving
Forward’, for the 173rd Dies Natalis of the Delft University of Technology, TU
Delft, as delivered on Friday 9 January 2015 by Arjan van Timmeren.
Delft University of Technology (TUD)

Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment
Department Urbanism
Chair Environmental Technology & Design
P.O. Box 5043 2600 GA Delft The Netherlands
www.etd.bk.tudelft.nl
ISBN 978-94-6186-417-8
Legal Notice: The publisher and editors have attempted to identify the owners of all
published photos and illustrations and have listed them in the index figures. Copyright
holders who nevertheless want to assert copyright claims are kindly requested to contact
the authors.
The information and views set out in this booklet are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the official opinion of Delft University of Technology. Neither the Delft
University of Technology nor the authors may be held responsible for the use which may be
made of the information contained therein.
2
You are Ubik.
Before the universe was,
you were.
You made the suns.
You made the worlds.
You created the lives
and the places they inhabit;
you move them here,
you put them there.
They go as you say,
then do as you tell them.
You are the word
and your name is never spoken,
the name which no one knows.
You are called Ubik,
but that is not your name.
You are.
You shall always be.
3
06 10 Rise and Collapse of Cities
I n t rod uc tion 13 From Nations to Cities
16
23 Environmental Status Quo
U rb a n ization 24 Limits to Urban Growth
i n c risis
28
N e t work ed 32 Wicked Problems
E n v i ronmen ts
36
U b i kq uity
44
49 Capital-biased Technical Change
T e c h no-
52 Competitive Cities and Crobos
A u s t erity
64 Smart versus Intelligent

58 67 Smart Solutions for Dumb Designs
Ri s e of th e 69 The Internet of Things
s m a rt cities 74 A World of Opportunities
76 Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up
88
Is something
rotten in the 92 Public Investment & Research Funding go ‘Smart’
state of
denmark?
98
Digital divides 102 Plutocratisation
and elite 106 The ‘Right to Infrastructure’
enclaves
110
Give us your 115 Rise of Algorithms and ‘The End of Theory’
data and we’ll 119 Predictive Policing Technology
give you a 121 Every Technology Encodes a Hypothesis
techno-utopia
124
Liberté, 129 Limiting Innovation
Prédictivité,
Uniformité
132
Acceleration 136 Control and Trust
towards cloud
feudalism
153 From Urban Consumers to Smart Citizens

146 156 Agonism and Creativity
I lluminated 159 Digital Democracy & Participatory Urban Planning
c i ties 167 Renegotiating our User Privacy Agreement
168 Interoperability and Open Source
01
In tr od uct i o n
8
Introduction
What was it
that nudged Homo sapiens sapiens, very wise (hu)man as it were, from our
humble origins as dispersed bands of bigheaded, somewhat organized,
yet perpetually hungry hunter-gathers scarping existence wherever the
lumbering woolly herds took us to the present apotheosis of Homo economicus?
Homo economicus, that clever mammalian species whose rarefied penchant for
social organization, technological innovation and self-interest has created
the monolithically obtuse socio-political-economic system that, for better or
worse, now commandeers nearly half the land surface of the Earth and the
oceans for its increasingly divergent and exponentially growing needs. Was
it divine intervention? Or was it pure dumb luck? Nothing can be proven
with absolute certainty as the abyss of prehistory has a tendency of obscuring
the truth, but one should probably start about 6000-4000 years ago when
humanity began to establish permanent settlements in the six (known) cradles
of civilization.
Those lucky enough to find themselves in these unique regions blessed with
fertile soil, temperate climate, and bountiful sources of freshwater established
settlements whose inhabitants utilized primitive agricultural techniques to
domesticate and selectively breed flora and fauna. In time, rapid advancements
in agriculture, metallurgy and irrigation created a sufficiently productive
economy, leading to surplus of food and population growth, the sin qua non
of urban existence1. These developments necessitated greater sophistication
of social organization that afforded a privileged stratum of society—artisans,
traders, government and religious officials—to centralize political will,
economic power, technological innovation and culture magnetism around
9
Ubikquity & the Illuminated City
the first recognizable iterations of

what could be described as cities2.
Rise and Collapse of Cities
Hovels along the Nile, Tigris,

Euphrates, Indus and Yellow Rivers
flourished into our first urban
agglomerations as surplus food,
goods, tools, and new and improved
modes of mobility created room for
commerce and trade. Expansion
of trade demanded technological
innovation, record keeping and
proper infrastructures like barriers,
defensive walls, roads, carts, boats
and harbors to facilitate growth. The
maintenance and production of these
goods, services and infrastructures
attracted those from the surrounding
hinterlands with the prospect of
protection, jobs and opportunities.
The self-reinforcing feedback loop
of urban growth, fluxes in labor, and
migration from hinterlands to urban
areas and the reciprocity between
cities, hinterlands, culture and nature3 to 2000 BCE had a population above
put strains on natural resources and 80,000. Limits to agriculture, natural
the infrastructures of city-states as resources, water and transportation
their economies were still primarily technology meant that cities had to be
agrarian, forcing them to increase planned within walking distance and
their sphere of influence or suffer inside the perimeter of its defensive
eventual collapse. walls. And if city size increased too
much, new cities were created in
To be sure, levels of urbanization the periphery near other hotspots of
at the time were extremely low and (physical) essential goods.
wealth inequality extremely high, with
cities reserved for only the elite of the Throughout the millennia cities
elite and their retinue. None of the prospered, but eventually, political,
smattering of cities that existed prior economic, social and cultural factors,
10
Introduction
Mohenjo-daro,
one of the first and larg-
est urban settlements in
the ancient world, had a
population no larger than
40,000 in an area between
85 to 200 hectares. It’s im-
portant to understand that
resource scarcity and climate change led this city was the capital of
to their collapse4. While populations the Indus Valley Civiliza-
tion, which at its height in
migrated between hinterlands and
2600 BCE had a population
urban areas like a displaced pendulum, of 5 million and covered
as empires and the cultures that created an area of 1.5 million km 2.
them expanded and then disappeared into That means it was the city
annals of history, the general factors that of the .008 percent, never
sustain and constrain urban prosperity mind the 1 percent!
have remained the same to this very day.
It was not until 19th century in

Western Europe that quantum leaps
in innovation brought about by the
industrial revolution allowed urban areas
11
> urban growth is still

checked by more or less
the same biophysical
factors as our ancestors
to transcend traditional barriers to growth. Revolutionary forms of production

such as machine run factories were powered first by wood—that is, until it ran
out. At the time, manpower, animal power and the use of wind and water no
longer sufficed as sources of energy for industrial activities. As a result, rampant
clear-cutting of forests lead to what some scholars consider Europe’s first ‘energy
crisis’. This was one of the major factors behind the German Confederation’s
implementation of the nachhaltiges bauen in the 18th century, one of the first
national efforts to reforest Europe and considered by some as the origin of
sustainability as we know it today5. The energy crisis was eventually remediated
by mining coal on a large scale, thus increasing productivity by magnitudes.
This marks the first inflection point in human history in which the majority
of society began to live in urban areas, allowing true urbanization to take hold as
cities began to expand above and beyond the capacities of local natural fallback
systems that once restricted their size. Acclaimed ecologist Eugene Odum correctly
observed that, “current cities are parasites that, unlike successful parasites in
nature, have not evolved mutual aid relationships with their life-support host
landscape that prevent the parasite from killing off its host and thereby itself6,7.”
In time, the buzzing factories that signaled the imminent death of agrarian man
were met by the steel tendrils of railroads connecting once isolated communities
in their wake as they slithered across continents. Strata of telegraph wires, roads
and bridges eventually created a plexus of technologies that quilted the earth as
the electrification of civilization began to illuminate and eventually consume the
starlight nights of our forefathers. Our greatest asset apart from our clever minds
are the bountiful supplies of cheap energy we use derived from the billions of
life forms whose matter was converted into useful hydrocarbons over the eons
(coal, oil, natural gas, etc.), substances abundant enough to power the innovations
that have lifted billions from poverty and starvation yet still scarce enough to
demarcate geopolitical conflicts.
12
Introduction
From Nations to Cities

In 2015, Homo economicus has created a sight to behold. Today, two dominant
themes in the urbanization debate acknowledge that firstly, networks have
become the driving forces of urban development and that the scale and complexity
of these networks are growing at an accelerated pace. Secondly, they observe that
the increased public awareness of environmental issues is drawing considerable
attention to the—either conflicting or potentially synergic—relationship between
nature and urban spaces8. Cities in the developed world that have benefited from
long standing planning policies have an urban form which, to a degree, separates
the built environment from natural areas such as nature parks and recreation
areas9. This kind of design and planning has also reserved multi-purpose green
parks as a response to the environmental challenges. Due to rapid urbanization,
in many developing countries such a clear separation doesn’t exist. Whilst there
is no universally agreed upon definition, an ‘urban area’ is generally understood
as a continuously built-up area with a total population of between 2,000 and
40 million people living at a density of around 1,000 per square kilometer and
employed primarily in non-agricultural activities (the appendices to the 2007
revision of the UN World Urbanization Prospects summarize such criteria from
around the world, while the 38.7 million limitation was estimated then to be the
population of the world’s largest city, Tokyo, in 2025)10.
Urban environments are the basis of the anthrosphere: a collection of 196

nation-states with a population of 7 billion and counting that adhere to a globalized
neoliberal economic system geared towards perpetual growth, despite the fact it
consumes 50 percent more resources than the planet can sustainably replenish.
Additionally, local and municipal governments are increasingly offloading key
infrastructural development to multinational corporations, some of which have
more assets than many of the countries in the world. To be sure, of the 100 largest
economic entities on earth 41 are corporations11. The backdrop of the drama
of modernity will be the estimated 60012 ‘global cities’ that concentrate the vast
majority of capital, talent, creativity and industry, so much so that it is not so
farfetched to imagine an atavistic future where society is run not by nations, but a
highly interconnected network of ‘denationalized’ city-states13,14. This might also
include a few corporately-owned, artificial archipelagoes that allow Silicon Valley
venture capitalists and their tech companies to do as please without the nuisances
of international law as they sail around the world in international waters15.
Modern life is defined by its thoroughgoing commitment to the new or, more
precisely, endless process of renewal16. Since the new must always be renewed,
something like planned obsolescence is intrinsic. Rapid population growth,
13
Ubikquity and IntelligenCITIES
> Man-Made CATASTROPHES

in the modern era are
less localized than ever
before
urbanization, economic inequality, political austerity, resource scarcity, climate

change and the specter of planetary-scale computation may lead to unpredictable
cascading effects as natural and man-made catastrophes in the modern era tend to
be less localized than ever before. This is due to the fact that the mere movement
of people inside and in-between cities depends on a number of technological
infrastructures that are integrated at the global scale and used extensively and
simultaneously by humanity, such as electricity grids, telecommunication networks,
water networks, energy networks, railway networks, road networks and the
Internet. While our technological cleverness might give us an edge in tackling these
interrelated and compounding crises, urban growth is still checked by more or less
the same biophysical factors as our ancestors. In a way though, the element of crisis
14
<<
Cars swept through the streets
of Manhattan in the aftermath of
Superstorm Sandy (2012)
and our attempts to escape its grasp—or cause it, depending on what side of the
sword you are on—has been with us since the genesis of civilization and can
interpreted as one of the few evolutionary forces of (human) nature that we have
yet to overcome.
In an effort to combat these issues, among others, the ‘smart’ city imaginary
has been proposed by policymakers and private industry as a panacea to urban
problems. In their eyes, information and communication technology (ICT) can
be used to make cities more efficient, environmentally sustainable, economically
attractive and socially inclusive. Considering the threat of the near-term
extinction of our species, any discourse that claims to offer such wide-ranging
benefits deserves a thorough investigation.
15
“ Ifachievements
we expect the extraordinary
of human
culture to survive, we have to
drastically change our
self-destructive patterns. ”
16
Urbanization in Crisis
02
URBANI ZATION
in CRI S IS
17
18
<< Rocinha is the largest favela (shanty town)

in Brazil. It lies on the hills surrounding Rio
de Janeiro
Our dominance
over most of the planet stems from attitudes towards the ontology nature, its
seemingly infinite bounty, and our relationship with the planet itself. This has
resulted in the begrudgingly dominant perspective of the ‘make-ability’ of the
environment17. If we expect the extraordinary achievements of human culture
and its myriad urbanisms to survive we will have to drastically change some
of our more self-destructive patterns. This must result in behavioral changes
towards one another as well as a shift in our understanding of the relationship
between the built and natural environment and the mutuality of their material
and information flows3. But let’s be honest, gross self-interest, fecklessness and
greed have never been our most lauded virtues. Just like in ages past, modern
cities are still highly dependent upon the built and natural environments of their
surrounding hinterlands and a complex network of infrastructures and mobility
for supplying materials, energy, and disposing of waste3.
The main difference now is that the auspice of technology and the highly
interconnected nature and demands of the global economy have allowed cities
to transcend the resource capacity of its surrounding hinterlands, requiring
material inputs from far-flung localities and financing through obscure fiscal
mechanisms that lie only within the imaginaries of stock market traders and
laissez-faire economists. For example, the densely populated metropolis of Hong
Kong depends almost exclusively on imported goods from around the world to
meet its material and energy demands. The average citizen consumes about 3.7
hectares of terrestrial and marine ecosystems annually, resulting in Hong Kong
relying on an area over 2200 times its size to sustain itself18. The inflows that stay
in the urban areas become part of the urban ecosystem in the form of landfills,
wastewater treatment plants and physical infrastructure19 while the outflows are
19
an U rban E x o d u s
There is an apparent paradox, as for instance in São Paulo (BR),
between the population decentralization processes underway
and the inertia of the migratory trajectories that continue to feed
its significant number of immigrants. “The big issue is that the
flexibility of the migratory trajectories, especially those originating
in the Northeast conform to the narrow limits imposed by regional
and social imbalances of contemporary Brazilian society” 20 . The
Metropolitan Region of São Paulo, nonetheless, deserves special
mention for its negative net migration, caused by continued
population decentralization toward the interior of São Paulo. The
interstate migration is almost completely offset by emigration,
primarily of return. The great urban crisis, with its lack of economic
and social opportunities, with the inherent social and spatial
segregation and social conflicts, eventually leads migrants to
the countryside or to other states, leaving more capital than the
metropolitan periphery. The migratory capacity of retention of
capital has declined significantly and is far from recovering. Many
people have migrated from São Paulo to Campo Grande (the young
capital of Mato Grosso do Sul) and also Florianopolis (the paradisiac
capital of the State of Santa Catarina). Additionally, an increased
amount of professionals have left São Paulo for the less developed
yet rapidly growing region of Nordeste because of increased job
opportunities and higher quality of life there in terms of access to
the nature and lower levels of traffic congestion and air pollution.
Regardless, people still continue to commute to São Paulo and other

megapolises for work, family and access to urban amenities. One of
the conclusions of the Brazil’s 2010 Census was that middle-sized
cities are the great “vedetes” (Portuguese saying) of urban growth.
Small cities are too dull and lack economic vitality, while huge cities
in Brazil are becoming increasingly unlivable 21 .
20
C I T I E S T H AT
SHRUNK
Cidades que encolheram
This map shows the change in the

total population of each municipality
in Brazil between 2000 and 2013
Increased Decreased Founded after

2000
21
P o siti o ns O F
Resistance
2014 saw an upsurge in protests
and demonstrations that advo-
cated for global action against
climate change. The People’s
Climate March in New York City
had over 311,000 participants
and involved over 1,500 schools,
NGOs, churches, and community
and environmental justice orga-
nizations, making it the largest
climate change march in history.
Top: New York City, 2014

Right: Washington D.C., 2013
Bottom: London, 2014
22
exported back to the hinterlands and distant localities as pollutants and consumer
products. Some studies and scientific fields like industrial ecology have framed
these material and energy inflows and outflows as a city’s ‘urban metabolism’.
Furthermore, many mega cities with over 10 million inhabitants have

reached their growth limit, leading to an increased migration to smaller cities and
suburbs nearby.
ENVIRONMENTAL STATUS QUO
At an annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in 2012, Brad

Werner, a pink-haired complex systems scientist from the University of
California-San Diego, had a much buzzed about session that was aptly titled, “Is
Earth F**ked? : Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and
Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”. Stripping through the
esoteric terminology and methods of complex systems theory, his model showed
that global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient
and barrier-free that ‘earth-human systems’ are becoming dangerously unstable
as a result22. Rather than being led by his research into activism or creating a
model with any preconceived ideological notions, his results are part a growing
trend within the climate science community calling for increasingly radical
and potentially revolutionary solutions, such as a switch from Value Added
Tax (VAT) to Carbon Added Tax (CAT)23, to combat climate change. Werner
concludes that his model shows that ‘positions of resistance’ taken from outside
the dominant culture—as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous
peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups—offer the best chance of
altering our business-as-usual path.
The alarming realties of climate change, biodiversity loss and resource

scarcity might at this point seem quite banal to reiterate for even the somewhat
news literate, but it cannot be stressed enough. The number of wild animals on
earth has halved in only 50 years24. The latest IPCC report has concluded with
95 percent certainty that humans are the main culprit behind climate change,
and if we continue to release greenhouse gasses at current rates (not including
potential future increases) there will be an inevitable warming of 1.6°C to 2.6°C
within the next two to three decades and a 2.6°C and 4.8°C by 2100 compared
to 2013 baseline temperatures. The vast majority of cities being situated along
coastal areas or deltas will put 60 percent of the global population at risk from
rising sea levels. While only covering about 2 percent of the earth’s crust, cities
consume about 75 percent of the world’s energy resources and produce 80 percent
23
of greenhouse gas emissions25. Conversely, urban citizens, especially in developed

countries, have carbon footprints that are up to 40 percent smaller than their rural or
suburban counterparts3. Studies by the International Institute for Environment and
Development and the Brookings Institute have calculated that the carbon footprint
of the average Londoner was approximately half that of the average Briton’s, while a
Sao Paolo resident produced just 18% of the average Brazilian’s carbon emissions26.
This indicates that cities are the locus of the problems and possibly—though it
might be extremely difficult to pull off—the solution to alleviating the affects of
anthropogenic climate change.
The level of trust between nations to combat climate change has come into
question as climate summits in Kyoto, Rio and Copenhagen have indicated that
the willingness to put the environment before economic concerns is extremely
low27. Cities, on the other hand, have taken the lead on tackling climate change
with organizations like the international C40 group and the Dutch Platform31. The
C40 group publishes the sustainability goals and accompanying projects of 40 cities
from around the world. For example, Buenos Aires aims to reduce emissions by a
third by 2030 while Madrid and Chicago want to cut emissions by 50 percent and 80
percent respectively by 205028. Words, ambitions and the setting of goals aren’t the
problem—it’s the lack of sustained political follow through.
LIMITS TO URBAN GROWTH
54 percent of the earth’s 7 billion human inhabitants currently reside in cities.

By midcentury, the UN projects that world population and urbanization rates are to
increase to 9.3 billion and 66 percent respectively, approaching the actual average
densities found in Europe (where in 2010 over 68% of the Europeans live in cities
)29. Driven by soaring levels of economic prosperity, 95 percent of urban growth
from this point on will occur in emerging markets found in Africa, Asia, and South
America where the combined urban population is expected to reach 5.3 billion by
2050. By this time, 63 percent of the global urban population will be living in Asia
and 25 percent will be living in Africa26.
While economic growth over the last 20 years has cut extreme poverty rates
by half worldwide, developing countries are beginning to go through many of the
same urban problems experienced by Western countries during the 19th century30.
The golden age of industry-led economic expansion, urban squalor and wealth
inequality that inspired the classic novels Les Misérables and Oliver Twist has in some
ways been exported to developing economies where wages are lower and workers
rights and environmental laws are more leniently applied. Rates of migration to
24
BY M I D C E N T URY
2 B I L L I O N PEOPLE
I N D E V E LOP IN G
C O U N TR I E S W ILL
B E LI V I NG IN
I N F O R MAL
S ET T L EM E N TS
>> Kibera is the largest slum in Nairobi, and the largest urban slum in all of Africa
25
> Cities accelerate economic

transformation because of their intense
population density, which encourages
social and economic interactions with
greater ‘social friction’ than non-urban
settings
>> San Francisco residents protesting Google’s buses, which sometimes

block municipal buses from following their designated routes.
26
cities in emerging markets are much higher than their infrastructures can handle,
leading to a lack of proper housing, high levels of traffic congestion, poor air
quality, inadequate sewage systems, water treatment and insufficient presence of
law enforcement. Despite these trends, certain advantages exist for developing
countries over developed ones: fast-growing cities in developing economies
can skip developmental phases by immediately implementing renewable energy
technologies and ‘smart’ infrastructure. Countries in the global north on the other
hand are experiencing a much tougher transition because existing infrastructures
are already of a relatively high quality, much less sustainable and difficult to
retrofit31.
Imbalances between labor and the availability of housing can result in both
suburbanization and gentrification, indicating that it is indeed possible for cities
to experience the aforementioned problems associated with economic growth
and urban decay (degeneration of housing stock and infrastructure, a loss of
population, tax base and economic activity) simultaneously. For this reason,
it is predicted that by midcentury 2 billion people in developing countries will
be living in informal settlements32. In some developing economies and mega-
cities, like São Paulo, urbanization has already taken hold, while established
urban agglomerations found throughout Europe and the US are expected to
grow until about 2025. Urban morphology within this context tends to lean
towards polycentric structures. Despite experiencing slow economic growth
and a tightening of national budgets because of economic austerity, wealth,
infrastructure and technical expertise are expected to help the west better cope
with future uncertainties more effectively as they arise. Ultimately, all cities
are looking for ways to increase the qualities of their urban ingenuity33. Cities
accelerate economic transformation because of their intense population density,
which encourages social and economic interactions with greater ‘social friction’
than non-urban settings. Cities need metropolitan solutions and networked
environments. Moreover, they can help each other by forging knowledge sharing
networks.
27
“ Civilization advances by extending

the number of important operations
which we can perform without
thinking about them. ”
Alfred Whitehead
28
Networked Environments
03
Networ k e d
E n v ironme nt s
29
30
<< A (partial) map of the internet as it was in

2005. Each node represents an IP address,
and the lines between the nodes indicate
the delay between the two addresses.
As cities grow
in complexity and their infrastructures become more networked, they invariably
become increasingly integral to the functioning of daily life of city dwellers
and, most importantly, fragile to disruptive systemic changes. Therefore, the
planning of their forms and services must adapt to the needs of present and future
urban dwellers as well as predicted shifts in environmental baseline conditions.
Systems thinking as it is applied in urbanism and smart cities is a considerable
branch of what has been addressed to as ‘Complexity Theories of Cities’34 and
the ‘new science of cities’35. The systems thinking approach presents problems
of complexity as more than issues of efficiency or their most obvious causes and
effects and reframes it into the language of relations, structures, meta processes,
and even humanistic concerns.
While thinking in systems is useful in understanding the formal structural

characteristics of complex (urban) systems, by itself it holds little regard for the
environmental implications of networks and the role and use of data driven
change. As a consequence, it may be argued that the predominant view that
the built environment and nature are diametrically opposed entities drastically
increases the vulnerability of urban environments in face of unforeseen shocks36.
The challenge, however, is not in stopping disruptive changes—a task that has
repeatedly proven to be impossible—but in understanding them as they occur and,
ultimately, improving the capacity of urban environments to adapt and assimilate
disruptions as a combined urban-natural system in dynamic equilibrium3.
Considering the increase in weather perturbations resulting from climate

change, our constantly increasing demand for energy, water and material
resources and predictions that the planet is entering a period of scarcity, responses
31
to disruptive change, vulnerability, complexity and dependence are essential to

planning future urban growth3. Massive population growth and increased rates
of urbanization over the past two centuries have contributed to the increased
frequency and magnitude of ecological, economic and social shocks encountered
by today’s urban environments. The full extent of the consequences of these
shocks is even today difficult to determine. The major stressors in life, especially
in anxiogenic situations, are uncontrollability and unpredictability37. A typical
counter-reaction to these stressors is an attempt to gain a sense of control and
predictability through the (usually unconscious) establishment of safety rituals
in the form strictly practiced emergency routines (e.g. evacuation procedures)39.
However, these kinds of ideas have only recently entered the core of public
and scientific discourses. This new attention reflects the fact that several recent
crisis events, such as consecutive record hot summers in the US and Europe,
droughts throughout the American Southwest, Africa, South America, and
Australia, and the harrowing levels of smog that encase Chinese cities in the
winter have brought to the fore complex environmental issues scarcely studied
before and for which society is not really well prepared. On the other hand, the
processes of globalization, urbanization and the consequent rise of trans-national
urban networks enhanced by the proliferation of information and communication
technologies (ICT) illustrates the strong interdependencies between various
sectors of society and the economies of the global north and south—especially in
times of crisis. As such, the growth and densification of the interdependencies
between cities increases their vulnerability to potentially uncontrollable cascading
effects40.
Wicked problems
ICTs can be understood as an umbrella term that includes integrated

audio/visual systems, information technology, telecommunications, portable
computers, the Internet, smartphones, software, middleware, data storage and
basically any communications technology that enables users to access, store,
transmit and manipulate information41. To be sure, while many of the physical
and infrastructural aspects of cities seem superficially manageable through
technology, most issues they are facing are in fact social and economic, also
known as ‘wicked problems’. Wicked problems are situations that cannot be
solved by a board of central planners or top-down mechanisms of control42. The
key benefit of new communication technologies in improving the sustainability
and overall quality of urban environments is their ability to allow people to be
more social in tandem with other technologies that improve comfort, efficiency,
32
>> Wildfires in California, exacerbated Networked Environments
by increasingly frequent and severe
droughts.
>> The recent heat wave in Australia was

so hot that koalas were approaching
humans for water.
>> Smog thickens throughout

Beijing, China
33
responsiveness, flexibility and reduce costs.
ICTs give institutions, companies and individuals with similar goals

and aspirations (e.g. resilience and sustainability) the means of sharing ideas,
having conversations and organizing accordingly. It is important that any new
institutional arrangements should be made in close agreement with all actors—
especially urban dwellers—involved43. If such systems are not inclusive, people
might start to feel that it is useless to take action. If not, the scope that is left for
them to affect their own living conditions and their impacts has been reduced by
the dominant technology driven culture of today. Within such an outlook, new
institutional arrangements are required to cope with the use of ICT and physical
environment related problems.
In fact, it puts a greater emphasis on another way of organizing infrastructure,

implying also another network architecture and organisation. Infrastructure
investments are agents of change that reflect, reproduce and alter social,
economic and environmental relations in urban space. Urban infrastructure
constitutes the physical structure as well as the urban and metropolitan functions
of greatest permanency in cities and yet, in its current form, it is neither sensitive
nor suitable to new perspectives on spatial, social, technological, political, and
ecological change. Another approach to networked environments and the use
of small, decentralized clusters has been investigated thoroughly in the field
of mathematics and is often related to the geometry of the World Wide Web
and the Internet. Tuning and adjustment (optimization) of quality, demand and
supply doesn’t just need smart networks, they require ‘intelligent network design’.
The new science of networks is called complexity theory. Evolving in the

last two decades, it portrays complex systems in terms of connected nodes.
Most studies of complex networks tend to focus on networks whose nodes are
not dynamic agents. The nodes of human networks (e.g. cities), per contra, are
dynamic cognitive agents, each of which is itself a complex system and network.
Human and in particular urban networks are the resulted outcome of multiple
interactions between agents that, at least in theory, ‘think globally and act
locally’. In this way, the local activities and interaction of agents give rise to the
interdependencies between multiple social and physical urban networks that in
turn affects the agents’ cognition, behavior, movement and actions in circular
causality.
Today, every strata of infrastructure that has enveloped the globe with each
leap in technological progress has either incorporated or disrupted the layers
that preceded it, compressing both time and space in the process. We scurried
34
> Every strata of infrastructure that

has enveloped the globe with each
leap in technological progress has
either incorporated or disrupted the
layers that preceded it
from farms and villages into factories and cities, but then one day, for some of
us, the factories closed and we stepped out into a world encased in a ubiquitous
network of deep-sea fiber-optic cables, cellphone towers and communications
satellites. This seamless and invisible infrastructure now connects new phyla of
digital organisms—from handheld black mirrors with wireless access to the entire
corpus of human knowledge to teapots that only work when the electricity grid
is off-peak—transmitting and receiving data in the form of invisible microwave
energy beams that permeate the human body and every crevice of the built
environment. The secure, yet monotonous 9-to-5 work week and the industrial
work space has been replaced by temporary contracts, freelance labor, tech start-
ups, and footloose multinationals and hedge funds that pay fealty only to the
laws of capital accumulation wherever in the world it may lead them. Society is
entering the most disrupting inflection point in its history as our world has become
defined by the ‘ubikquity’ and automation of ICTs. Reflecting upon modernity,
mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead dutifully concluded that,
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which
we can perform without thinking about them44.”
35
36
Ubikquity
04
UBI KQUITY
37
The root ‘ubik’ in the word ubikquity is

derived from the Latin word “ubique”, meaning everywhere,
and is also the title of a 1969 reality-bending novel by the
acclaimed science fiction master Philip K. Dick45. To explain
the novel is challenge within itself, but essentially, the story
takes place in a future where technology has advanced to the
point where psychic phenomenon is commonplace and the
38
Ubikquity
<< The original cover of Ubik, a novel published in 1969 by Philip K. Dick.
concept of privacy has become increasingly anachronistic. In

order to remain competitive, corporations must pay teams of
psychics to prevent other psychics hired by rival firms from
stealing valuable company secrets. At certain point, the very
basis of reality begins to fall apart and the only thing that may
(or may not) restore it to normal is canned substance called
Ubik. Readers for decades were puzzled as to the exact nature
of Ubik, but Dick’s former wife Tessa said that:
Ubik is a metaphor for God. Ubik is all-powerful

and all-knowing, and Ubik is everywhere. The
spray can is only a form that Ubik takes to make
it easy for people to understand it and use it. It
is not the substance inside the can that helps
them, but rather their faith in the promise that
it will help them. 46
Ubikquity will serve as a powerful dual metaphor

throughout this book and is defined thusly:
ubikquity / yoo • bik • wi • tee /

noun
01 The global infrastructure and ecology of ICTs.
02 Absolute faith in the power of ICTs (e.g, sophisticated
algorithms, cloud computing and data mining) to create
ready-made solutions to complex social problems.
The notion that the anthrosphere is part of an overall

network of natural and artificial systems can be traced back at
least to the work of H.T. Odum in the 1960s47. On this basis,
Kristinsson48 in 1989 distinguished a stack with four compo-
nents that build up our environmental system: the abiotic
component, the biotic component, the technical component
and the physical component. Some years later, McDonach and
39
Yaneske indirectly correlated the stack layers to the four ‘states of sustainability’49.
To get a better grasp of how Ubikquity has and will continue to affect the
anthrosphere, philosopher and design theorist Benjamin Bratton recently proposed
a model he calls ‘The Stack’. In Bratton’s technology-focused stack, instead of view-
ing the various scales and aspects of ubikquitous computer technology as a random
collection of devices, individual processes and standards (i.e. conflict minerals,
energy grids, IPv6 protocol, RFID, Bluetooth, cloud storage, the Internet of Things,
augmented reality, and smart cities), he models them as interconnected components
of a larger, comprehensive meta-technology50. In an attempt to conceive this ‘total-
ity’ of planetary scale computation, this software and hardware ‘stack’ is divided into
7 interdependent layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Network, Address, Interface and User.
Bratton in a way uses aspects from older stack concepts but inverts them by reducing
emphasis on the biosphere and focusing on the interactions of users within techno-
logical systems and their accompanying objects and artifacts.
For Bratton, the stack challenges our traditional understanding of physical layer-
ing, notions of sovereignty, political geography and the legal jurisdiction of nation-
states and translates them to ‘geo-political structures of planetary computation’. In
doing so he connects the future focus of urban development to Benjamin Barber’s
plea for a world ruled by cities51. To illustrate what geo-political dramas within the
stack might entail, he cites the convoluted nature of the Sino-Google conflicts of 2008
and the NSA hacking scandal of 2013 as examples. Initially, the Chinese government
hacked Google in an attempt to maintain its Internet filtering system known collo-
quially as The Great Firewall. In response, Google pulled out of China while all along
the NSA was hacking into the servers of every major American-based IT company,
the Chinese government, various NGOs, and the cellphones and emails of a number
of prominent international political figures. Ironically, Google continues to ghost-
write technical manuals for American intelligence agencies while circumventing the
last instances of state oversight altogether, not by transgressing them but by absorb-
ing them into its service offering52. Though abstract, the stack model serves as a
useful guide to contextualize the smart city imaginary within the constantly shifting
and multiscalar dilemmas of ubikquity and urban planning.
40
K
STAC
THE
R TH
EA
O UD
CL
Y
CIT
O RK
TW
NE
E SS
DR
AD
E
F AC
T ER
IN
ER
US
Based on Bratton’s Stack concept

A day
In the life
of haggard
protagonist
Joe chip as
he wakes up
in his
mockingly
intelligent,
UBIK
pay- per-use
apartment...........
welcome to PK Dick's
44
Techno-austerity
05
TECHNO-AUSTERITY
45
>> One of the robots recently purchased by Taiwanese

electronics manufacturer Foxconn
46
Techno-austerity
The disruptive
changes brought about by the digital age parallel those of the industrial age, where
in its infancy it was met with both awe and speculation. In 1779, Ned Ludd famously
destroyed two mechanical knitting machines in protest to what he viewed as
a threat to his livelihood, introducing the Luddite movement, humanity’s first
stance against technological change. As we know now, industrialization did not
destroy labor but instead shifted it from handcrafted goods to mechanical mass
production, and despite increased levels of productivity, technology required the
careful maintenance and watchful eye of humans to actually work. J. Bradford
Delong, professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote
for every machine that was introduced that outperformed human hands, there
was an increase in the demand of complimentary human skills (i.e. eyes, ears, and
brain power)53. He points out however that there is no natural or economic law
that ensures that technology will always create new jobs ad infinitum.
Today, ubikquity’s effect on labor is only beginning to take hold. According to

a study by Oxford University’s Programme on the Future Impact of Technology,
47 percent of employment in the US and Europe has a high risk of being automated
(i.e. computerized) within the next 20 years56. The first jobs to go are those
within the fields of transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative
support. This might also include jobs in services, sales, and construction. This
will be followed by a ‘technological plateau’ stage, where jobs in management,
science and engineering, and even the arts will be at risk. The authors concluded,
“…our findings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will
reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization—i.e., tasks that
require creative and social intelligence. For workers to win the race, however,
they will have to acquire creative and social skills.”
47
#byeKodak
Increased penetration of technologies into work previously undertaken by humans has
led the IMF to stress the emergence of ‘employment polarization’, or simultaneous
growth of high-wage, high-education, high-skill occupations and low-wage, low-
education, low-skilled conventional occupations at the expense of the middle 54. One
only has to look to the sad story of Kodak to see the disruptive nature of technological
change. At its height, Kodak employed 150,000 workers and was worth $28 billion. In a
curious twist of irony, the company that invented the digital camera today is bankrupt
and has been replaced by the new face of handheld digital photography, Instagram, a
company with a grand total of 13 employees for an active user group of 300 million,
that was recently sold to Facebook for $1 billion. One cannot lament the death of a
corporate entity that could not conform to the needs of the new economy for too long,
but seriously, what happened to all those middle class jobs? In San Francisco, the city
that has been at the heart of the internet revolution since its inception, restaurant
workers have been lobbying the local government for an increase in minimum wage to
$15 an hour because many already rely on welfare and cannot afford to live in the city
despite working well above 45 hours a week 55 . In response, the restaurant industry and
conservative groups have threatened to replace restaurant workers with iPads.
48
Techno-austerity
Capital-Biased technical change
As the costs of capital investments (machinery or other productivity

enhancing technology) have fallen since the 70’s, labor and capital investments
have become substitutable57. Corporations all around the world have been quick
to replace workers with technology. In Asia, even the infamous Taiwanese
multinational Foxconn—known as much for assembling most the smart phones,
laptops, and video game consoles purchased worldwide as it is for the safety nets
installed around the perimeter of its manufacturing plants to save workers form
leaping to their deaths—has recently purchased 10,000 robots, first in a disruptive
wave that will eventually replace its swelling army of 1.3 million workers58. This
trend can also be extrapolated to the cities of Detroit and Manchester, who as
manufacturing hubs were some of the most prosperous cities in the US and UK
respectively throughout most of the 20th century. While consistently incorporating
new technologies that increased the efficiency and output of industry, both saw
the destruction of its industrial base over the last three decades. Why? Business
in both cities failed to produce new jobs opportunities that could replace those
that were already being eroded by technological change and globalization. Instead
of taking advantage of new technological and business opportunities that could
generate new products and opportunities for employment, they chose profit first,
increasing factory productivity through automation and displacing labor. Overall,
though, Manchester has fared far better than Detroit in shifting to a creative/
knowledge-based economy since the collapse of industry.
49
<< Riot police called to action during the

protests in Greece in 2010 - 2012
<< A pro-Novorossiya (New Russia)

rally in Ukraine
<< Scottish nationalists at Scotland’s first

annual Independence Rally in 2012
50
This decline in the labor pool is
what economic journalist Eduardo
Porter calls ‘capital-biased technical
change’. He points to research by
economists Paul Beaudry, David Green
and Benjamin Sand that shows how the
demand for highly skilled workers in the
United States peaked around 2000 and
then fell, despite growth in supply57.
This moved the highly educated down
A union in crisis the ladder of skills in search of jobs,
pushing less-educated workers even
The 2008 global banking crisis caused further down. As ICT becomes more
economic growth in developed econ- ubikquitous it will continue to take
omies to stagnate, while in the EU, on more low-skill jobs previously
austerity has left millions in its south- done by human beings. Despite these
ern and periphery member states with apparently dire developments on the
unsustainably high levels of unemploy-
techno-economic-labor front, we do
ment, especially amongst the youth.
Lack of tax revenues has sent national
not condone a neo-luddite insurrection
and municipal governments reeling as to mass delete our Amazon, Gmail and
a sense of hopelessness amongst citi- Facebook accounts and proselytize on
zens has led to increased speculation the streets about the impending robot-
in the EU and a sharp rise in partici- led apocalypse.
pation in separatists movements and
nationalist political parties 63 ,64 . The
Globalization inspired by
current crisis—caused primarily by
unsustainable levels of state debt, lax
neo-liberal economics has lifted billions
banking regulations, and hedge funds from poverty, yet simultaneously
utilizing mammoth computer servers, income inequality is soaring in the
highly complex algorithms, and industrialized world. In his very
privately-owned dark fiber internet controversial yet highly acclaimed book
networks to trade on stock markets Capitalism in the 21st Century, French
around the world at the speed of
economist Thomas Piketty has seriously
light—has coincided with increased
income inequality and labor being
questioned the long held view within
digitized and/or shipped to develop- free market capitalism—exemplified
ing markets. Additionally, the lack by the Kuznets curve—that wealth
of state funds has forced municipal- inequality will naturally stabilize and
ities to take on a ‘do more with less’ decrease on its own accord. According
attitude 27 . to his findings, current economic forces
are concentrating more and more
wealth into the hands of a fortunate
51
few. Using data sets from dozens of countries over hundreds

of years, he concluded that the rate of return on capital
investments (e.g. machinery, land, financial instruments
and real-estate) is usually higher than economic growth.
Furthermore, he states that the existence of the middle-class is
not a natural tendency of the free market but rather a historical
abnormality59. According to Piketty, the post WWII middle
class in Europe and the U.S. was the result of two events:
the destruction of European inherited wealth during the
war and higher taxes on the rich. This brought wealth and
income from the top down, and raised working people up
into a middle class. Looking at the state of the world today,
his findings are not that far off. Deregulation of the markets
and reductions in income and investment taxes have led to the
top 10 percent of earners (particularly the .1 and .001 percent)
in the U.S. to have more wealth (adjusted for inflation) than
they did in 1913, at the height of the age of robber barons.
On a global scale, the richest 85 people on the planet own as
much as the poorest half of the world population60. Though
not as radical in the EU, income inequality has also increased
considerably in the UK, France, Germany, and even Sweden
and the Netherlands56,61,62.
Competitive cities and Crobos
As shown with the C40 group, cities’ economic

interdependence and decentralized governance allow for rapid
and responsive change65 that puts them on the forefront of
experimenting with and adopting progressive environmental
policies. Cities must also conform to the needs of neo-liberal
economic paradigm as they are forced to compete with one
another for the attention of globetrotting investment capital
and a growing class of crobos—a portmanteau of creative
and hobo, i.e. mobile creative talent—in lieu of automation,
unemployment and economic austerity. In general, the most
successful cities have: stable and solid public finances; low
and competitive taxation; simple and transparent business
regulations; strong and impartial rule of law; openness to
international trade and foreign investment; a welcoming
environment for foreign talent; good proximity and ‘hard
52
Techno-austerity
CROBO / krō • bō /
noun, plural crobos
01 a portmanteau of creative and hobo

02 mobile creative talent
53
connectivity’ such as roads, transit
systems, ports, and airports; and good
‘soft connectivity’ through education,
high-skilled laborer opportunities,
technological diffusion, and ‘hyper
caffeinated’ innovation66.
The resulting urban enclaves

are preferably compact, transit-
accessible and highly networked.
They should also attract talent, foster
open collaboration, offer mixed-
used housing, office, and retail space
and 21st century urban amenities.
As such, the intersection of urban
life and technology is key along with
more traditional aspects of liberal
societies such as equity, equality and
democracy67.
Until recently, academic research

that compared cities in different
countries has been marked by a rigid
divide between the global north
and the global south, reflecting
embedded assumptions about the
incommensurability of cities in more
or less developed parts of the world.
These assumptions are now being
challenged because comparisons
between cities of the south with
those of the north are usually based
on the transfer of policies or ‘lessons’
from the latter to the former68,69.
Comparisons should be based on
equal terms with regard to what can
be learned from the experience of
each and the potential for ‘policy
mobility’70 in any direction between
them. Worryingly, many of the fastest
growing cities in developing countries
54
Techno-austerity
<< Many fast-growing eastern cities constantly

emulate aspects of western culture in
architecture, media, and way of life. An example
of this is the Tokyo Tower (bottom), which is an
obvious homage to the Eiffel Tower (top).
are attempting to emulate western development schemes, eschewing local

culture and vernacular in order to seize a cosmopolitan future defined by the
Euro-American cultural perspective. From a citizen’s perspective however, this
might not be the most desirable developmental path. On the one hand, they value
transparent, accountable and responsive governance in a geographic space to
which they can relate. But on the other hand, this may lead increasingly to their
identification with the cities they live in, providing them with a stronger sense
of belonging, and thus a need to be different. This is encapsulated by statements
within the context of the so-called ‘creative’ city imaginary by the equally lauded
and criticized ‘creative guru’ Richard Florida, who said that, “the decision where
to live becomes the most important decision in your life32.”
Cities are constantly being ranked for liveability, happiness, cultural capital
and creativity. However, it is constant innovation that stands out as the key
stimulus for longevity in economic competitiveness71. Perhaps the greatest
validation of the shift towards so-called urban innovation districts is found in the
efforts of traditional exurban science parks (like in the Netherlands Technopolis
Delft, High-tech Campus Eindhoven, and Sciencepark Amsterdam) that urbanize
according to their workers desire for walkable communities and the preference of
participating firms to be near each other for collaboration opportunities. Where
some cities have gained recognition in innovation through short-term booms
such as Helsinki and Dubai City, the more dominant global cities like London,
Singapore, Paris and New York have maintained high levels of innovation and
retained their prominence over time. Several scholars have suggested that the
key characteristic of leading world cities is that they attract the best and brightest
minds13,14,72. As home to the creative classes, which consist of professionals
working in knowledge-based industries, cities are the bedrocks of prosperity
and drivers of innovation. They not only provide unrivaled educational and
professional opportunities, but also the best entertainment facilities such as art
galleries, theaters and restaurants73. Through hard and soft infrastructure, high
value residents of these cities enjoy a seamless connectivity that fosters human
creativity and prosperity.
As cities desperately compete to attract crobos and investment capital, phrases

like ‘smart growth’, ‘intelligent cities’, ‘digital cities’, ‘e-cities’ and ‘smarter cities’
55
it is
con s ta nT
innovat ion
that stands out as
the key stimulus
f o r longevity in
ec on omic
c o m p etitiveness
56
Techno-austerity
have become increasingly popular within the IT, policy and urban
planning fields as potential solutions to ‘urban (in)efficiencies’.
Public and private stakeholders have taken an urban-centric
position in hopes of initiating a leapfrogging effect with respect to
sustainability (the ‘Sustainable’ City), efficient infrastructure and
resource use (the ‘Smart’ City), improved equity and government
transparency (the ‘Just’ City), quality of life (the ‘Healthy’ City), and
increased levels of technological innovation and urban dynamics (the
‘Creative’ City) amongst others. Municipal governments want to
increase urban resilience and support of their (knowledge) economy
with the inclusion of ‘smart’ systems and other (considered) benefits
to attract and strengthen the innovation/technology (education)
sector.
All metropolitan areas worldwide face the same question: how

to ensure a high quality of urban life and the sustainability and
resilience of our vital systems that provide energy, water, food,
materials, mobility and communication? As Ubikquity has been on
the forefront of disrupting nearly every facet of the global economy,
can it disrupt potential urban crises and take our cities into the
future? Or, alternatively, is it a corporate schema that will reinforce
and magnify the systemic inequalities that plague cities today?
57
58
Rise of the Smart Cities
06
RISE OF THE
SMART CITIES
59
>>
An urban metabolism as illustrated by
Dirk Sijmons and Jutta Raith
60
The
THeoretical
basis for smart cities can be pinpointed to the halls of MIT,
where in the aftermath of WWII mathematician Norbert
Weiner gave birth to the field of cybernetics. Cybernetics
can be understood as transdisciplinary field that uses sensing
and feedback to model systems and their structures for the
purpose of organization and efficient control46. Within
cybernetics, all systems—machines, corporations, cities,
animals—could be interpreted as a balanced network of
data flows whose components can be represented by a set
of equations and processed in a computer simulation that
emulates complex system behavior. After putting data into
a computer, an analyst could use this generalized model of
reality and make system predictions by changing inputs and
observing the impacts. First used to organize the US’ SAGE
air defense system, Weiner’s contemporary Jay Forrester
used his expertise in modeling resource flows and stockpiles
of industrial systems to publish Urban Dynamics, where
he applied cybernetics to try and solve the most pressing
problems facing American cities74. Rather than looking at
any particular city, the book attempted formulate a generic
systems model of cities that could be applied anywhere.
61
The hype around the book landed Forrester a contract with the city of Pitts-
burgh, where his team was tasked with creating computer simulations that would
forecast how changes in public spending would influence policy decisions in
transportation, land use and social services. Sadly, the model was too simplistic
and misguided, rendering its findings ineffectual74. By the 70’s, planning schol-
ars moved away from embracing these generalized, all encompassing predictive
simulations of cities. 30 years later, computer power has increased by six orders of
magnitude and the largest IT companies have decided to give cybernetics another
shot. In their eyes, in order for cities to meet the challenges of the future graceful-
ly, they will need the help of ubikquity.
The smart city imaginary truly surfaced in the midst of the financial crisis in
2008, when IBM CEO Sam Palmisano gave a speech titled “A smarter planet: The
next leadership agenda”75. With markets around the world crashing, he argued
that the only way cities will be able to cope is to be ‘smarter’ by becoming more
sustainable and economically efficient. Not to long after that, IBM trademarked
the ‘Smarter Cities’ moniker for its worldwide advertising campaign to promote
ICT as a solution to urban problems. IBM is not alone in this game, with the
largest IT firms on the planet like Siemens, Cisco, Schneider Electric, Hitachi,
Accenture, Toshiba, General Electric, Microsoft, Oracle, Capgemini, SAP and
few start up companies—some with fuzzy profiles—vying for market share while
municipalities are still trying to figure out the exact benefits of getting ‘smart’.
Using their innovations and experiences with cybernetics in military planning
and the private sector, IT companies have set their sights on the untapped smart
city market that is estimated to be worth €1.2 trillion by 202076. IBM, Cisco and
Siemens have now shifted to offering full scale contracting to municipal and
local governments with flagship projects in Rio and Singapore and completely
designed smart city development projects such as Songdo in South Korea and
Masdar City in the UAE.
On the other hand, the public perceives the smart city imaginary primarily
through TV commercials, news headlines, and corporate advertising at airports
and metro stops. Marketeers tend to throw the word ‘smart’ around generously to
entice consumers without its benefits being explained in a comprehensible and/
or meaningful way. Additionally, urban planners, sociologists, anthropologists,
ecologists, architects and other urban science professionals are trying to express
their expertise on urban phenomenon and incorporate their divergent knowledge
and skill sets on key issues outside of the mental map emerging from the smart
city imaginary. As the world continues to shift its attention to cities, local and
national governments have allocated billions in funding targeted at various ‘smart’
projects, sparking new academic endeavours in many of the world’s most promi-
62
“SMARTER”
CITIE S
Through its Smarter City
Challenge program, IBM
has given free IT consult-
ing to over 100 munici-
palities and 2000 cities
around the globe in hopes
of attracting investment
in their ‘smart city in a box’
solutions 77 . For what its
worth, it’s paid off hand-
somely as IBM’s annual in-
come from smart city con-
sulting fees is about $3
billion, representing about
25 percent of the compa-
ny’s annual revenue 75 .
Top, left: ads doubling as

functional objects, part
of IBM’s Smarter Cities
advertising campaign.
63
W e are p rone to overe st i mat e

h ow much we understand ab o ut
the world ...
nent universities and research institutions. So what exactly makes a city ‘smart’?
According to urban theorists Hollands and Vanolo, the smart city discourse was
heavily influenced by the New Urbanism concept of ‘smart growth’ developed in
the United States and the intelligent city imaginary developed by Komninos, who
defines ‘intelligent’ cities and regions as territories with high capacity for learn-
ing and innovation and creativity ‘built-in’ their population, their institutions
of knowledge creation, and their digital infrastructure for communication and
knowledge management78,86.
Smart versus intelligent
The word ‘smart’ in this case is the American equivalent of intelligent. Taken
literally, it excludes real cognitive applications and should be interpreted more like
a quick and automatic analytical intelligence. This relates to the concept of System
I thinking as elucidated by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s work in cognitive
science, behavioural economics and prospect theory79 where he distinguishes
the approaches to (intelligent) judgment and choice of two theoretical agents (or
systems, viz. System I and System II). In an attempt to explain the heuristics of
judgement, Kahneman’s work elaborates on the distinction between automatic
operations (System I) and controlled operations (System II). He demonstrated how
associative memory with self-reinforcing reciprocities and the halo effect80 are
based upon suppressed ambiguities. Associative memory continually constructs a
coherent interpretation of what is going on in our world at any instant, influencing
the automatic and often unconscious processes that underlie intuitive thinking.
Or as Kahneman puts it, “The insight of a puzzling limitation of our mind is our
excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to
acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we
64
... and to undere stimat e the ro le

o f chance in events.
Daniel Kahneman
live in.” Later, he states, “We are prone to overestimate how much we understand
about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events81.” According
to Kahneman, in today’s world terrorists are the most significant practitioners of
the art of inducing availability cascades.
In contrast (or in addition) to smart, intelligence comes from the Latin word
‘intelligentia’, or the ability to acquire, interpret, and apply knowledge. Something
with intelligence has the ability to think (process) and understand instead of
doing things automatically or by instinct. Thus, the proper definition of smart
should put an emphasis on interpretation and application. Intelligence actually is
considered as “a natural (innate) general cognitive ability to reason all substantial
processes in a conventional way82”. It connects more to System II thinking, the
cognitive response, which allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that
demand it, including complex computations. Stephan Hawking once said that
intelligence is the ability to adapt to change, connecting it strongly to the notion
of resilience. When made less personified, intelligence should mean something
that has the ability to vary its state or action in response to varying situations and past
experiences.
For our intents and purposes, the smart city imaginary is part of the
contemporary language of urban management and development. In the current
dialogue about urban contexts, there is a wide range of overlapping/conflicting
city discourses like ‘smart’, ‘intelligent’, ‘innovative’, ‘wired’, ‘digital’, ‘creative’
and ‘cultural’ that connect technologically led information transformations
with economic, political and socio-cultural change83. The smart moniker is
analogous but not exactly synonymous to the ‘wired’, ‘digital’, ‘informational’ and
‘intelligent’ discourses used within planning literature84. The adjective smart has
an implicit positive connotation that focuses on urban-based innovation and ICT
65
What is a Smart citY?

While no exact definition exists, the most holistic definition of
the smart city imaginary distinguishes 6 distinct aspects 86:
Smart Smart
economy mobility
Linking to a spirit of innovation, Referred to local and supra-local
entrepreneurialism, flexibility of the accessibility, availability of ICTs,
labor market, integration in the inter- modern, sustainable and safe trans-
national market and the ability to port systems.
transform.
Smart Smart
governance ENVIRONMENT
Related to participation of various Understood in terms of attractive-
stakeholders at various levels in the ness of natural conditions, lack of
decision-making processes, trans- pollution and sustainable manage-
parency of governance systems, the ment of resources.
availability of public services and
quality of political strategies.
Smart Smart
living people
Involving the quality of life, imagined Linked to the level of qualification of
and measured in terms of availability human and social capital, flexibility,
of cultural and educational services, creativity, tolerance, cosmopolitan-
tourist attractions, social cohesion, ism and participation in public life.
healthy environment, personal safety
and housing.
66
solutions that optimize infrastructures, business and everyday life within cities.
For IT companies, the smart city imaginary deals exclusively with technology
and hardware. Other urban professionals emphasises governance and services,
sustainability and liveability32. On the most basic level, a city is comprised of a
government (in some form), people, industry, infrastructure, education and social
services. Therefore, a smart city ought to thoughtfully and sustainably pursue
development with all of these areas to meet the current and future needs of the
urban dwellers85.
Smart solutions for dumb designs
Most of the discourse about smart cities has been outside academic circles.
Beyond corporate press releases, think tanks like the Institute for the Future and
their lead urbanist and technology expert Anthony Townsend have been parsing
through the techno hype and forecasting the role of ICT in a world undergoing
rapid change. In his book Smart Cities, Townsend concludes that smart cities are
ones that utilize ICT solutions—either from IT companies or through bottom-
up initiatives—to fix the ‘dumb’ designs of the last century in order to prepare
theme from the challenges of the 21st century74. In 1997, the World Forum on
Smart Cities suggested over the next few decades that around 50,000 cities and
towns around the world would develop smart initiatives84. The increase in smart
city initiatives has been made possible in part by a number of technological
innovations and shifts in governance frameworks and business models26.
Smart technologies like digital sensors, portable computers, and smart phones
with onboard cameras and GPS systems have not been the result of radically new
innovations per say, but rather incremental developments in miniaturization,
increases in computer processing power, and steep drops in manufacturing costs.
The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed, as are
the tools we use to design, plan, and manage them. Smart urban development
opens up new opportunities for the emergence of research and development
in applied technology at the crossroads of the physical and digital aspects of
the urban domain, resulting in solutions that could fundamentally transform
or accelerate the development of cities as well as their ability to respond to
[disruptive] change. This might involve breakthrough transformations that
radically influence spatial qualities, sustainability, comfort and liveability and the
flows of the urban metabolism. This focus on urban metabolism and resilience,
health, and urban comfort relates from the directly measurable qualities (e.g.
body temperature, blood chemistry, etc.) to immeasurable qualities (e.g. quality,
delight, pleasure, etc.) of well-being. To this end, UN-Habitat has developed
67
Technology
> > The ongoing evolution of IP and the Internet as an underlying

framework for services (i.e. Internet of Things)
> > Telepresence and videoconferencing
> > Open application programming interfaces (APIs)
>> New connectivity technologies, including high-speed fixed, wireless

and mobile broadband
> > Proliferation of smartphones and tablets
> > Positioning technologies such as GPS
> > Enhanced cameras and image processing
> > Machine-to-machine and sensor networks
> > Radio-frequency identification (RFID) sensors and near-field

communications (NFC)
> > Augmented reality (AR)
Policy & business frameworks
> > Open data infrastructures
> > Push for increased data transparency
> > The crowdsourcing and open source movement
> > The proliferation of cloud computing services and software-as-

service models where businesses and individuals lease instead
of own software and/or hardware.
> > The mash-up model that enables data owners to make data
available to third parties
> > The development of a wide range of frameworks such as public-

private partnerships and distributed governance.
68
a ‘City Prosperity Index’ that translates the five dimensions of prosperity—

productivity, infrastructure development, quality of life, equity, social inclusion,
and environmental sustainability—into measurable indicators87. This definition
of the prosperous city is consistent with the principles of a smart, sustainable and
just city.
Each smart artifact found in urban space can potentially serve as nodes in a
data network for sensing and feedback control. This can range from emergency
warning systems and traffic reports that are automatically forwarded to urban
dwellers via e-mail or text to crowd-sourced projects that use citizens to identify
potholes on city streets with their smartphones. While each of these technologies
is useful by themselves, their combined use has the greatest potential for impact.
Apart from ICT, it is forecasted that developments in cloud-based services, the
Internet of Things (IoT) and Augmented Reality (AR) will have the greatest
potential of bringing smart city initiatives to the fore within the next 10 years88.
THE INTERNET OF THINGS
As any user knows, the greatest benefit of owning a smart phone is that
it gives you access to the myriad mobile applications (apps) available on
the digital marketplace. The Google Earth app, for example, puts the total
geography of the planet into your hands with only 29.5MB of space. How?
Most of the data storage and information processing occurs in the cloud (i.e.
cloud-based services found on servers around the globe). The app in this
sense is the thin user-facing membrane of a larger, seemingly invisible cloud
platform, bridging physical reality with the millions of services found in the
digital ether. Any location with an internet connection—bathroom stalls, 6
o’clock trains, packed elevators, that morning chemistry lecture, boring office
meetings—becomes the ad-hoc stage of the various cloud dramas that take
place on social media and proximity-based dating services like Tinder. In
this regard, as Bratton so succinctly put it, “the app has become the aperture
through which the cloud redraws the city89.”
App interfaces and cloud-based services have already reoriented the way
users allocate their attention between actual reality and their tech-enabled
curiosities, but augmented reality (AR) apps are rearing up to complete the
ubik trinity by utilizing the on-board cameras and screens of smart devices to
superimpose digital interfacial elements into the user’s perceived visual field.
In projecting an artificial cinematic layer upon our perceptual field-of-vision,
69
INTERNET OF
Everything
There has been an ex- AR has the potential to transform urban
plosion of crowdfund-
landscapes into completely customizable
ed projects related to
the Internet of Things experiences using various techniques: the
and smart devices in subtitling of objects and real-life events, the
the past few years. superimposition of navigation tools, the
Projects range from overlaying of iconic graphic-user interface
surveillance systems
to energy monitors to menus upon real-world systems, and other
virtual pets whose well artificial visual or auditory feedback systems
being is dependent on not yet imagined by the geniuses of silicon
the user exercising. valley89. AR is still in its neophyte stage
because mobile technologies still lack the
Above: a mere handful of
hundreds of IoT-related
necessary computational power, but given
crowdfunding projects time, the possibilities are endless. Alas, with
that can be found online. the advent of wearable technologies like
Google Glass, AR could permanently melt
ubikquity and the interfaciality of new media
70
> Any location with an internet

connection becomes the ad-hoc stage of
the various cloud dramas
onto physical objects and built environment in ways that would leave Philip
K. Dick with sense of incredible awe—or perhaps have him rolling in his
grave, there is no way to tell.
The billions of users and smart devices that are already citizens of
Ubikquity are about to be accompanied by many billions more with the ever-
swelling Internet of Things (IOT), or as Cisco calls it, Internet of Everything.
IOT can refer to a wide range of everyday physical objects with imbedded
sensors that gather and stream data into the cloud. This includes but isn’t
limited to pacemakers, farm animals with biochips, cars with built-in sensors,
smart waste bins that help you separate recyclables, smart thermostats that
sense human bodies within the home and adjust ambient temperature, smart
cups that track what you drink, and wearable technology like Apple’s iWatch
that have Movement Monitor Device (MMD) and Event Monitor Device
(EMD) sensors that measure relevant metrics for monitoring user health90.
Each web device requires an internet protocol (IP) address that provides
identification and location information as it travels through various computer
and router networks across the web.
With 4.3 billion unique addresses, the IPv4 addressing system, which
carries 96 percent of web traffic, has already reached its limit. The latest
communications protocol, IPv6, has 3.4 • 1038 unique addresses, more than
enough to identify the estimated 26-50 billion sensor-embedded objects that
will be around by 202046,91,92. Under IPv6, every human being on earth could
theoretically be assigned 4.67 • 1028 unique addresses each. One must ask, are
there even enough significant events in ones life that merit being addressed to
fill this digital void? How granular will the future of data be? Will it address
every letter in every book? How about the DNA sequence of every single-celled
organism in the human body that outnumber native cells 10-1? Perhaps even
71
72
73
the collective synaptic transmissions of every human brain? It is far too early
to tell, but IPv6 is nothing short of the alphabet of ubikquity—the passport of
future organisms digital, organic, or otherwise, as the anthrosphere careens
unimpeded toward the very real possibility of planetary-scale computation. In
such a future, applying ‘machine to machine’ applications in ambitious plans
like zero net energy districts will significantly alter the relationships between
people and urban infrastructures3.
A World of opportunities
Smart infrastructures tend to focus on phenomena that involve easily

quantifiable data, such as mobility and transportation, energy generation and
exchange, waste and water flows, and law enforcement to improve their overall
efficiency. In this way, ICTs can be used to elucidate the so-called ‘flows’ in our
society (people, energy, waste/materials, water, food, information). In most cases
these elaborations are based on the following starting points (or claims):
>> Data tied to geography becomes important information.

>> Data gives the city greater options for faster, more efficient decision
making.
>> Open data is about a connection between citizens and government.
A lot of these smart systems are designed with the environment in mind—
from charging stations for electric cars to water-recycling systems that prevent
clean drinking water being used to flush office toilets. The idea behind smart
projects, like smart energy grids for example, is that data can be used to help make
buildings and urban areas more responsive to fluctuations in the grid and, as a
second order effect, encourage households, neighborhoods and municipalities
to participant in the overall production and distribution of energy to make its
use more efficient, reliable and sustainable3,93. The EU has a smart grid policy
organized under the Smart Grid European Technology Platform. An actual
example of an innovative smart grid in the field is the large-scale ‘i-net’ (a medium
and low voltage smart distribution grid that includes advanced fault detection
technology, bidirectional communication, demand response technology and
advanced software/ICT development) in Amsterdam West by Alliander and the
Amsterdam Smart City platform. The project, which plans to connect a total of
40,000 households, is a case study for the EU-funded CityZen research project in
which several faculties of TU Delft play a crucial role.
74
>> A diagram of the smart grid Amsterdam developed by Alliander

and the Amsterdam Smart City platform, the basis of the large EU
research project CityZEN in which TU Delft participates
Besides energy related smart systems, mobility related innovations are

considered the most promising. Examples include simple mobility monitoring
and advising via matrix-signing along roads and user interfaces (apps) to concepts
that try to cover mobility as a service instead of a product, such as the Oyster card
and NS business card. Often connected to the provision of citywide free Wi-Fi
(like in New York, Seoul, Barcelona, Sofia, etc.), car mobility is increasingly
connected to smart concepts as there is little indication that cars (or individual
transport modes) will disappear from cities. Shifts from internal combustion
engines to electrical (at first) and later hydrogen-based vehicles offers other
opportunities for new synergies in the built environment (besides being more
energy efficient and less polluting).
The connection of electrical mobility (EVs) with smart energy grids, such
as the TU Delft-led research project at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam94 and
75
<< Amsterdam’s established network of car charging

points spreads across the entire city
Stadshavens in Rotterdam95, has recently been the focus of smart research and
development in the Netherlands. This research developed a smart grid that can
be used to manage grid load more efficiently, enabling both peak shaving and the
effective integration of local renewable energy production. Charging activities
of EVs take place in automated ‘Park&Charge’ parking places. By controlling
the charging protocols of the vehicles parked at the Park&Charge facility, the
grid management system can ensure that peak power is limited, thus mitigating
strain on the main transformers. The facility is also equipped with a vehicle-to-
grid interface, enabling EV batteries to serve as auxiliary energy storage for the
electrical grid. The vehicle-to-grid interface supports the integration of locally
produced solar energy by charging vehicles at times when solar energy production
is high, allowing vehicles to discharge to the grid at times of peak demand.
Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?
In general, three types of ‘smart cities’ can be identified: (1) greenfield projects;
(2) retrofit projects; and (3) community-led bottom-up initiatives (BUIs) (which
will be expanded upon later in Chapter 12)26. There are a growing number of
large-scale greenfield developments around the world that combine aspects of
housing, retail and leisure with smart technology into what are essentially fully-
76
>> A schematic drawing of a Park&Charge parking

facility, part of a research project at TU Delft
formed smart cities. In 2009, the South Korean city of Songdo paid Cisco Systems
$47 million to construct its plumbing infrastructure based on smart (sensing)
technologies. Songdo is dubbed by some as ‘smart city-in-a-box’ because it was
built from the ground up with Cisco technology as part of its DNA96. Strangely
enough, it is already a challenge in South Korea to deliver a smarter city than
Koreans are used to because the society already is highly technological. So what
makes Songdo so smart? Roads outfitted with sensors that track traffic patterns
and predict traffic jams; an electrical grid that uses household sensors to monitor
the movements of residents; apartments with sensor-based waste disposal systems
that suck trash from the kitchen into vast underground network of tunnels to
waste processing centers where it is automatically sorted, deodorized, and treated;
sensing of wastewater, energy use and urban climate; and a good amount of parks
and green spaces for urban recreation.

Songdo is not without its criticisms as it is said to exclude the poor and working
class97. Additionally, many of its innovations are still not fully operational. The
latter is due to the fact that the city is only partly in use (less than 20% of the
commercial office space was occupied at the beginning of 2014). Despite these
drawbacks, every year more and more people are leaving Seoul and moving to
Songdo, not necessary for its ‘smartness’, but because its tightknit urban design
allows most residents to walk from home to work within 15 minutes96. Thus
77
liveability, green spaces, walkability and secure and comfortable living seem to
be the main drivers of Songdo’s increasing popularity. Walkability has in many
ways become a kind of super fix for many cities, smart or otherwise, because
it allows urban spaces to become more granular (urban fractals, neighborhood-
based) while enabling placemaking. Walkability also offers deliberate advantages
for infill development as focusing on pedestrian-scale development enhances
the economic viability of infill projects98. It is now recognized that the single-
use zoning regulations have created cities not for people but for cars and that it
is important to restore multi-use zoning to create more vibrant, accessible and
environmentally sustainable urban areas. Streets are complex places where the
conflicting demands of many users must be balanced. The reallocation of space
> SONGDO is not a real city per

say, but rather the first
iteration of an extremely
expensive, top-down designed
product that is meant to
foster an ideal corporate
environment and business
experience
78
<< People are not moving to Songdo for its ‘smartness’,

but rather because of its walkability due to the
close proximities of its facilities
away from the car will help restore city streets to their proper function as places
for people and activity as well as traffic.
Another well-know example of a smart city is Masdar City in United Arab

Emirates, a greenfield project completely designed by Foster & Partners and
Siemens in collaboration with the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology.
Although still under construction, Masdar City’s integrated, multi-layered and
interconnected ‘car-free’ urban design and 6 square kilometer area makes one
of the largest developments to claim a zero-carbon footprint to date. The key
to their zero-carbon footprint is an integrated mix of smart measures including
bioclimatic and energy-efficient design, renewable energy sources, waste
conversion, carbon capture, and above all a car-free environment. The combined
measures make it possible to reach an estimated 80 to 100 per cent reduction in
79
Recent Smart
Integrated
concepts
>> The world’s first solar bike path has been built in
by SolaRoad in the Dutch town of Krommenie.
>> Automated pods provide a new form of

transit for visitors to Heathrow International
AIrport in London. The same system has also
80been implemented in Masdar City.
<< The Oyster card is the key

to London’s smart public
transport system. The
data collected from the
cards is used to create
more intelligent traffic
management systems.
<< Part of the Citybike Wien fleet, Vienna’s

public bike rental system.
>> The High Line in New York City, a project

that transformed a disused railroad line
into an elevated urban park
81
GHG emissions within the boundaries

of the city.
An important component of
Masdar is its large-scale personal
rapid transit system that uses ‘Free
Range On Grid’ technology (FROG,
a driverless navigation technology)
to transport people and goods. A
similar system has been installed
for some time already in Heathrow
airport for passenger transportation
between the terminals. The fact
PRT system will only be deployed
in particular districts means that the
city will not completely be a car-free
environment. Additionally, Masdar’s
claim of 100 percent self-generated
renewable energy has also come into
question96. Masdar City and Songdo
show that while the implementation
of smart systems in urban spaces are
often considered optimal from an
efficiency/positivist perspective, they
have yet to prove their mettle. To
this end, modifying existing urban
environments and cities with smart
technology will be even more complex
and expensive to implement.
Smart retrofit projects have

been realized in all kinds of cities
on a variety of scales; from the OV
chipkaart and Oyster transport card
>> Photos and an architectural render systems in The Netherlands and
(last) of Masdar city
London to the inclusion of RFID
and biometric data on passports. The
most famous examples of existing
cities made ‘smart’ through retrofit
are Singapore and Rio de Janeiro. The
former was developed and branded as
82
<< A dizzying view of Masdar

from below
Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City (SGK) and based on IBM support.

Singapore has widely experimented with and successfully created various smart-
green corridors/urban townships within its limited land area of around 700
km2. Even though Singapore has one of the highest population densities in the
world, its transport systems, parks and gardens, water and land management,
and extensive use of IT has given it the reputation as one of the smartest and
most livable cities. In fact, China has used Singapore as a template to guide its
urban planning over the last few decades. In the mid-nineties, it created a model
business park-cum-city in a joint venture with Singapore at Suzhou that became
the model for new business parks around China99. Joint ventures created via
Singbridge (a consortium of major Singaporean companies) transformed Tianjin
into an eco-city and Guangzhou into a knowledge city. All of these examples
are smart cities created as satellite towns within highly urbanized environments
where sustainability is being used as the principle driver of creating employment.
In 2007, Eduardo Paes, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, commissioned

IBM to design a disaster management system that would provide real time
information to government departments during times of crisis. The result was
a massive operations center filled with 70 technicians and a network of 400
cameras strewn throughout the city that transmit live video feeds to a giant wall
83
covered with screens. Officials from 30 city agencies

use this centralized operations center, or ‘centro de
operações prefeitura do Rio’, to effectively prepare,
predict and coordinate responses to any incident.
After the command center was built, the city set up a
high-resolution weather forecasting and hydrological
modeling system that can predict heavy rains as much
as 48 hours in advance.
According to IBM100, transportation issues can

be better monitored through real-time data culled
from sensors and video cameras. Four years after
the project launched, the citizens of Rio are just
beginning to reap benefits. Traffic management and
the response time and coordination of emergency
incidents have all improved. Residents also have
access to daily data feeds from the command center,
where they can get updates on weather and traffic
and receive suggestions for alternative routes.
These sorts of smart projects signal that the

built environment is slowly becoming subsumed by
Ubikquity—uncharted territory for people, policy
makers, and technologists alike. Smart cities might
not completely live up to the claims of corporate
marketers, but their function as a testing ground for
experimental technologies offers a possible vision of
what our future cities might look like: tech-enabled,
hyper-efficient urban spaces that harness sensing
technology to make the most seamless and automatic
urban experience possible. While the prospect of
automating our cities to work better seems quite
straightforward and banal on the surface, further
examination of the smart discourse’s underlying
ideology reveals an insidiousness that may take us in
the wrong direction.
84
>> “Mission Control” of Rio’s disaster management operations center
85
Drones for Good. Alec Momont, Industrial Design and

Engineering graduation project at TU Delft. Supervisors Prof.
dr.ir. Richard Goossens, Ir. Kees Nauta, Peter de Jonghe.
86
I ntr o ducing the Ambulance Drone
An Industrial Design and Engineering student at TU Delft

developed a new type of drone that serves as a compact flying
toolbox containing essential supplies for advanced life support.
The first prototype focused on the delivery of an Automated
Defibrillator (AED) for persons suffering from cardiac arrest.
The drone makes it possible to deliver defibrillation to any
patient in a 12 km 2 area within 1 minute. At that speed, survival
rates can be as high as 80%. Secondly, the incorporation of a
two-way video-supported communication channel in the drone
between 112 operators and the first responders will improve
first care. Successful AED usage by lay-persons is currently
at 20%. With personalized instructions and communication on
the Ambulance Drone, this can be increased to 90%.
87
88
“Is something rotten in the state of Denmark?”
07
“Is something
rotten in
the state of
Denmark?”
89
90
<< Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard

by Eugène Delacroix (1839)
The Smart city

is the latest in the ‘history of urban imaginaries’ posited by urbanists in the last
few decades to describe how cities ought to organize themselves in order remain
relevant, robust and successful. Beyond terrorist acts or natural disasters, the
spatial form of cities does not simply transform over night. Successful urban
policy of course can only be determined a posteriori. That being said, are smart
cities really the magic bullet that will carry our species into the future or, as
Marcellus uttered to Horatio in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is “something rotten in the
state of Denmark101?”
As it stands, the smart cities as defined by the world’s largest IT companies and
their government clientele is a proprietary top-down developmental model. Even
EUROCITIES, a network of elected local and municipal government officials of
Europe’s 130 largest cities stated in a press release that “too much of the smart city
agenda so far has been led by producers; competing corporations offering their
own technology to cities as an ostensibly comprehensive solution to every urban
problem76”. While the involvement of private industry in property development
is very common, allowing IT companies to be the primary stakeholder defining
the smart city narrative—and in effect the recipients of billions in public research
funding—raises numerous glaring red flags. For one, the IT industry is dominated
primarily by highly mobile multinational firms whose modus operandi is the
accumulation of profit. While many firms claim their dominance comes from
innovation and ‘disruption’ of current market structures, the worst kept secret
behind their monumental success is their business model: creating monopolies
(or monopsony3 as any publisher dealing with Amazon right now already knows).
91
Look at Facebook or Youtube for example. These services do not create

anything at all, but rather offer free services that allow users to do the creating
(a.k.a the sharing economy) for them. Once they established monopolies in their
respective fields they began to monetize through advertising. Or in the case of
Facebook, first came the advertisements, then the sale of personal data to third
parties, and finally the invasion of privacy and manipulation of users’ news feeds
for its own purposes102. Even truly innovative firms like Google were only able
to succeed through advances brought about by government-funded research and
military technology (ICTs like the Internet, AR, cellphones, computers, and GPS
were the result of university research projects funded by the US Department of
Defense)—to actually capture their market share. Though social media companies
like Facebook offer completely different ecology of services, The IT industry’s
strategy of providing free consulting to thousands of cities is indicative that they
are attempting to monopolize the market, or at the very least, keep the smart city
imaginary as a closed, top-down, proprietary developmental model.
Public investment and research funding go “Smart”
While most European countries continue to make cuts in education to

meet the demands of fiscal austerity, the inclusion of smart cities as a research
priority within the EU’s Horizon 2020 Program for Research and Technological
Development (the main source of research funding for member states), joint-
national programs like JPI Urban Europe, Climate KIC, NWO-Transnational
Programs, and national programs in The Netherlands like NWO/Verdus SURF
have made it a hot topic of academic research for cash-strapped universities,
cities and entrepreneurs. The Horizon2020 framework has made it a goal to
support the implementation of a Strategic Energy Technology (SET) plan that
provides funding to catalyse innovations in ‘smart cities and communities’ and
aims mainly on ‘impact’. The original overall aim of these initiatives was a 40 per
cent reduction in EU greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. By now, it is clear this
will not be achieved. They plan to achieve this goal by encouraging innovation in
areas where energy production, distribution, and use (e.g. mobility and transport)
and ICTs are intimately linked to offer new interdisciplinary opportunities
that improve services while reducing energy and resource consumption and
greenhouse gas GHGs and other polluting emissions.
The smart city imaginary envisions a future where cities off-load the next
stage of digital infrastructures to multinational companies whose priorities might
not have public interest in mind. One of the big debates in environmental urban
development today concerns policy and strategic responses. Both public and
92
> Intellectuals and politicians do not

ask if a policy is right or wrong, but
whether it is efficient or inefficient.
private sectors are looking for operational strategies that can be implemented
in the development and retrofit of sustainable urban areas. As a result, powerful
market players working together with governments are emerging as the new
leaders in this debate. Together with increased scaling, the convergence of utilities
and the growing number of parties and techniques involved have increased the
consumers’ subjective dependence103. Rather than support collaborative and
progressive citizen-focused urban solutions, the smart city discourse (e.g. Italy
and its ongoing economic crisis) has resulted in cutthroat competition between
academic institutions and municipal governments to secure EU funding and
foster the best environment for private investment86.
The funny thing about the free market structures resulting from globalization
is how they allow multinational corporations to break off ties, often historical
ones, with national and/or regional authorities. Municipalities and cities are
increasingly turning to multinationals to take the lead in designing, constructing
and maintaining global energy, transport and communication infrastructures.
Relinquishing management of integral infrastructure networks and their spatial
layout has in a real sense given private firms control of the essential process
flows of society. This leads to markets controlled by a small cadre of key players,
little effective competition, and, consequently, few incentives for equity and
innovation. The free-market system is based on a theoretical economic approach
where authorities behave as ideal, independent market superintendents and
producers and consumers as completely rational, self-interested market players.
Reality is more complex: all players, particularly businesses, show strategic

behavior that concentrates power in a few hands, ruling the roost as a result.
The dilemma of ‘competition or dominance’ plays its role as those countries,
municipalities, cities and educational institutions that behave ‘according to the
spirit of the letter’ of liberalization may in fact become its victims. In the near
term, the oligopolistic character of the tech industry might result in smart cities
that are mute to one another.
93
For example, cities in Germany might opt to use Siemens technology in their
smart development while Dutch cities opt to use IBM or Cisco. Each company has
its own branded technology, data types, and algorithms that are only interoperable
with one another, ‘locking-in’ cities and discouraging local innovations or
non-proprietary smart city technologies that do not ‘speak’ the correct language75.
In the long term though, similar to the field of battery-charging interfaces for EVs,
smart technology will probably be tuned to one, or a handful of standards. But
then again, in 2014 you still can’t plug European appliances into American power
outlets without an adapter! According to Fernández67 the main problem is that
“this institutionalized mindset of the smart city is hiding the projects, innovations
and developments taking place from a different way of thinking about the kind
of urban innovations the digital sphere can bring”. IT companies might be able to
scale up their infrastructure more efficiently that smaller firms, but walled-garden
software and hardware suites, top-down development models and monopolies do
not promote rapid innovation—they stifle it.
Public investment into ICTs and smart communities might seem like a
no-brainer on the surface, but it does not have any guaranteed results. Municipal
investment in public-private partnerships—which are effectively subsidies
94
to private industry—to spur local growth in the knowledge economy might

actually backfire as the flow of capital from the IT industry might go elsewhere
depending on if the partnership is generating enough capital for participating
companies. While rhetoric behind smart cities tries to paint that it encourages
growth of local IT start-ups and generates employment, the reality is that IT is
dominated primarily by a handful of multinational firms. In Ottawa, the Canadian
government invested upwards of C$6 billion to spur technology partnerships in
the region and are only expecting to receive a third of that money back by 202084.
Other model smart cities like Masdar City and Songdo are 100 percent designed
and maintained by Siemens and Cisco respectively, creating cities that are in
effect ‘privitopias’86. Stan Gale, chairman of Gale International, one of the main
investors in Songdo, stated, “The concept behind it is that this would become the
central focal point and a main alternative for large-scale companies looking to do
business in Japan, China and Korea”. Songdo is not a real city per say, but rather
a prototype of an extremely expensive, top-down designed product that is meant
to foster the ideal corporate environment and business experience.
In Europe, an effort it being made to establish smart cities as the preferred

urban identity86. The EU has reduced the complexity of urban development to
a set of performance indicators that assumes that the various urban ingenuities
found in countries with the vastly different levels of wealth and cultural norms
can actually be standardized. While indicators are useful tools for social scientists
and policy makers, the EU’s choice of smart city classification indicators may in
fact act as a subtle disciplinary tool. Within the current system, cities achieve a
higher score (i.e. are smarter) if they attract more private investment, and if they
don’t, cities are given a lower score. The phrase ‘smart’ in this way inherently has
a positive connotation, creating this false dichotomous scenario where cities are
smart if they are tech-based, green and business friendly cities, but if they follow
any other developmental path they are suggested to be ‘dumb’, neo-luddite cities.
As shown with the example of pubic-private partnerships in Ottawa, attracting
capital does not automatically make cities better or more profitable, but at the
same time private investment in urban development is not bad either, it simply
depends on just how capital is actually used and whether measures are taken to
ensure that profit motives of the private industry are not allowed to supersede or
manipulate public interests.
95
Smart technology has been shown to work in regards to improving

transportation sustainability and aspects of local governance, yet
there is a very clear sense that the smart cities are ‘entrepreneurial
cities’, technology based, corporately focused cities whose
main purpose is to generate capital. Geographer David Harvey
found that there has been a shift in the forms of city governance
in the mid-80s away from managerial welfare to one of ‘urban
entrepreneurialism’104. The historian Tony Judt concurs, stating
in his book Thinking the Twentieth Century (2013) that since the
70s politicians and think tanks have shifted to framing public
policy in economic terms. Intellectuals and politicians do not ask
96
if a policy is right or wrong, but whether it is efficient or inefficient.

They don’t ask if a measure is good or bad, but whether or not it
improves economic productivity. Judt concluded, “The reason they
do this is not necessarily because they are uninterested in society,
but because they have come to assume, rather uncritically, that
the point of economic policy is to generate resources105.” It
seems that cities are now being left to fend for themselves in the
highly competitive global market and must accept the realities of
neoliberal urban development in order to attract private capital.
The question now is whether market-led urban planning to attract
IT companies and private investment is inherently a good thing?
97
“ The most pressing urban problems are

not technological but social in nature,
and have tended to be exacerbated, not
solved, by corporate-led privatization
and city branding strategies. ”
98
Digital Divides and Elite Enclaves
08
Digital Divides and
Elite Enclaves
99
>> McDonalds using a street crossing as a form of

advertisement during Zurichfest, the largest
public festival in Switzerland
100
For the last

30 years there has been a growing trend worldwide toward the privatization
of public space as reductions in tax revenue has sent municipalities to search for
alternative revenue streams. It would be impossible not to spot at least a two dozen
billboards an hour driving down the highways and byways of the United States or
on the walls of metro stops in every major European and Asian metropolis, but not
until now have urban infrastructures themselves become modes of advertisement.
In the US, Brooklyn’s busy Atlantic Avenue subway stop has now become Barclay’s
Bank Station; KFC logos can now be spotted on manhole covers and fire hydrants,
pedestrian crossings are sponsored by McDonalds; while Virginia has become the
first state in the US to offer up the naming rights of its bridges, highways and roads to
the highest bidder106. Similar polices have been pursued by cash strapped Europeans
capitals like Madrid, whose local government recently sold off the naming rights
of Puerta del Sol, its most iconic square, and one of its metro lines to the UK-based
telecommunications company Vodafone107. In the Netherlands, cities are also
selling their roundabouts to private firms109. This begs the question: What does it
mean for society when in order to sustain our most iconic cities we must accept the
loss of public space to advertising and adapt to being bombarded with even more
corporately sponsored messages than we already are in daily life?
In her book Ground Control (2009), award-winning journalist Anne Minton

describes how the UK’s market-based urban development policies have led to
wholesale privatization of most of its new housing stock, town centers, shopping
arcades, streets, public services and the growth in private security forces and gated-
communities. This template for ‘urban regeneration’ (i.e. gentrification) began in
the Docklands area of east London, where the run-down wharfs were redeveloped
with expensive glass and concrete high-rise condominiums, gyms, cafes and high-
101
end shops. Instead of transforming the area for the benefit of all Londoners, it
created a protected elite enclave that removes undesirables, completely insulating
residents from the decaying urban environment that surrounds them109. While
the book is by no means a communist manifesto, Minton skillfully demonstrates
that the public spaces in which the people used to meet, hang out, and more or
less do nothing, have been commoditized with little to no democratic inclusion or
consultation with the public-at-large. Somehow, following the notions of trickle-
down economics, urban planners have concluded that the only reason anyone
ever leaves their house and walks around is to shop, and that the attraction of
investment capital automatically benefits all urban dwellers equally.
Plutocratisation
Seeing as the dominant proponents of smart cities are multinational

companies who by their nature would rather avoid democratic deliberation,
consensus building, and rules and regulations in order to maximize profit,
some have argued that the off-loading of key urban infrastructures and giving
redevelopment priority to private industry might result in what geographer Steven
Graham calls ‘urban splintering’110. Urban splinting ultimately leads to increased
gentrification, fragmentation and polarization of urban regions; eschewing of
local and immigrant cultures; and a heightened digital divide between the high
value adding activities of crobos and professional middle class workers who can
afford and understand new technologies and immigrant communities, the poor
and the elderly who do not. Not even 40 years ago, the most attractive (i.e. rich)
global cities like San Francisco, New York, Tokyo, London, Paris and Amsterdam
were poor and their built environments run down. But from the 80’s onwards
things improved significantly as the financial sector grew, and as it grew, cities
became richer and more gentrified. Journalist Simon Kuper claims that most of
these cities have moved beyond gentrification and have now entered a stage of
‘plutocartisation’ in which they are transforming into “vast gated communities
where the one per cent reproduces itself72.” And he may be right, as a quick glance
at lists ranking the world’s smartest cities reveals that they also tend to be the
most expensive cities to live in111,112,113.
Kuper argues that while these frontline global cities may be experiencing
an ‘urban renaissance’, aggressive property acquisition by the global elite have
made them so expensive that it has not only priced out the poor and working
class, but increasingly even upper-middle class residents, forcing them to relocate
to peripheral suburbs. Along with the rise of unpaid internships in the creative
sector—much desired by groups of young crobos who are often seen as essential
102
I ncome most M edian

household income
Unequal Upper 1%
Along with being one the most iconic

$716,625
cities and the financial capital of the In 1990: $452,415
world, New York City holds the dubious
distinction of being America’s most
economically unequal metropolitan
area, with an income gap comparable
to countries like Namibia and Sierra
Leone.
Median
household income
Lower 10%
$9,455
I n 19 90: $8,468
Source: http://clacls.gc.cuny.edu/
files/2014/01/Household-Income- 103
Concentration-in-NYC-1990-2010.pdf
> In 2012, Singapore to popularizing eventually gentrifying ‘sick’

beat the United neighborhoods—this situation has created a
States to de facto pay wall that excludes vast swaths of
hold its title talented people from enjoying the amenities
as the most and potential opportunities found in the
economically world’s best cities. As sociologist Saskia
unequal Society Sassen points out, “These new geographies
of all OECD of centrality cut across many older divides–
countries north-south, east-west, democracies versus
dictator regimes. So top-level corporate and
professional sectors of São Paulo begin to have
more in common with peers in Paris, Hong
Kong et cetera than with the rest of their own
societies107.” For now, that old Dutch maxim
still holds true: wie betaalt, bepaalt, or, he who
pays, decides.
104
<< Begging is illegal in the aspiring

“Smart Nation” of Singapore, so
many impoverished citizens peddle
packs of tissues as a method of
generating extra income
Trends toward gentrification and plutocratisation are even more

demonstrably evident in the global south, where from Cape Town to Mumbai
you will find well-endowed technological urban enclaves with qualities of
life similar to Western European cities that are functionally separated from
‘non-profitable’ urban spaces where the majority of urban dwellers still live in
informal slums. Rather than raising the standards of living for all urban dwellers,
prioritizing urban development policies to attract the IT industry has in fact been
shown to deepen social divisions114. As one of the first countries to incorporate
ICT into governance and urban space and adopt neoliberal economic reforms,
the autocratic city-state of Singapore has become one of the most technologically
advanced and richest countries in the world. Startlingly, 25-30 percent of the
population still lives at or below the poverty line as the income gap between the
richest 10 percent of households and the poorest households increased from 15.6
to 1 to 36 to 1 between 1990 and 200084. Putting its questionable human rights
record and harsh treatment of political dissidents aside, in 2012, Singapore even
beat the United States to hold its title as the most economically unequal society
of all OECD countries115. Similar trends in urban splintering have been observed
in other developing world cities like Kuala Lampur, Sao Paulo and Bangalore84.
105
The Right to Infrastructure

One of the features of twenty-first century urbanism is the dramatic worldwide
expansion of large, often claimed to be ‘smart’, infrastructure projects116,117.
Infrastructure and its morphology, integration, and fit within a city’s social
fabric is particularly essential to its urban metabolism118,119,120,121. Metropolitan
network logics, rationalities and ideologies shape decisions about infrastructural
intervention at different spatial scale levels. Lack of infrastructure capacity is
seen as a limit to city growth and prosperity , so cities face pressure to upgrade
infrastructure as part of a global inter-urban competition122,123. Conversely,
infrastructure planning can build equitable and sustainable resilience to climate
change3,124,125 with new projects addressing social, economic or environmental
inequalities123.
Recently, strong concerns have been brought up about the capacity of

new cities to provide adequate infrastructure and ensure that investment
from both the public and private sector supports just and sustainable urban
development3,33,126,127,128,129,130. Compared to the highly technologically
sophisticated, rich and organized cities in the global north, many cities in the global
south suffer from decaying, mismanaged or a complete lack of basic infrastructures
like sewage systems, water treatment, electricity, etc. Infrastructures in poor
cities are more like spatially separated but linked archipelagos where certain
(richer) areas have basic services and poor sections do not75. While cities serve
as platform for growth and innovation, design preferences in infrastructural
projects remained problem oriented and passive to ever changing societal and
environmental pressures. Infrastructural investment can equally reduce or
intensify resource inequalities and connect or displace communities, fracture
livelihoods, and reinforce spatial divisions131.
Following this notion, IT-led urban development has been shown to

ignore the ‘right to infrastructure’132. The right to infrastructure is considered
a prototype for open source urbanism as a novel expression and assemblage of
public and collective action. It echo’s Henri Lefebvre’s famous notion of the ‘right
to the city’133, which has recently become an emblem of urban social movements
worldwide134,135. The infrastructure is not something that gets placed, traversed
or inflected upon a cities social milieu. Rather, it becomes re-inscribed as a
constitutive ‘right’—the right to define and redefine one’s infrastructural being.
This has been made especially evident by the study of open source urban hardware
projects, where the means and ends of political action converge in very concrete
and material objects of infrastructure134.
106
>> Yangon, the capital city of Myanmar (Burma), suffers from regular
floods due to a lack of decent sewage infrastructure
107
>> Residents of Kibera (Nairobi) that have
been forcefully evicted so their slum
can be destroyed
>> Police forcing their way through

fences as an eviction begins at Dale
Farm in Basildon, England
>> Not everyone in Toronto is satisfied

with the influx of new condominiums
> in cities around the

world municipalities
and developers are
forcefully evicting
poor residents without
proper compensation
and reallocating their
property for more useful
(i.e. profitable) purposes
The smart city imaginary for the most part completely ignores many of other
social problems that plague most of the world’s cities in developing economies:
extreme poverty, economic inequality and ethnic discrimination. Smart cities
also turn a blind eye to what Harvey calls ‘accumulation through dispossession’,
where real-estate developers in cities around the world, rich and the poor, are
forcefully evicting poor residents without proper compensation and reallocating
their property for more useful (i.e. profitable) purposes. In 2009, the Centre on
Housing Rights and Evictions released a damning report that concluded that
forced evictions ranks amongst the most widespread human rights violations
in the world136. It is startlingly clear that prioritizing urban planning in the
global south to serve the business interests of multinational IT companies is
extremely misguided when tax-payer dollars could be better spent investing in
comparatively non-expensive infrastructure and progressive policies that benefit
the vast majority of poor urban dwellers who may still lack basic education,
sanitation and infrastructure services. The most pressing urban problems are not
technological but social in nature, and have tended to be exacerbated, not solved,
by corporate-led privatization and city branding strategies.
109
110
Give Us Your Data and We’ll Give You a Techno-Utopia
09
Give Us Your
Data and We’ll Gi ve You a
Techno-utopia
111
112
The story so far

is that cities are facing concurrent, interconnected and compounding
environmental, economic and social crises that threatened our future livelihood,
and how IT companies are selling municipal governments the ‘smart’ city
imaginary as our ticket into the future. We, like the IT companies, have painted
modernity as ‘sick’ and in need of immediate resuscitation. This cynical narrative
conveys the negative side of the ‘utopian mirror image’, a trope typical of utopian
visions of future urban planning ever since Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)75.
Urban planning historian Françoise Choay has argued that in order to provide a
thorough urban discourse, one must first diagnose the ailments before suggesting
universally valid solutions137. In its current form, smart cities are not about
synthesizing the multiplicity of perspectives of how human view themselves and
their relation with society and technology or our myriad urban ingenuities and
cultural norms. Rather, it is an all-encompassing technocratic utopian vision
that holds Ubikquity, rather than the slow, oftentimes contradictory nature of
politics, as the solution to our most pressing urban problems. And if the rising
number of political protests and the global shift towards nationalism are of any
indication, many are becoming increasingly frustrated with the current political
and economic order.
The idea that technology can deliver definitive and standardized solutions to
the diverse and oftentimes ambiguous social dynamics and conflicts of the human
condition given enough data, computing power, and the right algorithms is what
technology writer Evegney Morozov calls ‘solutionism’138. This is connected with
the reframing of social policies towards quantifiable efficiency indicators where
the smart city can optimize urban ‘imperfections’ and make life frictionless and
as trouble-free as possible without drastic changes in personal lifestyles or radical
113
structural change. According to Morozov, the solutionist mentality believes that

innovation and technology are inherently good within themselves, regardless of
the potential political implications or unintended social consequences. Though it
might be counterintuitive to claim, as innovation and the proliferation of digital
technology are almost universally assumed to be synonymous with progress, we
as a society may be suffering from a pro-innovation bias. This in turn digs up the
age-old debate about the supposed neutrality of technology.
Then again, what exactly is technology? In the most basic sense, technology is
a procedure (social or mechanical) of adapting our surroundings whose progress is
dependent on the efficiency and convenience of future developments compared to
previous iterations. Views on the neutrality of technology tend to fall within two
general camps, ‘technoneutrals’ who believe in instrumental theory of technology
and ‘technostructuralists’ who believe in the substantive theory of technology139.
The more widely accepted instrumental theory takes the position that technology
is simply a tool whose purpose is determined by the user, making it effectively
apolitical and value-neutral. With this definition, the smart city discourse can also
be regarded as technoneutral. Technoneutrals tend to agree with the reductionist
view that technological progress is a rational, autonomous, self-propelling, self-
perpetuating force with its own values, ideology, and social structures that benefit
everyone equally while simultaneously being external and independent of human
control. Computer scientist Abbe Mowshowitz argues, “We have cultivated
a special relationship to technology wherein needs and conflicts are almost
invariably formulated as technical problems requiring technical solutions140.” For
technoneutrals, when a technology fails or has negative consequences it’s the fault
of big business, the military, politicians or individuals, not the technology itself.
This follows the line of thinking that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
Technostructuralists on the other hand argue that technology presents

a new type of cultural system that restructures the social world as an object
of control. They believe that technologies develop out of institutional needs
with impacts mediated through institutional arrangements and social forces
and that a technological artifacts’ significance is also socially constructed. For
technostructuralists, ICTs are artifacts that do not inherently promote freedom
or tyranny, but objects that project and lock-in existing or emerging power
structures. Technology does not inherently liberate or enslave and does not exist
in a vacuum from society; its development and implied uses are determined by the
inventors and interpreted by the complex web of human activities that surround
it. The smart city imaginary is marketed as apolitical and value neutral in nature—
this is why smart city initiatives are being developed in highly democratic
regimes like those Europe and the US and autocratic regimes like Singapore
114
and China. In our view, (smart) technology is never neutral. From optimizing
public transportation to monitoring political dissidents, while it might utilize
similar means, technology has the potential to be used socially and politically for
dissimilar outcomes.
Rise of Algorithms and ‘The End of Theory’
What does the stock market, search engine optimization, web advertising
and smart cities all have in common? They are all defined by petabytes of data,
sophisticated computer algorithms and big data analytics. Statistician George
Box once said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful141.” Speaking at a
technology conference, Google’s research director Peter Norvig updated that
maxim: “All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them142.”
Without any particular knowledge of culture or marketing, Google has been able
to dominate the advertising world solely with mathematics and better analytical
tools. They don’t need to understand why people like a particular web page over
another—as long as their statistical quantifications point in the right direction, it’s
good enough. According to journalist Chris Anderson, Google’s philosophy to
success is not only disrupting the advertising world, but could potentially upend
the very basis of scientific inquiry itself: correlation without causation, the ‘end
of theory’.
The basis of the scientific method is creating theoretical models that are tested
with experiments to verify their validity. Scientists are trained to recognize that
correlation does not equal causation, and that before you can claim that phenomena
A causes phenomena B, you must understand both their underlying mechanisms.
Norvig himself rebutted Anderson in his personal blog to the authenticity of the
attribution where he updated Box’s maxim, retorting, “Models are here to stay,
and it doesn’t make sense to talk of doing science (or computer science) without
them143.” He pointed out to how spell checkers are more efficient because they use
the Markov Sequence to approximate results without the necessity of linguists.
For more complex systems, he states that we should “use as much data as well
as we can to help define (or estimate) the complex models we need for these
complex domains.” One could argue that for more complex (social) problems like
those found in cities we do need more complex models, but seeing as the smart
city imaginary maintain this solutionist, ‘correlation without causation’ ethos, it’s
worth taking a look if smart technology has yielded as fantastic results as those
of Google.
115
AN ES S E N TI A LLY
MECHANICAL
WO R L D
116
WOULD BE
AN ESSENTIALLY
MEANING L E SS
WORLD
Friedrich Nietzsche
117
B eautiful
Algorithms
In the past, GPS mapping

algorithms have generally
been restricted to calculat-
ing the shortest, cheapest,
or fastest routes.
Researchers at Yahoo Labs in

Barcelona are revisiting this
idea. After studying correla-
tions in Flickr’s database of
photos and their tags, they
developed an algorithm to
calculate the happiest, most
beautiful, and most quiet
routes through London and
Boston. They had 84 users
between the two cities eval-
uate the paths their algo-
rithm generated, and lo and
behold, the users agreed
that the algorithm did exact-
ly what it set out to do.
Top to bottom: Shortest route,

happiest route, most quiet
route, most beautiful route
118
> The basis of the scientific method is

creating theoretical models that
are tested with experiments to
verify their validity
Predictive Policing Technology
Overall, smart technologies and smart city initiatives in the form of greenfield
and retrofit projects have had varying levels of success. In 2009, IBM picked up
where the cyberneticists of MIT (as explained in Chapter 6) left off after their
failure in applying computer-based urban simulations in Pittsburgh. This time,
they set their sights on the city of Portland, Oregon. Working with local experts,
IBM amassed a vast cache of historical data and developed a model that grew to
over 7000 equations with the aim of creating a ‘decision support system’ to help
guide planning policy74. While their design was a vast improvement over past
attempts, all the time and money spent on development was to no avail. IBM’s
model produced reliably dull and resoundingly obvious predictions, such as there
was strong correlation between increased amounts of bike paths and reduced
obesity. In the end, city officials decided to pass on the program. Similarly, with
the previously mentioned case of Rio di Janiero, after mayor Eduardo Paes got his
camera network and centralized operations center up and running he took the
time to fly to California to give a dazzling TED talk to demonstrate how Rio is
moving into the future, yet in reality it was little more than a promotional stunt—a
city looking smart and actually being smart are two different things. Security
experts remain skeptical that this IBM led project will do anything to subdue the
criminality of the city, and beyond the live streams and weather forecasts, there
has been little to no investment in integrating the city or the system with a wider
array of smart infrastructures74.
In the last few years, IT companies have courted law enforcement agencies
in the US and EU with the prospect of smart ‘predictive policing technology’.
This might conjure up scenes from the movie Minority Report—coincidently
based on a Philip K. Dick short story—of snub nosed detectives turning to groups
of psychics to predict criminal activity before it happens, but this is a very real
and rapidly growing trend as police departments turn to Ubikquity to mine past
crime data in order to ‘predict’ and prevent future crimes. Using methods not that
119
>> A mapping of violent crimes against persons in London,

used by the London Metropolitan Police Service
120
much different from the algorithms found in Amazon’s recommender

system, privately developed software suites like PredPol analyzes
decades of crime statistics to draw correlations, recommends which
areas should be policed more intensely, and divides the city into a
‘predictive zone’ map140. So far, PredPol has yielded surprising results
in California with criminality down in Los Angeles and Santa Cruz
by 13 percent and 30 percent respectively since its adoption. Again,
we run into the issue of solutionism in which technology is used to
achieve a particular result but ignores the underlying mechanisms
of the phenomena, including possible second order effects such as
pushing criminality towards other areas.
Its cost savings and efficacy so far are impressive, but it is

important to be aware that predictive crime algorithms are not some
magical crystal ball that foresee future per say, they use historical
data to create probabilistic models of when and where crime might
occur. Information theorist Martin Fricke observed that data mining
initiatives tend to mistake data for information and encourage “the
mindless and meaningless collection of data in the hope that one
day it will . . . ascend to information—pre-emptive acquisition144”.
Future criminal activity is not the result of past crimes, but because
of underlying, harder to quantify environmental and urban problems
like poverty, lack of economic opportunities, urban decay and
education. Since criminal activity tends to occur in poor and minority
neighborhoods, ‘value-neutral’ algorithms may actually be used to
justify institutional biases like racial profiling. Furthermore, shifting
crime dynamics must be entered into the model in real time to keep
the models accurate. If urban baseline conditions change dramatically,
lets say during flood or a riot or something similar, the predictive
capabilities of software become rendered useless. Predictive policing
and data analytics are at best complimentary tools, and should not be
viewed as a cost effective replacement to human intuition and building
trust and respect between local communities and law enforcement.
Every technology encodes a hypothesis
Most applications of smart systems and smart data processing

are based on the collection and representation of data that is interpreted
by a technician, and thus in a way can be connected to the System I
approach in the context of the Kahneman’s prospect theory. The idea
121
that you put sensors out, measure everything, and on the basis make decisions is
biased because data is crafted. It is curated by machines and machine specialists,
or to put it straightforward: there’s a hypothesis behind it based on a specific
methodology: “Every technology and every ensemble of technologies encodes
a hypothesis about human behaviour, and the smart city is no different”, as
Greenfield claimed145. For example, smart meters are often seen as a genuine
reform mechanism to increase urban sustainability by monitoring household
water, gas and electricity use. Smart meters themselves are useful at presenting
consumption data but fail to generate any useful narrative because they generally
do not illustrate the relation between user consumption and the highly complex
and seemingly invisible infrastructure services outside of the household. This is
what Morozov calls ‘numeric imagination’: data enables us to think in numbers
about how much we can consume and what we can unplug, but it never
challenges us to think of beyond our own individual consumption and connect
it with larger urban systems140. A real sustainability policy might require larger
lifestyle sacrifices beyond simply being aware of material consumption. Numeric
imagination might convince us to buy an electric vehicle because it is more energy
efficient, but narrative imagination illuminates us as to whether we should buy a
new car at all.
In his book Mirror Worlds (1991), computer scientist David Gelernter

presaged the smart city in describing how sensors, networks, computational
power and data visualization were amalgamating in a way that would change
the world forever, specifically using cities as a metaphor to demonstrate how
these powerful technologies can capture urban complexities en vivo. For him,
ICTs act as scientific viewing tools that allow us to materialize a bird’s-eye view
of cities. These technologies would create digital, macro-level facsimile of the
intricacies of interactions between human beings, the built environment and
machines146. He contends however that such top sight won’t reveal the subjective
experiences of urban dwellers themselves, and that mirror worlds would slowly
optimized out the inefficient, irrational emotionalism of humans in favor of a
rationalist view of society. In The Gay Science, German Philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche resoundingly agrees, “What? Do we really want to permit existence
to be degraded for us like this—reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an
indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one should not wish to divest
existence of its rich ambiguity that is a dictate of good taste, gentlemen, the taste
of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon147.” After a few more
pages he dismissively concludes, “An essentially mechanical world would be an
essentially meaningless world.”
122
T he idea that yo u
put sens ors o ut,
measure everything,
and o n that basis
make decisio ns, is
biased because
data i s crafted .
123
“ Smart cities may be the apotheosis

of Homo Ubikis, where we become so
reliant on ubikquity that our capacity to
reason could not function without it. ”
124
Liberté, Prédictivité , Uniformité
10
Liberté,
Prédictivité,
Uniformité
125
>> La Grande Arche de la Défense, otherwise known as the Grand

Arch, a monument in the west of Paris
126
One of the main

criticisms launched against urban development guided by smart technology
is that it reduces the importance of thematic experts within the fields of urban
planning, sociology, and anthropology. Urban planning that relies primarily on
generalized algorithms could lead to what Marcuse observes as cities of political
consensus “in which the claims of the minority or powerless or disenfranchised or
non-mainstream groups are considered disturbing factors in the quest for policies
benefiting the whole148.” Smart cities may push age-old social problems towards
the field of post politics where solutions become generally agreed upon, digitally
constructed targets—which it has, at least in regards to the EU indicators—devoid
of critical discussion or debate between conflicting ideological positions. This
leads right to heart of the Two Concepts of Liberty (1958), a lecture presented by
the renowned liberal political philosopher Isaiah Berlin concerning the dialectic
between the notions of positive and negative liberty.
According to Berlin, negative liberty is used to answer the question, “What is

the area within which the subject—a person or group of persons—is or should be
left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?”
Positive liberty attempts to answer, “What, or who, is the source of control or
interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?149”. In
a broader context, positive liberty essentially deals with the freedom of individuals
or groups to be self-determined, self-realized, and to act autonomously and
collectively towards manifesting new, potentially better futures for society103.
Negative liberty on the other hand does have such lofty ideals or grand visions
for the world—it is only concerned with protecting individuals from unnecessary
restraint or harm. Writing during the Cold War, Berlin questioned attempts
to promote positive liberty, because for him every instance of positive liberty
127
>> Anonymous searching versus

personalized Google search results
in recent history has always resulted in the horrors of tyrannical dictatorships.

From the French revolution and the USSR to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the
revolutionary vanguard claimed that in order for the masses to be transformed
into better, more rational human beings, the people must trust them because they
were more rational and better educated. They had an absolute belief that they
knew the reasons why most of humanity was oppressed, and to reach the ideal
society they must be allowed to do anything, including kill, to achieve it.
Berlin’s work was immensely influential and relevant during the Cold War
when the west was actively promoting development in the global south that
conformed to capitalism and negative liberty (when it was possible). However, in
the post-cold war era, the west has combined negative liberty with the reductionist
theories of neoliberal economists who claim that the human interactions and
financial world are best understood as billions of self-seeking, rational economic
agents. It seems at times that the only purpose of government in the 21st century is
to protect individuals from coercion and to promote a social contract without any
ideals beyond recognizing individual desires and the right of persons to indulge in
them. Is it true that we have reached what the political scientist Francis Fukuyama
has called ‘the end of history’150?
Despite past atrocities that have occurred in the name of positive liberty,
is a world of developed and semi-functioning liberal democracies geared solely
towards economic expansion and sating the material desires of individuals really
the best thing we can envision?
The smart city imaginary, as an amalgam of technology and market-led

ideology, is not a radical utopian vision that posits any new ideas about how to
tackle the most complex problems in our species’ history. If anything, it might
128
actually act as a kind of technological straightjacket that maintains the status quo.
Limiting innovation
While there is no direct evidence to prove the smart cities inhibit positive
liberty, there are a number of comparable examples that demonstrate how
Ubikquity is used to manifest a kind of simplistic, static perspective of the
possibilities of the human experience and minimize risk-taking. For one, there is
what political and internet activist Eli Pariser has dubbed the ‘filter bubble’, where
web companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google use algorithms to personalize
search results and web experiences based on past links users have clicked on. If
two individuals with different political leanings were searching the same subject,
algorithmic truncation would personalize their search results and their social
media feeds to conform to their previously established worldviews based on their
web history. This kind of radical personalization is being employed in finance,
travel, and particularly in news.
Additionally, there are already companies like Automated Insights that are
using algorithms to generate complete stories—the next possible step in this
progression would be algorithms that automatically customize the actual text
of articles based on the user’s presumed education level. Yes, personalization
algorithms are a radically more efficient way to target ads and content, increase
viewership, yield economic benefits for businesses, and heighten user experience
for consumers, but this age of radical customization has serious implications for
social relations within the city. The ‘if you like this, then you’ll like that’ web
culture might give us media we are most interested in, but it also might overlook
content that is less popular but challenges our preconceived notions of reality and
129
Welcome to the age of information.

You’ll ne ver gue ss what
happen s ne x t !
Trending “news” according to Buzzfeed
As news websites search for ways to increase click-through

rates, ad revenue and readership, companies like the Daily
Me offer services that allow for the personalization of news
stories and web advertisements based on information stored
in the many cookies hidden away on users’ computers and
mobile devices that track what they read on social media
and other websites 140 . In effect, the actual content of news
stories becomes less important than its ability to attract an
audience and generate advertising revenue.
130
justice. Just like Google’s Norvig said, algorithms are used to simplify complex
problems for the sake of efficiency. This unwavering belief to personalize user
experiences in name of efficiency manifests a highly self-centered view of reality
that trap individuals into an increasingly fixed vision of themselves and the world
around them. The unintended consequence of such technology is that it tends
to inhibit change. This could potentially reduce the possibility of solidarity and
objectively informed debates as people receive similar facts but generate different
knowledge bases, or even worse, lead to important local and international issues
being swept away in the background time and time again by a continuous tide of
#trending lists and LOLCAT memes.
The ‘filter bubble’ significantly contorts the flows of information we receive

from the web, yet there are other more absurdly powerful systems in the world
of finance operating along similar mechanisms that are also used to inhibit risk-
taking and keep things the same. Investment banking and finance is sometimes
portrayed in the media as a carnival of gluttonous, self-indulgent fat cats who use
complex mathematics and high-risk trading mechanisms to enrich themselves at
the expense of humanity and the planet—at least if your point of reference is the
financial reporter Matt Taibbi or Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. This
might be true for the gravest of offenders, but reality is a bit different, almost
to the point of banality. ALADDIN is an incredibly powerful, yet essentially
unknown computer network owned by Blackrock, the world’s the largest asset
manager151. Aladdin controls over € 8.76 trillion worth of market investments, or
just about 7 percent of all financial wealth on the planet. Startling to say the least,
but how exactly does the computer system work? The culmination of 20 years
of development, ALADDIN has within its memory a vast trove of information of
the last 50 years of history—financial or otherwise152.
Just like previous examples of Ubikquity, ALADDIN mines historical data

and uses its massive computer power to make correlations between the present
with events in the past in order to predict possible (financial) disasters and moves
investments away from futures that might disrupt the status quo. As it moves
around € 8.76 trillion in investments, the ALADDIN system is in some ways
more powerful than traditional mechanisms of politics. From the perspective of
finance, the system is quite laudable, but from a societal perspective it is very
boring because its purpose is to make the (financial) world as stable as possible,
preventing investment into any kind of truly innovative development that might
benefit humanity but are deemed too risky to the bottom line of a small cadre of
investors.
131
“ This 2-dimensional archive of

reality bolsters a deeply static, flat,
and endless perpetual ‘now’. ”
132
Acceleration Towards Cloud Feudalisms
11
Acceleration
Towards Cloud
Feudalisms
133
134
The smart city

discourse and the solutionist mantra idealizes technology as a almost mythological,
spontaneously generating, and accelerating force of nature that grabs us by the
hands and drag us into a future defined on it own terms. This ideology is a tacit
continuation of Marx and other materialist theorists who posited that economic
forces and the latest technological artifacts were the primarily drivers behind the
transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe. In Speed and Politics (1977),
urbanist Paul Virilio frames it from the perspective of dromology and his ‘war
model’ of development153. Dromology is concerned with the ‘acceleration’ of the
social, political and economic world, and how that durations of time involved
in the transference of people and objects, and the transmission of the images
and ideas, have become compressed153. He interprets history, politics, society
and technology from the perspective of speed, and that speed (i.e. efficiency),
enhanced by technology, has become the only benchmark for measuring progress.
For Virilio, politics can never be subsumed by wealth, and in addition to

wealth, the history of institutions like the military and artistic movements like
futurism show that war and the need for speed are cornerstones of modern
human civilization and the primary modes of organizing cultural and spatial
development of urban areas157. Feudal cities used to be guarded by massive
defensive walls to protect them from outside invaders, yet the walls disappeared,
why? Within his ‘war model’, increasingly transportable and accelerated weapons
systems rendered feudal urbanisms obsolete as siege warfare transformed into
wars of movement, affecting local authorities ability to govern the flow of people
and encouraging what he calls focus on the ‘habitable flow of the masses’155.
135
Concurrently (if market dominance of IT companies, hedge funds and energy

companies is of any indication), the accumulation of wealth and power in the
modern era is also tied to the pursuit of greater means of speed. Globalization for
him has less to do with the homogenization of economies and cultures and more
to do with the creation of a global ‘one time system’—the ever present, perpetual
now156. Virilio has argued that capital cities of the future will only remain
significant because of their ability to act as the intersections of speed, rather than
serving any communal or social purpose157.
Control and Trust
In a post-9/11 world, the importance of the military-industrial-scientific

complex has not been decreasing, but increasing. The traditional notion of
‘pure war’, with tanks, ships and planes, has evolved to the current epoch of
‘Infowar’ epoch. The threat of attack by clandestine agents (covert Islamist terror
cells, cyber terrorists, etc.) who can easily blend into the general populous has
been used by governments to validate increased spending on the ‘third age’ of
military weaponry—Ubikquity—for the purposes of national security158. Virillio’s
writings are almost hauntingly prophetic: Not only are just about every major
ICT development—wireless communication, the Internet, computers, transistor
chips, AR, GPS, RFID, etc.—the result of military research funded by the US
Department of Defense, but the revelations of the NSA wiretapping scandals
demonstrates how smart technology could be the final nail in the coffin for
personal privacy. Smart cities may become a digital rendering of Jeremy Bentham’s
Panopticon, an invisible prison that reinforces what Foucault calls a ‘disciplinary
society’: permanent observation and visibility allows for the control of behavior
without the necessity of excessive prejudicial violence, jail cells, handcuffs or
locks. Beyond public areas installed with CCTV cameras, nobody will be spying
on us—ironically enough, social media companies have outsourced spying to
the users themselves by somehow convincing us to make our digital lives their
private property.
A similar critique can be applied to the IoT. Google recently proposed that
its successful web-based advertising strategies could be used to monetize this new
ecosystem of network objects159. This opens the possibility of smart cars pushing
particular brand of engine oil when the oil needs changing, or smart refrigerators
that upsell gourmet goat cheese from Alsace, skim milk and Starbucks coffee based
on your recent purchases at the supermarket when you are running low on food
and are trying to make breakfast. Autonomous marketing appliances aside, the
biggest players looking to take advantage of IoT are insurance companies. IoT
136
Hey, your tank is almost empty.

Why not stop here?
Tesoro Gas Station

tsocorp.com
4.9 8 Google reviews · Google+ page
> Google has proposed that its successFul

web-based advertising strategies could
be used to monetize this new ecosystem
of network objects
may well become the very basis of future home, car and health insurance policies,
where insurers offer free or cheap smart devices that surveil our daily lives and
stream data into their servers so they can create the most ‘accurate’ policy costs.
Because insurers make money when we conform to non-risky behaviors that
limit the possibility of a payout, this creates a feedback system of control (i.e.
behavioral modification).
This should not be construed as paranoid speculation, as a recent report

by insurance consulting firm Celent’s Americas Property/Casualty Practice
plainly states that data from IoT can “provide a much more accurate picture of
the exposures, hazards, and risks of what is being insured,” and recommends,
“insurers can create feedback and control processes to command or request
137
> In the near future, we may become

less defined by the very real, yet
unquantifiable ambiguities of the human
condition and increasingly commoditized
by the trail of digital bread crumbs we
leave
things to change their loss-related behavior and performance161.” If insurance
companies can spot when we are meddling in behaviors that affects their bottom
line, they can impose a disciplinary system that penalize users by hiking policy
premiums, denying insurance or simply take away our smart devices. Presently,
there are little to no legal regulations of IoT that curtail the power of insurance
companies. As law professor Scott Peppet pointed out, “antidiscrimination
law does not prevent economic sorting based on our personalities, habits, and
character traits . . . insurers are free to avoid insuring—or charge more to—those
with risk preferences they find too expensive to insure160.” What may happen
in the future if no regulations are imposed is that insures could require users to
always wear health and fitness monitoring devices like Apple’s iWatch as part
of a policy agreement. This all makes sense for insurance companies from an
economic standpoint, and maybe even from a health and wellness standpoint,
but the prospect of a Pavolvian world that monitors our daily movements with
networked household devices and smart apparel for the sake of optimizing
insurance policies that discriminate and punish people for being too ‘risky’ is
extremely dubious to say the least.
Issues of individual autonomy and privacy are further complicated by what

computer security and privacy expert Bruce Schneiner has dubbed the rise of
‘cloud feudalism’161. Classical feudalism was a system of complex and hierarchical
fiefdoms where serfs made oaths and allegiances to lords for protection from
harm. A similar model now exists in computer security today as users mercifully
click on byzantine user agreement and privacy policies and entrust their personal
data to IT companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox and Apple for the right to
use their ubikquitous products and services (Gmail, iCloud, etc). And this exactly
is the problem: trust is our only option because it’s either we trust them or we opt
out of Ubikquity, making life a lot more difficult. Unless you are a programmer
with a lot of time on your hands, the vast majority of users have no idea how these
services and their accompanying security systems actually work. And even if you
had the technical knowledge to understand it, you definitely could not install your
own security systems to your mobile devices, e-mail or social media accounts.
138
>> Hidden away in the user settings for Google accounts is an option to
manage what kinds of ads Google displays for you. As a result, you
can see what your “interests” are, from their perspective. See for
yourself at https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads
Despite efforts to assure users otherwise, the price we pay for using these ‘free’
services, as in the case of Facebook, is that our private data is monetized and
sold to third parties. If the recent celebrity photo hacking scandals on iCloud162,
Facebook’s manipulation of newsfeeds to understand users’ emotions163, and
Amazon’s ability to remotely wipe the memory of any Kindle at any time164 counts
as evidence, security is not guaranteed and there are still very few restrictions as
to what these companies can do with the data we entrust them with—for now,
the law is on their side.
139
140
Google bird view

The ubikquitous Google Maps web
application is the golden standard
for geographical and navigational
tools. Curiously, despite our cultural
differences and on going wars and
conflicts, the people of the world
seem united in their opinion about the
invasion privacy whenever they see a
Google street view car passing by.
141
Furthermore, the political realities of ‘superjuristiction’ and the increasingly

ambiguous sovereignty of data as it travels through Ubikquity also exacerbates
the issue of privacy52. According to the USA Patriot Act, an anti-terrorism law
passed in the United States in the wake of 9/11, all data stored by US companies
on non-US data servers falls within the jurisdiction of US intelligence services.
That means the United States government effectively has card blanche access to
the data of all global users of US cloud-based services: Facebook, Apple, Twitter,
Dropbox, Google, Amazon, Rackspace, Box, Microsoft, IBM, CISCO, and many,
many more. Here, that rambunctious sociologist Saskia Sassen is at it again:
Through the Patriot Act [...] the government has authorized

official monitoring of attorney-client conversations, wide-
ranging secret searches and wiretaps, the collection of Internet
and e-mail addressing data [...] All of this can be done without
probable cause about the guilt of the people searched—that
is to say, the usual threshold that must be passed before the
government may invade privacy has been neutralized. This is an
enormous accrual of powers in the administration, which has
found itself in the position of having to reassure the public
that it can be ‘trusted’ not to abuse these powers. But there
have been abuses 165.
The idea of the Internet as some sort of boundless medium of free expression
is juxtaposed by the fact it is also highly contested political space where the US
government has a unique position in managing and monitoring most of its core
functions. Extending this to smart cities, any city on earth that develops their
digital urban infrastructure through an American-based IT company runs the
risk that it may become a giant spy machine for US intelligence agencies and third
party affiliates as a significant portion of the US’s intelligence gathering capacity
has been privatized and outsourced to multinational consulting firms that serve
both government and corporate clientele with equal fervor166. Furthermore,
the increased digitization and centralizing of key public infrastructures to the
cloud increases the risk of them being hacked and manipulated by talented cyber
terrorists and/or foreign governments.
Human beings are already highly dependent on technological artifacts in our

everyday lives, but we can still somewhat function without them. Smart cities may
be the apotheosis of Homo Ubikis, where we become so reliant on Ubikquity that
our capacity to reason could not function without it. It will not result in humanity
becoming slaves to technology, as slavery is a state forced upon the individual by
an aggressor. As recent history has shown us, forcing people to do things with a
143
boot on their neck doesn’t yield particularly effective outcomes in the long run.
The genius of this smart utopian vision is that it assumes, perhaps correctly, that
users and cities will willingly embrace technology as a convenient means for
individual empowerment, access to knowledge and services, and increasing public
safety, urban sustainability and economic growth. This will all be at the cost of
privacy and personal autonomy as human beings become utterly dependent on
corporate gatekeepers who hold the keys to essential digital infrastructures that
only the highly technologically literate understand.
In the near future, we may become less defined by the very real, yet
unquantifiable ambiguities of the human condition and increasingly commoditized
by the trail of digital bread crumbs we leave as we move about built environments
imbedded with smart sensors and smart walls festooned with video advertisements
tailored to ours moods and shopping history—that is of course if they can pry us
away from incessantly tapping on our personal windows to Ubikquity. When
considering the prospect of wearable smart technology and AR, this might result
in a literal truncation of reality with bespoke, digitally enhanced experiences of
the physical environment itself.
Though it is doubtful that tech companies and hedge funds were thinking
about it when they were designing movie recommendation engines, predictive
crime applications and investment software, the unintended consequence of
algorithms is that they are being used to limit risk-taking and maintain, rather
than radically empower users to challenge the status quo, to innovate or to become
creative. These sophisticated, yet simplified models only look at past datasets to
find correlations with the present and predict the future. It is a 2-dimensional
archive of reality that bolsters a deeply static, flat, and endless perpetual ‘now’ that
circumscribes our understanding of who individuals and communities actually
are and what they could potentially transform into. This is besides the fact that
the digital you could potentially be sold off to third party companies depending
of which services you use, so be weary. Following this path, urban dwellers may
become serfs within terra ubikquita, a hybrid spatial-digital landscape controlled
by competing public and private cloud-based kingdoms with their own rights,
privileges and public service offerings; a technologically enhanced, highly
stratified neo-feudal society where people have no other choice but to pay fealty
to IT companies who we must trust to protect our privacy and (digital) selves, and
all with the tacit click or poke of an arcane user agreement form.
>> Right background: Facebook’s lengthy Data Use policy, which states everything
that Facebook is legally allowed to do with users’ data. The full policy statement
can be found at https://www.facebook.com/full_data_use_policy
144
Information we receive about about you to, for example, tell mation to be accessible to reactivate your account at When you select an audience News Feed. If you want to mation with the games, app
you you and your friends about Platform applications, you can some point in the future. You for your friend list, you are delete a story you posted, cations, and websites you a
We receive a number of dif- people or events nearby, or turn off all Platform applica- can deactivate your account only controlling who can see choose the delete option. your friends use. Facebo
ferent types of information offer deals to you in which you tions from your Privacy Set- at: https://www.facebook. the entire list of your friends What your friends and others Platform also lets you br
about you, including: might be interested. We may tings. If you turn off Platform com/settings?tab=security on your timeline. We call this a share about you your friends with you, so y
Your information
Your information is the infor-
also put together data about
you to serve you ads or other
you will no longer be able to
use any games or other appli-
Your friends will still see you
listed in their list of friends Acceleration Towards Cloud Feudalisms
timeline visibility control. This
is because your friend list is
Links and Tags
Anyone can add a link to a
can connect with them
Facebook. In these two wa
mation that’s required when content that might be more cations until you turn Platform while your account is deac- always available to the games, story. Links are references Facebook Platform helps y
you sign up for the site, as well relevant to you. back on. For more information tivated. applications and websites you to something on the Internet; make your experiences
as the information you choose When we get your GPS loca- about the information that Deletion use, and your friendships may anything from a website to a the web more personaliz
to share. tion, we put it together with apps receive when you visit When you delete your be visible elsewhere (such as Page or timeline on Facebook. and social.
Registration information: other location information them, see Other websites and account, it is permanently on your friends’ timelines or in For example, if you are writing Remember that these gam
When you sign up for Face- we have about you (like your applications. deleted from Facebook. It typ- searches). For example, if you a story, you might include a applications and websites a
book, you are required to pro- current city). But we only keep If you want to see information ically takes about one month select “Only Me” as the audi- link to a blog you are referenc- created and maintained
vide information such as your it until it is no longer useful available about you through to delete an account, but ence for your friend list, but ing or a link to the blogger’s other businesses and dev
name, email address, birthday, to provide you services, like our Graph API, just type some information may remain your friend sets her friend list Facebook timeline. If some- opers who are not part
and gender. In some cases, keeping your last GPS coor- https://graph.facebook.com/ in backup copies and logs for to “Public,” anyone will be able one clicks on a link to another or controlled by, Facebo
you may be able to register dinates to send you relevant [User ID or Username]?meta- up to 90 days. You should only to see your connection on your person’s timeline, they’ll only so you should always ma
using other information, like notifications. data=1 into your browser. delete your account if you are friend’s timeline. see the things that they are sure to read their terms
your telephone number. We only provide data to our Your Facebook email address sure you never want to reac- Similarly, if you choose to hide allowed to see. service and privacy polic
Information you choose to advertising partners or cus- includes your public username tivate it. You can delete your your gender, it only hides it on A tag is a special type of link to understand how they tre
share: Your information also tomers after we have removed like so: username@facebook. account at: https://www.face- your timeline. This is because to someone’s timeline that your data.
includes the information you your name and any other per- com. People can use your book.com/help/contact.php?- we, just like the applications suggests that the tagged Controlling what informat
choose to share on Facebook, sonally identifying information Facebook email address to show_form=delete_account you and your friends use, need person add your story to their you share with applications
such as when you post a sta- from it, or have combined it send you messages and any- Learn more at: https:// to use your gender to refer to timeline. In cases where the When you connect with
tus update, upload a photo, or with other people’s data in a one in a message conversa- w w w. f a c e b o o k . c o m / h e l p / ? - you properly on the site. tagged person isn’t included game, application or webs
comment on a friend’s story. way that it no longer person- tion can reply to it. faq=356107851084108 When someone tags you in in the audience of the story, it - such as by going to a gam
It also includes the infor- ally identifies you. How we use the information Certain information is needed a story (such as a photo, will add them so they can see logging in to a website us
mation you choose to share Public information we receive to provide you with services, status update or check-in), it. Anyone can tag you in any- your Facebook account,
when you communicate with When we use the phrase We use the information we so we only delete this infor- you can choose whether you thing. Once you are tagged, adding an app to your timel
us, such as when you contact “public information” (which we receive about you in connec- mation after you delete your want that story to appear on you and your friends will be - we give the game, applic
us using an email address, or sometimes refer to as “Every- tion with the services and fea- account. Some of the things your timeline. You can either able to see it (such as in News tion, or website (sometim
when you take an action, such one information”), we mean tures we provide to you and you do on Facebook aren’t approve each story individu- Feed or in search). referred to as just “applic
as when you add a friend, like a the information you choose to other users like your friends, stored in your account, like ally or approve all stories by You can choose whether a tions” or “apps”) your ba
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to your story, use our contact mation that is always publicly that purchase ads on the site, someone a message (where a story and later change your in appears on your timeline. your “public profile”), wh
importers, or indicate you are available. and the developers that build your friend may still have a mind, you can remove it from You can either approve each includes your User ID and yo
in a relationship. Information you choose to the games, applications, and message you sent, even after your timeline. story individually or approve public information. We a
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cover photos, gender, net- Choosing to make your infor- ple, in addition to helping peo- information remains after you timeline, like posts or connec- you approve a story and later IDs (also called your frie
works, username and User mation public is exactly what ple see and find things that delete your account. tions, it means those things change your mind, you can list) as part of your basic inf
ID are treated just like infor- it sounds like: anyone, includ- you do and share, we may use II. Sharing and finding you on will not appear on your time- always remove it from your Your friend list helps t
T His is the issue :

mation you choose to make ing people off Facebook, will the information we receive Facebook line. But, remember, anyone in timeline. application make your exp
public. be able to see it. Learn more. about you: Control each time you post the audience of those posts If you do not want someone rience more social becau
Your birthday allows us to do Choosing to make your infor- as part of our efforts to keep Whenever you post content or who can see a connection to tag you, we encourage it lets you find your frien
things like show you age-ap- mation public also means that Facebook products, services (like a status update, photo may still see it elsewhere, like you to reach out to them and on that application. Yo
propriate content and adver- this information: and integrations safe and or check-in), you can select on someone else’s timeline or give them that feedback. If User ID helps the applicat
tisements. can be associated with you secure; a specific audience, or even in search results. You can also that does not work, you can personalize your experien
Information others share (i.e., your name, profile pic- to protect Facebook’s or oth- customize your audience. To delete your posts or change block them. This will prevent because it can connect yo
T rust is o ur o nly
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you from your friends and oth- off Facebook; features and services, like can see it. remove people from or add Social reporting is a way and it can access your ba
ers, such as when they upload can show up when someone telling you and your friends Choose this icon if you want people to the audience of the for people to quickly and info, which includes your pu
your contact information, post does a search on Facebook or when something is going on to make something Public. content. easily ask for help from lic information and friend li
a photo of you, tag you in a on a public search engine; nearby; Choosing to make some- People on Facebook may be someone they trust. Learn This includes the informat
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location, or add you to a group. book-integrated games, appli- effectiveness of ads you and it sounds like. It means that even if they cannot see your book.com/note.php?note_ as well as information that
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when they upload and manage Graph API. such as: suggesting that to share with your Facebook icons because they are always a group) only the people who have to ask you for speci
their invites and contacts. Sometimes you will not be your friend use our contact Friends. publicly available. As a general can see the private space can permission.
Other information we receive able to select an audience importer because you found Choose this icon if you want rule, you should assume that if see the link. Similarly, if you The “Apps” setting lets y
either we trust thE IT

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We also receive other types of (like when you write on a that another user add you You can also use this to hide the information will be publicly the people who can see the use. You can see the perm
information about you: Page’s wall or comment on as a friend because the user your story from specific available. comment can see the link. sions you have given the
We receive data about you a news article that uses our imported the same email people. Finding you on Facebook Other information applications, the last ti
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you look at another person’s ries are always public stories. you in a picture they have your story no matter what anyone with your contact about you” section of this on Facebook for timeline s
C O M PA NI E S o r we
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message, search for a friend assume that if you do not see for internal operations, includ- same is true when you approve address or telephone num- may share information about tion posts on your behalf. Y
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use a Facebook mobile app, When others share informa- service improvement. Always think before you post. top of most pages, as well as you and tag you in their posts. off all Platform applicatio
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OP T o u t o f u bikq u ity
When you post things like pho- Information that is always allows us to provide Facebook email, information you share you have not shared your con- post. is no longer given to applic
tos or videos on Facebook, we publicly available as it exists today, but it also on Facebook can be copied tact information with them on Groups tions, even when your frien
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took the photo or video. ed just like information you that use the information we whom you share, there may email address or telephone adds you to a Group, you will websites through Facebook
We receive data from or about decided to make public: receive about you in new ways. be ways for others to deter- number you added to your be listed as “invited” until you When you first visit an a
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the pages you visit. For exam-
ple, we may get your GPS or
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public in your profile picture or
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Of course, for information
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Access on phones and other
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it. Once you remove an app
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technical information about possible. We may allow service pro- something (like when you to an event, they may be you’ve “liked” through your tions you use on that devi
the IP address, browser and Usernames and User IDs viders to access information write on a Page’s wall or com- able to use Facebook or third timeline or on the Page. If you say okay, those applic
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and other third parties that With your username, you get mation we’ve put together not see a sharing icon, the post or photos you share) may applications you use through Instant Personalizat
helps us (or them) deliv- a custom link (a Facebook from your profile pictures and information will be publicly be stored on or accessed by Facebook. Because this con- receive your User ID and frie
er ads, understand online URL, such as www.facebook. the other photos in which available. their device. tent comes directly from the list when you visit them.
activity, and generally make com/username) to your time- you’ve been tagged. If this Control over your timeline You should only share infor- Page owner, that Page may You always can remove ap
Facebook better. For exam- line that you can give out to feature is enabled for you, Whenever you add things to mation with people you trust be able to collect informa- you’ve installed by us
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Facebook or on another site) name or User ID, they can use line and Tagging” settings. do this, simply click on the the information to a device. access to insights data, which remember, apps may still
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As described in “How we use someone has your Username, Deleting and deactivating your to make something Public. of your information on Face- tion about specific people). you’ve removed an applicat
the information we receive” they can type facebook.com/ account Choosing to make some- book, including things you’ve They may also know when and want it to delete the inf
we also put together data Username into their browser If you want to stop using your thing public is exactly what hidden from your timeline. You you’ve made a connection to mation you’ve already shar
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already have about you, your tion as well as anything else tivate or delete it. anyone, including people off your content. For example, you liked their Page or posted a application. Visit the applic
friends, and others, so we can
offer and suggest a variety
you’ve let them see. Similarly,
someone with your Username
Deactivate
Deactivating your account
Facebook, will be able to see
or access it.
can do things like delete sto-
ries, change the audience of
comment.
To control who can see the 145
tion’s page on Facebook
its own website to learn mo
of services and features. For or User ID can access infor- puts your account on hold. Choose this icon if you want your stories or stop an appli- Facebook Pages you’ve liked, about the app. For examp
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146
Illuminated Cities
12
Il l uminat e d
citie s
147
148
Illuminated Cities
The acclaimed
Bavarian filmmaker Werner Herzog was once invited to a film festival in Milano,
Italy where he screened Lessons of Darkness, a science-fiction film based on footage
he took of oil fires that transformed parts of the small desert kingdom of Kuwait
into a haunting alien hellscape covered in iridescent oceans of black goo and
skies eternally engulfed in flames. After the screening, one of audience members
stood up and asked Herzog to comment about the Absolute. What followed was
a sprawling and improvised philosophical speech167 whose main thesis furnishes
a conceptual foundation for this chapter:
How important, really, is the Factual? Of course, we can’t

disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never
give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which
Truth emerges.
Thus far we have painted the potential future of smart cities in broad, and
at times very dark strokes—a world just as alien as those found in any number of
cautionary science fiction films and dystopian novels. Unlike the ardent disciples
of Ubikquity, we do not believe that the past or present development of city
discourses can be used to verifiably predict our future urbanisms. In its quest to
optimize out all the inefficiencies of urban spaces (i.e. the people themselves),
the smart city is sold as a kind of utopia where Ubikquity is used as philosopher’s
stone to reveal the true ‘soul’ of the city, sate our desires, and unleash our hidden
potential through tech-based behavioral modification. Smart city projects have
been successful in a limited sense, but Ubikquity still cannot account for the
149
irreducible complexity of human beings.
The truth about utopian or dystopian visions of the future can be found in
their very definition: they are musings, complete fictions. If you’ve made it this far
and expected that the penultimate chapter of this book would contain a detailed
manifesto of how to more or less save the world, you would be wrong. In our
view, there is no such thing as generalized, ready-made solutions to humanity’s
problems. Though our genetic make up is 99.9 percent identical, the cultures,
social norms, communities and individuals that make up our society are as unique
and diversified as the clade of insects on the tree of life.
> Cities are made up of individuals with dreams

for the future and concerns about their local
community and a world that at times seems
impossible to change.
Ubikquity has allowed people to communicate with each other more than ever
before, yet modernity has left many people with an increased sense of uncertainty,
anxiety, isolation and alienation168. As we become increasingly reliant on
the convenient, yet impersonal modes of digital communication afforded to
us by computers and smart devices we may be losing a bit of the intimacy and
depth of social communion and physical correspondence. In an age of extreme
connectivity, what becomes important is not what, but who we are connected to.
Realistically, we cannot return to the atavistic life styles of our agrarian ancestors.
Our progress into the future will require further advances in technology, but we
cannot allow Ubikquity or a small cadre of technologists and entrepreneurs to
define that future for us.
Digital technologies do not just make it easier for us to communicate and share
information wherever we are: those interactions create new opportunities to meet
in person and to exchange goods and services; this creates new requirements for
transport. Additionally, 3D printing, open-source manufacturing and small-scale
energy generation within larger clustered grid geometries make it possible to
carry out traditional industrial activities at smaller scales. According to Robinson
some bulk movement patterns will be removed by thousands of smaller, peer-
to-peer interactions created by transactions in online marketplaces169. We can
already see the effects of this trend in the vast growth of the traffic of goods that
are purchased or exchanged online. Within this context, new challenges appear:
digital technology will not only increase our desire to travel, but heighten its
complexity. Today’s transport technologies are not only too inefficient to scale to
150
Illuminated Cities
our future needs; they’re not sophisticated and flexible enough to cope with the
complexity and variety of demand.
>> A wall of the “Before I Die” project by Candy Chang
The question of what we want our future urban spaces to look like cannot
be separated from what kind of people we aspire to be, the kinds of social
relations and lifestyles we deem fruitful, or redefining our relationship with the
natural environment. As Harvey points out, “We must move beyond the rights
of individual or group access to resources that the city embodies: it’s the right
to change and re-invent the city more after our hearts desire… the freedom to
make and remake ourselves and our cities is… one of the most precious yet most
neglected of our human rights170.” This reflects on Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’,
the previously mentioned ‘right to infrastructure’, and to what we suggest to call
the ‘right to empowered Ubikquity’. It allows us to escape the human-nonhuman/
epistemology-ontology dichotomy altogether by opening-up the agential work
of infrastructures, the living environment, and Ubikquity as (open) sources of
151
the illuminate d city

uses techno lo gy to
reveal the unseen
relati o ns between
urba n communi t ie s
and the wider
nat ura l syst e m s
that suppo rt them
possibilities in their own right134.
Combining the physical city as a construct, the digital city in the management
of its flows, and using engineering skills and creativity to empower (end-)user
control will play a key part in realizing intelligent metropolitan solutions that are
superior to the current ‘smart’ approach. We should lay the Smart CityTM to rest
and move towards the Illuminated City. Though we admit that we are using the
utopian ‘[insert interesting adjective here] city’ trope that we have criticized in
length in our rebuttal, the illuminated city serves as a useful handle to differentiate
our vision from other city discourses. It is not a generalized prescription to cure
all urban ills; urban problems may be similar but are myriad in form, extremely
complex, and can only be truly understood and solved by urban dwellers and local
governments themselves.
The illuminated city is an alternative to technological solutionism and

corporate urban spaces that monitor and placate citizens into passive, corporeal
peripherals of Ubikquity. Illuminated cities are citizen-focused, community-
defined, open-source cities that harness technology to enhance democracy and
distributed governance, support individual and collective autonomy, community
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Illuminated Cities
>> Urban air conditioners in

Madrid based on renewables by
EcoSistema Urbana
participation in urban planning, and enshrine the citizen’s right to privacy

and protection from commodification. Technology must be used to support
agonism rather than hyper rational, consensus-based governance that eschews
debate between opposing views. From an agonistic perspective, democracy is a
situation where the facts, beliefs and practices of society are forever examined
and confronted, and for it to flourish, spaces of confrontation must exist and
contestation must occur171. The illuminated city harnesses ICT to illuminate
truths of urban life that are not absolute or self-evident in sensor collected data, but
generated and understood through the continuous physical interaction of human
beings within urban spaces. And finally, the illuminated city uses technology to
reveal the unseen relations between urban communities and the wider natural
systems that support them.
From Urban Consumers to Smart Citizens
Many of inequalities found in cities are the result of an economic system

that rewards capital, speed and greed over more humanistic concerns. Slovenian
philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek observed that in the modern era
global capitalism has more or less been accepted as the only way forward, yet
simultaneously our media and culture are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes like
zombies, deadly viruses, the rise of AI machines or an asteroid hitting the earth172.
Even renowned physicist Stephen Hawking and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk
have warned about the possibility of the extermination of the human race as a
153
consequence of artificial intelligence.

It seems that we can more easily
imagine the end to all life on earth
than the more modest task of creating
an ethical economic system. For now,
the altruism of capitalism will be left
for the reader to decide.
The first step towards the creation

of illuminated cities is the creation
of social, political, and economic
infrastructures that support the
growth of smart citizens. This must
begin with an overhaul of publically
funded educational institutions.
Despite rapid advances in technology,
today’s primary schools, secondary
schools, and universities generally
run on the same archaic factory-
model inherited from 19th century
Prussia that focuses on the efficient
and standardized production of
workers. This educational philosophy
entails ridged bell schedules, credit
requirements, age-based grade levels,
institutional hierarchies, a lack of Estonia173, national governments
personalization, the separation of should mandate computer coding
science, engineering and mathematics and programming skills as part of
from the social sciences and the core curriculum within primary
humanities, and a zealous focus on and possibly even secondary schools.
specialization. Our institutions need Considering that nearly half of labor
to prepare the youth for a technology- could be automated within the next 25
dominated future where creativity years, national governments should
and social skills will be paramount. fund vocational programs that offer
the possibility of learning technology
While most people in developed skills to all citizens—but especially
countries are computer literate, they the poor, immigrant communities
are completely clueless about the and the elderly—to help them adapt
actual semantics and architecture of to the realities of a job future market.
the ICT systems that define modernity. Additionally, within the context of
Similar to what is being done in plutocratisation and capital-biased
154
> The first step towards the
creation of illuminated
cities is the creation of
social, political, and
economic infrastructures
that support the growth
of smart citizens
technical change, consideration should be given to the implementation of a

universal basic income, shared-job programs, higher taxes on corporations,
investments and high earners, and a (gradual) transition from Value Added
Tax to Carbon Added Tax (from VAT to CAT) to stem rising levels in income
inequality and environmental degradation.
The increased deployment of ubikquitous technologies in urban space offers

a new approach to the study of the built environment and the conception of
urban solutions. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically
transformed, as are the tools we use to design, plan, and manage them. A new
field of research and development in applied technology is emerging at the
crossroads of the physical and digital sides of the urban domain that focuses on the
creation of unique, contemporary and vibrant shared environments for discovery
and innovation. These ‘community innovation incubators’ would function as a
place where the brightest, most entrepreneurial talents in technology and design
come together with citizens to find real world solutions that will transform cities
155
towards prosperous, dynamic and adaptive living environments.
More encompassing changes such as systems innovations (change on the

level of a technological system174) and transitions (i.e. reconfigurations of societal
systems and technological systems that they encompass) will be needed to cope
with future ubik-fueled adaptations175,176. According to Guest and Skerlos, “The
primary problem we face is not the availability of technology, but the lack of
a socio-technological planning and design methodology to identify and deploy
the most sustainable solution in a given geographic and cultural context177.” We
propose that at the university level, design-oriented students within science,
engineering, architecture and technology should be required to take non-design
social science and humanities courses that support a systems thinking approach,
such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, development, philosophy or
ecology. Studies have shown that design students primed to think in terms of
systems who receive additional training in non-design disciplines tend to come
up with more innovative and sustainable solutions178 than design students only
primed to think like efficiency-maximizing engineers140. An engineer that is
morally guided, conscious of social problems and is engaged in a community is
more likely to consider design factors beyond efficiency than otherwise. As the
Spanish philosopher Josè Ortega y Gasset once said, “to be an engineer...is not
enough to be an engineer179.”
Agonism and creativity
It goes without saying that adapting our cities and our selves to cope with a
future where scarcity and fleeting job opportunities becomes the norm will require
determination, foresight, and that indelible skill that has become subsumed and
commoditized by marketing and business circles but is none the less important:
creativity. But to what ends? Renowned science-fiction writer and educator Isaac
Azimov once wrote an essay concerning creativity and how Charles Darwin and
Alfred Wallace came up with the theory of evolution. Apart from their scientific
backgrounds and travels, he says the most important thing was their ability to
make ‘cross-connections’:
Obviously, then, what is needed is not only people with a good

background in a particular field, but also people capable of
making a connection between item 1 and item 2 which might
not ordinarily seem connected…
Making the cross-connection requires a certain daring. It

must, for any cross-connection that does not require daring is
156
Illuminated Cities
performed at once by many and develops not as a ‘new idea,’

but as a mere ‘corollary of an old idea 180 .
In a relative way, our limited knowledge and organization has created a

barrier to envisioning potentially radical urban solutions. Röling states that
‘cognition’ (perception, emotion/affection and acting) should have a more central
role in our current infrastructures182,183. He claims that the survival of humanity
is connected with man’s talent to change paradigms and to deal with that
change effectively (adapted from Kuhn184). This goes beyond just ‘adaptation’.
Additionally, a resource-based perspective should be taken into account from
the moment of the initiative and design. Within such a process, relevant
parties can focus on any uncertainties or potential unexpected incidents to find
alternative possibilities for the design and/or the arrangement of their own
(living) environment while promoting subconscious strategies, incorporating
aspects of improvisation, and gaining collaborative experience. Improvisation is
the concertino of action as it unfolds, drawing on available material, cognitive,
affective and social resources185. Five phases of the translation of cognition into
‘ecological rationality’ can be distinguished182:
> > Control

> > Adaptation
> > Learning
> > Improvement (evolution/innovation)
> > Change with feedback
To this end, smart cities are a corollary of an old idea rather than anything
particularly new. Truly radical urban solutions require stepping out of our
specialized boxes and adopt a new design methodology that illuminates these not
so obvious ‘cross-connections’.
In his book Adversarial Design (2013), Carl DiSalvo has outlined an almost
counterintuitive agonistic design philosophy. According to DiSalvo, “To claim
that adversarial design does the work of agonism means that designed objects can
function to prompt recognition of political issues and relations, express dissensus
and enable contestational claims and arguments173.” His examples of adversarial
design include browser extensions that tell you how much funding universities get
from the military industrial complex when you visit their website; an interactive
map that illustrates which city blocks have the most residence incarcerated and
the cost to tax payers as opposed to simply pointing out where crimes occur;
157
and an umbrella that flashes lights in a sequence to scramble facial recognition

software. One of the most memorable and poignant examples is Natural Fuse, an
art project designed by architect Usman Haque that promotes systems thinking
and narrative imagination140 to encourage users to think about the effects and
ethics of off-setting carbon.
<< Natural Fuse by

Usman Haque
Natural Fuse is a collection of plants that are covered in specialized sensors,

connected a computer network, and plugged into an electrical outlet. The system
is effectively a buffer between electrical appliances and their power source. The
plants act as a carbon sink, so essentially the energy emitted from the socket is
limited to the amount of carbon the plants can sequester; this usually lasts at most
a few minutes. Interestingly enough, the system is scalable, so your neighbors
or anyone connected to the computer network could participate. Additionally,
each individual plant can be switched to either an ‘off’, ‘selfless’, or ‘selfish’ mode.
Once your appliance stops receiving energy, you can turn on ‘selfish’ mode and
‘borrow’ carbon allotments from other plants that are connected to the central
sever granted they are in selfless mode themselves. If your plant becomes too
selfish it can ‘kill’ other plants, causing the network to send participating users
an e-mail about your heinous transgression. If your plant kills three other plants
Natural Fuse automatically douses it in vinegar and kills it in real life.
Though somewhat complex, Natural Fuse is a novel collection of

technologies that brings the tragedy of the commons into the home by asking
158
Illuminated Cities
us if it is reasonable to be continually pursuing our individual desires or work

towards the common good of the plants/our neighbors. Natural Fuse is by no
means a steady state or consensus-based system; rather, it encourages participants
to engage in contests. Its design is used not to provide energy efficient solutions,
but actually problematize and maximize deliberation between participants. As
Morozov points out, “It provides a second-order, superior visibility: not only do
we know how much carbon we need to sink to offset the electricity we use, but
we actually know how much sacrifice—by us and by other people—is needed to
sink that carbon140.”
Digital Democracy and Participatory Urban Planning
The uncertainty around future climate and urbanization patterns calls for
a revision of the relationships around ubikquitous and conventional physical
infrastructure with an emphasis on more malleable possibilities186. Sometimes
addressed as the dilemma of certainty versus legitimacy, it is quite apparent that
intelligent infrastructural investments will influence the future trajectory of
urban sustainability. What is important is that social interests are balanced in a
sufficiently explicit and integral way. ‘Malleable infrastructures’ offer a distinctive
way of thinking about the relationship between infrastructure and its position in
the urban realm and tends to result in more sustainable and just outcomes133. At
one level, we argue that major infrastructure projects unfold over time and space
through phases of design, consultation and implementation, and that they will
continually undergo significant changes in response to practical challenges and
changes in context. This is sometimes referred to as the dilemma of speed (or
time) versus quality.
The slowness in changing systems or in carrying out new projects is due to

time-consuming decision making procedures of local governments. Nevertheless,
it cannot be scientifically proven that decision time can be called a problem. In
general, an approach based on empowerment, as suggested here, is considered
in better agreement with participation, quality, and legitimacy than it is with
efficiency, speed, and certainty. It is important however to realize that these
dilemmas do not always imply contrasts: faster decision-making may enhance
the legitimacy (and topicality) of a decision and attempts to reach a commitment
through participation103. As Dimitriou187 argues, infrastructure projects need to
be conceived as ’organic phenomena’ that are subject to change rather than ‘static
engineering objects’. It can be argued that the same holds for Ubikquity. The
question to be answered then is whether the way governments and real estate
developers manage infrastructure and data fully encompasses their potential for
159
malleability, and if not, what might that involve?
As concluded in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, the complexity of infrastructures

and urban environments is growing while the effectiveness of action-driven
strategies (i.e. positive liberty) to alter and change them appears to be decreasing.
The illuminated city approach emphasizes the importance of improving the
overall fitness of networks (social and technical) so that thresholds, wherever and
whenever they might be, are kept as far away as possible. Therefore, it is important
to consider the application of alternative approaches: (1) strategies of inaction; (2)
strategies of subtraction; or (3) strategies of hormesis188,189 that keep their subject
areas (cities, neighborhoods, communities, etc.) under a small, controlled, and
continuous dosage of stress with the purpose of strengthening local networks for
the eventuality of future shocks. An actual example of the hormesis strategy is the
city of Venice. Hormesis may be rooted in the first two if inaction or subtraction
causes deprivation, especially when it consciously induces lower-than-usual levels
in relative comfort of living190.
Generally, the study of networks is part of the field of science called

complexity theory, as introduced in Chapter 3. One very essential concept to
complexity theory is the complex adaptive system (CAS) and its characteristics of
emergence and self-organization. Emergence refers to patterns and meaningful
order that emerge spontaneously out of the interaction of parts within a complex
system. These patterns are identified by accumulative change over time and can
occur at different scales, for casual reasons, and are usually difficult to predict (e.g.
the shape of a flock of birds moving in the sky versus the collective will of the
global economy). Self-organization refers to how complex order arises from the
interaction of agents or components in an initially disordered system.
A key element of CASs is that they have multiple potential equilibriums.

From this perspective, on the macro-scale the city serves as the perfect example of
a CAS, where urban dwellers fulfill the role of agents and express behavior based
on internal schemas (desires, actions, beliefs) and external rules imposed by both
society (laws, culture) and the physical environment (streets, parks, rivers, etc.).
Furthermore, the emergent features of CASs can be found on the micro scale
in BUIs and community building projects that are equally relevant in describing
urban forms at the district and city levels36.
We propose that an illuminated city encourages citizen-led, bottom-up

initiatives (BUIs) —from the perspective of the four mentioned strategies,
preferably hormesis—that focus on sustainability and social inclusion and urban
planning policies that give communities more control in designing the public
160
Illuminated Cities
Infrastructure
projects need to be
conceived as organic
phenomena that are
subject to change
spaces they interact in. This is not some baseless fantasy, as thousands of citizen-
led projects are already popping up all around the world.
In her book From The Ground Up191, Efrat Eizenberg did a study of 650
community gardens in New York City that are collectively managed by some of
the city’s poorest residents. These gardens not only increased urban sustainability,
but also taught horticulture skills and acted as a public space for recreation,
social gatherings and cultural events. A 40-minute subway ride away in Queens,
The Beachside Bungalow Preservation Association is a community initiative
that began 30 years ago with the simple objective of creating sand dunes and
planting native flora and community gardens near the shore to restore the local
coastal ecosystem to its original state192. As a second order effect, these dune
environments protected large stretches of local neighborhoods from the deluge of
floodwater that caused $19 Billion in damage and grief elsewhere after hurricane
Sandy.
In the Netherlands, you can find BUIs in the fields of community-based
renewable energy generation, carbon footprint reduction and urban agricul-
161
ture, such as ‘Oranje Energie’ in

the Amsterdam Metropolitan
Area, ‘Uit je eigen stad’ in Rotter-
dam and Amsterdam, and several
newly founded local energy
service companies (ESCo’s) in
Haarlemmermeer, Venlo Green
Port and Texel.
Such initiatives are increas-

ingly supported by social develop-
ment platforms like the Amster-
dam Waag Society and research
institutes like the Amsterdam >> Rooftop farming at Greenpoint farm in New York City
Institute of Advanced Metropol-
itan Solutions (AMS). AMS is a
newly launched joint-research
institute between TU Delft, the
Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology and Wageningen Univer-
sity that aims to find new ways to
activate such CASs within cities
through studying BUIs, promot-
ing systems thinking, placemak-
ing, pragmatic design, and creat-
ing strong networks through
‘diffusion-limited aggregation’ >> Community gardening in Oakland, California
(DLA). This implies that projects
are tied together within a structure
supporting flexible and contin-
uous processes of change. These
kinds of platforms are looking for
ways to ‘connect the dots’ between
individual and community efforts
and create ‘swarms’ of nested
urban BUIs networks so that they
avoid the risk of remaining local- >> Uit je Eigen Stad in Rotterdam
ized niches.
In the end, BUIs are ‘smart’

not because they are borne of
162
Illuminated Cities
technology; they are intelligent because they solve multiple urban problems like
social capital, sustainability, urban resilience and community spirit all at once.
Then again, ICT platforms cannot be completely discounted because they have
been used to create powerful participatory platforms that have had real impacts
on local communities
Neighborland is an online platform/public installation tool developed by
social designer Candy Chang in collaboration with Tulane University to encourage
<< Girls pondering the

Neighborland proposal board
civic collaboration in New Orleans, Louisiana. Organizations can post questions

and crowd source ideas from locals about real world projects that are being built or
that they want built in their communities193. Each idea submitted has a dedicated
page where people can share knowledge, updates, resources, meeting times, etc.
The web page is complimented with signs in public spaces to make the design
process more inclusive and engaging. Neighborland was so successful that it has
been rolled out across the entire US. There is similar online planning platform
called Brickstarter. According to their website, “We are sketching a system
that would enable everyday people, using everyday technology and culture, to
articulate and progress sustainable ideas about their community194.” They aim to
be a digital platform that makes citizen-based urban planning a reality where new
urban initiatives can utilize social media to be more responsive, representative,
and educative by transforming grass roots urban proposals into viable projects.
163
> A collection of data, geeks and start-ups does

not make city smart; collaborative digital
platforms that illuminate citizens and urban
communities to become self-determined and
tackle urban problems will.
Offficina is a Madrid-based collaborative architecture platform that opens up

a particular form of ambient intelligence in the city. Such ambient intelligence was
not so much an enhancement effect of a particular set of digital or technological
interfaces as a wholesale urban event in its own right. It reconfigured the city’s
ecology not only by enlisting new types of intelligences into its relational fabric,
but more ambitiously by radically subverting the very status of such an ecology as
an epistemic form134.
In the Netherlands, there are a number of artists and designers who have
recognized the limits of the imagination within urban planning and have
decided to take things into their own hands and put them into ours. Temp. is
an architecture firm that has observed that there is a lot of vacant space and real
estate, even in Holland, and is attempting to re-envision these stagnant spaces as
flexible areas of development195. Urhahn Urban Design has developed a concept
along similar lines called the ‘Spontaneous City’ that focuses on small-scale
initiatives by local businesses and communities as the most effective method of
regenerating neighborhoods and transforming abandoned government buildings
and vacant offices into new businesses and/or communal spaces196.
The ‘Gamification’ trend popular within Silicon Valley start-ups has found
its way to Holland and has been applied to urban planning. Play the City is an
Amsterdam and Istanbul-based ‘City Gaming Company’ that posits new methods
of urban planning based on interactive digital platforms and gaming. According to
their website, “We integrate city gaming, digital public polls, interactive learning,
co-design and social networks with traditional architecture and urbanism. We
work with cities, housing corporations and cultural organizations to generate
interactive and collaborative plans with multiple stakeholders197.” Artists Jeanne
van Heeswijk and Maaike van Engelen have developed a platform called Face Your
World, an interactive 3-D multi-user platform that allows children to investigate
and adapt their living environment198. It was later used to design in collaboration
164
Illuminated Cities
with locals a virtual representation of a park they wanted in their Amsterdam

neighborhood. Eventually, the design was used to persuade local planning officials
to replace the city’s original plan.
A similar project called Mobile City is an independent research group

launched in 2007 by Martijn de Waal and Michiel de Lange that investigates
this relationship between digital media technologies and urban life, and the
implications for urban design. According to their website, they “focus lies on the
role of digital media technologies in the social and political domains of urban
life199.” They organize events, lectures, and workshops and collaborate with
individuals and professionals who have interests in digital media and urban culture
from disciplines like architecture and urbanism, media, design, technology and
urban policy. One such event was an app contest where they asked web developers
to use Amsterdam’s city data to develop useful mobile applications. Similar sorts
of contests have been organized in San Francisco, Dublin, Edmonton, Portland,
Washington D.C. and New York with mixed results74. Most apps were mundane,
with only a few examples that were actually scalable and successful in the long run
because the programmers failed to identify the needs of citizens themselves, but
this is not always the case.
Let’s consider the city of Boston, where former major Tom Menino
created a taskforce to prototype new forms of civic technology called the Office
of New Urban Mechanics that piloted a number of successful web applications to
enhance digital democracy and civic engagement200. SoChange is web platform
that took inspiration from online games to encourage community engagement
en vivo and include residents in local urban planning. On the surface it nudged
residents to shop in local shopping districts. As an added bonus, local businesses
that profited from the app used the platform to ask residents how they should
direct part of their in-store profits towards community projects they want to see.
This resulted in summer jobs for youths and greening of businesses.
All of the aforementioned platforms are examples small-scale web

applications that have had verifiable impacts on the urban environment while
being relatively low-tech and low cost. Instead of smart innovation being
business-focused, digital democracy and participatory urban planning is more
accountable to local politics while empowering citizens to be creative and take
the city into their own hands. A collection of data, geeks and start-ups does not
make city smart; collaborative digital platforms that illuminate citizens and urban
communities to become self-determined and tackle urban problems will.
That being said, democratization of urbanity through participatory urban
planning platforms is a very important but a small part of truly transforming
165
welc o me t o
d e ceu v el
De Ceuvel is a bio-remediating
workspace for creative and so-
cial enterprises located on for-
mally polluted land in Amsterdam
Noord. The brainchild of a col-
lection of architects, landscap-
ers, sustainability experts and
entrepreneurs, it is considered
“one of the most sustainable and
unique urban developments in
Europe 201 .” The site consists of
old houseboats that have been
craned onto land and refitted
with systems for renewable elec-
tricity, heating, water, wastewa-
ter, nutrient recovery and food
production.
166
Illuminated Cities
our cities for the future. Truly innovative projects that push our urbanisms into
new territory may be beyond the purview of the masses and therefore never gain
traction in strictly populist schemes. A more concrete example would be the case
of De Ceuvel in Amsterdam. If the municipal government used a platform like
Neighborland to crowd-source idea from locals in Noord of what should be done
with this open space, visionary plans like De Ceuvel would probably not of made
it high on the list. Therefore, local governments should incorporate elements of
participatory urban planning with progressive polices that encourage ambitious
people to experiment with urban forms.
Renegotiating our User Privacy AgreementS
One of Ubikquity’s biggest drawbacks is that it is not designed to protect the

privacy of users. As the urban environment becomes digitized we will inevitably
be tracked more. The question is if there is a way to balance technological
convenience with one of our most basic human rights, or, should privacy
simply become another vestige of the past that must be disrupted in the name of
progress? This is an ongoing debate with legal scholars, technologists, citizens
and politicians, but there are really only two things people can do to fight back.
First, people can use technical safeguards such as encrypted e-mail and Internet
browsing via TOR or VPNs to protect their data. There are peripherals like
Cyborg Unplug, a unique anti-wireless device that can detect unwanted device
like surveillance drones, Google Glass, hidden cameras, unknown Bluetooth
devices, and wireless signals and disconnect them from your local network202. If
citizens are concerned about their privacy they need to petition their governments
to say no to unwarranted surveillance by the likes of the NSA and social media
companies and update privacy laws to meet the needs of the digital age. At the
very least, citizens should be aware of what kind of data is being taken from them
and by who.
In an illuminated city, local governments will need to enact data and

privacy laws themselves that can somehow ensure that data obtained through
public sensors in the urban environment are secured on ‘local’ servers and
protected from unauthorized third party organizations. They will also need
local platforms for cross party collaboration between citizens, the city, public
institutions and entrepreneurs. Creating neutral data handling platforms is
essential since new urban solutions invariably involve a multi-party and multi-
technology complexity with an active involvement of multiple stakeholders,
private and public. This might eventually lead to the creation of local, national
and international ‘privacy agencies’ with independent power and fact-finding
167
functions but no regulatory authority203. Furthermore, the creation of smart

citizens through life long technology education would empower people to
perhaps program their own mobile apps or computer applications to protect
their privacy or, better still, create neighborhood-level data networks to serve
community needs with custom router firewalls and non-web based data transfer
technology like NFC and Bluetooth.
Interoperability and Open Source
Smart devices by and large are considered platforms that enable access to
a variety of web applications, but are they really? Computer technology used
to be hardware stacks that allowed for third-party software solutions to be
built upon them. Nowadays, Smart devices and smart city technology are more
like appliances, objects with inherently planned obsolesce that do what the
manufacturer intends and only work with hardware and services tailored to
that particular manufacturer. The wonders of ICTs are plainly understood, but
what they lack is interpolation that allows consumers to have full control over
the services those devices support and consume. The world cannot be segregated
into IBM cities, Siemens cities and Cisco cities that refuse to speak to each other.
If we want to see a future where our devices and cities can freely interpolate and
where people have ultimate control over what they do with those devices and the
services they connect to, a stand must be made. Otherwise we will stay on the
current path where innovation (see Chapter 10) is a means of maximizing profits
over human potential.
As an alternative to the closed-garden smart infrastructure development

that restricts innovation to the whims of multinational IT companies that charge
cities annual consulting and maintenance fees, illuminated cities take inspiration
from Linux and Wikipedia. The EU ought to fund research into intelligent
infrastructure, hardware and software platforms that are non-proprietary, free
to use, open-source, collaborative and completely interoperable with all smart
devices. Instead of all encompassing ‘smart city in-a-box’, an open source route
would lower development, implementation and maintenance costs and allow
civic hackers and local governments to customize hardware and software to
the particular needs of their communities—that is if a technological solution is
determined to actually be best course of action.
168
Illuminated Cities
>> District Vauban in Freiburg, an area of “plus”

energy homes, meaning they generate more
energy than they consume
>> Nieuw Leyden is a new residential

district in the city of Leiden that
encourages residents to start their
own development projects on the site.
169
AfterworD
In setting out to write this book, throughout months of meetings and
discussions, it became clear that we are part of a growing number of
scientists, activists, politicians and entrepreneurs with divergent
ideologies trying to comprehend and tackle the most complex and
difficult problems our species have ever faced: hyper urbanization,
economic inequality, rampant consumption of nonrenewable resources
and the degradation of natural environment. Some have argued (e.g.
proponents of smart cities) that the only way forward is to ramp up
industrialization and innovate our way out of scarcity, as we have
done before. Others claim that in order to save the planet industrial
civilization must be halted full stop—something as ludicrous as jumping
out of speeding racecar midrace. Whatever ideology you adhere to, the
truth is that any path that ensures the survival of both our species
and the planet means that the anthrosphere must undergo radical
and large-scale transformation—perhaps a transformation even more
drastic than the shift from agrarian to industrial (hu)man. The key
thing to realize is that nothing happens over night and that people
themselves are the key to real and lasting solutions. Retrofitting our
cities with smart sensors, installing new energy systems and carbon
sequestration technology, or testing new strains of genetically
modified crops that can save millions of lives will take time and—most
dauntingly—money, and a lot of it.
We are asking ourselves to do something that is seemingly unnatural

in the animal world. If the ecological destruction caused by invasive
species like rabbits in Australia, Zebra Mussels in the Great Lakes,
Kudzu vines in the American Southeast and the Asian Carp in the
Mississippi River serve as any example, given the right baseline
conditions, organisms tend to overrun their environments at the
expense of all other creatures. Humans are no different. What’s more,
we have evolved socially to focus on immediate, short-term problems
with local impacts over long-term and abstract concepts like climate
change or things that happen to the ‘other’ far way. To this end, it
may be a bit difficult to convince a family in Abu Dhabi to empathize
and sacrifice their material comfort to save the lives of lemurs in
Madagascar or nomadic tribes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Knowing this
set of unsettling facts, it seems that our species is destined to self-
destruction, its engrained in our DNA—right? Not so fast.
Consider four institutions that have been part of our culture since
time immemorial: slavery, the divine right of kings, perpetual war and
171
patriarchy. These four horsemen have been at the core of society for 99
percent of our history, to the point where it seemed that they were as
permanent and infallible as the laws of thermodynamics. To be sure, if
you went back in time to Amsterdam in 1800 and told a Dutch merchant
that in the year 2014 slavery would be abolished, Europe would be at
peace, gay people could marry and that everyone, including women,
had the right to vote, he would laugh right in your face and look at you
as if you were mad, yet here we are. In the last two centuries alone our
society has undergone unprecedented and profound changes time and
time again. No cultural institutions, even capitalism—the dogma that
simultaneously nurtures the innovations that have improved the lives
of billions while stifling technology’s full potential by tying innovation
not to what is possible, but to what is profitable—is safe from the
malleability and ingenuity of human beings.
That being said, there are no guarantees. We have definitely messed up

in the past, but we had an excuse: we were ignorant and there was still
a relative abundance of resources. Despite our ignorance, over time we
eventually made the right decisions. Today, we are completely aware
that the status quo is untenable and that we have the technological
capacity met the basic needs of all human beings, yet our political
and economic systems are geared toward risk aversion and profit
maximization. It would be, for a lack of better a word, extraordinarily
lame if the pendulum of civilization that has swung to and fro between
cities and hinterlands for the last 6000 years came to standstill, not
because of ignorance, but a lack of vision and will. Their reciprocities
are key.
So what does this all mean? For starters, we must recognize that
technology alone will not save us. Radical technological innovation
without equally radical changes to our lifestyles and social and
political institutions would render the former moot. We need to ask the
right questions. And, as Bratton pointed out in his eye-opening TED talk
entitled, “We need to talk about TED”, “If a problem is in fact endemic
to a system, then the exponential effects of Moore’s law also serve to
amplify what’s broken. It is more computation along the wrong curve,
and I doubt this is necessarily a triumph of reason 204 .” The ‘smart’
city is an ubikquitous city where automation and algorithmic-powered
software will make machines smarter while we get stupider. Besides,
the smart city is not radically innovative; it’s a corollary to older ideas
used to optimize warfare, manufacturing techniques and product chain
172
management. It is no doubt a valorous attempt to make sense of the
harrowing levels of complexity and ambiguity that define the human
condition, but in the end it is a radically simplified and conservative
futurism based on incremental efficiency improvements. Just because
‘irrational’ human traits like altruism, empathy, love and emotion
cannot be readily quantified does not mean they are any less valid or
real than the material flows of a city. The smart discourse does our
species a great disservice, it’s too timid of an ideology—we can and
must aspire for more.
True societal transformation can only occur once we realize that

innovation is not a matter of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,
or thinking that we already have all the puzzle pieces on the table.
Going forward, we cannot ignore the difficult and ambiguous nature
of existence that history, philosophy, music, poetry, literature and art
have been grappling with since the beginning of our journey— this is
as university faculties of social sciences and humanities the world
over are increasingly being defunded because they have a low Return
on Investment (ROI), mind you. Instead of simplifying complexity and
using algorithmic truncation to minimize risk and maintain the status
quo, we must learn embrace risk and complexity in all its obscurity and
splendor and cherish and share the integrated scientific discourses
of alpha, beta and gamma perspectives. We understand a great deal
about our planet and our universe, but no matter how advanced our
computers get we could never create a model that truly mirrors reality.
Designing advanced technologies and infrastructures to support

urban life is not enough. We need equally sophisticated and cogent
narratives that immunize the mind from the cynicism and nihilism that
is pervasive in today’s culture and changes the way we think about
our relationship with one another other and the planet itself—towards
possible futures where technological innovation, tempered by ethics
and reason, meets the needs of both man and nature and not the other
way around.
Though we may have failed to provide neat, tidy, and detailed solutions
to the biggest problems our species has ever faced, we hope that this
book in some way illuminates and inspires you to think about wider
systems in which we are nested and that are nested within us, and to
dream big, because that is exactly what the world really needs today.
173
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203. De Vries, W.T. (2003). Protecting Privacy
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204. Bratton, B. (2013b). We need to talk
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentis-
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ted
205. Bakker, K. (2003). An Uncooperative Com-
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Image credits
Image credits
in the universe”. Simulation by Andrew
01 >> Introduction Pontzen and Fabio Governato. https://
www.flickr.com/photos/nelsonmi-
1. “Archive: Ganges River Delta (Archive: nar/5343099039/ (36-37)
NASA, Space Shuttle, 11/19/05)”. Photo 19. Cover art of Ubik, published by Doubleday
by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. (39)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasamar- 20. “The Stack Re-imagined”. Graphic by Alex
shall/14610275771/ (6-7) Reynolds. (41)
2. Painting from Indian River Community Foun- 21. “Welcome to Ubik”. Comic by Maria Alexan-
dation (8) drescu. (42-43)
3. Photo by Saqib Qayyum. http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Mohenjo-daro#mediaviewer/ 05 >> Techno-Austerity
File:Mohenjo-daro.jpg (9-10)
4. “Sandy’s aftermath”. Photo by Samytry. 22. Photo by Corbis. http://www.thedailybeast.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/samy- com/articles/2014/10/25/how-much-do-
try/8151934310 (14-15) you-tip-a-robot-bartender.html (44-45)
23. “Asimo’s Gonna Gitcha”. Photo by azadam.
02 >> Urbanization in crisis https://secure.flickr.com/photos/azad-
am/83278753/(46)
5. Photo by Peter Stewart (16-17) 24. Kodak advertisement. Found on http://blog.
6. “Rocinha Favela Brazil Slums”. Photo by Alicia finnfemme.com/2012/11/1960s-kodak-in-
Nijdam (18) stamatic-camera-the-original-instagram/
7. “Ciadades que encolheram”. Infographic (48)
by Daniel Roda, Dalton Soares and Elvis 25. Advertisement by BadIdeaCA. http://www.
Martuchelli. http://g1.globo.com/brasil/Ci- badideaca.com/ (49)
dades-que-encolheram-2000-2013/index. 26. “Old man hit by riot police in demonstra-
html (21) tions in Athens Greece”. Photo by Ggia.
8. “South Bend Voice”. Photo by People’s Cli- http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
mate March 2014 NYC (22) File:20110629_Old_man_hit_by_Riot_Po-
9. Photo by Emerson Skufca. (22) lice_in_demonstrations_in_Athens_Greece.
10. Photo by Antonio Acuña. https://www.flickr. jpg (50)
com/photos/antonioacuna/15126293858/ 27. “A rally in support of Novorossiya in Mos-
(22) cow on June 11, 2014”. Photo by Artem
11. “View of Kibera”. Photo by Schreibkraft. Tkachenko. http://commons.wikimedia.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibera#media- wiki/File:A_rally_in_support_of_Novoros-
viewer/File:Nairobi_Kibera_04.JPG (25) siya_in_Moscow_on_June_11,_2014_(19).
12. “Google Bus Protest”. Photo by Chris Martin. jpg.(50)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cjmar- 28. Photo by Phylis Buchanan. https://www.
tin/11295749384 (26) flickr.com/photos/pgautier/(50)
29. Photo by Aleksandr Maksimenko.
03 >> Networked Environments http://www.telegraf.in.ua/photocol-
lection/2014/07/16/izvestnye-fo-
13. Photo by Michael Henninger. http://40. tografy-kremenchuga-aleksandr-maksi-
media.tumblr.com/55adae373825c3e3f- menko_10038501.html(51)
c1ea585c2b973a1/tumblr_n28hcnw- 30. “Cafe de Ceuvel”. Photo by Leonoor Verplan-
ZUs1rsoapwo4_1280.jpg (28-29) ken. http://leonoor-verplanken.wix.com/
14. “Internet Map”. Map by Matt Britt. http:// leonoor-verplanken (53)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_ 31. “Eiffel Tower at night”. Photo by Prasanth
map_1024.jpg (30) M. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
15. Photo by Joel Duggan. https://www.flickr. File:Eiffel_Tower_at_Night..JPG (54)
com/photos/joelduggan/ (33) 32. “Tokyo Tower at night”. Photo by kakidai.
16. Photo by velovotee. https://www.flickr.com/ http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:To-
photos/velovotee/3254046627/ (33) kyo_Tower_at_night_2.JPG (54)
17. “Beijing, China”. Photo by Lei Han. https:// 33. “A London bus”. Photo by e01. https://www.
www.flickr.com/photos/sunset- flickr.com/photos/e01/2334039881/ (56)
noir/12657650665 (33)
06 >> RISE OF THE SMART CITIES
04 >> Ubikquity
34. Photo by Kai Morgener. https://www.flickr.
18. “Large scale structure of light distribution
181
com/photos/kaihm/ (58) (88-89)

35. “Urban metabolism”. Illustration by Dirk 53. “Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard”. Paint-
Sijmons and Jutta Raith. (60) ing by Eugene Delacroix. http://commons.
36. Advertisements by IBM. http://adsofthe- wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eug%C3%A8ne_
world.com/media/outdoor/ibm_people_for_ Ferdinand_Victor_Delacroix_018.jpg (90)
smarter_cities (62) 54. Comic by xkcd. http://www.xkcd.com (94)
37. Photos from Kickstarter, IndieGoGo. 55. Photo by Vitaliy Raskalov. http://raska-
Found on http://postscapes.com/inter- lov-vit.livejournal.com/136180.html(96-
net-of-things-and-kickstarter. (70) 97)
38. Infographic by Alex Reynolds. (72-73)
39. “Intelligent electriciteit voor Amsterdam 08 >> Digital divides and elite enclaves
Nieuw West.” Graphic by Alliander. (75)
40. “Electric car charging”. Photo by Ludovic 56. Photo by Boriss Jonicenoks. https://500px.
Hirlimann. http://commons.wikimedia.org/ com/photo/86690047/-by-boriss-jonice-
wiki/File:Electric_car_charging_Amsterdam. noks (98-99)
jpg (76) 57. “Macfries pedestrian crossing.” http://ad-
41. “Schematic layouts of automatic parking softheworld.com/media/ambient/mcdon-
at the Park&Charge garage and renewable alds_macfries_pedestrian_crossing (100)
charging facilities”. Render from TU Delft 58. Graphic by Alex Reynolds. (103)
report: “Schipol the Grounds 2030: A 59. “Downtown Core Skyscrapers”. Photo by
SCENARIO FOR INTEGRATON OF ELECTRIC Randy Tan. https://www.flickr.com/photos/
MOBILITY INTO THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT”. randytan/10851079194/ (104)
(77) 60. Photo by hslo. https://www.flickr.com/pho-
42. “Songdo Lake Park”. Photo by G43. http:// tos/hslo/31981089 (105)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Song- 61. “Yangon floods”. Photos by Alex Reynolds.
do_Lake_Park_20080927.jpg (78-79) https://www.flickr.com/photos/lenstastic/
43. “Kinderen van Boven”. Photo by Solaroad. (107)
http://www.solaroad.nl/wp-content/ 62. “Forced slum eviction”. Photo by Susana
uploads/2013/06/DSC8910_kinderenvan- Secretariat. http://commons.wikimedia.
boven2.jpg (80-81) org/wiki/File:Forced_slum_eviction_-_de-
44. “Calling at all stops to London’s King’s struction_(4112045298).jpg (108)
Cross. | London’s Calling for Flickr Friday | 63. “Eviction - police breaking fences”. Photo by
Explore. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ Advocacy Project. https://www.flickr.com/
londondesigner/8628279668/ (80) photos/advocacy_project/6944793091/
45. “Fahrradständer City Bike Wien vor (108)
der U-Bahn Station Längenfeldgasse 64. “Touche”. Photo by Loozrboy. https://www.
in Meidling. Tauben.” Photo by Herzi flickr.com/photos/loozrboy/3009768428/
Pinki. http://commons.wikimedia.org/ (108)
wiki/File:Fahrradst%C3%A4nder_City-
Bike_L%C3%A4ngenfeldgasse.jpg (81) 09 >> Give Us Your Data and We’ll Give
46. “London”. Photo by Wilson Loo Kok Wee. You a Techno-utopia
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kw-
loo/9667382054/ (80-81) 65. “Nerd!”. Photo by Pedro Gonzalez.
47. Photo by Robin Stevens. http://www.cynic. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pita-
org.uk/photos/ap/full/usa2010/dsc_2600. del/4951801589/ (110-111)
jpg (81) 66. “Dubai - The Strip”. Photo by Daniel
48. Renders (3) by Foster + partners, London. Cheong. (112)
(82) 67. “Facebook server racks”. Photo by v3.
49. “Masdar Cityscape”. Photo by Tom Olliver. http://www.v3.co.uk/IMG/954/168954/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/big- facebook-open-compute-server-racks.
fez/5444800585/ (83) jpg?1302251544 (116-117)
50. “Sala de Controle de Operaciones”. Photo 68. Maps found at Urban Gems. http://urban-
by Raphael Lima. http://www-03.ibm.com/ gems.org/ (118)
press/us/en/presskit/27723.wss (85) 69. “All Violence against the person”. Map by
51. Photos from Drones for Good. Alec Momont, London Metropolitan Police. http://maps.
graduation project at Industrial Design met.police.uk/ (120)
Engineering, TU Delft. (86-87) 70. “Big Data”. Photo from Learnpatch.
http://learnpatch.com/wp-content/up-
loads/2012/09/Big-data.jpg (123)
07 >> is something rotten in the state of
denmark? 10 >> Liberté, Prédictivité, Uniformité
52. “IBM stand during CeBIT 2010”. Photo by 71. “La Liberté guidant le peuple”. Painting by
Patrick. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ce- Eugène Delacroix. Edited by Alex Reynolds.
BIT#mediaviewer/File:IBM_CeBIT_2010.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
182
Image credits
File:Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix_-_La_lib- 94. “MVRDV Nieuw Leyden”. Photo by Jonas

ert%C3%A9_guidant_le_peuple.jpg (122- Klock. https://www.flickr.com/photos/
123) klock/8058030454 (169)
72. “Grand Arch”. Photo by Willi Steb. (124)
73. Screenshot from Buzzfeed. http://www. Afterword
buzzfeed.com/bestof2014 (128)
95. “Sunset over Philadelphia”. Photo by Alex
11 >> Accelerating towards cloud Reynolds. (170)
feudalisms
74. “Hide & Seek”. Photo by Dany Eid.

https://500px.com/photo/85965203/hide-
&-seek-by-dany-eid (132-133)
75. “Herr Reinmar von Zweter”. Codex Manesse.
Edited by Alex Reynolds. http://en.wiki-
pedia.org/wiki/Feudalism#mediaviewer/
File:Codex_Manesse_Reinmar_von_Zweter.
jpg (134)
76. “Tesoro”. Photo by arbyreed. https://
www.flickr.com/photos/19779889@
N00/6507747529 (137)
77. Photos from Google Streetview. https://
www.google.nl/maps (141-142)
78. Poster by the American Civil Liberties Union.
https://www.aclu.org/ (144)
12 >> Illuminated cities
79. “TIetgen exterior view in the Courtyard”.

Photo by Jens Lindhe. http://www.dac.
dk/media/6327808/tietgen-exteri-
or-view-in-courtyard-jens-lindhe.jpg
(146-147)
80. Photo by Mona Hepbarn. (150)
81. Photo of Before I Die project by Candy
Chang. Photo source unknown.
82. Photos from Ecosystema Urbano. http://
www.ecosistemaurbano.com/ (154 - 155)
83. Photo by Alex Reynolds. http://www.flickr.
com/photos/lenstastic (156-157)
84. Photo by Natural Fuse. http://www.natural-
fuse.org/ (158)
85. Photo by Arjan van Timmeren. Edited by Alex
Reynolds. (161)
86. “Greenpoint Rooftop Farm”. Photo by Betty
Tsang. https://www.flickr.com/photos/bet-
tytsang/4131557459 (162)
87. “Rooftop farm/ greenpoint”. Photo by
Lila Dobbs. https://www.flickr.com/pho-
tos/8476316@N03/3750820179 (162)
88. “Uit je Eigen stad”. Photo by Kracht-
inNL. https://www.flickr.com/pho-
tos/88526039@N06/9245417197 (162)
89. “Neighborland”. Photo from Candy Chang.
http://candychang.com/neighborland/
(163)
90. “Cafe de Ceuvel”. Photo by Alex Reynolds.
(166)
91. De Ceuvel from above. Photo by Mechani-
cus. http://www.mechanicus.nl/ (166)
92. Photo by Leonoor Verplanken. http://
leonoor-verplanken.wix.com/leonoor-ver-
planken (166)
93. “District Vauban”. Photo by Arjan van Tim-
meren. (169)
183
Arjan van Timmeren (1969), is lately more of a
hobo than a crobo, due to his work as full professor
Environmental Technology & Design and lead
P.I.ship of the Amsterdam-based joint TUD-MIT-
WUR Institute for Advanced Metropolitan
Solutions (AMS). Regardless, he plans to return
to his crobo existence together with his beloved
family. He likes painting, avant-gardening, running
in cities’ hinterlands, Pilates and Mediterranean
cuisine and wines. He aims to one day become a
Uomo Universale, but for the time being, he lives
based on the belief that caring and sharing are
the most important values for everybody’s future,
as “alles van waarde is weerloos”.*
Laurence Henriquez (1988) is an Aruban-

American crobo with a background in political
science and journalism who is currently pursuing
a masters in Industrial Ecology at TU Delft.
He was at one point a music blogger but has
shifted gears towards thinking more concretely
about paradigm shifts. He is currently working
on a digital knowledge sharing platform that
empowers community-based green initiatives in
the Amsterdam region. He enjoys reading, good
conversation, watching movies and pretending
to be a writer when and if the opportunity arises.
Surprisingly, his mood is not that affected by the
weather.
Alex Reynolds (1991) is an American crobo

extraordinaire. She has a background in computer
science and the arts, but has lately adopted
a creative lifestyle. In recent years, she has
passed over opportunities to expand her arsenal
of academic credentials and accomplishments
in favor of climbing trees, exploring the world,
and cultivating interests in just about everything
unrelated to what she was supposed to be doing at
the time. As her mood is, in fact, affected by Dutch
weather, she is currently scheming on how to move
to warmer Asian climates, but first needs to find a
way to conquer the international visa system.
* From the poem De zeer oude zingt by Lucebert
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Ubikquity and the Illuminated City

Book · January 2015

A. Van Timmeren Laurence Henriquez

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Written by Prof.dr.ir. Arjan van Timmeren and Laurence Henriquez

Designed by Alexandra Reynolds

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Printed on 100g white FSC Mix Credit

Delft University of Technology (TUD)

64 Smart versus Intelligent

153 From Urban Consumers to Smart Citizens

the first recognizable iterations of

Rise and Collapse of Cities

Hovels along the Nile, Tigris,

It was not until 19th century in

> urban growth is still

to transcend traditional barriers to growth. Revolutionary forms of production

From Nations to Cities

Urban environments are the basis of the anthrosphere: a collection of 196

> Man-Made CATASTROPHES

urbanization, economic inequality, political austerity, resource scarcity, climate

<< Rocinha is the largest favela (shanty town)

Regardless, people still continue to commute to São Paulo and other

This map shows the change in the

Increased Decreased Founded after

Top: New York City, 2014

Furthermore, many mega cities with over 10 million inhabitants have

ENVIRONMENTAL STATUS QUO

At an annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in 2012, Brad

The alarming realties of climate change, biodiversity loss and resource

of greenhouse gas emissions25. Conversely, urban citizens, especially in developed

LIMITS TO URBAN GROWTH

54 percent of the earth’s 7 billion human inhabitants currently reside in cities.

> Cities accelerate economic

>> San Francisco residents protesting Google’s buses, which sometimes

“ Civilization advances by extending

<< A (partial) map of the internet as it was in

While thinking in systems is useful in understanding the formal structural

Considering the increase in weather perturbations resulting from climate

to disruptive change, vulnerability, complexity and dependence are essential to

ICTs can be understood as an umbrella term that includes integrated

>> The recent heat wave in Australia was

>> Smog thickens throughout

responsiveness, flexibility and reduce costs.

ICTs give institutions, companies and individuals with similar goals

In fact, it puts a greater emphasis on another way of organizing infrastructure,

The new science of networks is called complexity theory. Evolving in the

> Every strata of infrastructure that

The root ‘ubik’ in the word ubikquity is

concept of privacy has become increasingly anachronistic. In

Ubik is a metaphor for God. Ubik is all-powerful

Ubikquity will serve as a powerful dual metaphor

ubikquity / yoo • bik • wi • tee /

The notion that the anthrosphere is part of an overall

Based on Bratton’s Stack concept

>> One of the robots recently purchased by Taiwanese

Today, ubikquity’s effect on labor is only beginning to take hold. According to

Capital-Biased technical change

As the costs of capital investments (machinery or other productivity