Figura 2-8 Oferta relativa de habilidades referentes al College y el College Premia “The behaviour of the (log) college premium and relative supply of college skills (weeks worked
3. Formulación de un modelo de equilibrio general
3.3 Dinámica del capital
“The computer and the Internet were designed, but the ways people used them were not designed into either technology, nor were the most world-shifting uses of these tools anticipated by their designer or vendors”[180, p. 182]
To conclude this section, I would like to borrow the framework Urry summarised to characterise the tourist gaze inThe Tourist Gaze “revisited". The smart city gaze in this section could also be summarised as such. First, many of these gazes are self-consciously organised by professionals. These include the experts who interviewed and more. The ones that are writing algorisms and software to capture, calculate and analyse the urban data, the ones that try to utilise these data to ground and guide their planning and the ones who endeavour to harvest the success of such a way of working, commodify this way of working and profit on it etc. Or as Thrift and Amin noted“it would acknowledge intelligences already at work in the city, address situated problems and set urban governess as a challenge of harnessing this plurality rather than subjugating it to a master intelligence.”[6, p. 25]
Second, different gazes are authorized by different discourses, these include technology advancement, as in both the development of machine leaning algorisms for urban environment
and the development in hardware to match the software advancement; civic engagement, as in how new ways and forms of engaging citizens in not only urban generation and regeneration but also in ways and forms of data contribution; greater social and environmental good, as in the encouragement and pursuit in both reducing energy consumption as well as incorporating sustainable development plans. As Foucault argued that“discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but on the contrary, a totality in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed.”[69, p. 60] There is and should not be a universal smart city gaze. We recognise a city or tell a pair of twin apart through identifying the difference, nuances not really the similarities. We see it, but that is not what helps us to tell them apart. It’s what makes them a twin but what makes them the individual. And standardisation embedded in a universal gaze casted on cities would kill this individuality.
Third, there is a distinction to note between the expert or specific vision and the collective citizens’ gaze. In the former, the emphasis is on the specific problems and issues that face both the municipal government and the cities as the object of the gaze. Whereas the latter one held ‘people’ and their needs and concerns at the heart of this gaze. When concluding the chapter Smart Mob: The Power of the Mobile Many, Rehingold wrote“the computer and the Internet were designed, but the ways people used them were not designed into either technology, nor were the most world-shifting uses of these tools anticipated by their designer or vendors.”[180, p. 182] After 15 years, this statement is also true while contrasting the gaze the experts hold and the one the citizens hold on the same object: the smart city. As Thrift and Amin have proposed that“to know the complex city is to draw on this broader spectrum instead of privileging experts and models” in order to resist or balance the centralised and monitory tendency of computational governance. . . It would recognise the many ways in which urban knowledge is acquired and maintained, including learning and cognition, sensory and bodily perceptions, conversation and storytelling, memory and archive, formal and informal expertise, symbolic and computational intelligence.”[6]
While unpacking the gaze the smart city casts on us through the sensing technology, the CCTV cameras and the advanced algorisms, I presented the argument as if the smart city is an entity, or an overlord, who has its own agency to cast its gaze upon us humans, citizens, people. As Sassan [186] and Thrift and Amin [6] have all advocated, we need an alternative
“science of the city”which is more open and modest, which“concerns itself with making visible, rather than taking for granted, the hidden work of algorithms, machines and codes behind the city’s many sociotechnical system and their effects, so as to make the city fabric heuristic space in which public can engage with machine intelligence.”This is to say that
though the smart city, much close as gets to be an artificial intelligence, it still is not one just yet. The gaze the smart city casts upon is probably not one held by someone whether that is operators in central control rooms, the data analysts in front of screens, software/hardware engineers busy designing next generation smart city technologies, the researchers (academic or industrial) busy reporting their findings, the city managers and public administrators in the town hall, or the faceless techno-god such as IBM, Cisco, Samsung, Huawei, and Google to just name a few.