Diseño de muros a flexo-compresión

For one expert being ‘smart’ means using technology to save money, as the expert said“if you can put technology in and that saves money, that’s often smart.”This sentiment could also be found in the promotion of Smart Meters or energy related ‘smart’ projects that the ‘smartness’ in this sense is ‘saving’ whether that’s money or energy consumption. Being ‘smart’ is also a way of setting standards and standardisation in regards of the urban data that

are being collected in order to have the ability to compile them.

“You have to define smart, you have to put various standards in place. . . define what data standards should be, so once this data emerges, it all begins to join up”

With the capability to compile, process and join the data they are hoping the city will one day be aware of itself. So, in other words the data being collected now would be used as training data to develop machine learning and potentially systems equipped with artificial

3_{However, what’s interesting about the lack of citiness in the definition of the smart city offered by experts,}

there’s a lot emphasis on ’citiness’ or ’smartness in a city context’ offered by the citizens I interviewed which are detailed in section 4.3.

intelligence to achieve the seamlessness in the smart city.456 _{Smartness could be defined as}

“self-monitoring, analytics and reporting technologies”and ultimately“self-aware”. Another expert arrived at the same argument,“it’s not just about the nice stuff, it’s about this kind of everyday kind of mechanisms that are built underneath using the new ability to sense things like water levels.”

Considering the urban data being collected is used to train machine learning systems to create a smart city i.e. approaching the smart city as merely a data collection exercise, whether they will be able to solve the problem we are facing in cities is becoming a secondary consideration. As one of the expert put it,“on one hand we create a problem and trying to solve it through other means where we say let’s loads of data coz data will be really useful and we say but actually we have to make the data really useful to people by making more things that are less useful than it. It’s a real kind of. . . let’s produce data until someone figures out what to do with it and eventually someone will figure out what to do with it, but until that point let’s just keep making more.”Therefore, it is not a surprise that some experts would argue not to“take smart city seriously” since if we do, we are still far away from being anything near a smart city.

From how the experts define ‘smartness’ there are three things worth noticing. That NOT being able to pin down what ‘smartness’ means is in my opinion the main obstacle for us to reach a clear definition of the smart city. The second one is, the understanding of ‘smartness’ is context specific – in energy related discourse ‘smart’ means efficiency or simply energy saving, and in data related discourse, smart means standards. This means we probably won’t be able to“take smart city seriously”as it is going to be impossible to put a definition upon a context specific concept.78 _{Thirdly, from the experts’ definition of the smart}

city, there is an internal contention between ’smartness’ and ’city’ in defining a smart city. Some placed the emphasis on the smartness (especially the ones coming from a technological

4_{UK government has embrace such as concept and it will be used in UK health care design. See:}

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/people-will-see-health-and-social-care-fully-joined-up-by-2018

5_{Matthew Chalmers however openly argues against seamlessness, that “seamfulness is about taking account}

of these reminders of the finite and physical nature of digital media.” Instead he advocates for seamful design which “involves deliberately revealing seams to users, and taking advantage of features usually considered as negative or problematic.” [35]

6_{Greenfield heavily criticised the concept of seamlessness, that the effortlessness experiences the seamless-}

ness promises comes at the price of separating the people from what’s behind the technology and what’s behind the seamlessness.[93]

7_{The expert’s definition of the smart city also reminds me of Garfinkel’s ‘indexical expressions’. Indexicality}

is a concept in which Garfinkel argues that even if there is shared meaning, either attached to an object, within conversation, gestures etc, the individual meanings may still help and shape the emergent meanings. In a conversation, an individual would understand a description with a meaning for the speaker – who which then assumes that the meaning is the same for the listener. Garfinkel argues that these meanings people use may not be the same between the two or more individuals involved within social interaction.

background whether they were based in academia or industry) meanwhile the experts from urban management or urban design background centred their definition more on the city. And this contention in defining a smart city is not distinctive just among the experts I interviewed, Alawadhi and Scholl pointed towards a definitional gap between academics and practitioners in the smart city arguing that while the practitioners focus on more immediate issues the academics tend to have a more holistic approach towards defining a smart city [1]. That said, there is still very little coherence in how to bring these two potentially competing concepts together. The question then becomes 1.) how we could try to re-clarify what smartness means in the context of a city as it may not be necessarily how ’smartness’ is being defined in the context of the smart city; 2.) whose right it is to define what a smart city means and ultimately what a city ideally means, whether that is the people who live in them or the people who design them. The right to the city as I introduced earlier in the thesis should not just remain as a nice concept; rather how to translate into our action, design and research of a city should be at core of any research that’s concerning a city. Whether that’s to follow Harvey and Lefebvre’s argument to consider the right to the city as a fundamental human right or that’s to follow Jacob’s idea that people must re-appropriate the production of space and take control of it and govern it for themselves.