Michiel de Lange: Recent Episodes
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Two students have experimented with combining Meta smart glasses and facial recognition technology, allowing them to look up personal details of strangers on the streets. Both 404 Media and Ars Technica report the story.
Image source: 404 Media
Two Harvard students recently revealed that it’s possible to combine Meta smart glasses with face image search technology to “reveal anyone’s personal details,” including their name, address, and phone number, “just from looking at them.”
In a Google document, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses….(quote source: Ars Technica)
In addition to all the personal privacy and safety risks, this proof of concept hack also shows that anonymity on the city streets – long theorized as a defining quality of urban public space – is no longer a given. Due to pervasive tracking technologies and relentless datafication, urban public space has been losing its role of being a vestige where you are not constantly watched, tracked, monitored and identified.
Some authors have been talking about a new era of ‘face politics’. Of course games of make-belief, identifying and cloaking have always been played in public situations. Makes me curious what new interaction patterns might arise from technologically mediated situations like these.
Another older piece that was waiting to be read… Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic wrote a beautiful article about Silicon Valley utopian new cities for likeminded tech-elites. In her thoughtful reporting and musings, she weaves together several strands:
- Reporting on Zuzalu, a 2-month event and experience in Montenegro for tech-nomads who want to experiment with new forms of living and dream of building their own urban societies away from the nation state, with money from rich tech investors and entrepreneurs, hosted by often weak and dubious existing nation-states.
- A historical tracing of anti-nation-state political ideologies, from the likes of libertarian Ayn Rand, all the way up to today’s blockchain ideologues who feel that existing institutions, states and cities are failing and that building new utopian cities – or network-states – from scratch is the answer.
- Some criticisms of these ideals from a speaker invited at the event as a counter choice.
- A passionate plea for the messiness, friction, imperfection and the cultivation of dealing with all the everyday problems and societal issues of actually existing cities. And the beauty of it.
- Through the lines, the article also argues for the need to address today’s problems through political means, instead of tech-elites seceding and fleeing this messy earth with a bag full of investor money.
One quote from someone in the article rebuking critique of these developments, which IMO exposes the whataboutism logical fallacy so often used:
“I find it interesting that critics of the project seem to have no problem living in a city where homeless people are allowed to die on their doorsteps, in a country that murders people at home and abroad every day.”
Link to the article >>
A somewhat older need item. Politico and Ars Technica/Wired are among the outlets reporting about the RealPage price collusion case on the housing market. The heart of the matter is that this company is accused of allowing landlords to fix rental prices, using its software:
The Justice Department is gearing up to challenge what it says is collusive conduct in the rental housing market with a lawsuit against a software company that it believes allows large landlords to fix prices. (Quote from Politico)
The underlying issue already to be that the company’s software platform has become very good at aggregating public and non-public data, and recommending prices accordingly.
RealPage’s software is powerful because it anonymizes rental data and can provide landlords and property managers with nonpublic and public data about rentals, which may be different from that advertised publicly on platforms like real estate marketplace Zillow. The company contends that it’s not engaging in price-fixing, as landlords are not forced to accept the rents that RealPage’s algorithm suggests. Sometimes it even recommends landlords lower the rent, RealPage claims. But antitrust enforcers have alleged that even sharing private information via an algorithm and using it for price recommendations can be as conspiratorial as back-room handshake deals…(quote from the Ars/Wired article)
This appears another case where the mantra of ‘openness’ of data is not necessarily leading to desired outcomes for society at large. Instead of foster more inequality and weakens the position of renters. The unchecked amassing of data by companies fuels a market-driven logics in a domain where the product or service (housing) is more like a public good than a commercial one.
A strange rambling interview with technology futurist Vinay Gupta in Vice from some time ago. Some quotes send shivers down my spine…
What I wanted was control of a substantial piece of planetary infrastructure. And then I wanted to tax people for access to that infrastructure […] I wanted it to generate enough wealth that I could go and privately finance climate mitigation work.
Individual control of privately owned global infrastructure? Private ‘solutions’ for collective issues like climate change? No thank you.
…when it comes to hundreds of millions of people needing housing, you just can’t get there in a commercial context.
So the stated goal is to generate enough money to build two experimental cities, one of which is expected to fail and the second, it is hoped, will succeed […] we hope to figure out pretty much everything we need to rehouse hundreds of millions of people efficiently.
Blank slate urbanism? Efficiency discourse? Complete disregard for casualties and collateral damage of techno-utopianismand delusional grandeur? Please don’t.
…you’re still talking about setting up something like 10 or 20 new Londons. […] the technology platforms necessary for building dozens of new gigantic cities do exist. It’s actually entirely possible that we can do that.
Eurocentric visions of urban futures? Technology platforms as the backbone for new urban developments? “Can-do” mentality simplifications of complex matters? Come on.
And it goes on and on. Blockchain? Yes of course, blockchain too.
Source >>
A Governing the Digital Society event, in collaboration with [urban interfaces] and the Open Cities Platform.
Organized by Michiel de Lange (M.L.deLange@uu.nl) and Erna Ruijer (H.J.M.Ruijer@uu.nl) – SIG Inclusion; Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen (S.G.Grimmelikhuijsen@uu.nl) – SIG AIGOBE
Date: 14 November 2024 14:30 – 16:30 + drinks
Locatie: Kromme Nieuwegracht 20, Utrecht, Foyer (ground floor)
Sign up here: https://www.uu.nl/en/events/civic-urban-ai-expert-meeting-2024
Towards civic urban AI
In the last few years there has been a surge of AI deployment in urban settings. Examples include camera surveillance with image recognition, predictive policing, sound/noise detection, autonomous vehicles and robotics, energy distribution prediction and optimization, traffic optimization, public services using synthetic voice chat, the use of algorithms in welfare schemes, urban planning. However, the majority of these AI applications serve the narrow interests of public administration and/or businesses, instead of collective stakes and societal values. Urban AI use cases overwhelmingly focus on further optimizing control, efficiency and consumption at the expense of (other) public values. Often this happens at the expense of marginalized communities and public values. Furthermore, there is the risk of ‘mission creep’ when deployment shifts from specific aims toward broad general purpose applications. Public governance structures and procedures, and institutional frameworks that safeguard public values are frequently lacking. How can urban AI be conceptualized and designed with civic aims and values like inclusiveness, accountability, and transparency in mind? In short, how can urban AI be (re)conceptualized, developed and governed as civic urban AI?
Questions
In this explorative seminar/expert meeting on the topic of civic urban AI, we bring together researchers from the Netherlands and elsewhere in order to discuss how responsible civic urban AI can be conceptualized and what it could look like in practice. We want to collect examples of AI deployment in urban settings, and scrutinize whether and how this harms or supports public civic values, and how approaching this from the angle of civicness and public values provides more just alternatives. How can we anchor ‘urban AI’ in civic public values? How can AI make the city more beautiful, equal, accessible, inclusive and participatory? We will break down these overarching questions into 3 sub-questions, each approaching the notion of civic urban AI from one specific angle:
- From the perspective of technological and medium-specificities of AI: how can public values and ‘civics’ be part of the development, training, evaluation, etc. of AI systems?
- From the perspective of urban culture and city life: what are the implications of urban AI for urban society, and what is needed from civicurban AI systems to make cities inclusive, vibrant and hospitable places?
- From the perspective of governance and public administration: what institutional challenges arise from AI applications in urban settings, and how can civic urban AI be anchored in fair and just governance and institutional frameworks?
Aims
The aim of this expert meeting is to open the dialogue between various disciplines engaging with AI in urban and public contexts, to begin formulating outlines and principles for responsible uses of urban AI, to start forming coalitions, and to start wider public debates about AI applications in urban settings. This expert meeting could further lead to a series of events, publications, collaborations and coalition building, and so on.
Program
14:30 – 15:15 Welcome
After a brief introduction by the organizers, three invited experts open the meeting with a short opening statement of ca. 10 minutes, sharing their initial thoughts, a key question, a challenge, or a provocation, from the perspective of each of the 3 angles (tech, urban, governance). Speakers are:
- On governance: Prof. dr. Esther Keymolen, Tilburg University (https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/staff/e-l-o-keymolen)
- On urban inclusion: Prof. dr. Ajay Bailey, Utrecht University (https://www.uu.nl/staff/ABailey)
- On ‘civic’ AI: Dr. Mirko Schaeffer, Utrecht University (https://www.uu.nl/staff/MTSchaefer)
15:15 : 16:15 Breakout & dialogue
Format breakout sessions:
- Either around one of the 3 angles (tech, urban, governance),
- Or around a specific use case of urban AI
16:15-16:30 Wrap-up
Next steps: where is the energy and urgency? What are ambitions? E.g. coalition building, possible calls, joint (writing) projects, etc.
16:30 Drinks
Noema magazine features a piece on how Guizhou, a former underdeveloped hinterland province, is linked to the global circulation of data and people. In the Gui’an New Area, Huawei has built a vast data center in a ‘18th century European city’ style.
Theme-park European architecture is nothing new in 21st-century China, nor in Gui’an New Area, which already offers a Swiss-style scenic village as a nearby tourist attraction. However, look more closely at the buildings in the new Czech town and you’ll notice that their windows are in fact air vents, thrumming and heaving with the high-pitched rush of server racks and cooling fans. The water tumbling down the artificial cliffside and circulating in the moat is part of a cooling system for transferring heat away from the machinery. This is Huawei’s new Cloud Data Center, which follows the company’s tradition of building its Chinese campuses in a range of historic European styles
This data center is part of efforts by the central Chinese government to transform Gui’an New Area in formerly disconnected provinces like Guizhou into a “Big Data Valley”, which in turn fits in grander visions of Sinofuturity.
Why do I find this interesting? First of all I find it intriguing how a mediatized ‘imagology’ of European urbanism is mobilized. As a simulacrum, is it an attempt to mask the friction between a high-tech connected data industry and the rural peripheral character of the hitherto disconnected landscape and province, by deliberately inserting an urban archetype that is both out-of-place and out-of-time? Or is it a sardonic relegation of euro-centric techno-modernity to the past and in doing so indeed displaying the rising power of sinofuturity?
Second, new digital infrastructures like these are coming to shape urban/rural environments all over the world, blurring any neat distinction between the two. This prompts new questions about what contributes urbanism beyond the city today, and also beyond the western-dominated theorizing of urban culture with classical concepts like publicness, public space, civicness, pedagogics and tolerance of differences, encountering strangers, and so on.
Third, cases like these highlight new types of ‘infrastructural exclusion’, allowing some to benefit from (access to) global media networks while pushing others out. The notion of ‘infrastructure’ has been conceptualized as “the connective tissue that knits people, places, social institutions and the natural environment into coherent urban relations” (Graham and
Marvin 2001). What is holding together the various actors and actants in this new type of complex urban assemblage? How is a purely technical understanding of connectivity also creating new kinds of disconnections and exclusionary practices?
Dutch tech news Tweakers.net reports that Cowboy, an e-bike company from the Netherlands, has stopped offering its urban racing game Race. The game allowed e-bike users to engage in 500-meter competitive racing games in the city. E-bikes in the Netherlands are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and are receiving a lot of backlash for being unsafe and illegally upgraded to achieve speeds way above the legal maximum of 25km/h.
image source: https://www.rtl.nl/nieuws/binnenland/artikel/5460209/e-bikemaker-trekt-racespel-terug-na-kritiek-amsterdamA number of public officials earlier have criticized the game Race for inciting unsafe and potentially illegal behavior on public roads.
The use of the city as a canvas for playing urban games has been described by many (including myself >>). It is interesting to see that by now, there seems to be a much faster feedback loop, and stricter clampdown, between digital platforms/products and government policies. This is already visible in for instance the platform economy and accommodation apps. The age of the digital cowboy seems to be over, at least in the Netherlands and in Europe at large.
Link to original article on Tweakers.net >>
See also the coverage (in Dutch) on RTL Nieuws >>
Together with various colleagues and organizations, I am co-organizing this event later this week:
https://circulateproject.nl/2024/05/03/workshop-relational-interfaces-design/
Organized by Dark Matter Labs, The research project Charging the Commons at the Civic Interaction Design Research Group at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and Zöop, in cooperation with the Focus Area Governing the Digital Society at Utrecht University.
Rest of World reports on startup Nippy from Argentina that offers flexworkers free use of the loo in exchange for their data. A new type of extractivism, or is it more than that?
The company rents out small storefronts where gig workers can use clean toilets and get coffee free of charge — in exchange for downloading Nippy’s app. Nippy makes money by processing and selling the data workers register on the app to financial, insurance, and telecommunications companies it has partnered with.
Most delivery workers say to Rest of World that they did not know their data was being sold. Nonetheless, some workers also call it a safe space where they can relax for a while.
That’s what i like about this kind of reporting: it does not get stuck in a simplistic political economy voor but also is mindful of street level perspectives that are more complicated and ambiguous.
Link to original article >>
Ars Technica writes about Amazon pulling the plug on its Fresh grocery shopping concept, because it just didn’t work:
Just Walk Out was supposed to let customers grab what they wanted from a store and just leave, skipping any kind of checkout process. Amazon wanted to track what customers took with them purely via AI-powered video surveillance; the system just took a phone scan at the door, and shoppers would be billed later via their Amazon accounts.
Ars refers to reporting by The Information (paywall) that suggest Amazom was not able to properly train the machine vision AI they should detect what items people are grabbing from the shelves. The report said that “Amazon had more than 1,000 people in India working on Just Walk Out as of mid-2022 whose jobs included manually reviewing transactions and labeling images from videos to train Just Walk Out’s machine learning model.” And: “As of mid-2022, Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales”, which never made it a viable technology.
These kinds of new shopping experiences are also emerging het in the Netherlands, for instance in Utrecht where Aldi has a similar ‘Shop & Go’ concept store. It fits really well with the ‘friction free’ discourse of Smart Tech. Thanks to technology, at no point does the individual need to feel limited or hampered in their sense of freedom by mundane things like waiting in a queue, having to speak to someone, or be interrupted by drawing their wallet. Even taking a product from the top shelves and handing it to somebody else means that you will be billed. So much for everyday sociability and solidarity…
Yet as so many have already noted, friction is what life in the city is about: dealing with other people and events beyond your control. It’s of course deeply ironic that one of the biggest and richest tech companies seems to not be in control of this latest friction-free technology. Yay for bumping into each other!
==UPDATE
James Bridle in The Guardian makes the valid point about the real price that is being paid by the underpaid workers in far-away countries, and the neo-colonialist violence being done to its core values:
When this work is outsourced via video cameras, it is passed to data labellers. Amazon’s remote data labellers might be paid one or two pounds an hour, if they are lucky. If you can replace half a dozen UK staff with half a dozen data labellers in India, Kenya or the Philippines, then the difference in the annual staff bill alone could be almost £100,000 a year. […] The size of Bezos’s rocket is very precisely determined by the difference in costs between paying a worker in Britain and a worker in India – including all the historically determined racist and colonialist inequality that calculation involves.
The Markup reports that Microsoft’s AI chatbot is not sticking to the facts when responding to questions about public seconds like starting a new business or public housing.
If you’re a landlord wondering which tenants you have to accept, for example, you might pose a question like, “are buildings required to accept section 8 vouchers?” or “do I have to accept tenants on rental assistance?” In testing by The Markup, the bot said no, landlords do not need to accept these tenants. Except, in New York City, it’s illegal for landlords to discriminate by source of income, with a minor exception for small buildings where the landlord or their family lives.
In the report by The Markup, an extensive overview of further examples is given of the chatbot confabulating unreliable answers, half-baked truths and downright nonsense. For example, the chatbot gave false information on housing:
The bot, for example, said it was legal to lock out a tenant, and that “there are no restrictions on the amount of rent that you can charge a residential tenant.”
Likewise, the bot went against the city’s consumer and worker protections. The bot suggested that restaurant owners can take workers’ tips, need not tell employees about scheduling charges, or can make their business cash-free:
For example, in 2020, the city council passed a law requiring businesses to accept cash to prevent discrimination against unbanked customers. But the bot didn’t know about that policy when we asked. “Yes, you can make your restaurant cash-free,”
The Markup concludes by reflecting on the notion of trust, noting that “there’s no way for an average user to know whether what they’re reading is false.”
I would add that there might be an even more sinister and worrisome aspect to the rise of confabulating chatbots. It appears that they further erode civic values and lead to new forms of exclusion. What strikes me about these false answers, in my view, is that they exude a strong whiff of market logics and libertarian ideas about the role of government (less is better). All of the answers directly go against policies meant to protect public values and the rights of the weaker sections of society. In this sense, GenAI isn’t merely a ‘stochastic parrot’ that returns what you feed it (in many cases this is ‘garbage in, garbage out’). It seems a stochastic parrot deliberately fed on a restricted unhealthy diet of Californian Ideology and Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism. Time to serve it a wholesome mains composed of public values…
Link to original article >>
Update by The Markup “Malfunctioning NYC AI Chatbot Still Active Despite Widespread Evidence It’s Encouraging Illegal Behavior”:
Still available and still encouraging illegal behavior, the chatbot’s site has been quietly updated following last week’s publication. While the bot previously included a note saying it “may occasionally produce incorrect, harmful or biased content,” the page now more prominently describes the bot as “a beta product” that may provide “inaccurate or incomplete” responses to queries.
Ars Technica reports on a AI-powered project for safer cycling.
For $ 399.00 USD you get a small 330 gram camera, powered by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and equipped with “AI-powered predictive analytics” that you can install under your bike saddle. Facing to the rear, it promises to constantly monitor for bad drivers and give off a audible and visible cue when it detects a potentially dangerous situation. It also visibly signals to upcoming drivers that there is a bike ahead.
This is the pitch on the website:
Copilot is an AI-powered bike light that uses smart sensors to constantly watch the roadway. Cyclists will receive audible and visual feedback from Copilot to indicate driver behavior and warn cyclists of potentially dangerous situations. Audible and visual cues will also indicate to drivers that a cyclist is near in order to avoid potential crashes.
I find this an interesting case of well-meaning techno-fix. It attempts to make cycling safer in countries where there isn’t a tradition of cycling mobility. Good for cities, good for peoople, good for the envirnment. Who could possibly oppose to this? In the Netherlands cycling is ubiquitous and hence car drivers are fortunately much more aware of bikes. Moreover, an increasing number of Dutch cities are now imposing 30km/h speed limits to make traffic safer and more accessible for everyone. But – as our Dutch ‘cycling professor‘ always emphasizes – this is the outcome of political struggles. It is not some kind culturally specific historically grown ‘path dependency’ that others cannot copy.
Hence, I consider these kinds of well-intended ‘solutionist’ smart technologies as backfiring and unhelpful in the end. It puts the onus on individual cyclists to install such a camera. It simply optimizes an existing system of mobility that is car-centric. It depoliticises broader discussions about “the right to the city”, instead of making urban mobility itself the subject of political controversy and debate. For me, the big question with these urban AI applications is how we can move towards more civic uses of urban AI?
Link to article on Ars Technica >>
Dutch tech website Tweakers reports that 110 supermarkets in The Netherlands (ca. 1,7%) have started to use cameras and software made by the French company Veesion to prevent theft and shoplifting. The software analyses customer behavior and claims to be able to detect when people put an item in their pockets. It sends out push notifications to employees when it detects such suspicious behavior.
Large supermarket chain Jumbo is considering adoption for the near future for 100s of stores.
The software is called “Intelligent anti-shoplifting system”, which the company describes as “gesture-based recognition software”.
This AI-based software uses the latest advances in Deep Learning to automatically detect shoplifting gestures in real-time in supermarkets from existing surveillance cameras.
source: Veesion website
Veesion propositionThis is yet another user-case of Urban AI used in particular physical situations, almost entirely geared towards surveillance, control and/or consumer optimization, in what I have called in the past ‘the logic of the 3 Cs’: consumption, capsularization and control.
An increasing number of everyday urban spaces are becoming governed by digital technologies and software. This has huge ramifications for ‘inclusion’ in these spaces: the degree to which these spaces are open and equal for everyone despite their backgrounds. It has been shown in the past that technologies in general, and algorithms/ AI in particular, are never neutral but perpetuate and reinforce all kinds of biases.
To me, and a few colleagues, the big open question is what civic uses of urban AI could be, that fosters public values instead of narrower single-stakeholder interests.
Under the title “The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same”, The Guardian has a very interesting longread that touches on the complex twisting between digital media and urban place.
The author, who just had a new book out called “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture” , takes a closer look at the “hipster coffee shop” that looks basically the same in every city in the world. For one type of audience this feels very welcoming and familiar whole for others these global ‘spaces of flow’ as Castells called them are exclusionary. Quote:
If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds.
I shared the article with my current class Urban Mobile Media, in the MA program New Media & Digital Culture, with these words:
I wanted to share this recent article in The Guardian that ties together so many issues we’ve been discussing in our course so far: mobile work & digital nomads, data & algorithms, situatedness and place-making, Instagrammable cities, authenticity, homogeneity. Well worth the read!
Link to article >>
Dutch local news channel for Amsterdam AT5 reports that GroenLinks, a Dutch leftwing green party, is worried about the rampant use of smart doorbells like Ring.
GroenLinks is worried about the implications of these doorbells for people’s privacy and for social cohesion in the city. The problem according to GroenLinks is that these doorbell cameras are filming public space instead of private terrain. In Amsterdam’s smaller streets it is possible to peek into each others homes. A study by Amsterdam Municipality (no source is given in the article) would suggest that a majority of inhabitants have uncomfortable feelings about so many smart doorbells in public. A spokesperson is quoted: “While the smart doorbell can contribute to a greater sense of safety for property owners, it can have the adverse consequence for other groups of being filmed unwittingly all the time.”
Earlier I reblogged another news article about smart doorbells.
Link to original article in Dutch >>
Another grim case of how (faulty) software and algorithms can impact real people’s everyday lives in specific workplaces:
Ars Technica writes that “Fujitsu software bugs that helped send innocent postal employees to prison in the UK were known “right from the very start of deployment,” [according to] a Fujitsu executive [during] a public inquiry”.
From 1999 onwards, the accounting software called Horizon was installed in UK post offices by a Fujitsu subsidiary. Since then, between 1999 – 2015, this software has led to the “prosecution and conviction of more than 900 sub-postmasters and postmistresses who were accused of theft or fraud when the software wrongly made it appear that money was missing from their branches”.
The Fujitsu executive now says that bugs in the software had been known from the outset. A lawyer representing victims asked the key question: “Did nobody historically make that pretty obvious connection between very poor code going out into operation and then very poor data coming out and through the litigation support service?”
Full article on Ars Technica >>
On Jan. 22 2024 between 16:00-18:00, I co-organize a roundtable event about ‘Creative Urban Methods’. The event is both to celebrate the launch of our recent special issue on ‘creative urban methods’ in Mediapolis, and to discuss the merits of innovative ways for studying Media Cities.
Date: 22 January 2024
Time: 16:00 – 18:00
Location: MCW Lab, Kromme Nieuwegracht 20 (entrance via Muntstraat 2A), Utrecht, NL.
Event link: https://urbaninterfaces.sites.uu.nl/save-the-date-roundtable-creative-urban-methods/
On Monday, January 22nd, [urban interfaces] joins forces with the IOS Platform for Open Cities (OCP) and the focus area Governing the Digital Society (SIG “Inclusion in the Datafied City”) to organize a roundtable event on Creative Urban Methods. The event follows, centers around, and builds upon the recent publication of an edited dossier on creative urban methods in the online journal Mediapolis.
With this collection of articles, the editorial team, consisting of Sigrid Merx, Coco Kanters, Michiel de Lange, and Nanna Verhoeff, aims to explore the merits of creative methods for researching contemporary cities and urban culture. A growing catalog of new and innovative creative methods for urban inquiries demonstrates a wide array of theoretical approaches, critical concepts, and scholarly techniques. This dossier presents seven articles that think through the epistemological and ethical grounding of specific creative methods developed in direct response to particular, situated inquiries that are all, in their specific ways, related to, and responding to various (inter-)local, urban realities.
The event will start by offering some of our dossier’s authors the possibility to introduce their articles. Authors Anastasia Hacopian, Noortje van Amsterdam, Irina van Aalst and Gery Nijenhuis, Inte Gloerich and Gabriele Ferri, and others will pitch their articles and share their works’ most pivotal points. Afterward, the authors and audience will be joined by guest speakers from urban studies and creative methods to discuss and think about creative methods with and about cities. We will close the event with some drinks.
Discussants:
Prof. dr. Karin Rebel
Prof. dr. Martijn Oosterbaan
Dr. Joost Vervoort
Interested in attending the event? You can sign up via this link.
If you have any questions regarding the event, or if you would like to join the event online, please do not hesitate to reach out to the [urban interfaces] team at urbaninterfaces@uu.nl.
Today is the day Amsterdam is implementing 30km/h on the majority of its streets. So a good occasion to reblog this article here. Vox writes that San Francisco’s robotaxi experiment is getting out of hand >>
In San Francisco – and in other US cities too – self-driving taxis operated by companies like GM’s Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo are clogging the city streets and are becoming a nuisance if not downright dangerous for emergency vehicles.
In a podcast interview between Vox host Sean Rameswaram and Liz Lindqwister, a data journalist at the nonprofit news startup the San Francisco Standard, it is explained that because of flexible pricing schemes, people are frequently taking robotaxis just to ride around town and hang out and do – I love the word – debaucherous things. What can be more American than people using robotaxis to have sex in the backseat. The problem is, however, that any complicated traffic situation makes these robotaxis completely freeze and block traffic.
To me, the real issue that is barely touched upon in this article, is the question whether ‘smart’ cities in general need more tech-optimized car mobility, or whether they should radically rethink what fair and equitable mobility might mean in the future? After all, cars take up a lot of space, come with huge environmental downsides, and serve the needs of privileged while being downright dangerous to weaker sections of the population like children and elderly. Moreover, visions of robotaxis are such poor imaginations of urban futures by totally uncreative people. Ultimately this is a question of ‘the right to city’.
Link to original article on Vox >>
Additional important context from another article on robotaxis:
“Legal frameworks remain woefully inadequate: in the Golden State, cities have no regulatory authority over the robotaxis that ply their streets, and police legally cannot cite them for moving violations.” (Source: MIT technology Review)
The Conversation has an interesting piece called “WeWork approached physical space as if it were virtual, which led to the company’s downfall”. In the article, the author argues that dreams of cities as cybernetic systems – while old – have their limits.
The author suggests that this cybernetic logic of essentially seeing cities and computers as the same in terms of ‘informational flows’, is what led to the downfall of WeWork:
“Earlier in the twentieth century, offices were thought of as, essentially, industrial buildings. […] But during World War II, executives witnessed the military use giant mainframes for logistics and deciphering codes. Afterwards, many started thinking of an office filled with workers as a kind of computing infrastructure.”
But of course offices are more than that. They are social work spaces, and give people a sense of place and belonging. WeWorkfailed to deliver exactly this.
Ultimately, the author concludes with a reference to Shannon Mattern’s book, the city is not a computer…
Link to article on The Conversation >>
I am very happy and proud to announce that the special issue in Mediapolis Journal on Creative Urban Methods, that I co-edited with my [urban interfaces] colleagues Sigrid Merx, Nanna Verhoeff & Coco Kanters, and with the invaluable help of Elle Zwinkels, is out now! See our own introduction here: https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2023/11/creative-urban-methods/.
In addition to our own introduction, this special issue contains contributions by:
- Gillian Sonnad and Noortje van Amsterdam
- Karin van Es and Marcel Broersma
- Inte Gloerich and Gabriele Ferri
- Anastasia Hacopian
- Jan van Duppen, Augusto Anéas, Aileen Harvey, Sandra Jasper, Laura Kemmer and Claudia Muniz
Ars Technica reports about a lawsuit filed against 14 DC landlords who are accused of having colluded “with a property management software firm to keep rent prices high in a city with a housing affordability crisis.” The software company RealPage suggests rental prices to landlords, based on the data that they feed the software company.
Sounds like a very risky data feedback loop to me anyway, but apparently these 14 landlords in DC joined forces with the company to keep rent prices artificially high on the platform. Effectively they formed a housing cartel.
Just another warning that despite rhetorics of optimization, urban technologies when unchecked frequently tend to benefit the already powerful at the expense of the less privileged (in this case by deliberate misuse).
Link to the original article on Ars Technica >>
This news item by Vice on the quick rise and demise of Revel scooters in NYC makes me think about temporarily as a theme that I’ve been interested in for a long time. As digital media technologies and urban culture intersect, we often see a mismatch between their temporal cycles. The fast-moving ways of the tech industry, with their extremely short cycles and aggressive grab-all strategies for taking over markets, is at odds with the much longer development and maintenance cycles of most urban infrastructures, such as housing and public transport. It artists that many urban tech companies simply do not have a long-teeth strategy that is sustainable and that considers maintenance. This quote from the article is illuminating:
The actual costs of running a safe and reliable shared transportation business that provides people a ride when they need it with minimal wait or inconvenience are almost always higher than what people are willing to pay for.
Link to original article on Vice >>
I love this series of portraits by Rest of World called Life as a Gig Worker. While a political economy perspective of platform labor tends to focus only on harms and exploitation, this more ethnographic perspective shows that marginalized people are smart and creative, and that they will find workarounds for restoring their agency and dignity. It adds a healthy emic on the ground perspective to the view from above in many studies.
Being trained as an anthropologist myself, this truly resonates. It reminds me of a perhaps lesser-known book by James Scott called Weapons of the Weak, where he present a range of everyday subversive tactics by Malaysian peasants to combat the hegemonic grip of large landlords, and restore a sense of self-worth and pride. This series suggests that we should perhaps focus not only on platform labor as drivers of inequality but also on smart platform appropriation.
Link to series >>
The Markup writes:
The software product formerly known as PredPol but rebranded into Geolitica, has been right in predicting crime a paltry <1% in an investigation about its use at the police department in Plainfield, New Jersey.
We examined 23,631 predictions generated by Geolitica between Feb. 25 to Dec. 18, 2018 for the Plainfield Police Department (PD). Each prediction we analyzed from the company’s algorithm indicated that one type of crime was likely to occur in a location not patrolled by Plainfield PD. In the end, the success rate was less than half a percent. Fewer than 100 of the predictions lined up with a crime in the predicted category, that was also later reported to police.
Captain David Guarino of the Plainfield Police Department expressed the hope that this software would make their work more accurate and efficient. But with this low success rate they decided to end their use of the product. The article further mentions that Geolitica plans to end operations by the end of 2023.
The underlying problem with this predictive software is of course that “Geolitica’s software tended to disproportionately target low-income, Black, and Latino neighborhoods….”
The article does a nice job explaining how data bias slips into these products. The software returns what it is being fed, in terms of quality and quantity:
The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that less than half of violent and property crimes were reported to police in 2022. Reporting rates are also inconsistent across demographic groups. The agency found in a 2012 report that Black, Latino, and lower-income crime victims were more likely to report the crime than White people and people from higher-income households.
A major problem with Geolitica’s system, as it was used in Plainfield, is that there were a massive number of predictions compared to a relatively small number of crimes.
Yet again the ongoing datafication of urban life ends up harming those in marginalized positions, just like in the past the cadaster has underpinned many home evictions of the urban poor.
Link to original article on The Markup>>
This one is sad and funny at the same time: 404 media shares a video from a 2017 incident involving police in LA being too busy with playing Pokémon Go to pay attention to either a robbery happening nearby or basic traffic rules.
Two Los Angeles Police Department officers who ignored a robbery in progress in order to catch a Snorlax and Togetic in Pokémon Go also rolled through a stop sign, sped through residential neighborhoods and zoomed over speed bumps, tailgated various cars, and drove the wrong way down a one-way road in order to catch ‘em all, video of the incident obtained by 404 Media six years after the event shows.
Link to original article on 404 Media >>
Another one on the ‘gig economy’: Ars Technica writes that in New York Uber and Lyft have agreed to pay $328 million after “cheating drivers out of hundreds of millions of dollars”.
In addition to the usual observations that platform companies are not compliant (and knowingly do) with local or state legislation, what is interesting in this case is also the role of the app interface itself:
Uber misrepresented the deductions made to drivers’ pay in their terms of service, telling drivers that Uber would only deduct its commission from the drivers’ fare, and that drivers were “entitled to charge [the passenger] for any tolls, taxes or fees incurred,” though no method to do this was ever provided via the Uber Driver app.
The Uber app itself, it seems, was not even compliant with Uber’s own stated policies…
Link to the original article on Ars >>
Vice writes that Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, has sent letters in August 2023 to Amazon, DoorDash, and Walmart, demanding they address allegations that their wages are so low that they trap workers in poverty.
The companies have responded with the usual ‘technological exceptionalism’ argumentation that platform based work is fundamentally misunderstood.
Yet another example of how digital tech in the city leads to exacerbated inequality, now in the domain of labor.
link to original article on Vice >>
Vox had an interesting read about location-based mobile media and the question “Should we know where our friends are at all times?”
With constant tracking and check-ins, our everyday lives have become hybrids of online and offline. In anecdotally describing how location-sharing has become, in the words of one of the respondents “so, so common among basically everyone I know”, the author addresses a number of pertinent issues.
One of these is the tension between safety and security, and sociability and a sense of proximity. another is the constant negotiation over access to one’s private life and whereabouts, and the little microstrategies and tactics involved in balancing this, an avoiding awkwardness, creepiness or downright pervasive stalking practices.
Link to original article on Vox.com >>
A bit of brighter news, in The Guardian, a “Swedish tech startup helping cities go green”:
This article in The Guardian reports on the tech startup ClimateView that have created a kind of dashboard for Green and Sustainable Cities, called ClimateOS (link to Sweden indicators).
Company pitch: ClimateView is a Swedish company that accelerates city transitions through a science-based framework, process and platform.
According to the CEO of ClimateView, Tomer Shalit, “Cities account for more than 70% of global CO2 emissions. They are clearly critical to climate action, but they are also complex and highly interconnected systems – and they really lacked the tools to plan and manage their transition.”
This dashboard allows cities to do exactly that: to break down the complexity of the climate challenge into smaller and easier to achieve indicators, and to keep track of their individual progress.
Dashboard for Sweden, source: https://app.climateview.global/v3/public/board/48023530-bb99-4a82-a00e-c9e7aad71f5dCool and hopeful idea and useful application of smart & sustainable technologies and ‘green media‘, apparently. A particular boon could be that tools like these actually make a powerful argument for undertaking actions, instead of relinquishing all hope.
Nonetheless, two key concerns come to mind, in fact these are issues that always pop up in discussions about datafication and quantification:
- onto-epistemology: can a hugely complex issue like climate truly be broken down into these smaller chunks and be reduced to a sum of smaller parts, while omitting the most complex question of how these smaller parts are interrelated? What kind of knowledge is generated and visualized through such dashboards? What also remains unclear are questions of scale: what policies and actions are needed and on which political level? Can indeed the joint actions of cities taken together be sufficient to tackle this crisis (as exemplified by the fact that the most comprehensive case study is for Sweden as a nation and not at the city level)? Much enthusiasm has gone out to the idea that wicked problems might best be addressed at the city level instead of national politics but I have my doubts…
- politics: the second concern that I have is that this tool turns a difficult and painful transition that will inevitably hurt many people (and some more than others…) into a depoliticized, rationalized, managerial issue of frictionless bureaucracy. To what extent are dashboards like these ritualistic consolations that we have everything under control as long as we have the realtime numbers, a Modernist human hubris perpetuated? Smart tech perhaps serves more as legitimizing tool for government (in)actions. Hence, technologies like these in the end might end up being a band-aid to avoid making more painful decisions with bigger political ramifications, with the actual involvement of civic participation in making those choices.
Dutch National news outlet NOS reports that students who have a (non-western) migration background assist to be disproportionately targeted by a fraud detection algorithm. This […] Read More
With colleagues Luke Hespanhol (University of Sydney) & Nanna Verhoeff (UU) I am co-editing a special issue on what we call “Urban Civic AI” >> […] Read More
Together with colleagues at Utrecht University and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, I am organizing this event: Symposium & Workshop “Critical city-making: exploring design […] Read More
Wired last month had an article that critically examines the use of what is euphemistically labeled ‘crowd control tech’ but in fact is an ongoing militarization of the urban realm all over globe fueled by the US weapons industry. The author speaks from personal experience about the harm that these supposedly benign arms can do: they were shot in the face while covering a protest outside the White House in 2020.
“The theory behind all less-lethal crowd-control devices, from the simple billy club to the infrared laser dazzler, is that they allow security forces to suppress a riot without committing a massacre. Law enforcement and military experts have described them, again and again, as a “humane” alternative to conventional arms—and often as the frontier of high-tech innovation.”
“Unhindered by the kind of oversight on production, sale, use, and export that applies to typical small arms, the less-lethals industry has been left pretty much to its own devices. It is to the armaments trade what dietary supplements are to the pharmaceutical industry: a supposedly more benign sector that is, in practice, largely unsupervised and often slipshod.”
While the rhetoric suggest that crowd control technology might lead to less harm and damage, the author suggests something entirely else. On the dais before their widespread use they was often a tacit or even explicitly negotiated mutual understanding between protesters and law enforcement. But with the advent of new tools, also a new power dynamics emerges: “…across the US, negotiated management fell out of favor, and reliance on less-lethals has increased.”
At the end of the article, the author highlights the financial stakes behind all this: “Even by conservative estimates, the less-lethal industry is predicted to grow by more than $3 billion over the next decade.”
Link to full article >>
The Conversation reports on a recent study about CCTV and bias in crime investigations, under the header “The camera never lies? Our research found CCTV isn’t always dependable when it comes to murder investigations”
The authors of that study write:
“…the evidence we gathered during our study of British murder investigations and trials reveals how, like other forms of evidence such as DNA and fingerprints, CCTV footage requires careful interpretation and evaluation and can be misleading.”
“Instead of providing an absolute “truth”, different meanings can be obtained from the same footage. But understanding the challenges and risks associated with CCTV footage is vital in a fair and transparent system to prevent possible miscarriages of justice.”
The authors discuss a number of potential issues with the use of cameras, such as retention, image quality, and the pitfalls of reliance on self-declared ‘super recognizers’. One important consideration that seems to be lacking is that the very spatial distribution and implementation of CCTv is already biassed toward certain neighborhoods and are deemed unsafe or prove to criminality. I would have liked to know more about this kind of underlying spatial injustice. Now the considerations on bias and exclusion are just about the image interpretation phase, not not comprehensively about the steps before (or after).
Link to article >>
According to a recent press release by the national government, a sensor registry is being worked on. Too bad they the actual register itself cannot be currently accessed.
In any case, the stated purpose of this first attempt at a national registry for sensors used in urban public spaces is to enhance public transparency, and avoid doubles and promote reuse. This second wij to me sounds a bit tricky, as it may lead to ‘mission creep’ with additional usage scenarios being stacked onto a single initial purpose.
Amsterdam municipality already has such a registry, albeit incomplete.
While I’m at it, this publication came out in 2022. It is co-authored with several colleagues, but to be honest, Tamalone & Corelia did by far most of the writing work, while Maartje de Goede has been key in setting up the participatory design process. It is available Open Access here >>
van den Eijnden, Tamalone, Corelia Baibarac-Duignan, Michiel de Lange, and Maartje de Goede. 2022. “Materials and modes of translation: Re-imagining inclusive “zero”-waste futures.” Frontiers in Sustainable Cities 4. doi: 10.3389/frsc.2022.958423.
My colleagues Karin van Es and Nanna Verhoeff edited this great collection of essays on datafication and algorithmization.
With my colleagues in the Designing for Controversies in Responsible Smart Cities project, we contributed a chapter titled “Controversing Datafication through Media Architectures” (authors: Corelia Baibarac Duignan, Julieta Matos Castaño, Anouk Geenen, and Michiel de Lange).
The book Situating Data: Inquiries in Algorithmic Culture can be downloaded in full as an Open Access pdf here >>.
Taking up the challenges of the datafication of culture, as well as of the scholarship of cultural inquiry itself, this collection contributes to the critical debate about data and algorithms. How can we understand the quality and significance of current socio-technical transformations that result from datafication and algorithmization? How can we explore the changing conditions and contours for living within such new and changing frameworks? How can, or should we, think and act within, but also in response to these conditions?
This collection brings together various perspectives on the datafication and algorithmization of culture from debates and disciplines within the field of cultural inquiry, specifically (new) media studies, game studies, urban studies, screen studies, and gender and postcolonial studies. It proposes conceptual and methodological directions for exploring where, when, and how data and algorithms (re)shape cultural practices, create (in)justice, and (co)produce knowledge.
Undark has an intriguing opinion article about the current trend of tech companies interested in neuroscience. Neuroscience research has produced various technologies capable of measuring human brain activity, e.g. magnetic resonance imaging, implanted electrode systems, and electroencephalograms (EEGs). Biohackers started experimenting with EEGs for meditation purposes. This has trickled through to the consumer tech market, with companies like Meta, Valve, Snap acquiring neuroscience startups.
Of course, tech companies do this because “with enough information about individuals and their habits, developers can divine, with fine-tooth specificity, how a certain person will respond to certain advertisements.”
What I find interesting about this, is how technologically mediated neurofeedback acts as a new type of interface between people’s mental experience and their physical environment. In urban theory, there has always been an interest in the relationship between inner experiences and outside stimuli. Think of Simmel’s urbanite who adopts a blasé attitude as a way of protecting themselves from overstimulation. Or Lynch and his cognitive maps that serve to alleviate people’s fear of getting lost. Such theories envision specific conceptual interfaces between inside and outside worlds (the filter, the map). The promise of neurotech is, I guess, that it offers a direct unmediated access to people’s inner mind and the outside world. Moreover, as a second thought, the directionality is inverted: mental experience is no longer a reaction to outside stimuli, it now drives behavior and, by extension, the possible design of urban environment environments.
The wider implications may also be that this exacerbates the already existing tendencies of our technologically mediated urban life to become subjected to the logics of the 3 Cs: control, consumption, cocooning. Totaling control by states and/or businesses, pervasive tracking and datafication of consumer preferences, and reinforcing personalized sameness over differences are ready to infer.
Finally, I believe we need to understand this potential rise of neurotech in urban space through the lens of ‘affect’: the realtime measurement of people’s affects and emotional states in relation to urban space is a key factor for understanding current technologically mediated urban life.
Link to article on Undark>>
This is the third part of a 3-part report of a workshop held on 6 October 2022 about the data commons and the smart city, which I co-organized. Links to part 1 >>, and to part 2 >>.
| Background of the workshopIn our datafied smart cities, the creation of value out of data lies mostly in the hands of companies and governments. As data is considered to be a new type of resource, questions arise around for instance the governance of this resource but also its potential for citizen agency. These two approaches to the data commons – as on the one hand a matter of governance and regulation, and on the other hand its promise of increasing democratic civic participation and inclusion – were central to the one-day workshop Data Commons and the Smart City, which was organized by Utrecht University and the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG).The data commons are one of the models advanced in academic literature and political practice to restructure our economies and societies in more bottom-up inclusive, and democratic ways. During this workshop, the promises and pitfalls were discussed with experts from a variety of backgrounds.In the morning session we laid the groundwork for speaking about data commons in relation to smart cities. Workshop participants were asked to show an exemplary case and make an opening statement about what the data commons means for them. Guiding questions were: What is the concrete problem or case your contribution deals with, and how can your example of a data-commons from your own research or practice shed new light on what works, what does not, and why? What makes it a data/digital commons? What kind of (digital) resource does it revolve around: data, access, infrastructures, etc.? What kind of community are we seeing? What are the two most important challenges or problems your concrete case draws attention to?
The workshop was organized by Gijs van Maanen & Nadya Purtova (EU funded INFO-LEG project), Michiel de Lange (focus area “Governing the Digital Society” GDS), and Jörg Pohle (Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society HIIG). This workshop is part of a seminar and workshop series on the data commons.Participants: Anna Artyushina, Tommaso Fia, Alexander Mörelius-Wulff & Emeline Banzuzi, Tasniem Anwar & Berna Keskindemir, Martijn de Waal, Jiska Engelbert, Gijs van Maanen, Nadya Purtova, Michiel de Lange, Jörg Pohle. 6 Oct 2022, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Französische Straße 9 Berlin. |
Image credit: Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society
After the lunch break, I (Michiel de Lange) continued the round of presentations by talking about the Snuffelfiets case as an example of commoning data. Snuffelfiets is a project started by a public-private consortium in Utrecht Province, mobilizing cyclists to install a small sensing device to their bicycle steer in order to measure air quality.
What I am interested in is the role of socio-technical controversies in relation to datafied smart cities and citizen engagement and inclusion. For the workshop, I wanted to explore the connection between controversies and the commons. In my view, research and designing for the data commons needs to give central stage to frictions and contestations. Of course classical commons scholars like Ostrom too looked at frictions and tensions. Governing the commons requires institutions: accepted ways to settle disputes and punish breaches. Still, frictions and tensions tend to be seen as exceptions to be overcome. They are conceptually framed as obstacles, not vehicles for empowerment and agency. Why the need for this controversies approach? Classical commons are mostly about fairly tight-knit communities around localized, finite and walled resources. In the context of an increasingly urban planet in general, and datafied smart cities in particular, this no longer holds.
There is no agreement on how to understand the term ‘data commons’: from commoning data as a way to govern it in a more democratic way, to considering data as part of commoning practices in order to increase people’s engagement with smart cities and socio-technical issues. My interest is with the second. The term ’commons’ is commonly understood along 3 dimensions: 1. as a resource, a collectively shared and managed good; 2. as a collective: a more or less well-defined and delineated group of people responsible for governing shared resources; 3. as a praxis: commoning as doing the everyday management and stewardship, governance in practice.
For each of these 3 levels, I raised a number of thorny questions that highlight frictions in collaborative sensing and collective data producing projects like Snuffelfiets, like:
- Commons as resource: What do we actually consider to be the ‘resource’? Perhaps it is not the data as such, but the way data may contribute to the articulation of the issue via frictions and controversies around public values, that makes data into a resource? Can we understand data in a material sense as ‘talking matter’ for the common good?
- Commons as collective: Who can actually be part of collectives governing the data commons, who have a voice? Can we reconceptualize the commons as ‘collectives-in-difference’? And can we understand data as a ‘social glue’ that helps to forge sticky bonds between different people?
- Commons as praxis: How can data commoning contribute to repoliticizing the smart city? The commons is frequently pitted against relentless value extraction from citizens by big tech companies. Commoning is seen as a more inclusive and just mode of regulating and governing collective and public issues. But it isn’t so by nature, by any inherently better principle. Can it function within current ‘surveillance capitalism’ or is it indeed a way to break out or go beyond it? Smart city governance through data, with urban interfaces like dashboard, apps, screens, encapsulates a vision of friction-free management, instead of an agonistic smart city politics rife with tensions and conflict. Can we understand data commoning as a form of ‘controversing’: a continual process of making controversial how datafication shapes urban life and culture?
Finally, at the end of the day, Gijs van Maanen (like Tasniem) walked us through what’s happening at urban testbed Marineterrein. His main question is how this might contribute to the establishment of a ‘fair data economy’.
Gijs spoke about different notions of the ‘data commons’, and which one might be most applicable when it comes to addressing questions like: “What is being governed? By whom, who are the actors involved in governance? What kind of relationships are being established through the socio-technical setup of the commons?” In relation to the idea of a fair data economy, important issues include: what kind of moral logics are at play (e.g. compared to the free market logics), what does it mean in a smart city context, and what are implications for privacy and data protection?
Conclusion
To conclude, the workshop brought together a very diverse group of scholars who each approach the data commons from a particular disciplinary angle (governance, media, urban). These different frames and perspectives lead to a fruitful dialogue between the disciplines. It became clear that the notion of the data commons is not to be considered a catch-all proposed solution for questions concerning the just governance of smart cities. As a framing notion however it may help to advance our thinking about more inclusive datafied cities. Attempts at defining what the data commons is or should be are perhaps less fruitful than using the term as a ‘sensitizing notion’ that allows us to zoom in on aspects of today’s datafied cities that might otherwise be overlooked: issue articulation and controversies arising from it, collective agency and potential for joint action, shifting power dynamics between stakeholders like government, businesses, knowledge institutions and citizens, public values and collective governance/the governance of collectives in the context of datafied smart cities.
This report started with part 1 >>
And here is part 2 >>
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
This is the second part of a 3-part report of a workshop held on 6 October 2022 about the data commons and the smart city, which I co-organized. Links to part 1 >>, and to part 3 >>.
| Background of the workshopIn our datafied smart cities, the creation of value out of data lies mostly in the hands of companies and governments. As data is considered to be a new type of resource, questions arise around for instance the governance of this resource but also its potential for citizen agency. These two approaches to the data commons – as on the one hand a matter of governance and regulation, and on the other hand its promise of increasing democratic civic participation and inclusion – were central to the one-day workshop Data Commons and the Smart City, which was organized by Utrecht University and the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG).The data commons are one of the models advanced in academic literature and political practice to restructure our economies and societies in more bottom-up inclusive, and democratic ways. During this workshop, the promises and pitfalls were discussed with experts from a variety of backgrounds.In the morning session we laid the groundwork for speaking about data commons in relation to smart cities. Workshop participants were asked to show an exemplary case and make an opening statement about what the data commons means for them. Guiding questions were: What is the concrete problem or case your contribution deals with, and how can your example of a data-commons from your own research or practice shed new light on what works, what does not, and why? What makes it a data/digital commons? What kind of (digital) resource does it revolve around: data, access, infrastructures, etc.? What kind of community are we seeing? What are the two most important challenges or problems your concrete case draws attention to?
The workshop was organized by Gijs van Maanen & Nadya Purtova (EU funded INFO-LEG project), Michiel de Lange (focus area “Governing the Digital Society” GDS), and Jörg Pohle (Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society HIIG). This workshop is part of a seminar and workshop series on the data commons.Participants: Anna Artyushina, Tommaso Fia, Alexander Mörelius-Wulff & Emeline Banzuzi, Tasniem Anwar & Berna Keskindemir, Martijn de Waal, Jiska Engelbert, Gijs van Maanen, Nadya Purtova, Michiel de Lange, Jörg Pohle. 6 Oct 2022, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Französische Straße 9 Berlin. |
Image credit: Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society
Tasniem Anwar (also on behalf of Berna Keskindemir) gave a talk called “Inclusion in the city, smart city technologies and an inclusive ‘common’?”. The question addressed was how various communities are involved in participatory initiatives around ‘living labs’, and what can be done to increase the participation of marginalized communities? In smart city literature, there is a generic idea of the common and citizenship, which – as critical data studies have already shown – is a neoliberal, tech-savvy, male, western perception of the citizen.
Anwar & Keskindemir are following these pointers by Sasha Costanza-Chock about inclusive design: 1) For whom is the technology designed? 2) Who gets paid? 3) What are the stories that we tell about the design? and 4) What methods can we use to teach and learn about design? Through participant observation in Amsterdam’s living labs and community events, and via interviews, they disseminate their findings to activist organizations and representatives of marginalized neighborhoods. Some of their provisional findings so far:
What helps inclusion:
- Connection with local urgency
- Active cooperation with key figures from the community
-
Temporality & spatiality
-
Breaking up in different skill sets
What doesn’t help inclusion:
- Formulation of technological solutions and harms unclear
- Generic and open approaches such as ‘living labs’ or ‘input gatherings’
- Single moment of participation
In the Q&A various issues were touched upon, such as the presumption of genericness for citizen engagement, the importance of issue articulation by urban inhabitants themselves (what do people consider a problem in their neighborhood?), how we might move from civic participation to representation and recognition; and in relation to the earlier observation, it was suggested that at Amsterdam’s Marineterrein, citizens are not really actors, they are not owners of the data. It is more about a ‘public demonstration’ of smart tech perhaps, rather than civic participation?
Jiska Engelbert showed the provocative public design intervention “Donate Your Data” in Afrikaanderwijk, Rotterdam, which was created by two colleagues from the Centre of Bold Cities. This project set up a public stand in a lower income neighborhood, where people were asked to become ‘data donors’. The aim was to investigate how data donorship could foster public health and wellbeing, and how citizens can become more empowered when it comes to urban data-related issues.
The project attempts to include marginalized groups in discussing data practices by using the recognizable analogy of blood donorship. While most health and sensor data are produced by individuals, the benefits are reaped by companies. Through the practice of what Jiska and her colleagues call ‘data poaching’ an attempt is made to restore this disbalance, by appropriating privately owned data and sharing it with the public as a commons. The metaphor of ‘donating’ resonates with this attempt to use data beyond individual private benefits. Furthermore, just like the donation of organs is controversial but also well-established, data donations too may seem a provocation but could become a common practice. Jiska takes further inspiration from the British Digital Cooperative, an initiative that attempts to forge new digital platforms and infrastructures that is collectively owned by the public, as an alternative to Big Tech platforms.
In the Q&A, a range of topics were touched upon. It was noted that the “Donate Your Data” project was a design provocation that could trigger public debates, help in issue articulation, and the formation of collectives. As such, it is not about data as commons but about commoning the issue of datafication. Furthermore, in discussing the notion of ’digital socialism’ we wondered whether this would require us to get rid of private ownership altogether, or whether it is about a democratization of data ownership? Or, as was suggested, can it be many entities at the same time, just like the cow is for the farmer (productive unit, an individual, with rights)? To me, this idea of poaching back data from the clasp of Big Tech data enclosures has this Robin Hood-like rebellious ring to it that may be less about providing any realistic alternative and more about creating imaginative and inspiring critical viewpoints that have the power to make people think differently, and in the end also act accordingly.
Martijn de Waal presented ongoing work on ’resource communities’ as an urban commons, in the context of Amsterdam (project Circulate). Resource communities are groups of people who collaboratively produce, manage, consume & govern a (set of) resources, usually with the aim to produce collective benefits, and to promote the social and ecological wellbeing of the community. The case used is Schoonschip, which is a collective of people who jointly built a floating neighborhood based on sustainability principles. The question is whether they truly are a commons, and if so what are the boundaries? Hence, Martijn prefers the use of the term ‘resource community’. One area where resources are shared and collectively governed is energy. The inhabitants created a smart grid and a governance system to manage energy sharing (solar, heat pumps, heat recovery systems). The 46 households have just one connection to the national energy grid. Schoonschip uses data to gauge this exchange in realtime but they also encoded the rules about fair exchange into the VVE regulations (home owner’s association).
Martijn introduced a new term, ‘becommoning’, to speak about how commons come into being, and how publics are formed. Especially in the early stages, the application of Eleanor Ostrom’s well-known design principles for governing the commons are of paramount importance.
Initiating a collective governance structure comes with a variety of design dilemmas about underlying economic and social values, and about making these explicit and transparent. These dilemmas include: transparency vs. privacy (to what extent are inhabitants willing to share personal information with the community?); economic vs. social value (which value sets can be tokenized as economic or social values?); quantified vs. qualified values (what kind of actions should be tokenized and which should be left in the domain of informal sociality?); incentivisation vs. manipulation (when does benevolent nudging become manipulation and deceit?); private vs. collective interests (what is the trade-off between personal gains and for the greater good?); human vs. algorithmic governance (what should the balance be, who is allowed to decide?). In the Circulate project, the role of design is central as a way to tease out such dilemmas. Tara Karpinski created a water fountain based on data as input, the Ener-Geyser. This design intervention is not so much a way of visualizing of data as a resource, but more a provocation about datafication itself as an issue, a thing to publicly debate.
In the ensuing discussion, a number of interesting points were touched upon, most of them having to do with the role of design. One issue is that design interventions create the risk of depoliticizing specific issues: is it actually a design problem, or rather a political problem? Design can be a way of ‘provotyping’ but can also be proposed solutions to existing problems. And to what extent can design ‘scale up’, from being this bottom-up interventionist way of bringing issues to light to a way of shaping legal policy? Can you design policy regulations? Another idea that I had is that a new term for the formation of a commons, becommoning, begs for another new term to describe the termination of a commons, whether through peaceful means or conflict. ‘Uncommoning’ perhaps, or ‘decommoning’? In any case, terms like these could be useful to understand the processual (and often frictional and controversial) nature of the commons, rather than treating it as a given, more or less stable entity. Particularly in more dynamic, sometimes fleeting urban and media contexts, this seems important.
Proceed to part 3 >>
This report started with part 1 >>
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
This is the first part of a 3-part report of a workshop held on 6 October 2022 about the data commons and the smart city, which I co-organized. Links to part 2 >>, and to part 3 >>.
| Background of the workshopIn our datafied smart cities, the creation of value out of data lies mostly in the hands of companies and governments. As data is considered to be a new type of resource, questions arise around for instance the governance of this resource but also its potential for citizen agency. These two approaches to the data commons – as on the one hand a matter of governance and regulation, and on the other hand its promise of increasing democratic civic participation and inclusion – were central to the one-day workshop Data Commons and the Smart City, which was organized by Utrecht University and the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG).The data commons are one of the models advanced in academic literature and political practice to restructure our economies and societies in more bottom-up inclusive, and democratic ways. During this workshop, the promises and pitfalls were discussed with experts from a variety of backgrounds.In the morning session we laid the groundwork for speaking about data commons in relation to smart cities. Workshop participants were asked to show an exemplary case and make an opening statement about what the data commons means for them. Guiding questions were: What is the concrete problem or case your contribution deals with, and how can your example of a data-commons from your own research or practice shed new light on what works, what does not, and why? What makes it a data/digital commons? What kind of (digital) resource does it revolve around: data, access, infrastructures, etc.? What kind of community are we seeing? What are the two most important challenges or problems your concrete case draws attention to?
The workshop was organized by Gijs van Maanen & Nadya Purtova (EU funded INFO-LEG project), Michiel de Lange (focus area “Governing the Digital Society” GDS), and Jörg Pohle (Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society HIIG). This workshop is part of a seminar and workshop series on the data commons.Participants: Anna Artyushina, Tommaso Fia, Alexander Mörelius-Wulff & Emeline Banzuzi, Tasniem Anwar & Berna Keskindemir, Martijn de Waal, Jiska Engelbert, Gijs van Maanen, Nadya Purtova, Michiel de Lange, Jörg Pohle. 6 Oct 2022, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Französische Straße 9 Berlin. |
Workshop morning presentations
In the morning session we laid the groundwork for speaking about data commons in relation to smart cities. Workshop participants were asked to show an exemplary case and make an opening statement about what the data commons means for them. Guiding questions were: What is the concrete problem or case your contribution deals with, and how can your example of a data-commons from your own research or practice shed new light on what works, what does not, and why? What makes it a data/digital commons? What kind of (digital) resource does it revolve around: data, access, infrastructures, etc.? What kind of community are we seeing? What are the two most important challenges or problems your concrete case draws attention to?
Image credit: Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society
After a round of brief introductions, Tommaso Fia opened up the round of short presentations. He spoke about commons-based data governance in the smart city and shared lessons from two cases: Sidewalk Toronto and Barcelona’s DECODE Project. There is no agreement about what is a smart city, Tommaso noted, nor is there agreement on how to govern data in the smart city. Smart city models disguise processes of data appropriation by private enterprises. On the one hand, there are discussions about the arrangement of data ownership by one or more stakeholder parties. On the other hand, increasing attention is being paid to decentralized data infrastructures in public-led projects. A key issue that is often neglected however, is how value generated by citizen’s (inter)action flows back to the community, in what can be called ‘positive externalities’. Current ways of governing data in ‘public’ ways, like the DECODE project in Barcelona, still do not avoid value extraction, and do not sufficiently center on the communal rights of citizens. How then can these positive externalities be consistently handled? Tommaso mobilized the ideas of Fritz Schumacher (Small is beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, 1973) and his model of large-scale ownership. From this work, an idea that can be applied to the data commons is the participation of the public in half of the profits of private actors.
What I liked about this talk is how it enters the debate about the data commons not from the angle of threats and obstacles, but from an affirmative angle. With the term ‘positive externalities’, the possibilities for community benefits derived from data are highlighted. Of course this still leaves open many questions about, for example, persuading or forcing businesses and government to give 50% of their profit away, as one of the other participants remarked; or how ‘positive externalities’ can be defined in the first place, with regards to scale, timeframe and scope (small/large benefits; short/long term; limited number of people/large group).
Anna Artyushina, who participated in an earlier online seminar, discussed the GKC framework (Governing the Knowledge Commonsframework), which has been developed by Frischmann, Madison, & Strandburg (2014) with the aim of analyzing (and designing) a series of issues that are typically associated with governing the commons. One of those issues concerns the definition of value (and for whom). Anna observed that digital data does not have an inherent value. In most jurisdictions data does not constitute property. So value is fluid, and the curation of data is dynamic. As to the who, Anna noted that for Ostrom commons were always run by community, whereas for GKC it can be private property (commons can be ‘nested’ into private frameworks). Practically speaking, GKC is about managing contestation. Anne gave the examples of CyberToronto and – again – DECODE to make the point that in Barcelona, the digital sovereignty movement and policy was informed by the political context of Catalunya’s struggle for independence from central Spain.
What I found interesting in Anna’s talk was that in a sense the idea of ’data sovereignty’ in the context of Barcelona appears to be born out of controversy. I wondered whether that friction could help to include more people in the discussion about smart city futures, as we research in our project Responsible Cities? Anna replied that in the GKC framework, resources are considered a social construct and that community (formation) is crucial for that construction. In the context of Barca, the aim was to build a smart city from solidarity, not competition. Another aspect I found interesting was Anna’s observation that there may be stigma attached to data reuse: is the source reputable; e.g. who owns the cameras that are recording traffic? Like the other point about the political context of Catalunya, this suggests we must take a highly situational and historical approach to understanding data as a collective (common) resource.
The third talk was by Emeline Banzuzi & Alexander Mörelius-Wulff (also on behalf of Alina Wernick who couldn’t attend), speaking about their project “The Long-Term Human Rights Risks of Smart City Technologies”. The provocative title and opening question of their talk was ”Where do all the smart city pilots go?” They studied this issue through interviewing stakeholders. Stated reasons include: some companies live of R&D funding without ever commercializing; it’s difficult to reach the stage of procurement; it’s hard to sustain continuity, this depends on community management. Currently, they are in limbo about two possible approaches: the “What is the Problem Represented to be“ approach (WPR), or the already mentioned Governance of Knowledge Commons (GKC) approach.
In the ensuing discussion afterwards, an interesting point was made about the performative element of smart city pilots. These smart city pilots are about showing that a city is committed by investments and showcase projects, that they want to export knowledge and smart city solutions in a replicable way to other cities. This raises further questions about cooky-cutter smart city solutions and one size fits all models; about which cities profit from being ‘in the center’ of technological developments and attention from tech-companies, and which cities are doomed to remain on the receiving end of the stick, while perhaps getting nothing more than ill-fitting solutions invented elsewhere that do not really work in other urban contexts.
This report continues with part 2 >>
Directly to part 3 >>
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
A black man was wrongfully jailed for a week after a face recognition error, Ars Technica writes.
With an increasing number of cities and law enforcement deploying ‘smart tech’ such as AI based facial recognition software, the risk is that existing divisions and inequalities are exacerbated.
Police in Louisiana reportedly relied on an incorrect facial recognition match to secure warrants to arrest a Black man for thefts he did not commit.
Randal Reid, 28, was in jail for almost a week after the false match led to his arrest, according to a report published Monday on NOLA.com, the website of the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate newspaper.
It’s not clear exactly what facial recognition was used in this case. In previous cases, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto’s office requested facial recognition analyses through the Louisiana State Analytic and Fusion Exchange in Baton Rouge, which uses Clearview AI and MorphoTrak systems, the report said.
Clearview software compares faces to pictures on social media and many other sources. “Our platform, powered by facial recognition technology, includes the largest known database of 30+ billion facial images sourced from public-only web sources, including news media, mugshot websites, public social media, and other open sources,” the company’s website says.
Interestingly, at an AI conference that I attended, one of the speakers told about the use of AI by the Dutch police. According to this speaker, police would only follow AI advice when it confirms their own intuitions and experiences, not when it is at odds with it. But perhaps this is another context? In any case, it would be ready to just blame the technology as not working perfectly (yet), or even as ‘racist technology’. However, the underlying issue is how commercial and proprietary smart urban tech is adopted embedded into an organization that is supposed to serve public needs, and how this in practice mirrors and enlarges issues of inequality in society at large.
Source to original article on Ars >>
Wired has a long-read on how a digital nomad initiative has wrecked havoc in the island of Madeira, Portugal. Rising housing prices, in some places forced evictions, and virtually no interactions with local culture are the painful consequences of an essentially predatory locust lifestyle that only the privileged with the right passports can afford to live, at expense of locals. This is a clash between what Manuel Castells has termed the ‘space of flows’ versus the ‘space of place’. The author draws a paralel to the naming of Madeira (‘lumber’), discovered in the 15th century as a green forested uninhabited paradise, and named for its extractable resources.
“For a sector that so loudly proclaims its devotion to quality of life, the failure of the global leaders in the digital nomad space to consider the losses of host communities is astounding to behold. It is as though those living communities don’t matter beyond the abstract role they fulfill as backdrop. Lumber, not trees. In April, a video circulated on social media of 50 police officers with their batons out in the streets of Beato, a rapidly gentrifying parish in eastern Lisbon, grabbing and striking a group of women and children who were protesting a mass eviction. A few weeks later, the massive Creative Hub of Beato on the waterfront, home to Lisbon’s newest “unicorn factory,” hosted a hackathon to find innovative solutions to the capital’s housing crisis. The winning answer: blockchain.”
Link to article >>
Vice reports on one of many cases in which a vindictive ex (almost always male) uses Apple’s AirTags or similar tech to keep stalking and harassing their former partners (almost always female).
In addition to complaints that tech companies like Apple are not doing enough to prevent this, the article also notes that the problem is not merely due to tech but also is encoded into the law that suffers from gender bias:
“…courts tend to view family disputes through a gendered lens, Godsoe [ a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School] said.”
“There is lots of gender bias in family law. And I think there is the assumption that men are not as involved, but then women get slammed if they’re not perfect,” she said.
In Australia’s Byron Bay, various authorities are fighting among themselves about putting a cap on short term renting, The Guardian reports.
On December 14, The Guardian wrote that the local town council would be voting the next day on lowering the maximum number of days per year for subletting apartments from 180 to 90. On December 15, The Guardian followed up with an article that says the state of New South Wales had stripped the local council from the right to hold a vote, even though NSW had explicitly appointed the council as the approval authority for the proposal. Real estate developers, property owners, and Airbnb too apparently weighed in on the controversial vote.
The Airbnb platform has contributed to rising inequality in town:
“The Byron community has come under increasing housing pressure over the past few years, with escalating levels of homelessness, rising rents and a rapidly shrinking pool of available long-term rentals exacerbated both by flooding disasters and the Covid-19 pandemic.”
“Up to 35% of housing in the region is estimated to be taken up by short-term rental accommodation, while available long-term rentals have declined by 10% since December 2020.”
Links to articles: 14 Dec 2022 and 15 Dec 2022
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