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Urban Planning
Last updated March 8, 2022
# notes from A people-centric smart city for racial justice
- cities are the backbone and hope of social change
- either great benefit but also digital cages of surveillance and control
- what is the role of cities in the post-pandemic phase?
- laboratories for democratic and sustainable innovations
- smart, equitable, democratic cities
- tech has market AND social power
- 9T market cap, more than the entirety of european stock market
- IMPORTANT QUESTIONS
- smart for whom?
- cities for whom?
- types of cities
- big tech first → e.g. toronto (sidewalk labs)
- turn data into common good and infrastructure
- SHOULD be people first → make digital transformation work for all
- reduce inequalities
- affordable housing
- health care
- sustainable mobility
- ecological transition
- green public psaces
- reduce carbon emissions
- THEN see how we can apply tech
- avoid techno-solutionism ->
maintenance of existing systems
- involves citizen decision making
- zero carbon cities of the future (energy transition)
- electrify our mobility, shift to renewables
- creating green spaces
- super blocks → make larger blocks, reclaim some roads for public use
- agile digital transformation
- ethical digital standards for cities
- open source, open standards,
interoperability
- reproducibility
- public money ↔ public code
- data is the raw material of the digital economy
- ML will increase ROI by anywhere from 10 to 30 percent
- data extractivism
-
surveillance capitalism → you are not the customer or even the product, you are the raw material
- black box society → strong need for public engagement
- what are the social, ethical, racial & geopolitical implications of automated decision systems (
software is political)
- latent costs of externalities related to manipulating data
- new deal on data → data as digital public goods
- data sovereignty, data portability, data trusts (data commons)
- privacy + security by design
- data infrastructure at city-scale
- open standards, open APIs
- access to historical, anonymized, and aggregated data which minimized privacy risks
- assess automated decision systems and ensure accountability (make algorithms public)
- questions
- how do you have mass citizen participation if there’s mass inequalities in the city?
- how do you include the traditionally excluded?
- participitary populations → ohh this would only be digitally native citizens
- actually not necessarily true, lots of more senior citizens and more impoverished people
- not a ‘facebook democracy’ → click here to sign a petition to solve a problem
- hybrid process, physical participation, digital part just enhances participation
- people of marginalized communities trust the government less (theyve failed them in the past)
- make public institutions more transparent and accountable too, not just a citizen problem