Architecture and the Smart City

Sergio M. Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurthy, Torsten Schroeder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000706710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Increasingly the world around us is becoming 'smart.' From smart meters to smart production, from smart surfaces to smart grids, from smart phones to smart citizens. 'Smart' has become the catch-all term to indicate the advent of a charged technological shift that has been propelled by the promise of safer, more convenient and more efficient forms of living. Most architects, designers, planners and politicians seem to agree that the smart transition of cities and buildings is in full swing and inevitable. However, beyond comfort, safety and efficiency, how can 'smart design and technologies' assist to address current and future challenges of architecture and urbanism?

Architecture and the Smart City provides an architectural perspective on the emergence of the smart city and offers a wide collection of resources for developing a better understanding of how smart architecture, smart cities and smart systems in the built environment are discussed, designed and materialized. It brings together a range of international thinkers and practitioners to discuss smart systems through four thematic sections: 'Histories and Futures', 'Agency and Control', 'Materialities and Spaces' and 'Networks and Nodes'. Combined, these four thematic sections provide different perspectives into some of the most pressing issues with smart systems in the built environment.

The book tackles questions related to the future of architecture and urbanism, lessons learned from global case studies and challenges related to interdisciplinary research, and critically examines what the future of buildings and cities will look like.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Our brave new world

Sergio M. Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurthy and Torsten Schroeder

Technology and science in service of efficiency and convenience. While expressed in a multitude of iterations and approaches, this basic idea establishes the very foundation of most—if not all—smart systems that have come to colonize our buildings and cities. These systems are also often accompanied by an explicit promise that each time any iteration of this conceptual equation is solved, we will find ourselves closer to a societal bliss on the verge of utopia. Furthermore, with this promise of a better, more efficient and safer society, smart systems and devices justify any (potential) shortcomings as small sacrifices on the path towards a greater good. And this needs further disentangling.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same ideas, reasoning and ambitions could be used to describe the futuristic society imagined in 1931 by Aldous Huxley in his novel Brave New World.¹ However, beyond the promises of technology and efficiency, Huxley presented the social implications of such a pursuit by introducing his readership to a sinister and insidious society, or World State, of futuristic landscapes and technical marvels controlled by powerful elites. With a clear inspiration in Fordism, particularly as an industrial paradigm of mass production, standardization and predictability as well as an economic regime of a virtuous cycle of mass production and mass consumption, Huxley presented the logical conclusion of utopian attempts of societal efficiency at the cost of individual freedom: a totalitarian consumerist regime purged of everyday human concepts in which history is considered to be “bunk.”²

Much like the World State, today’s smart systems in architecture and cities attempt to shape or suppress human behavior for the sake of a more efficient (and therefore inevitably improved) society, purposefully blurring the boundaries between collective and individual, public and private. Thus, issues first described almost 90 years ago in Brave New World continue to be remarkably relevant today, almost clairvoyant when considering the ongoing debates regarding smart systems in architecture and urbanism.

From smart meters to smart buildings, from smart materials to smart grids, from smart communication to smart citizens. Increasingly the world around us is becoming smart. Throughout history buildings and cities have undergone major shifts. Today, the smart transition is in full swing, remodeling the world around us in a more fundamental way than we might fully understand.

To engage with the smart transformation and to discuss the issue of “smartness” in architecture and cities, the editors of this book initiated, from November 15th to 17th 2018, the 15th Architectural Humanities Research Association International Conference at the Department of the Built Environment, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Titled “Smartness? Between Discourse and Practice,” the conference brought together more than 100 scholars from 30 countries worldwide.

The city of Eindhoven was a particularly appropriate host for this conference, since in the past few years it has embarked on an ambitious quest to become one of the leaders—in the Netherlands and beyond—of “smart” urban solutions. This is best articulated in its establishment of Brainport Eindhoven, which is branding itself as “Europe’s leading innovative top technology region.”³ Through this program, the city is not only retrofitting smart systems into existing urban fabric, such as the massive deployment of networks and sensors across the city’s center, but also in developing new smart urban districts, such as the Brainport Smart District development project in Helmond.⁴ Likewise, the Eindhoven University of Technology has been deeply invested in researching smart architectural and urban systems both as an active member of the Brainport Eindhoven program and through a wide range of other projects and collaborations. But while both the city of Eindhoven and the Eindhoven University of Technology have been important instigators for research into smart technologies, their research has thus far concentrated on technical aspects of architectural and urban smart systems, a pursuit that has sometimes come at the cost of a broader understanding regarding their social contexts and effects. As such, the broader reflection on technology and its meaning provided by this conference seemed particularly appropriate.

Effectively, the critical presence of the conference in this city—and in this university—was perhaps best captured in one of the conference’s opening speeches, by philosopher of architecture Jacob Voorthuis, as he discussed smartness and its relation to wisdom. Accordingly, he observed that “to be smart, is to be clean, tidy and well-dressed or, informally, to show a quick-witted intelligence,” while, conversely, wisdom was “to know good means to good ends and to know their value.”⁵ Now, more than ever, it seemed important to question the good ends and the value of smart systems in architecture and the city.

Defining smart?

“Smart” has become the catch-all phrase to indicate the advent of a charged technological shift that has been propelled by the promises of safer, more convenient, healthier and more efficient forms of living. The majority of politicians, infrastructure planners, security specialists, high-tech representatives and many more seem to agree that the smart transition of buildings and cities is self-evident and inevitable. But behind this apparent consensus many contradictions and open questions emerge.

Architecture and the city are intertwined. However, while there is a broad body of scholarship surrounding the notion of the “smart city,” literature on “smart architecture” has thus far received less attention. Anthony Townsend defines smart cities as “places where information technology is combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects, and even our bodies to address social, economic, and environmental problems.”⁶

Large corporations, such as Cisco, Siemens, Microsoft, IBM, Hitachi and others, have been major drivers of discourses, as they have come to appreciate the business opportunities inherent to this transition. These corporations “see big money as growing cities turn to tech,” since they are able to sell technology solutions “to address real and urgent problems such as those related to health and aging, traffic congestion and environmental quality.”⁷ Innovations pursued and offered by these large corporations are often technology-driven, with limited positioning on its impact on everyday life. Recently, Hug March and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz, and Alberto Vanolo and Rob Kitchin have criticized this lack of social contexts when it comes to the application of Smart City concepts.⁸ Others like Mike Crang and Stephen Graham, Robert Hollands and Mark Shepard, for example, have all criticized the technocratic and depoliticized view of smart-city policies for its non-committal, ambiguous definition, its lack of theoretical underpinnings, as well as the corporatization of urban governance due to the influence of the private (technological) sector and the manipulation of big data.⁹ It is often unclear how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and its applications are embedded within urban and architectural environments. The absence of an integrated inter- and transdisciplinary view on how these applications impact everyday life demands analysis and better articulation.

The title of this book, Architecture and the Smart City, aims to address this neglect. It also intends to question why architecture has received so little attention, despite being a central building block within the “smart city” fabric. It is in architecture that we spend time, that we sleep, recover, produce, trade and meet. Reflecting on the increased ubiquity of smart systems in architecture, Rem Koolhaas suggested that we must shift our perception of “architecture’s new relationship with technology,” since smart systems in architecture (and urbanism) are “catalyzing a nearly invisible shift … that is nevertheless far more profound and ubiquitous than the stylistic trends that have been the primary effects of digital technology on [architecture] thus far.”¹⁰ Specifically, Koolhaas warns, “[t]he tech world’s gradual colonization of architecture is taking place without the collaboration of its host.”¹¹

So, if conversations around the smart city have been growing in reflection and thinking, what is the role of architecture in this brave new world? How do smart systems transform architecture? Why are architects not more engaged in these discourses? These questions seem hard to answer and position, as the “smart” transition brings together a broad range of different challenges, stakeholders, interests, timeframes, spatial scales and technologies: ubiquitous computing, democratic participation, safety monitoring, shared driving, autonomous elderly living, connectivity, unprecedented efficiency and many more. And it is precisely the vagueness of the term “smart” that has enabled the success story of the “smart city” concept as a welcomed projection for a broad range of stakeholders, issues and intentions.

Nevertheless, discussions regarding the use of technology and cybernetics in architecture had been occurring long before the current proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and other smart systems. In the 1960s, people like the British cybernetician Gordon Pask and the American architect Nicholas Negroponte first developed the concept of architecture machines in which human and machine collaborated to affect how architecture was both designed and experienced. These early experiments focused particularly on a convergence between human and machine through interactions that could challenge the static qualities of architecture and make it dynamically responsive.¹² What was most interesting about these early efforts, however, was how these systems were not always efficiency-driven, but how the interaction between human and architecture machine was also regulated by dynamic criteria framed by underspecified goals. An interaction which, according to Usman Haque, was based on a completely different notion than “that used in many of today’s so-called interactive systems, which are premised on unproductive and prespecified circular, deterministic reactions” in which systems contain “a finite amount of information and the human simply navigates through an emerging landscape to uncover it all.”¹³

In the early 2000s, as the effects of ubiquitous computing on architecture were becoming increasingly noticeable, discussions regarding the interaction between human and environment continued to develop. Technological advances allowed architecture to now be smart, that is, to be interactive and present itself as an interface between users and their surroundings. In fact, according to Ed van Hinte, Marc Neelen, Jaques Vink and Piet Vollaard, by mediating “the demands and desires of users and environment,” smart architecture was “behaving intelligently” and thus allowing architecture to become efficient and do more with less.¹⁴

But even as these authors identified smart architecture with the technological advances of ubiquitous computing—specifically the deployment of sensors “to build up a ‘memory’ and to learn”—they nevertheless questioned the almost dogmatic positivism associated with technological-driven solutions and attempted to broaden the notion of smartness in architecture beyond technological apparatuses. In fact, they warned that “[s]ometimes a simple and hence ostensibly ‘dumb’ building [was] smarter than a technology-dominated living-and-working machine over which the user has lost control.”¹⁵ The loss of user control and meaningful human–machine interaction in smart architecture seems to have only escalated since then.

The advent of big data, IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has promised that our buildings will learn and do more with less. While these promises remain far from being fulfilled, the critique offered by authors such as Hollands on the all too often “selfcongratulatory” tones that cities put forward is far removed from reality. His article “Will the real smart city please stand up?” questions what it means to be smart and, perhaps more importantly, the means to get there. His argument that “progressive(ly) smart[er] cities must seriously start with people and the human capital side of the equation, rather than blindly believing that IT itself can automatically transform and improve cities” echoes Voorthuis’ nexus between smartness and wisdom.¹⁶

Where we seem to have ended up is at an ambiguous yet seemingly ubiquitous position where information technology can provide us with solutions that almost seem utopian. Using...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Biographies
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: our brave new world
• Part I: Histories and futures
• Part II: Agency and control
• Part III: Materialities and spaces
• Part IV: Networks and nodes
• Index