The citizens develop new selves in the smart city.

City planners, and their stakeholders take in considerations when developing new plans to advance a city. As the last chapter determined, the influence of IoT devices is becoming a new form of both control and development in cities, by making them ‘smarter’. Although, unlike the Ellulian position, this section considers it important for us to face these new technologies as a group of active people, not as helpless victims.

More importantly, citizens and city officials alike interact and create relationships with the technical objects around them, and the same is true about the device as well. In other words, we should consider the co-creation of relationships that arise from our world with technologies, where “technologies do not merely arise form an interaction, but also play an active role in it” (Verbeek, 2014, p. 563).

After positioning the conversation in a post phenomenological analysis, this paper will look at how the influence of informatics with sensors in a citizen’s daily life impacts the sense of self in a city.

Calculated Citizen

In Chapters 3 and 4 , we showed how sensors and urban development both have social biases built into them as well as how a citizen is portrayed or assumed to be because of it. The postphenomenlogical analysis can develop this portrayal a step back by showing how the relations citizens have with the smart city through devices and IoT change how citizens see themselves in the city.

Fredrick Ohlin and Carl Magnus Olsson took on the challenge of presenting a post phenomenological framework of personal Informatics in smart devices (2015). The team showed how the relations between human and wearable smart devices, those which measure and report back the users’ physical activity, calories burned, etc.; how these relations need to be worked into a postphenomenological framework in order to better understand how they play a role in our daily lives.

This means moving beyond a strictly utility perspective of informatics in personal data, where users are assumed to be living as ‘rational data scientists’ who live and interpret data for a living (2015, p. 1088).

The following section will show how the smart personal device to smart personal city is not a far leap. Smart city designers should reflect on how informatics as a data-driven relationship is both not easily accessible to interpret into useful information for citizens, and that the other phenomenological relations should be included in their design concerns.

Relationships are Important

Reliable ways to describe relationships between things and beings are always a challenging investigation. Postphenomenology, considered a derivative of phenomenology, teaches us that reality emerges not just from language and context, but in the relations we as humans have with it (Verbeek, 2014, p.568). In turn, the post phenomenological framework gives us the language necessary to describe features of human-technology relationships, where human experience (and existence) is co-shaped by the technology they interact with, rely on, and experiment with. In some respects, then, the sense of self in the city is amplified by this technology, and in others it is restricted (Kristensen and Prigge, 2018, p.45). For example, in SmartSantander the web interface represents the city at large and mediates an experience with the city for the citizen. In this case a citizen feels as though they know what is going on throughout the city, such as traffic forecasts, temperatures and current events, interpreted in real time through their computer.

The human-technology interactions are framed in postphenmenology using Don Ihde’s categories of hermeneutic, embodiment, alterity, and background relations (Ohlin and Olsson, 2015). A smart city, one filled with different technologies, contains these relations. The previous example would be considered a hermeneutic relation to the smart city, where the engagement with the computer monitor and online maps becomes a new representation of the city through an internet of things (IoT) infrastructure. When the citizen decides to leave their home, the IoT structure tracks their device throughout the city and collects information, forming a background relation. While roaming the city, a person can begin an alterity relationship, where the technology represents as a thing out there. For example, by looking for a Wi-Fi hotspot on their SmartSantander application, a citizen must see both his device and the city around him “emerge as the foreground and focal quasi-other” (Ihde, 1990, p.559). Indeed, citizens interact with the city in embodied ways as well. Embodied relations, where there the technology is felt or experienced as an extension of the human being, is found in the ways that citizens interact with their city on the ground.

The IoT infrastructure engages citizens by not just opening automatic doors, but also by notifying citizens of such things as hazardous environments. These relations between city, sensors, devices and citizens creates a new sense of self for the human being. A sense of self that is both mediated in new ways by information now accessible in the public domain, and by the new interactions between each other as citizens with (new) roles built into the smart city infrastructure.

Considerations

The citizens develop new selves in the smart city. We have learned in Chapter 1 that smart cities are rampant with IoT devices. These IoT devices shape the new face of a city, one that is data-driven with progress and productivity. Of course, these sensors develop new frameworks that insist that the user be both a stakeholder and a tool, as I described in Human as Sensor.

Unfortunately, data comes with bias, and bad or discriminating habits can be repeated as we learned in Chapter 4. In fact, autonomy could even be considered not important, or at least a version of autonomy, where human choices get pushed to the side. Sensors change habits through nudging, and as we learned Chapter 5, we may not even be fully aware of what extent we are nudged. These drawbacks become clear when we look to critical writers like Jacques Ellul. In Chapter 6, the city appears to not even rely on citizens as important or worthy of its development, it moves forward with or without them and exploits privacy in return.

The relationships we build with our cities shape our interactions with them and only until we find ourselves reflecting on the relations to these places, will we see how much we have changed. In order to do that, the post phenomenological position suggests reminding yourself that things mediate human existence (Verbeek, 2014, p. 571). What you interact with throughout your day influences both your actions in reality, as well as how you realize your existence. This existential idea paves the way to new ways of considering our smart cities. Does my smart city promote more face to face conversations or acquaintances? Is this smart city helping local citizens become more active in local government? Does this smart city promote a healthier well-being for citizens over a city without these features? Context sensitive questions like this bring in multiple frames of reference that should in turn make for a better, more honest city.

Notes

This was the continuation of the last article posted and part of a still larger text, which is why other chapters are referenced.

References

Kirwan, Christopher Grant. “Urban Phenomenology: Incorporating Dynamic Frames of Reference in the Design of Urban OS.” In Cross-Cultural Design. Cultural Differences in Everyday Life, edited by P. L. Patrick Rau, 296–302. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39137-8_33.

Kristensen, Dorthe Brogård, and Carolin Prigge. “Human/Technology Associations in Self-Tracking Practices.” In Self-Tracking: Empirical and Philosophical Investigations, edited by Btihaj Ajana, 43–59. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65379-2_4.

Ohlin, Fredrik, and Carl Magnus Olsson. “Beyond a Utility View of Personal Informatics: A Postphenomenological Framework.” In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers, 1087–92. UbiComp/ISWC’15 Adjunct. Osaka, Japan: Association for Computing Machinery, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1145/2800835.2800965.

Sadowski, Jathan, and Frank A. Pasquale. “The Spectrum of Control: A Social Theory of the Smart City.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, August 31, 2015. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2653860.

Whittemore, Andrew H. “Phenomenology and City Planning.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 34, no. 3 (September 1, 2014): 301–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X14536989.