Breakdown in Smart City

A city is an ever growing and evolving system. Smart city as a concept of urban development, as well as cities are inevitably incomplete projects that requires constant upgrade and update, Houston et al. (2019) argued. Yet, often, smart city plan is viewed as a monolithic process without the consideration of the reality that the system is often “buggy, brittle and bugged”.  Technology does not always function according to plan, interoperable or become obsolete in the process.

Through a community air quality monitoring project, called Dustbox, Houston et al. (2019) explored the approach of workaround of smart city on the ground. This study offers a way to look smart city breakdown as part of the city development as the sensors and networks are often working in partial or suboptimal way in the day-to-day operation. This project opens a collaboration between citizens to work with and around the technology by remaking and realigning the technology so that it could is relevant to the community needs, which includes how they use the data that the sensors and network collects. 

Through this experiment and approach, Houston et al. (2019) expect that the technology in building the smart city can be more open, collaborative, and participatory in their development, imagining, installation and use. Thus, closing the gap between the process of design the “repair” that are crucial in the running of smart cities. 

Reference:

Houston, L., Gabrys, J., & Pritchard, H. (2019). Breakdown in the Smart City: Exploring workarounds with Urban-sensing practices and technologies. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 44(5), 843-870.

‍