DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-116

University of Bologna, Italy

patrizia.violi@unibo.it

Abstract

The label of ‘smart city’ is today a largely used, or maybe overused, one and it seems to apply to many different dimensions of contemporary urban life. It is not quite clear, however, what exactly it implies to be a smart city and which kind of “intelligence” is here presupposed. My intervention will focus on some of the problems con­nected to the use and definition of the “smart city” label, in the light of an international project we are currently running together with Brazil.

A spectre seems to be haunting contemporary urban research today, a magic expression full of promises and suffused with a supernatural aura, although while often not too well defined in terms of content and dimensions: the idea of the Smart City.

“Smart city” is a definition widely used for many different purposes and in relation to very different usages and applications, from automatic traffic regulation to the use of key public utilities, such as water, air, or electricity, to the recycling of refuse, green environmental policies, mobility, real estate development etc.

The common goal of all these applications is the development of what is supposed to be a more “liveable city”, a notion that is still far from being univocally defined. What really makes a city “liveable”, what really makes a city “smart”? And first and foremost, what exactly does it mean for a city to be smart? What does “being smart” actually consist of?

A first question to be answered for us, as semioticians, is whether this is merely a technological conjuring trick without particular interest from a semiotic perspective, or it might reveal itself as something with at least some potentially interesting aspects from our perspective too. As we will see, however, potential interest does not come without some potential danger too, the risk of extending the powerfulness of the city’s control over its citizens. On the other hand, we could also observe that all forms of digital technologies, starting with the smart phones we all use to run our lives with nowadays, are also devices exerting a significant degree of control over our lives, our movements, our tastes and our interests.

But now let us take a closer look at what some actual meanings of “smart” might reveal for us.

The flexible nature of being smart

The word “smart” was first introduced into the world of technology by powerful North American high-tech multinationals such as Cisco and IBM, and was initially merely meant to be no more than a kind of synonym for “technological”.

Indeed, at the very beginning, the expression used was not even smart city but smart grid, with an accentuated stress on the purely technological side. A smart grid is a grid connected to a series of Internet-based control systems that assist in optimising power usage, and avoiding waste, thus becoming a kind of an “intelligent grid”. An example of this is an experiment realized through the electrical power supply, lowering peaks of higher consumption and thus saving energy by using the electric net in a more efficient way.

But a smart city is a far wider project than this, and in this context the modifier smart implies much more than an intelligent optimisation of energy recourses. Let’s have a closer look at some possible meanings of such an expression. At the beginning of my research on smart cities I was somehow dubious and critical about the use of this word. Why use “smart” and not, for example, the apparently nobler “intelligent” in thinking about technology issues as applied to urban space? The word “smart” seems to have been chosen because it is supposed to add a flavour of canniness, shrewdness, wittiness, fashionability and so on, and this is not necessarily a positive feature.

Browsing in a dictionary however, some other, different semantic features emerge. Smartness is, for example, often associated with the “capability of making wise adjustments in response to changing circumstances”.

Two key notions should be emphasised here: adjustment and changing situations. One qualifying point is therefore at the level of the quality of the response of the system both in terms of temporality and flexibility: to be smart means to have a high action capacity. Smartness then is an adaptive capacity capable of facilitating rapid change, a form of practical intelligence that could be compared to the mètis of ancient Greeks (Détienne and Vernant 1974). Mètis implies flexibility and adaptive capability in relation to a changing environment, the capacity of exploiting the wider potential of some given context, which can also be found in the natural world, as is the case with the camouflage characteristics possessed by certain animals. In ambiguous and uncertain situations it is thanks to métis that individuals are able to respond in successful ways to complex and problematic events. In a way, it is also the secret of providing an adequate response to the environment in a situation characterised by a lack of resources, of initial scarcity. Mètis includes in its meaning a kind of double valorisation. On its positive polarity it alludes to a plasticity that makes it possible to successfully adhere to the constraints of reality, on its negative polarity it might also imply a certain degree of ambiguity and “trickiness”.

If we now turn to the whole semantic field of related terms, we can see some kind of opposition emerging between smart and intelligent, where intelligent seems to allude to a more continuous, permanent behavioural feature, a quality of being rather than a form of behaviour. A key difference in the aspectual configuration of the semantic field is also evident here, alluding to an opposition between permanent and durative – i.e. connoting a kind of static quality on one hand – vs. dynamic, changing forms of action and transformation on the other.

Technologies and urban spaces: the transformation of public space

Starting from this notion of fast and rapid response to change, it is possible to say that a smart city implies a pervasive use of new digital technologies to change our ways of interfacing with urban space. And as such, this is of a greatest degree of semiotic interest, since affecting our relationships with urban space is also going to affect our social life-forms in cities (and possibly too, as we will see, relationships between citizens).  Thus, the principle questions at stake here become the re-definition and re-semantisation of public space, which in its turn implies the emergence of new forms of intersubjectivity

A common sense opinion regarding technology is that technology in itself is neither good nor bad: it is rather a kind of ‘neutral’ device, completely deprived of any kind of ‘phoric’ investment or semiotic value, so that everything depends on the actual uses we are going to make of it. But things appear to be even more complex than this, since any technology, due to the fact of its very existence, is going to produce semiotically relevant transformations of our lives, the ways we interact with objects and the environment, and give sense to them, and as consequence also the ways we give sense to our shared social relationships. Indeed, the initial introduction of the dishwasher affected women’s lives in important ways, and probably also produced changes in our gender relationships too.

Thus, to define a smart city merely as a city implemented with certain technological devices appears to be a very poor, even insufficient, view of what technologies are and which kind of transformations they can produce. Different uses of various technologies in the urban environment, combined with other less technological forms of innovation, can produce a very relevant transformation of public space, of the relationships between public and private spaces and, more relevantly than anything else, of our social forms of interaction. Whether or not this will all be for better or for worse still remains to be seen.

This may well turn out most important for contemporary and future cities, given that metropolitan landscapes are now dominant: 50% of the world population leaves in big cities nowadays and this demographic trend is certainly going to increase

This fact imposes a change in the very way we conceptualize the city in terms of its problems: cities can no longer to be seen only as the problem but rather as the solution. In Italy there is a very interesting debate around the notion of the ‘greater metropolitan city’ area, applied to both small and medium size cities, such as Bologna for example (Vitali 2014). In this framework, new technologies play a very central role.

This is one of the key issues of relevance for any semiotically oriented project focused on smart cities. Recently, we have been actively working on one such project, a joint effort involving a group of semioticians, architects and city planners based at the University of Bologna and a group of semioticians based at PUC, San Paulo, led by Ana Claudia de Oliveira, which aims at comparing two very different realities: the Brazilian megalopolis and Italian cities of much smaller dimensions. A similar comparative cooperation has already been initiated together with the city of Rome, (Oliveira, Pezzini 2013) and I hope that a widening the scope of this project to include smaller cities such as Bologna might also reveal some especially interesting issues, since Italy is, after all, mainly a country of provincial small cities and towns, with very different problems in relation to those of huge megalopolises.

As mentioned previously, one of the more relevant features of a smart city is its capacity for rapid response to change, which is also directly connected to the ways technology can change our ways of relating to space. This happens crucially through a double process of both sensing and actuating: sensing the environment through technological sensors, and actuating/realizing adequate responses that also modify our own human behaviours.

Sensing could be seen as acquiring a form of competence with the assistance of a technological device (our contemporary magical tool) that allows us to register/utilise data and information gleaned from the environment. Actuating, on the other hand consists of a series of phases of performance, where our behaviours are modified through actions.

This double process is semiotically interesting because it implies a transformation of our ways of thinking about what our communication with the environment actually consists of. Indeed, the most relevant change that occurs in this context is that the environment itself becomes a speaking’ environment, so to say, sharing with us information about itself in ways that were previously unthinkable. Space is now literally talking to us. Tags attached to objects, on trash containers for example, enable us to follow their movements, to see how objects and things move, and where they are going, telling us the story of their possible uses and re-uses. In similar ways, traces themselves become useable. In an analogous way “tags” have been used to develop new experimental art forms.

But there is still more. Users can also choose, and generate, their own forms of information, what they want to be kept in memory, through photos, posts, tweets posted via the net etc. This is what is commonly referred to as user-generated content.

An interesting project also moving in this direction has been realized in Spain by a research group led by Carlo Ratti, together with a group of other Spanish researchers (Ratti 2013). The project, called Los ojos del mundo (the World’s eyes), was first initiated in Florence, based on the idea of using photos posted by users on Flickr (and therefore public and available to everybody), in order to register all points in space where the largest number of pictures had been taken. From this information it was possible to create a map of the most photographed urban spaces in Florence. The second level of analysis was to exploit the chronology retrievable from each photo posted on Flicker in order to reconstruct the actual trajectories of tourists’ movements. From these data some interesting differences across different tourist populations became visible, depending on their national identities: Americans tend to explore the territory according to very different mappings than Italians, or other national groups.

This experiment was repeated in Barcelona, and this time it was used to study a more serious problem, i.e. the scarcity of water. Without a complicated sensory system, and just using the normal photos people posted on Flickr, it was possible to obtain some remarkable results. Indeed, in each picture we take, variations in colour are linked to the level of humidity in the air, and can therefore give us information about water scarcity distribution in the territory. Los ojos del mundo means exactly this: we can look at some given portion of space, and retrieve information about what is happening there, through the eyes of the people who are currently looking at it.

In this case, the user himself or herself is, in a way, a sensor, which, at one and the same time, sends information to the environment and reacts to it. This is an interesting new way of thinking about our real everyday interactions with our environment. People are part of the environment (themselves being sensors) while at the same time they also act as agents of transformation of the environment.

Communicating with and through the environment

In semiotics we have recently had an interesting development of the basic notion of inter-subjectivity into another, that of inter-objectivity, which not only refers to interactions between human subjects and material objects, but also to interactions among objects themselves, which are seen as real actors within a process of communication.

The same idea can now be extended to the environment: urban space itself can be seen as an actor in a process involving what is not only an exchange of information, but also a real process of reciprocal transformation. Indeed, it can be described as a full process of communication, in the semiotic sense of the term. From a semiotic perspective, communication is something quite different from a simple transfer of information: it is a process of transformation and manipulation that take places among several actors.  The interesting point regarding the notion of the smart city is that we here can apply this enlarged idea of communication to the urban environment itself.

Indeed, it is important to underline that we are not facing here a process of mere information retrieval from the environment, based on technological devices, but something much more complex, an interactive exchange between different categories of actors, some human some not.

In the same vein, in the process just described, another important change occurs: the old fashioned centrality of the computer as a central brain that regulates processes is now completely surpassed. In its place we have distributed interactions among human actors, the net and physical space. The real physical life of urban spaces has now come into the picture, as well as the ways this interacts with our own human (inter)actions.

This resembles very closely the idea of a distributed network of agents variously located in urban space and interacting with one another. This is something that, for a semiotician, ought to appear very interesting. I am thinking here of the concept of extended mind, of peircean origin, that has very successfully been revisited today in some new developments in the fields of cognitively oriented anthropological and sociological research, such as the well known works of Ed Hutchins (1995) and Bruno Latour (2005). According to Peirce, there exists a physical state of inherent continuity, the study of which he referred to as synechism, between the internal world of individual minds and the external world of our environment. This selfsame idea is today being exploited in the theory of an extended mind of agents and of intelligent networks distributed in space. [1]

We could also look at the same phenomenon from a different angle. Marc Augé, in his foundational work on spaces and places (Augé 1992), first introduced the notion of non-places (non lieux) to describe places of transition such as airports, stations, malls and so on. Now, Augé’s idea was that these places are somehow dehumanized spaces dominated by neutralizing technological relationships. It might not necessarily be so, however. Technological devices that involve users in their communication networks might produce new and different forms of participation, and in the long run, change and affect the apparently impersonal aspects of these non-places.

Experiments in this direction have already been carried out, mainly in Spain, and in particular in Barcelona again, in order to build new public spaces where technologies can facilitate exchanges and interactions (Ratti 2013). The aim of these projects is precisely to facilitate a transformation of urban space both for users, and through users.

From places to people

We are now moving from places to people, from smart cities to smart citizens (or more precisely to participatory citizens).

Smart technologies can be seen not only as devices to allow interactions with the environment, but also to facilitate and transform interactions and communication processes among individuals. This dimension is not always fully recognized.

Often, in the literature on smart cities, the environment and urban spaces appear mainly to be made of ‘things’ and ‘objects’, things that can talk to us, things with which we can interact, but always things. It is not by chance that the expression “The Internet of Things” has recently become so popular. It alludes to the control that technologies can exert on different sectors of our life, from urban traffic to the way our future kitchens and all our other electro-domestic instruments will be regulated by way of the Internet.

But this is also a highly reductive view. We know that space is not only a matter of things, but also of people. Urban spaces are inhabited and this is, I believe, the most interesting and challenging aspect of a research focused on smart cities, at least for a semiotician. Considering communication among people in space implies to take into account two quite different and closely interacting systems, communication among people and that between people and their lived spatial environment.

Indeed, in today’s vast literature on smart cities, more and more attention is beginning to be paid not only to the uses of space but also to the new forms of interaction and social participation that emerging new technologies might make possible in our future everyday lives. One relevant domain of such practices is participatory city planning, where citizens can voice their opinions and become an active part of decision-making processes concerning present and future uses of public spaces.

Some experiments in this direction have already been carried out in Bologna, which according to ICity Rate – a rating agency for technological impact in urban contexts – is the smartest city in Italy, with a long tradition of innovative use of digital technologies. It was the first city in Italy to develop in the 80’s a free public digital network: Iperbole, which was made available to all interested citizens.

Similar uses of technology can have potentially useful applications in facilitating multi-cultural societies, opening up for a more democratic access to new public spaces. Recently, urban anthropologists and sociologists have begun to question the notions of multi-culturalism and multi-cultural societies, by focusing more on the related idea of ‘coexistence’, in favour of the more inclusive and egalitarian notion of the shared city. (Sahar, Rosen in press)

Thus, one important question that should be investigated in relation to the notion of the Smart City is the flora of new opportunities that these technologies may offer within the wider perspective of the shared city, involving diffused processes of participation and democratisation. Without forgetting, of course, that given that many people do not have equal access yet to these new technologies: the digital divide can still be a limiting reality for many categories of citizens, from immigrants to the elderly and so on. Particularly interesting, in light of this, are those experiments of local communities that utilise at one and the same time both new technologies and face to face interactions, thus combining both digital and non-digital forms of communication with forms of social interaction and exchange.

To conclude, in the heterogeneous domain of the various, often quite different, forms of interaction that can now take place across a wide range of public and private spheres, smart technologies can facilitate reconceptualization and reconfiguration of the borders between public and private space, contributing to a potential re-semantisation of many of the “non-places” we are at present used to encountering in urban environments. Smart technologies can thus be seen as a medium for human re-mediation of currently “inhuman” spaces, such as Augé’s aforementioned “non-places”.

Smart cities can thus be seen as offering positive opportunities in at least three different directions:

1. as a tool to facilitate communication among citizens and between citizens and the administration;

2. as a tool to re-articulate urban spaces;

3. as tools to challenge traditional distinctions between public and private spaces.

Notice, however, that the possible direction of such change is not exclusively from the “real” to the “digital” but rather towards a creative combination of the digital and the non-digital. This movement challenges any ontological definition of what is real, in combining technological mediated forms of communication with embodied practices where actors also interact with each another’s bodily presence, as in the case of Obama’s election campaign, or recent “Arab Spring” movements. 

A potentially hopeful result of hybrid interactions of this kind could be, rather than merely the creation of a ‘smart citizen’, in the longer-term construction of the even more responsible figure of ‘participative citizen’. Always remembering, of course, that smart technologies can always conceal a potentially less promising aspect, as a hidden power system for controlling people. Which of these two potential sides of these technologies will end up being most dominant in the future will certainly depend very much on how each and everyone of us does his or her part in choosing the right path for us to follow!

References

AUGE, M., 1992. Non-lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, Paris : Seuil.

DETIENNE, M. & J.P. VERNANT, 1974. Les ruses de l’intelligence. La métis des Grecs, Paris : Flammarion.

FUSAROLI, R., T. GRANELLI & C. PAOLUCCI, 2011. “The External Mind. Perspectives on Semiosis, Distribution and Situation in Cognition”, Special issue of VS, 112–113.

HUTCHINS, E., 1995. Cognition in the Wild, Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.

LATOUR, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social : an Introduction to Actor-network Theory, Oxford : Oxford University Press.

OLIVEIRA, A.C. & I. PEZZINI, 2013. Prácticas de vida e produção de sentido das metropóles. São Paulo e Roma, Sapienza- Roma,  Puc-SP, Embaixada do Brasil, Roma, Italia, 20-21 May 2013.

RATTI, C., 2013. Smart city, smart citizen, Milano: Egea.

SAHAR, A. & R. ROSEN, Negotiating the Semantics of Shared Urban Spaces. (in press)

VITALI, W., (ed.), 2014. Un’Agenda per la città. Nuove visioni per lo sviluppo urbano, Bologna: Il Mulino