Human Scale Cities

Week picks #9

COSM

COMMON SENSE
Mobile sensing for community action

Week picks series features every Friday some initiatives and projects I found or want to highlight on this blog. It will help me to track new findings from community groups, startups or local governments working and delivering solutions relevant to the issues of this blog. I often bookmark them or save them on Tumblr while I wait to use them. Maybe this a good way.

Video of the Day: Usman Haque on Global Open Data for Digital Urbanism (via P2P Foundation)

haque design + research: Notes from my talk at the Open IoT Assembly, June 16-17 2012

Great notes by Usman Haque, particularly these two points:

- the spectacularisation of data, revelling in complexity only so that ‘experts’ can rescue us from the cacophony: scientists, urban planners, yes, even artists

- the concerning thing about this neo-postivism is when it’s applied to the design and manipulation of our cities because these processes have their own ‘god fantasies’:

efficiency (those big biz initiatives that use “Smart” throughout their PR material)
predictability
homogeneity
all the things that go counter to the sustainability of what makes a city a city
social goals that rarely have anything to do with technology and sound suspiciously like the sorts of things urban planners were saying in the 50s and 60s when they gave us highways and highrises/tower blocks

haque:

- why are we here at the Open Internet of Things Assembly, what are we all trying to do?

- one view, the Cosm firehose: data data data

- problem comes when people think that this equates to ‘knowledge’ (Wisdom/Knowledge/Info/Data paradigm)

- enlightenment project, rationality — if we…

A brief history of the internet of things

‘Bundled, Buried and Behind Closed Doors’ is a short documentary by filmmaker Ben Mendelson which offers viewers a glimpse inside one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of internet connectivity: 60 Hudson Street, New York.

(Source: cluster.eu)