Today, a nascent movement of civic hackers, artists, and entrepreneurs have begun to find their own uses and their own designs for smart cities. While lots of the technology giants building smart cities are mostly paying more attention to technology, not people, mostly focused on cost-effectiveness and efficiency, mostly ignoring the creative process of harnessing technology at the grassroots, Townsend mentioned that truly applications of new information technologies have almost always come from the bottom up. He reckoned that the grassroots are more willing to use new technology and to innovate.
In Chapter 4 , Townsend used the web map called “Dodgeball” as an example to show us a new form of mobile social application which is called crowdsourcing today. This reminds me of Dianping, which is a platform that focus on the communication and aggregation of urban consumption experience. All the information that posted on Dianping is generated by its users and the information also serves the users. Dianping combined with the geographical position and netizens personalized consumer demand, offer anywhere at any time of catering, shopping, leisure and life service areas such as business information, consumer preference and consumption evaluation of the interactive platform via internet. It has become a necessary tool for people’s life in urban areas especially among the young people.
On the platforms like Dianping, people could exchange their information about their favorite restaurants and their recommend dishes. Instead of making people stuck in the world of Internet, it has stimulated offline consumption. People would be willing to drive across the city or even travel to another city to find the food that posted on Dianping. Urban economists believe that cities thrive because they create opportunities for people to interact for commerce and entertainment. But it takes someone who intuitively understands cities to create a new way of doing that for the whole world to use. Jan Jacobs’s book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, glorified how good streets create opportunities for people to meet by chance. Mumford described the city as a fundamentally communicative space, rich in information. Thus, apps like Dianping are acting as engines to amplify that serendipitious potential, by constantly prodding us to get up to make new friends.
However, Townsent mentioned that there is a challenge that people would be blocked out side the smart cities. Nothing works until they connect, register and log in. We might all come across the problem that we have give our information like phone number, Wechat ID to get access to the apps. Moreover, we have to give up our privacy to get the service from those apps. For example, if we turn off the positioning, I would not get the information in the area of my position. Though lots of people would be unhappy about that, they would still turn it on to get the service. This would threat people’s right of privacy.
In conclusion, though we are experiencing the convenience of the development of smart cities that generated by crowdsourcing apps like Dianping, we need to build a systematic evaluation of social sustainability into the planning of new smart-city service. Once we have a sense of the risks, mitigating measures can be designed.
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