The smart city is always proposed with an implied discourse of “the cities of future.” There is a common verbal trick underscoring the core object of building smart cities is to leverage technology to serve people and make the urban environment more alive and livable. However, just as Shannon Mattern has pointed out in “A City Is Not a Computer” that public concerns regarding this issue usually lie on the scales of “financial markets, transit patterns and news cycles” rather than on the climatic scale and the geological scale, it is hard to reach every aspect of a matter.
Therefore the free-market mode is not so suitable for city-making. Merely from the commercial perspective, young people are no doubt the target audience of smart cities. They embrace emerging things, have the capacity and willingness to consume “smartness” (which means convenience based on the internet in most cases), and can grasp new concepts and technologies very quickly. So smart cities can be interpreted as “smart young cities” in a sense. But this tendency does manifest the hegemony of technology in terms of social classification. The groups that cannot catch up the advancing urban intelligence will lose in this game of computation. No matter big data or high tech should be used to improve public life. There is no city intended for a particular social group or the majority only. No one is supposed to be the loser. If we forget about the people, we lose the sense of being smart. So a really smart city will be an inclusive city that built around diversified users without any barrier in everyday operation.
A best option is to collect different perspectives in the process of city planning. By means of engaging all parts of society to share their perceptions and demands, we can gain a bottom-up intelligence and effectively detect bugs resulted from a simple and arbitrary mindset. For instance, nowadays the subway signs and VI systems in many cities are designed super terrible. They are ambiguous and visually cluttered. Young urban dwellers may have tolerated and got used to them. While the elderly cannot tell the right way to go or the right train to take with such guidance. Solutions are not difficult to figure out; the mindset matters. So I hope in building smart cities, the state can make more efforts in this macro control to guarantee the right of certain vulnerable groups in terms of technology.
Here is a video of a conference on smart cities for healthy aging: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=325GC-_BuaA
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