Thoughts about Sentient City | Siyan Song (ss13340)

Few would dispute that our cities are becoming more and more sentient. They loaded up with information and communications technology and a resultant profusion of data, all over the cities, ‘intelligent’ applications have started sensing what is happening around them and reacting to it – smart traffic lights or CCTV cameras whose images are computer analyzed for suspicious behavior. Even our cellphones are traced and connected to the “data clouds”. The wireless city is full of leaking telepathic signals and constant robotic sounds. The sense of a city replaces the sense of its citizens, the systems protect us as well as monitor us, serve us as well as control us, eventually shape our experience of living in it.

MIT’s Sensable City Lab once presented an exhibit named “Trash Track” at the exhibition “Toward the Sentient City” – running at the Architectural League NY. It proposed that trash items such as paper cups are tagged with a GPS-device and mobile phone chip. After the trash has been disposed of, the item sends text messages with its location, so people could follow its track from the recipient to watch the waste disposal site. The project hopes to express that people’s “knowing” might lead to a change in “doing”: the fact that people know where the trash ends up should make them more aware of the problem they create by throwing things away.

Astonishingly, data from many different sentient sources can be aggregated in real-time and give us a grasp of what is happening in the city that we never have had before – we could even be familiar with the trash thing. The revolution in urban informatics reveals the circulatory of a city, from how it feeds itself to how it discharges itself. Quoting from Paul Saffo, our future has even been characterized as “a world of connecting machines”. The scenarios of the feedback loop from machine to machine construct the city image for the near future. However, instead of thinking about how human beings “mechanized”, I would rather prefer to consider it as how robotics “humanized” in cities. Freud (1989) has a perfect metaphor, “with every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motory or sensory, or is removing the limits of functioning”. A city is a human. The trash disposal system, the wireless communication infrastructure, the ubiquitous computing network, they all work as a part of his organ. It could also be connected with McLuhan, when we reckon the shared bike system as an extension of the city’s feet, the telecommunication system as an extension of the city’s ears…In this way, the city alive as a man, and in Freud’s words, even becomes “a kind of prosthetic God”. The city perceives from every form of sensors, records in all sorts of data streams, and operates by both giant machines and tiny chips. He is putting on more and more auxiliary organs, and is becoming more and more magnificent. People who live inside it, sometimes pass through the heart of the city. They step on its skin, gibber about to have steak or salad for dinner, without hearing its heartbeats, sound after sound, reverberate through the deep dark sky.