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There are fantastical promises of awe and freedom of telepathy in contemporary telecommunications, telemetric and smart-dust-sensor technology, and urban-sensor connectivity. Intelligent communication ecologies consist of clouds and oceans. The transcendental poetics of machines that anticipate human needs and commands are celebrated in Jennifer Gabrys’ text Telepathically Urban, which explores sensor architectures and mobile smart-dust, extending early-twentieth-century radio, electromagnetic transmission technologies, and the long history of utopian futurist aesthetics. Smartdust can be linked to a telepathic understanding of the nineteenth-century interest in atomized ether and atomic dematerialization, as well as to the future development of tiny neurobiological sensors of neural dust. The high ambience of smart sensors, accompanied by florid promises of telepathy, relates to the invention and reinvention of telecommunications as it is accompanied by the invention and reinvention of telepathy.

In 2018, the telepathy city  was  selected as one of the top 10 breakthrough technologies in the world by MIT Technology Review. The city has been upgraded to be an “intelligent body” capable of sensing environmental information and human behavior data, and artificial intelligence has become a powerful force for urban governance and sustainable urban development.

Hangzhou was regarded as a successful example in dealing traffic troubles with a urban brain. The “Urban Brain” can monitor 24 hours a day, and the command center can be notified within 20 seconds of abnormal events, and the accuracy rate can reach more than 95%. Some old cameras have poor picture quality, and fuzzy scenes that cannot be recognized by the human eye can be recognized by the machine. This reduces the workload of traffic road patrols and frees traffic police from the trivial task of monitoring and controlling.

Thanks to the “urban brain”, Hangzhou Xiaoshan District has achieved priority dispatch of 120 ambulances and other special vehicles. Once the emergency point receives the call, the “urban brain” will calculate in real time, automatically allocate the timing of the signal lights along the route, and customize a green light lifeline for the ambulance. According to estimates, the time for an ambulance to arrive at the scene can be reduced by half.

While Toronto was trying to build a much more smart city than Hangzhou. Google’s Sidewalk Labs worked with the Canadian government to plan to create a high-tech community, Quayside, and rethink how to build and operate a city. 

However, such intensive urban data collection and the increasing number of automatic operations  also leads to growing concerns about privacy protection and the potential harm to human life and health caused by machine errors.

I lived in Fengxian District, where was far away from the downtown area. So I had to take a special express bus to the railway station. The special express bus was built one or two years ago, which freed countryside people from spending plenty of time waiting for a regular bus that leaved every 40 minutes. However, to enter the bus station, you have to either show your transport card or buy a ticket with cash. No online payment is allowed. Last week I went to school to attend my class but was prevented from the station, because my transport card had run out of money, and I did not bring cash for I had been so used to make online payment. Suddenly, it came to my mind that Apple wallet now began to support public transportation as long as you bind your transport card to your phone. Then I tried, frustrated again. I had to first bind a credit card to my iphone first. But I did not bring a credit card. At last, I had no choice but turned to other people for help. Believe it or not, nobody brought cash. Due to the limited time, I chose to call a taxi, which was quite more expensive than taking a bus.

To my surprise, I felt extremely anxious and angry with the “backward countryside infrastructure”, because it did not support online payment. I had an urge to promote it with advanced technology at that time. If people was able to make online payment, everything would be perfect, I thought.

However, later I realized that something went wrong. Why did I automatically blame everything on the inconvenience and a not smart enough city? We are so spoiled by technology that they want to find a solution for everything from it. If things are not good enough, it is because the technology is not advanced enough.

Technology does not only improve our way of life, making changes to our habits, but also take control over our life. If you do not follow its rule, you had no choice but being get rid of an advanced civilization. A smart city understand our needs, because it cut our autonomy into pieces and give it to technology in order for its dominance. The smarter it is, the more we rely on it to survive, the more power we hand in.

When everybody is looking forward to a smarter and smarter city, it is crucial to be on the alert.

In our mapping project, we investigated the operation of mobile food stands under the control of Shanghai Government after the epidemic of COVID-19. It has been long time in first-tier cities in China that mobile food stands were unwelcome in the eye of government. As a form of informal economy, the emergence of mobile food stands are related to issues of immigrant labors, unemployment, city planning, garbage disposal. Although never regarded as an organic part of urban life and strictly prohibited for a long time, mobile food stands never disappear. Scattered food vendors wander through the city during rush hour, staying for several hours and then leave.

Only when the COVID-19 economically hit the city to a great extent did the government realize the function of mobile food stands, which was ignored intentionally in the past.They thought they should do something to show their encouragement to ease the environment for informal economy, as a result, they started their plan, incorporating mobile food stands into part of infrastructure, a kind of public resources that every citizen is able to share. That is a common logic for government to take control over economic activities: to classify, to divide, to specify and  incorporate. To make a city more ordered, clean and tidy, mobile food stands were carefully designed and gathered together and fixed, appearing as a special landscape in the post-epidemic period. An independent mobile food stand, which is able to self-supported as a small system, is deconstructed into small parts to assimilate into the city: space, facilities, electricity, operation system that includes food resource and marketing, garbage disposal, and assigned to corresponding part of a formal economy, a nearby shopping mall or a supermarket or something else.

The reason I believe that mobile food stands are being made part of infrastructure is that, it is being designed as neither pure economic activity nor complete cultural landscape, but a combination of both. Thus it becomes a steady, fixed, clustered organization, a network is built within it with man-made systems and processes that function collaboratively and synergistically. Connecting mobile food stands with their surroundings only technically ensures better control while getting rid of their distinct features.

In addition, I think mobile food stand is turned into infrastructure is in a more conceptual way. Through planning and regulation, the mobile food system is able to maintain for a relatively long period compared to what was in the past due to government fund. Under the context of designing, the image of clustered mobile food stands is fixed, at least it is managed to sustain as a landscape for current purpose without considering real consumption because government is supporting it. People do not really consume it, while it still stands. The change of mobile food stands from pure economic activity to a concept of infrastructure take place when people is just watching it, or we can say, enjoy it visually in most circumstance without inner motivation.

 

When it comes to street food, I am sure that its cheap and unhygienic characteristics are concerned by many people. I used to believe that the best way to improve the quality of street food is the government’s intervention and regulation. Being under control seems to solve all these potential problems, isn’t it?

However, I didn’t realize how complicated this problem can be until I came to a new type of street food and did some research by myself. The government’s intervention does not save these vendors as it claims, it almost kills them.

Last week I went to one of the night markets in Shanghai, which seemed prosperous with the encouragement of the Shanghai Government from the website of government affairs and some social media. It was the third time to visit the market for the sake of my mapping project. During the first experience, I talked to the head manager of this newly built night market. He rent it from the owner of the shopping mall nearby with the support of the district government. The government not only helps him to negotiate with the owner of this shopping mall but also gives some financial support to him to run this market. While he recruited all these vendors, consisting of the night market. He claimed that they( both him and the government) did not aim at gaining profit. All they wanted is to build a cultural environment for our citizens to have their night recreational activities. “ Culture is the most important element.” He emphasized, “based on traditional culture, we want people to consume.” He did not run any risks when running the market with government foundation and fixed rent handed in by stall owners. What he mainly needs to do is examining and verifying the qualification of food stalls.

The running mode of the newly built night markets is almost the same with shops inside the shopping mall. Vendors are fixed in one place, waiting for consumers passing through and buy or ignore what they are doing with high rent per day, although lower cost. When I was talking to many of the vendors in the night market, most of them claimed that they just managed to maintain a balance between income and expenditure. Government regulations increased their cost thus lowered their income.

As to the problem I concern most, whether food hygiene can be guaranteed, the answer is no. Although the manager kept emphasizing how much attention they paid to food, the vendors told me that they could sell food to customers which were completely different from what they claimed in the materials when applying for a position in the market as long as the managers didn’t care about it, which was exactly the current situation.

The result was totally out of my expectation. People pay no interest in the night market, while vendors are losing their advantages in the limited space. It seems that nobody benefits from the “encouragement “ except for the manager.

I am so confused, why are all this happening? Why do our governors spend so much money doing nothing?

In Cohen’s article, Living the Good Life, he mentions that, Manchu emperors try to achieve a dominant status in the cultural life of the Chinese elite,  in order to define their culture as well as distracting them from the political power, and food is a perfect topic in Chinese culture. Food bears much more meaning than its original function. We can see something through the TV series, Empresses in the Palace, which is very popular among Çhinese people.

The series tells the story of Zhenhuan, an innocent girl who becomes the most powerful woman among the Yongzheng emperor’s many wives by defeating her opponent step by step. Food appears much frequently than any other item as a necessary element to depict the luxury way of people’s lives in the Qing Dynasty as well as the fierce infighting among women.

As a symbol of status

Food is viewed as a symbol of political status in the Qing Dynasty. In Empresses in the Palace, the Yongzheng emperor eats the best food(in the meaning of value, nutrition, function, and so on), and has the power to give whatever in the warehouse to whatever he wants. He usually sends fresh fruit, which is hard to get because Beijing is remote from the origin of many fruits to the one he loves most at that moment, to show his favor and generosity. Also, when he feels someone needs to be awarded, food is a good choice, too. Hierarchy exists everywhere in a feudal society, so as to the emperor’s harem. Theoretically, the queen should have enjoyed the best food among the emperor’s women, but in Empresses in the Palace, Hua enjoys a much more luxury food consumption, because she has a potentially higher political status than the queen for the sake of her brother, Nian Gengyao, who is the most important officer in the court. By emphasizing the significant differences between Hua and the queen’s daily meal, their status is indicated.  

 

As a tool to achieve a specific purpose

What surprises me most is when an imperial concubine Cao’s daughter was taken by Hua to show her mercy to children to the emperor ostensibly, but in fact, she poisoned the little girl to frame Zhenhuan secretly. Cao was so afraid of Hua’s power that she was not able to tell the truth to the emperor. Instead, she cooked a bowl of lotus seeds soup for the emperor without getting rid of its core, which tastes bitter. When the emperor was eating the soup, he suddenly understood what Cao wanted to tell him, although she did not say even a word to him. It is because the lotus seeds pronounce as Lianzi(莲子) in Chinese, which reads the same as Lianzi(怜子), means to have mercy on your child. As a result, the emperor asked Hua to give Cao’s daughter back to her. The most common way to use food as a tool is to cook it by the imperial concubine themselves and send it to the emperor, to show their love and consideration to him, thus improving their status. (If you want to watch the TV series, click this link.)

Really amazing, isn’t it?

 

 

 

As mentions in Food,  the industrial revolution simplified and eased the transportation of food and its ingredients. With the rapid development of technology and internet, the invisibility of food system is intensified, especially in China. 

Nowadays people have various ways to purchase food, online food shopping is becoming one of people’s favorite way. With just a click on the internet, (mostly in Taobao, in China) and a few days waiting, you are able to get what you want to eat. Isn’t it fascinating? The extremely easy way of buying food, even stops people from thinking about where do these food come from and what are they made of. Although it’s invisible, it exists. And under most situation, that’s the way merchant makes profit, especially some small food store raised by individuals. Although I have not ever tried to be a shop keeper in Taobao, I guess there must be methods for anyone who want to open a online store to avoid investigation without food production license and health certificate. It’s just so easy that everyone could buy a fake one. Several  years ago, I was informed by my friend, that my favorite cookie brand, an online store, was accused of illegal operation(see news report here). All the products they sold were made of cheap flour and other unknown ingredients. Their workshop was so dirty and messy that many workers huddled together. To my sadness, I saw the scene from The Rule of Law Online. Although unknown to food system, people begin to hold doubt on these small scale food shops with increasing negative news reports on them. People always have another choice to food, but it will be a crisis for many small scale shop keepers. 

However, there are smart people who come out with ideas to sell their products. For example, it can be easily seen that many shopper keepers in Taobao claim that they are laborious farmers, and they have no idea how to sell their surplus agricultural products(usually shown in the first page of their homepage) due to some problems like natural disaster or something else. Or other people who use plain pictures and videos to indicate that their products are natural, while nobody knows the true. But many people are glad to buy these product, they believe their purchase is not only to satisfy their own needs, but also a beneficence. Thanks to the invisible food system! Otherwise consumers must be disappointed at the simple and boring process.