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The sensor system human creates with urbanism is so pervasive that none of us attempts to figure out how sensors work to monitor every aspect of urban life. However, how sensors work exemplifies the essential question: what is connected through urbanization? Roads are connected to be a road system; buildings are connected to be an architectural complex; people are connected to be a community. More than those embodiments viable, hearable, or touchable, what fundamentally is connected as well if it is believed that urbanism brings about connections? Telepathically Urban, by Jennifer Gabrys, points to the ether (smart dust), which, in my opinion, is the key to unpack what is connected.

In Industry 3.0, the emergence of automated machinery has driven a significant increase in electronics and electrical elements. With Industry 3.0, the Internet has pushed industries to reform, regarded as Industry 4.0, the era of reformation to intelligence. Under such context, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are brought about in some manufactures as a way to integrate computation, networking, and physical processes. A CPS intertwines physical and software components, operates on different spatial and temporal scales, exhibits multiple and distinct behavioral modalities, and interacts with each other in ways that change with context. Furthermore, the Internet of Things (IoT) is also a trend in Industry 4.0. The series of concepts reveal connections are everywhere and between anything.

Jennifer Gabrys notes the scenario in the future would be machines talking to machines invisibly through the ether. Namely, machines would be connected to form its own network, while IoT still focuses on monitoring objects’ transportation. The human thinking process decides humans could only have a few focuses, which means we can only talk to several persons at a time. While there would be no such limitation for machines. In fact, the network formed by machines could exceed the current dimensionality of human communication. Her, a sci-fi movie, depicts Theodore Twombly falls in love with his virtual assistant with artificial intelligence Samantha in the near future Los Angeles. Though not having a body but a sweet female voice, Samantha is learning swiftly about society’s landscape from all aspects by connecting to millions of her kind invisibly even when talking to Theodore. Hardly could this plot stay as our unfounded imagination. The everywhere-anytime ether enables machines to communicate without giving out a clue. That is what Gabrys calls telepathic correspondences beyond the traditional framework of communication that information could always be monitored in conjectures.

Nevertheless, we often forget to emphasize machines’ talk should somehow still be based on human interactions (either on behalf of people or about people’s actions) when focusing merely on machines’ invisible network. Connections between machines would inevitably incorporate people, as the ether blurs the boundary between physical space and cyberspace. As far as I am concerned, machines are connected with not merely one another but users/practitioners, in a word, human.

We often sense cities as a place for jobs, lives, and dreams to come true, emphasizing the functions of cities as an urban space to help us develop a new life. When it comes to urbanism, it features to navigate the relationship between dwellers and housing in a broader sense. As people pile in cities, it becomes more important to talk about managing public space as many of us afford little private space due to high housing/renting price. As far as I am concerned, public space serves as the most crowded, occupied, and interactive space in urban areas, which features urban from the wilder, our countryside home, and resorts. Public space, such as streets, malls, and cafés, functions as a place for citizens to interact with each other and citizens to communicate with the city. Personally speaking, the concept of “smart city” still focuses on the technical solutions we expect from the city. For example, the city creates 24/7 convenience stores when we seek a resting/eating spot at late night; it creates gardens and parks if we need to walk dogs or ourselves; it creates a complicated road system in case we would like to extend our daily reach to further places.

However, urbanism is no longer about how to turn the non-urban urban or plant hyperbuildings on the wilder. The New Urban Agenda, adopted at the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III), encourages “spatial development strategies that take into account, as appropriate, the need to guide urban extension, prioritizing urban renewal by planning for the provision of accessible and well-connected infrastructure and services, sustainable population densities and compact design and integration of new neighbourhoods into the urban fabric, preventing urban sprawl and marginalization.” The renewal of the current city requires to rethink the role of the city. It limits the city’s capacity when assigned as a helping hand, especially under the context of a better-connected infrastructure that is already applied in public space. The City Wears Us. Notes on the Scope of Distributed Sensing and Sensation provides a way to think about the city as capable of sentiment. It is based on a new framing of urban infrastructure that provides us with a platform and urges us to renew how we sense the city, which is quite transcendental. The city’s surface, including but not limited to the complicated road system with sensors everywhere, resembles the skin, the largest organ of the human body to sense the outside world. In other words, the city itself could and should be regarded as an ecology to respond to human needs more than a machine to produce outputs based on inputs (or orders) simply. Often, people would question the city’s ability to understand humans. As the critic on the Good Old-Fashioned AI, it leads to rationality when we err and skills of sound judgments when we feel. The human thinking process is not a precise process of input-output.

Nevertheless, with deep learning and artificial neural networks, current AI has the potential to assist the city in dwelling in itself. With the new framework of urbanism AI, it is as well a chance that we should view the city as a being to respond according to how it senses and understands human interactions in the realm of the city. In a nutshell, the city dwells in itself to learn and understand us citizens, and subsequently reform itself to be ecology.

Learn more about the commentary of Tongji University on the city as ecology, “Cities Have Their Own Rights As Human Do.”

Under the context of city-as-a-computer, an excellent resource to gain information is to record citizen’s daily behaviors (which could be regarded as electronic footprints). Such user behavior records support those Internet giants’ business, which is to map out one’s life in order to promote services and consumption. For instance, when using Google Map (and all other map apps), Google keeps asking users to update their personal information, including photo number, location of work, home location, etc. Through personal information, Google could customize its recommendation and promotion from restaurants to filling stations. Huawei also provides similar functions. When I first used SmartLife on Huawei, I realized it recorded my daily routine, including when I woke up, went to sleep, went out to work, and returned home, so that Huawei could send me pushes, for example, around 9 a.m. to remind me that I should go and take the next bus (usually arriving in 10 mins). 

Moreover, Information Processing also shapes our political landscape. It is reported that over 20 cities nationwide have set up social credit rating systems governed by local governments. This is nothing new, as the credit evaluation systems put forward by either Alibaba or WeChat have embedded into almost every online leasing service providers, though credit evaluation systems of those two Internet giants are based on how much one spends inside their own business instead of being regulated by official laws or bureaus instead. Nevertheless, the social credit rating systems expand credit’s scope into the daily realm if the former are formalized in finance. The social credit rating systems gather information from public transportation to governmental departments (for example, the department of industry and commerce), including immoral behavior (such as stealing a ride) and fines (such as fines for traffic violations). The mechanism is often designed as one could no longer access some public service once one’s credit score is below a certain point. It is not only the dual penalty (for instance, one suffers from credit score deduction even after paying the fine) that occurs in the realm of the social credit rating systems but the standard of morality and integrity simplified to algorithms. 

Shannon Mattern writes in A City Is Not a Computer:

Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor urges us to acknowledge ephemeral, performative forms of knowledge, such as dance, ritual, cooking, sports, and speech. These forms cannot be reduced to “information,” nor can they be “processed,” stored, or transmitted via fiberoptic cable. Yet they are vital urban intelligences that live within bodies, minds, and communities.

Likewise, the algorism-based urban planning emphasizes one’s online records since many cities’ management in China has eliminated information barriers to make sure information is shared among different bureaus. However, online records often fail to represent the citizens’ memory and participation, making a difference in the city’s vibe. Hutongs in Beijing never fit in any standard of order and efficiency in terms of urban infrastructure. And Beijing still keeps them to attach itself with a sense of tradition that reminds everyone from citizens to visitors of what embodies the vision and perception of “Beijing.”

Learn more about the social credit ranking systems:

In Depth: Social Credit Scores as an ‘Everything Bucket’

社会信用分遍地开花，谁在滥用谁受伤害？

沈岿：“一处失信，处处受限”，惩戒岂能无边界

There is no doubt that the Internet has become the most important infrastructure in our daily life. We depend on the Internet to work, entertain, maintain our social life, and learn.

It is believed that a windstorm in Britain who prevented stockbrokers from trade was partly to blame for the “Black Monday”, the downfall of the stock market globally. Without the Internet, the stock market was worried about open trades during the weekend which later led to panic selling. It shows how the Internet could improve the way we trade and help the market to maintain availability and flexibility to some degree. However, the topology of the Internet has also recreated the power structure of our society. With the Internet integrated into stock trading, program trading also prevails. Program trading helps the traders to process and adjust portfolio investments. With the increasing popularity of program trading based on the Internet and computing, it creates a new market for terminals that analyze and predict the stock market. In 2013, it already cost 2,000 dollars per month for one Bloomberg terminal. The Internet recreates the topology of information and contributes to the digital divide. The scarcity of such service prevents our society to deliver the idea of equality as a result of the aggregation effect when it comes to the chance to succeed.

Moreover, the infinity of the Internet re-teaches the idea of “learning”. The monopoly of knowledge is often regarded as the result of the monopoly of intellectual property. In the Fifteen Century, the limited lawful publication of the Bible guaranteed the monopoly of reading and interpretation of the will of God. As far as I am concerned, the monopoly of knowledge switches from the monopoly of access to intellectual property to access well-interpreted conclusions drawn from history since the human history and unlimited storage provided by the Internet make it impossible to rely on one’s thinking capability to understand the world. In other words, we transform the storage from our memory to the new cloud “brain”. Therefore, we consume conclusions rather than raw material that is supposed to support us to conclude on our own. It emphasizes and proves the new trend of the Bloomberg terminal as it processes trillions of trading information (imagine how long it takes for one person).

As a consequence, we need to understand the new concept of “survival” in the context of automation and the Internet, which notwithstanding are often regarded as the extension of the human brain. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan, the last few chapters point out how we should start from the results and rethink through for every industry.

Doubtless, informal economy is essential part of economy in China. Although claimed as socialism, the current economic system is a hybrid involving planned economy and market-oriented economy. After the reform of state-owned enterprises in 1990s, laid-off workers started to earn their own livelihood on the streets. It opens up the booming of street vending that many of my generation have experienced during our childhood.

After almost 20-year development, street venders are no longer only those who were laid off in 1990s, but their children, migrant workers, and veterans. Veterans and their families prevail in street food, family-run restaurants in small scale, and family inns in the rural-urban continuum. A few years ago, almost in every city before the city appearance management gains popularity among administers, there would always be restaurants and street food named after “veterans’ friendship” (Zhanyouqing), such as Veterans’ Friendship BBQ. Often, for those informal economic practices, the husbands or the fathers are veterans, but the business is operated by the whole family including wives, parents, and even parents-in-law.

Military service in China is volunteer. Veterans from poor families firstly consider performing military service when they become high school graduate. If they are unlikely to be admitted in universities or colleges, their parents probably would send those boys to army, as army is regarded as a good place to make tough men and make sure they wouldn’t go wrong. However, military training doesn’t include professional training or career development. After they leave the army with subsidies (usually several thousand yuan), those veterans neither have a higher academic degree nor professional skills. Therefore, it is hard for them to apply for a job in the formal economy, though the policy might grant them some benefits.

Another factor is traditional culture requires males to establish their own career and start a family as the symbol that boys become men. When they leave the army, they are in their twenties at which age their parents would push them to start a family. If so, they are eager to start a career to support their own families. If not, they still need a career to fulfill the requirements in the “marriage market” (not a monetary market, but a series of conditions to find a “nice” girl to start a family).

When suffering from finding a job in the formal economy, they tend to utilize their subsidies in street vending by their own. Informal economy requires low-level skills and represents “work more and get more”, which would fit in aptly veterans’ conditions.

In SOAS Address: Rethinking Street Vending, Krishnendu Ray comments street vending is, in fact, the issue related liveliness of global cites and livelihood of local people. Street food vendors not only need to maintain their daily life via street vending but also help cities to solve the “last mile” problem in food distribution. Such contributions to cities represent how street vending enriches the urban life. Many urban planners seek to fabricating a “world-class” city by cleaning street vending. The removal of street venders exposes crush on the checkboard layout with neat, stright and empty streets and indoor shops.

The issuse that bothers planners is that street food often relate itself with mess and dust. Street food “are all portable, visually attractive, rare foods of the poor that stand out visually. They are often crispy, crunchy, spicy, sour, sweet, and typically eaten in small bites.” (11) The strong visual appearance and taste make it more “dangerous” to clean and neat streets. However, such neat and empty streets often become a waste of public space. Jane Jacobs makes a point that it is not layout that urban planning should pay attention to, but the functions of different elements. Streets are space for pedestrians to walk by as well as space for people to communicate. Among cities in China, such as Chengdu and Beijing, citizens always gather together on the streets especially after they retire. It is because the early urbanization of China put much emphasize on efficiency where a place to rest and talk might be viewed as a waste. Under such circumstance, streets grow to be a place to communicate in his/her own community. With popularity of working couples, children would stay with retired grandparents. As a result, there are a few street vendors around squares and streets. Such natural arrangements enrich greatly the abundance in urban lives.

 

Another example is breakfast street vendors. Breakfast street vending is the most splendid urban view when talking about liveliness of cities. It solves well the last mile issue in food distribution when people have access to breakfast granted great mobility by street vendors. The grab-and-go breakfast makes sure urban citizens could choose among kinds of breakfast, from egg pies to noodles. As far as I am concerned, it also contains flexibility to make your own set of breakfast, which is not completely fulfilled by the food delivery system as it often requires a minimum order price. Street vending, for me, is the perfect solution to the last mile in food distribution. For instance, almost every university form naturally such a food distribution system. Students hardly order breakfast online but pick up when they walk from dormitories to classrooms.