Siyan

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.

In A City is Not a Computer, Shannon Mattern brought up again the big question mentioned by almost every urban designer, planner, and scholar before: how do cities function, and how can they function better? She narrowed down the issue to a more common life angle: how can cities help more of their residents be happy and reach their potential? For the last few decades, cities have highly adept at sharing and copying innovations to improve the transportation scheme. From bus rapid transit to public bike-sharing, the practices of smart-city innovations have surged on to the global stage. Now when I walk along the streets, I often see shared bikes neatly arranged beside the sidewalks. With simple scanning, people could easily unlock a bike and ride it to finish the last part of their commute. After the failure of Moby, the shared bike system is more mature and does not need the payment of a deposit. I can’t help wondering: do shared bikes make our city functions better?

Shared Bikes in New York

The number of bike-sharing programs globally doubled between 2014 and 2018, while the number of bikes increased twenty-fold. In 2019, there were over 17 million shared bikes in use, and about 10 million of them in China. Shanghai is definitely a big market for bike-sharing programs. During peak hours in congested places, shared bikes can provide a faster, cheaper way from A to B versus sitting in a cab or car in traffic. Also, considering the complete and developed public transit system in Shanghai, most office workers choose to commute by subway or bus, and the shared bikes become a great solution to “the last one-mile” problem. It also began to be recognized as an effective tool to reduce air pollution, travel costs, and fossil fuel dependency while improving public health. When urban areas grow denser, space will be at a premium – shared bikes take up less space, besides, making cities look much more vibrant, cool, cosmopolitan, and eventually, “smarter”.

The market for bike-sharing has returned to rationality. The collapse of OFO, Moby, has made the remaining bike-sharing enterprises realize that it is unsustainable to rely solely on increasing the amount of investment to compete for market share. At that moment, the big giant Meituan entered into the red sea. Meituan didn’t aim at the profits created by the sharing bikes industry but aims at the flow of the population brought by it. Users could not use Meituan’s shared bikes from the entrance of WeChat or Alipay, they have to download the Meituan app to use it. In this way, Meituan expanding the number of users and gathers their information. In addition, due to the creation of the complete location-based service (LBS) ecosystem, Meituan e-bikes have also become an important part of the LBS ecosystem, including online car-hailing, bus, unmanned distribution, etc. It’s time to reflect on how the commercial giants play their roles in the constructing of modern transportation infrastructure and creating the notion of smart cities.

Meituan App Interface of Shared Bikes

If you are interested in this topic, have a glance at the related mapping project of shared bikes: in 2010, Oliver O’Brien, a researcher at the Department of Geography at UCL (University College London) working with digital cartography and data visualization, created a Bike Share Map. Updated in real time, the map shows the location of bike share stations in 150 cities across the world, and has become one of the easiest ways for users to get updated on information on their local bike programs: https://bikesharemap.com/#/2.7200000000000006/-64.3676/19.7982/

Read more about this topic:

How and When E-bikes can help Smart Cities: https://www.urenio.org/2018/11/28/how-and-when-e-bikes-can-help-smart-cities/

Why E-bikes are at the Forefront of Future Urban Mobility: https://na.panasonic.com/us/trends/why-e-bikes-are-forefront-future-urban-mobility

Infrastructure is essentially important in our society. It has a great power to bring together different people, objects, and spaces into interaction, and “allow the possibility of exchange over space”. They are “system of substrates” that underlies the built phenomenal world and is “invisible” to most of us in most of the time. “We often see computers not cables, light not electricity, taps and water but not pipes and sewers”, the infrastructure has a peculiar ontology that they are “things”, and at the same time, they are also “the relation between things”.

Recently, me and my partner explored the food cabinets in Shanghai, a newly-emerged food delivery system which we believe also functions as a part of the culinary infrastructure. Through the web system, the food cabinet automatically collect the information of the order, the location of the customer, and the delivery progress of the deliverymen. It emancipates the deliverymen by creating a new relation inside the food delivery system – the relationship between the machine and the customers replaces the relationship between the deliverymen and the customers. In this way, it allows more possibilities of exchanging the take-out over space, and brings more profit to the delivery system.

Quoting from Brian Larkin, the poetics of infrastructure also “points to the sense of desire and possibility”, and what Benjamin would term “the collective fantasy of society”. The roads and railways are not just technical and commuting objects, but also things that encode the dreams of individuals and societies and made the fantastic “economically real”. So does the food cabinet. People always have a desire about “speed” when they ordered a delivery food from the Elema or Meituan app. They could allow themselves one hour to finish the lunch if they go outside, but they could not stand even five more minutes if the take-out do not deliver to them in 30 minutes. The food cabinet however, precisely grasps the collective desire about “speed” and makes it more time-saving to send every delivery food.

Food Cabinet of Meituan

In The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure, Larkin states that “many infrastructures are copies”, they are funded and constructed everywhere in the cities and nations. The repeating of the infrastructural projects creates the modernity of a place to some extent. Comparing to numerous visually impactful restaurants in culinary infrastructure, food cabinet has a lower sense of visual appreciation, but a stronger advantage of repeating itself and participating in a common visual and conceptual paradigm of “what it means to be modern”. The second locker imitates the look of the first locker. The second batch imitate the first batch of cabinets. The delivery infrastructure spread from the backend data, to the yellow-colored or blue-colored workwear flashing across the street, and eventually, to the similar-appearance food cabinets. The terminal of the delivery infrastructure endows it with a kind of industrial aesthetics which visualize the delivery technology. The huge, cube-like food-keeping machines may not able to “investigate waves of societal progress”, but they indeed qualified as “mechanisms to control time”.

As a kind of informal economy, the controversy around street food never stops. Many people have a nostalgia feeling about street foods, they are supportive of “street culture” and object to the strict governmental regulation about street vendors. “Informal economy is the people’s spontaneous and creative response to the state’s incapacity to satisfy the basic needs of the impoverished masses”, and street food not only provides a survival mode for the urban poor but also expresses a city’s “liveliness” and cultural charm, why should we forbid them? Okay, then let’s have a hypothesis here: what would happen if we permit all the street foods? Would there be uncontrollable problems if street food becomes “legal”?

1. The environmental problem

Many people enjoy the street food provided by the stalls, however, when the mobile vendors left the spot, there are always thick oil stains covered the ground. The stain is sticky and a lot of garbage stick to it and attracts the flies, which greatly affects the surrounding environment. If pedestrians walk on it, their shoes would be stuck to the stains, and difficult to walk through the area. So there has to be someone to clean up the mess. If it’s not the street vendors themselves, who would that be? Yes, the sanitation workers. In a news report, a sanitation worker Ms. Xu told the reporter that it was hard for her to clean up the oil stains. She had to prepare two brooms, one for the normal ground, and a special one to sweep the contaminated ground. She had to undertake the extra workload every day because she was “in charge of the area”. Consider about that: is street food legal a good idea for all the urban poor?

two sanitation workers try to clean up the oil stains

 

2. The safety problem

If you observe the street food stalls carefully, you could find out that most of them fire up the cooking stove with gas cans. It could be very dangerous if the gas cans are not been formally used (eg. placed near the open fire), but lots of street food vendors did not care much about the safety issue even though lots of gas can explosion cases have already happened. I read about an interview on this issue. A journalist was investigating several street food stalls and found out that most of the gas cans been use were stained with oil and full of rust, and many gas cans are even directly connected to the stove. He asked a street vendor, “your gas can and gas stove looks very old, could it still be used?” The vendor hesitated and said vaguely that although it has been used for many years, it would not cause any safety problems. In fact, the journalist asked many street food vendors about the service maintenance of their gas cans, but few of them care about that. Some even said, “as long as you don’t knock it over, it should be OK.” In this situation, the safety of the street food is not guaranteed, and those food stalls with non-standard gas cans become “time bombs” lurk around us and threaten the safety of every pedestrian.

This is a Chinese report of a gas can explosion that happened in Shandong: https://www.sohu.com/a/132205699_700231. From the video, we could see that a huge flame suddenly burst out, and the fire flashed into the sky with a radiation range of four meters. Five people were severely burned in the accident, including two children…

A lot of problems also exist: the food safety problem, the traffic block problem, and the unfair competition it would bring to the substantial restaurants… It seems that we still have a long way to go to turn the street food economy into a kind of “heroic entrepreneurship”.

I still remember the first time when I went to New York, I was really amazed at the enormous and various street vendors which cover almost every corner of the city. There are hot dog vendors and ice-cream vendors near the public parks, Mexican-styled street food is sold from the fancy food trucks outside NYU library, fresh fruit and vegetable vendors cover a long street in China town, street artists pop up in subway stations with different musical instruments… In fact, the survey data shows that there are as many as 20,000 street vendors in New York City, they are all small businesspeople struggling to make ends meet.

I have to admit that my street food experience in New York even broke up my stereotypes of street vendors: I used to think that the more developed and cosmopolitan a city is, the fewer street vendors it will have. This “rule” was in fact summarized from Shanghai’s street vendor history. I remember that the sweetest taste of my childhood memory came from the baked sweet potato and the cotton candy, two kinds of traditional street food that used could be seen everywhere in Shanghai. Baked sweet potato usually came out in winter, when you finish a whole-day study, walking in the cold wind with a hungry stomach, you could not resist the temptation of having a warm and sweet baked potato. Cotton candy is not limited by seasons, it appears throughout the year. It is a typical “street food” with an easy production process and could be served on a stick for made-to-order service. It even has several flavors for you to choose from: strawberry, lemon, grape… I always choose the strawberry one, and wait to watch the whole “performance”. I love to see the part when the cotton-like product surrounding the spinning head of the machine after the vendor poured sugar into the machine. The cotton becomes pink when he pours pink sugar, and it gradually grows into a big, round, cloud-like candy. At that time, I would joyously take over the stick from the vendor, and enjoy my little snack. I always imagine myself biting a piece of soft, pinky cloud, until one day I suddenly being told that the pink color comes from the low-cost chemical pigment instead of real strawberries. But this didn’t influence my love for cotton candy. It always symbols the taste of my childhood.

Street food – the cotton candy

Street food – the baked sweet potato

Nostalgia also comes from the disappearance of street food in Shanghai. I rarely see any cotton candy vendors or baked potatoes vendors these days, they are all restricted by the food safety laws. Sharit K. Bhowmik stated that the governments in Asian countries have more or less refused to recognize street vending as a legal activity and view these vendors as irritants to the city’s development. The streets with food vendors are regarded as “disordered”, “undeveloped”, and required to be “regulated”. As a result, street vendors in most Asian countries “live a precarious existence as they face the constant threat of eviction and destruction of their property”. The governmental action in fact destroys “the liveliness of the city”. Liveliness is an idea proposed by Jane Jacobs, it is generated in the shared use of a public space by different groups of people. Jacobs insisted that “only when cities are created for everybody can they provide something for everybody”. But unfortunately, governments sacrifice “somebody” to achieve the tidy and regulated appearance for “everybody”. The dynamic street food vendors disappear, but the neat and consistent food streets have been building up, as long as the illusory of the liveliness of the city.

In this week’s readings, Joanna Waley-Cohen depicts a vivid China’s food and cuisine landscape in Ming-Qing era. As she stated, “food, the culinary arts and their practitioners, and by extension gastronomy, in the sense of an informed and active appreciation of their pleasures, occupied a central role in social and cultural life and in the culture of consumption.” The food selection and consumption of the upper social class, including the cultural elite group and the imperial court, shaping the food culture and people’s gastronomic life in a great way. And in all eras, people always enjoy of talking the food stories of the emperors. The connection to the emperors would always endow the delicacy a special and miraculous charm.

Ming dynasty: Zhu Yuan Zhang and the beggar’s chicken. As the first emperor of Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuan Zhang has an impoverished family and a starving childhood. One day he was very hungry and tried to find something to eat. Then he met a beggar. The beggar saw the poor little boy, shivering and starving, and he decided to steal a chicken for him. The beggar wrapped the chicken with a lotus leaf and baked it in the fire. Zhu Yuan Zhang ate the chicken and thought it was the most delicious food in the world. Later when he ascended the throne, he sent people to seek for the beggar, and named the “Beggar’s Chicken” as one of the most precious imperial delicacies.

the picture of the “Beggar’s Chicken”

Qing dynasty: Qianlong and his adventures of Jiangnan. Qianlong has been to Jiangnan six times, each time he discovered several types of delicacies. In Joanna’s description, Jiangnan is the other center of culinary art besides Beijing, “in terms of claiming the most refined gastronomic sensibilities—the Jiangnan elite at least rivaled the court; in practice each tended to imitate the other, competing to claim the most recherché dishes and the most refined palate.” If Qianlong still alive, he would be a great supporter of Joanna’s words. Once when he went down to the south part of the Yangtze River, he wandered to a restaurant named “Song He Lou”. He ordered a mandarin fish and asked the chef to cook it. The chef fried the fish and covered it with tomato juice. When he placed the dish on the table, the fish body creaked because of the hot oil. It sounded like a squirrel. Qianlong tasted it, it has a sweet and sour flavor, and was crisp outside and tender inside. He enjoyed the delicacy and named it “Squirrel-Shaped Mandarin Fish”. The Jiangnan elites heard the story. They endeavored to taste the delicacy, and asked their chefs to imitate it. Then the dish became well-known and popular and was passed down today as a traditional specialty. In fact, Qianlong boomed several delicacies in this way, such as Gusu’s crucian carp soup, Weishan Lake’s four-nosed carp, Xushun’s sizzling rice soup…He even loved to write poems for the delicacies and then named them with beautiful poetic names (which the Jiangnan elites also loved to imitate to do so). If you went to cities in Jiangnan today, you could still find a lot of restaurants served foods which “has been tasted by Qianlong”. But be careful, most of them only borrows the name of the dish, without borrowing the taste of it.

the picture of the “Squirrel-Shaped Mandarin Fish”