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Jane Jacobs once argued that, to build a successful street, “there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. These eyes are equipped to handle strangers and to ensure the safety of both residents and strangers.”

Recently, I discussed a question with several friends: Do you think it problematic if the government sets up electronic eyes in ALL public spaces in the name of security, despite its promise that it won’t snoop on any personal realm? Most of my respondents said that “it’s wired, but I can’t point out the problem”, while one claimed that “I welcome that, for it makes me feel safe.” As our activities have the potential to be seen in public spaces, I think the problem does not lie in the assumption that we will be constantly watched by electronic eyes, but that when our movements and behaviors are recorded, how will the government utilize the data. This assumption is not far from the reality. According to a series documentary called Amazing China broadcasted by CCTV, by 2018, China has set up the largest video monitoring network—Tianwang—in the world. Nowadays, there are more than 20 million cameras in the whole nation, and prediction of police affairs could be conducted with the help of AI and big data.

The monitoring system-Tianwang in China

Surveillance cameras on a corner of Tiananmen Square

As the number of video camera in the public spaces becomes a significant criteria in measuring the grade of modernity and public security of a city, and many of us are normally told that mass surveillance is for fighting against crime, regulating undeniable behaviors and protecting our safety in public, we largely neglect the fact that it is at the cost of our privacy. Unlike European Union countries where strong legal protections for the privacy of personal information have been well established, “privacy is a new luxury in most of the urban Asia”, including in China. A lack of awareness of privacy may generate companies’ abusive collection of personal information. I remember that when I was traveling to Weizhou Island in Guangxi, I was required to have a facial recognition before getting on board, by the passenger port company rather than the local government. Although its official website says that the recognition is to prevent illegal ticket scalping and find out the escaping criminals, I doubt whether it is a “must” to have my face recorded if I just get on the ship for once.

facial recognition payment

When facial recognition technology is used without our knowledge or against our will, it becomes an instrument of surveillance. Recently, Hangzhou Wild Animal Zoo set facial recognition as the new check-in approach without the consent of customers. Dissatisfied with the alternation, a professor charged the zoo and won the case (Read here: https://www.sohu.com/a/433404376_362042). Yet for more ordinary people, they either think little about the harm of abusive collection of personal information or they unconsciously allow machines to record their faces or fingerprints.

In the Weizhou Island case, no one at that time resisted the facial recognition, for all of us concerned merely about getting on board as quickly as we can and there were no alternatives besides having our faces recorded. The company even praised its machines as “convenient, efficient, and advanced”, concealing the hinder dangers if our information is sold to other retailers or accidentally leaks. In some Pornhub videos, faces and expressions of celebrities were maliciously grafted on the body of porn stars, almost like the real one. Imagine if those are faces of app users and citizens, will technologies turn around to control us?

Today, a nascent movement of civic hackers, artists, and entrepreneurs have begun to find their own uses and their own designs for smart cities. While lots of the technology giants building smart cities are mostly paying more attention to technology, not people, mostly focused on cost-effectiveness and efficiency, mostly ignoring the creative process of harnessing technology at the grassroots, Townsend mentioned that truly applications of new information technologies have almost always come from the bottom up. He reckoned that the grassroots are more willing to use new technology and to innovate.

In Chapter 4 , Townsend used the web map called “Dodgeball” as an example to show us a new form of mobile social application which is called crowdsourcing today. This reminds me of Dianping, which is a platform that focus on the communication and aggregation of urban consumption experience. All the information that posted on Dianping is generated by its users and the information also serves the users.  Dianping  combined with the geographical position and netizens personalized consumer demand, offer anywhere at any time of catering, shopping, leisure and life service areas such as business information, consumer preference and consumption evaluation of the interactive platform via internet. It has become a necessary tool for people’s life in urban areas especially among the young people.

On the platforms like Dianping, people could exchange their information about their favorite restaurants and their recommend dishes. Instead of making people stuck in the world of Internet, it has stimulated offline consumption. People would be willing to drive across the city or even travel to another city to find the food that posted on Dianping. Urban economists believe that cities thrive because they create opportunities for people to interact for commerce and entertainment. But it takes someone who intuitively understands cities to create a new way of doing that for the whole world to use. Jan Jacobs’s book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, glorified how good streets create opportunities for people to meet by chance. Mumford described the city as a fundamentally communicative space, rich in information. Thus, apps like Dianping are acting as engines to amplify that serendipitious potential, by constantly prodding us to get up to make new friends.

However, Townsent mentioned that there is a challenge that people would be blocked out side the smart cities. Nothing works until they connect, register and log in. We might all come across the problem that we have give our information like phone number, Wechat ID to get access to the apps. Moreover, we have to give up our privacy to get the service from those apps. For example, if we turn off the positioning, I would not get the information in the area of my position. Though lots of people would be unhappy about that, they would still turn it on to get the service. This would threat people’s right of privacy.

In conclusion, though we are experiencing the convenience of the development of smart cities that generated by crowdsourcing apps like Dianping,  we need to build a systematic evaluation of social sustainability into the planning of new smart-city service. Once we have a sense of the risks, mitigating measures can be designed.

 

As the book’s introduction says, we have witnessed the tremendous changes that digital technology brought to society, but the transformation “is just getting started”- ubiquitous digital technology will continue to shape our world and our lifestyle. Urban life in the modern society is largely driven by technology, internet, and electronic infrastructures, and in fact, the convenience brought by the digital revolution are now being regarded as a major feature and advantage of urban life. The author traced the historical developments of the formation of smart city, which is very novel to read because our generation don’t have a complete understanding of this macroscopic evolution that brought about huge changes.

Clearly, digital technology accelerates the pace of life in the city and connects everything more closely. The Bryant Park mentioned by the author is a good example. “Disconnected, it was a place for office workers to relax. Connected, it had become a digital waiting room for the massive subway station beneath it.” With the coverage of Wi-Fi, it had a totally different role in the city’s transit system. However, the advancement of such technology also accelerates the inequality in modern society by widening the difference in life between urban and rural residents. When you are accustomed to enjoying the wireless network and electronic technology equipment that can be seen everywhere in the city, it would be difficult to accept the intermittent network in the countryside, let alone adapt to the life without convenient delivery services. This problem cannot be blamed on the defects of the infrastructure in rural areas-after all, from a realistic point of view, the ROI of investment on rural infrastructure construction is much lower.

Here comes to the close relationship between the digital technology with business and public affairs. The innovation and large-scale application of digital technology require a lot of capital, so commercial interests and competition play an important role in this process. In the case of Wi-Fi, many big wireless companies and start-ups wanted to “muscle in and turned public spaces into a commercial battleground”. (pp. 130) Additionally, it made the government to reinvent the infrastructure which could provide citizens with good service. After witnessing the rapid development of the Wi-Fi industry by major enterprises, the governments then begun to build related infrastructure to meet people’s demand. It also reminds me of a recent report about 6G, which showed the fact that China has launched the first 6G satellite in the world. ( Read more here) As we all know, 5G is still in its infancy and most mobile devices still use 4G for network. It seems difficult for people to imagine life with 6G technology. Maybe the network will become very fast at that time, bringing a seamless network connection experience. But obviously, this kind of technological innovation is not mainly driven by the actual needs of people in daily life – it bears more political meaning. To some extent, the research and development of digital technologies have become a battlefield for competitions between the world’s great powers.

The world’s first 6G satellite (Cr. Xinhua News Agency)

This week, we read about the thoughts on smart cities. With the rapid development of the internet, people have become more and more used to technology intervention in their lives. Although privacy is always concerned by internet users, the trend of letting all kinds of apps and websites gain our personal information has never stopped. The construction of a smart city cannot be divorced from the application of information technology.” According to what we read this week, the smart city operates in a way in which modern technology permeates every aspect of citizens’ lives. The operation of the city relies heavily on the calculation of big data. And as Shannon Mattern writes in her article, “Our current paradigm, the city as a computer, appeals because it frames the messiness of urban life as programmable and subject to rational order.” One of the most typical actions of building a computer-like is the health QR code we are using every day. As China stepped into the post-epidemic era, the control of the spread of the virus has become more and more restricted. The methods to gain information on citizens’ movements have become very systematic and complete. It is undeniable that the application of the “health QR code” effectively monitored the whereabouts of the citizens and thus enables the government to cope with the virus more timely. By this time, I believe most of the Chinese people have adapted to the ubiquitous “health QR code”, and would consciously show it before entering any public place, and cooperate with the efficient epidemic prevention measures brought by this technology.

However, as most citizens enjoy the safety brought by the “health QR code,” it may be hard for us to realize that this technology marginalizes certain groups of people. Although a huge impact always accompanies the arrival of new technologies on existing personal habits and cognitions, their impact on different age groups is extremely uneven: the young generation who have grown up in rapid development are often more willing and able to get started with new technologies faster, and then enjoy its convenience; while those older generations may need more time to get familiar with the new technology feel at a loss for the overwhelming, fast-changing technological products. A new report about how an old man was refused to take the bus because he didn’t have the cell phone to show his “health QR code” aroused public attention on the internet. People questioned the rationality of requiring a safe green “health QR code” to access all public facilities. However, similar cases are happening every day as the skillful application of modern technology and mobile phones’ possession becomes essential to make a living in an “intelligent” society. Not all people could afford a cell phone or could adapt to the new technology as quickly as others. Due to the lack of basic access to the complex online world, they are unable to express and speak at all, and they have become invisible in the modern technology-based society.

（volunteers helping old people to register the health QR code）

We may all imagine that living in a smart city means living in a more rational way in which everything runs orderly and efficiently. But there always remind question about who are the beneficiaries of the efficiency and convenience brought by the order. The construction of the smart city is based on the prioritization of certain standards such as degrees of familiarity with new technology and the ability to learn new skills. I believe we should be vigilant about such prioritization and always pay close attention to those people who might be eliminated in this process.

There is a popular misrecognition of modern city: city is a computer. Algorithm such as big data and network would bring regulation, order and innovation to the city and form the city life. In other words, city is an object that can be totally coded. Technology does found a solid basis of city planning. The concept of “smart city”, which refers to the automation of city that should be achieved by complex algorithm, codes and smart technology, announced the importance of technology and the possibility of technological regulation. There is a video introducing the digitization of Hangzhou from public health to traffic congestion (link is here). One specific example is the use of health ID barcodes based on Alibaba cloud to track the spread of covid-19. The digitized city-management system is also applied in other areas such as public resources, municipal services, tourism, etc. Government use information technology to regulate and improve citizens’ life, from another perspective, technology helps to foster a better relationship between government and citizen communities. Hangzhou is not the only case, of course. Smart city is all around the globe. Internet of things is now the infrastructure of a city that connects everything including buildings, citizens, transportation and mass media. However, this does not mean that cities can be totally arranged by technological machine. Though the example of health ID barcodes showed the result of algorithm that citizens’ routines are arranged by programming, interpersonal communication can never be the mere data. Health ID barcodes can decided where you can go or cannot go, but it can never prevent the communication between two persons. Algorithm can predict the possible behavior of a community, but it is still a kind of fiction. Also, it can never reach our brain to calculate our emotions and minds. Data is cold, but human is not.

 

City is an organic ecosystem in which both human and technology are communicated and intertwined. Technology provides the space for human performance and nearly forms everything that human use to satisfy their daily needs. From infrastructure like internet and cable to specific products like smartphone and digital media, in the modern cities, communication is set up on this bridge of technology. However, the subjectivity of citizens, or in other words, their agency cannot be ignored. Citizens do have their freedom to decide which channel they want to access, who they want to contact and when they will act. There is no denying that the restriction of technology does not work, for instance, people cannot talk with someone through whatsapp when internet breaks down, however, the procedure of app cannot force you to talk with someone for a certain long time with your enthusiasm. Human agency is not the data that can be written into codes. Therefore, as long as city is somewhere human live, whatever the smart technology is, it never becomes a computer but a mixture with flesh and data.

China is well-known for the strict policy on public security. Since the economic reform in 1979, the goal of maintaining the general social stability was manifested in the official documents and government guideline. Such policy has generated both positive and negative effects in modern China. It is, on one hand, essential in order to provide a stable environment for the economy to grow without interruptions from malignant incidents in large scale; on the other hand, it has generated discontent as its enforcement was rigid and even inhumane for which it received backfire that worsen the situation. One of the most criticized measures taken to execute the policy is surveillance. The “Skynet Project” is a national surveillance network that deploys more than 20 million public security cameras all around the country. Administrated by the police department, the network aims to detect criminal activities and track fugitives. Public has long been concerned about the fact that theses camera, as they were installed everywhere, might invade individual’s privacy. But the officials claimed that these cameras were used solely for the purpose of maintaining security and that “if you did not do something wrong, you have nothing to worry about”. Despite such statement, the public are still worried that the information gathered through these surveillance might be used for other purposes. Indeed, the “Skynet Project” receives technological support from corporations like Tencent, Huawei, ZTE and Bytedance and so on. It is normal that the public might concern data leaks as a lot of these firms encountered before. The project also received backlash as these security cameras seem unreliable and malfunctioning every time the recorded incidents related to official institutes and government officials. There is a phrase “the surveillance was down” mentioned by Chinese netizens as social incidents being discussed on the Internet. It seems to become the excuse for government to hide the truth from the public. With such statement circulated frequently, public’s trust to the government and CCP deteriorates greatly.

The mass surveillance also expanded to school where students were observed during classes. In 2019, a high school in Guangzhou installed a surveillance system that can detect the facial expressions of students in order to find students who do not pay attention in class. When the news about the system came out Chinese Internet was shocked by how insensitively and inhumane the system operates. It treats students as objects that can only be defined by mere facial expressions.