I return to the theme of the smart city. In the middle of the technological era, Smart City's digital formalism will often collide with the everyday informality of city life, that is, from now on, it will be absolutely necessary to reinvent everyday experiences, the design of public space and the spirit of places .
Let's look at some features of the smart city lifecycle:
– We already know that the smart city is a privileged meeting place between technology, ecology and humanity, our drama is to find this rare point of balance and all the more since we do not always have enough ingenuity and art to do so; the terms of this equation have cycles of very variable duration and this fact is at the origin of our main problems; technology has very short innovation cycles and often accelerates, leaving many people behind, ecology has much longer cycles, but more and more frequent and intense severe episodes, humanity, which until recently breathed in the rhythm of intergenerational cycles, feels now too confused by the mismatch of technology and ecology.
– We already know that the intelligent city of the future is a hybrid product of rational, emotional and artificial intelligence, but also of individual intelligence and collective intelligence; it is this hybridization that will allow the production of very varied content and, also, of various symbolic, artistic and cultural expressions that are so many distinctive signs of the intelligent city.
– We already know that the smart city will have an urban modulation very different from the current one, with increasing impacts on the infrastructure and architecture of the city; beyond the conventional functions of material equipment, we will see urban modeling acquire a more immaterial versatility and multifunctionality and extend the city's perimeter beyond its more tangible limits towards a more intelligent, polycentric and circular city.
– We already know that the smart city will be much more than a mere product of capitalist greening and human ecology much more than a mere by-product of ecological modernization, despite the multiple misunderstandings and misunderstandings that will emerge regarding environmental justice and around the urban perimeter and in the peri-urban rings of the modernist city.
– We already know that the smart city will present its own aesthetic inherent to digital culture that will be reflected in the organization of its public space, in the sense of a more imaginative scenography and choreography and in the appeal to creative talents to create a distinctive language for the city; One of the new facets of the city will be the creation of many collaborative platforms for citizen or civil initiative that will revolutionize the administration of local and regional territories.
The smart city, the genius and the spirit of the places
There is a lot of work to be done to make the smart city of the future a genuine smart and creative city and not just a digital machine serving a certain technocratic and ultramodern city idea. Everything suggests that due to the irreverence and creativity of the human community that inhabits it, the smart city will have non-places, hyper-places and third-places, but also unique places where the genius of the place and the reinvention of the world.
If not, let's see:
– Firstly, there is no technological determinism, nor is there a brave new world glued to the digital city, I mean, there are many ways to conceive the smart and creative city beyond the merely digital city.
– Secondly, the public space and the spirit of the places will have a very direct relationship with the city limits or the geography of political governance, for example, the dosage between representative democracy, participatory and collaborative democracy, what can be termed as the new digital architecture of power; the digital transformation starts by changing the relationship between the back office and the front office from the municipal administration and progressively form two intelligent and complementary cities, the centralized city in the form of a citizen's store and the co-produced city in the form of a decentralized network of collaborative platforms.
– Thirdly, data will be the new raw material of the smart city, so the city is, in the first instance, good connectivity (a good 5G connection), good calculating ability (big data e cloud computing) and good analytical definition (algorithms and predictive profiles); that is, the city of the future will be, simultaneously, a city of circulation, consumption and communication, but also a city of literature and culture, of poetry and freedom.
– Fourthly, the genius and spirit of places will collide, sooner or later, with hyperspeed, hypervigilance, hyperconsumption and hyperindividualism, that is, the smart city will also have to be the city of public spaces and of meeting points where the joy of neighbors and visitors is manifested, in clear counterpoint with the dissolution of places in media and virtual spaces.
– Fourthly, the smart city will have to permanently promote the reinvention of everyday life, give the imagination a central place, mobilize the various heritages as protection and projection of our memories, design the city's routes through its most distinctive signs, promote the events that the city deserves, that is, reinventing the genius and spirit of its symbolic places.
– Fifthly, the smart city, if it wants to function fully, will have to promote digital literacy in all its areas, but to the right extent, so as to avoid digital addition and alienation; as the dominant icon of the smart city, the smartphone, the greatest symbol of non-place and hyper-place, the symbol of our ubiquity and real virtuality, signals us, at all times, that “our absence” is, for very disturbing because we are never where we are physically.
The smart city and new everyday places
Modernity and globalization have dissipated the spirit of places through an increasing functionality, homogeneity and uniformity of city models. Thus, the uniqueness of many places disappeared and their enchantment was lost.
However, we do not want the smart city to be a non-place and the citizen to be a simple digitized individual. The reinvention of everyday places is therefore a real categorical imperative.
Otherwise let's see:
– Non-places (Augé, 1992) are spaces of many people and no one, spaces with a lot of circulation and also a lot of anonymity; we are talking about airports, stations, large boulevards, public squares, shopping centers, car parks, but also large hotel chains or even, as is visible today, large refugee camps; Basically, we are talking about circulation and transit spaces where the plane, the car, the train, the ship or the bus dominate. Non-place is the opposite of a neighborhood dwelling, residence, or meeting place.
Marc Augé tells us about an anthropology of supermodernity on the way to an anthropology of solitude. In the end, non-places are places of circulation, consumption and communication, but uniform, general and monotonous. In non-place we are all the same, copies of each other, solitary individuals.
– The hyper-places (Lussault, 2017), where Augé saw, in 1992, a non-place of solitude, Lussault now sees an intense, hyper-connected, multi-scale and emotionally very rich place; moreover, hyper-places can also be other-places and alternative places, that is, places of demonstration and protest, random places like squares, parks and public streets; in this immense plurality of places there are movements such as slow food and economic degrowth; finally, Lussault highlights the importance of online communities for initiating and rooting new offline movements and communities.
– The Third Places (Oldenburg, 1989), Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Places, is about an urban sociology of everyday life, a chemistry of places in our daily routine, from the barber to the bookshop, from the coffee shop to the neighborhood store, from bar to neighborhood restaurant; between places of work and residence, third-places are places of relaxation, hospitality and the culture of healthy sociability, the perfect places to exercise the micro freedoms of our daily lives.
– Coworking spaces (De Koven, 1999), with coworking spaces the city transports us from familiar places to the collaborative spaces of the technological and digital society of the XNUMXst century; we are talking about a wide variety of collaborative spaces with different names – studios, ateliers, hubs, factories, parks, academies, shared offices – used by micro-enterprises, individual entrepreneurs, liberal professionals, independent workers and digital nomads; the use of common spaces lowers the fixed costs of real estate, increases the connection between everyone and gives rise to a creative spirit and entrepreneurial opportunities.
– The art of the place (Schultz, 1997), in the words of the architect Christian Schultz, the spirit of the place will become “the art of the place”, an art that cultural and tourist marketing will take advantage of to segment, differentiate and commercially exploit.
In fact, metropolises and big cities eagerly seek in architecture, great works of art and urban ecology a source for the mystery and spirit of places, against the boredom and melancholy of the great vertical cities.
Final Notes
For sociologist Manuel Castells, financial capitalism and digital capitalism pushed us towards the information society. People still live in spaces of places, but as power and its functions are organized in information flows, the dynamics of places are profoundly altered. The space of flows becomes predominant and this “real virtuality” will substantiate the informational city.
As a result of this virtualization, urban spaces are increasingly differentiated in social terms and the correlative development of this trend is the formation of metropolitan megacities.
However, the space of places does not disappear and due to the growing mobility and flexibility of the work modalities, places become more unique and also closer. We are, therefore, in full digital nomadism and in a regime of topolygamy.
The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman will say, in turn, that this growing nomadism leads us to the liquid city where everything is transient, transitory and ephemeral. It is time that dominates, we are in the middle of the city of speed. The spirit of places is no longer obtained from their substance, but from their itinerancy; instead of the essence of a place, the individual/consumer is invited to participate in a series of events held in a non-place or a hyper-place.
Arriving here, the smart city will perhaps already be full of non-places, hyper-places and third-places built from an intense dialectic between spaces of flux and spaces of places. The most likely is that we even have a chaotic situation and a real cacophony of everyday life and instead of the mystery and spirit of the place we will most likely have the routine and melancholy of everyday life.
This is the paradox that presides over everyday life, between banality and alienation and the freedom and invention of everyday life. And beyond the tedium and monotony of everyday life, there are also the gestures of nobility and the micro freedoms of everyday life that often surprise us, not to mention the frequent events that relieve us of the pain of melancholy and loneliness.
And, by the way, may the smart city learn the lessons of covid19, the prudent city, and use its intelligence and prudence towards other forms of sociability and conviviality.
Author António Covas is a Retired Full Professor at the University of Algarve
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