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Algorithmic city, Sicilian style

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I’m all for making data work for San Francisco, a city I know well and which strives to be “smart.” But then I think of Palermo, Sicily, a city I know a little bit. It has similar aspirations, but they start from a much different place — with a warm, rich indigenous culture that’s not so easily handled by algorithms.

A few years back at my relative’s house in Sicily just west of Palermo, eleven people crowded around her kitchen table about 9 on a Wednesday night. They joked, talked, nibbled, drank a little bit of my cousin’s white table wine.… Read the rest “Algorithmic city, Sicilian style”

Data driven but wabi-sabi driven, too

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The get “smart” these days, city leaders usually beef themselves up with a network of sensors. They become a city of things, wired and tuned. Unfortunately, that alone doesn’t make a city a nice place to be. For that, you also need wabi-sabi.

It’s a Japanese thing, and like so much of Japanese culture that Westerners like, it’s hard to explain.

I picked up a little book, on Seth Godin’s recommendation, that does a pretty good job of explaining. It’s Leonard Koren’s Wabi-Sabi, for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers.

“Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete,” it says on the first page.… Read the rest “Data driven but wabi-sabi driven, too”

Cities / Too much “smart” can make you dumb

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Richard Sennett’s new book, Buildings and Dwellings, has a new variety of ambivalence about so-called “smart cities.” It’s one I hadn’t heard.

From the Los Angeles Review of Books’ review:

Referring to smart cities that use technology to dictate city life and surveil citizens, he warns, “By using machines, people would stop learning. They would become stupefied. The prescriptive smart city is a site for this stupefaction.”

But there might be a kind of “smart” that actually makes people, not machines, smarter.

Sennett, though, holds out hope for technology that can “coordinate” urban life, by exposing citizens to new ideas and enabling them to understand their worlds and voice their opinions more clearly than they currently can.

… Read the rest “Cities / Too much “smart” can make you dumb”