Smart Cities

I’ve been leading my DH class on collaboration down a path from collaboration, through connected learning, personal learning and the exploration of new learning tools which mean that we hit the collaborative writing expertise at the same time as I raised the question of smart learning environments outside the university – the question of a Smart City as a learning environment.

There are, I think, two different ends to the idea of Smart Cities. One deals with the ‘Big Iron’ of digital infrastructures where large corporations can make money out of selling big solutions to city governments to make cities run better – or just to keep cities running at all, since it is so easy for them to break down.

The other end of the human end, from the bottom up, which focuses on people, learning as a process which we do everyday by finding new ideas to build resilient communities. This is the end I’m interested in.

I don’t think it is confined to the physical built up area that is a city either. As long ago as 1998, Barefoot Doctor pointed out in a memorable passage in his Handbook for the Urban Warrior:

“We are all urban now with our communications and transport web, we have created, through the combined force of all our ideas, one huge mother of a global urban sprawl. And you’re in it right now. Wherever you may be as you read this, no matter how remote or apparently isolated, you’re in it, part of a vast planetary web of population centres linked by planes, cars, boats, phone lines, electric cable, oil pipelines, microwave phones, radio waves, internet, television signals, satellite, postal services and homing pigeons.

You cannot escape. Resistance is futile. The only viable strategy is to accept it and make the most of it by enjoying every moment of it”

Putting great chunks of texts on powerpoint is a Bad Thing, but I got both the MA and BA classes to read this quote off the powerpoint – I enjoy watching them follow his logic down to the smile when they hit ‘and homing pigeons’

For me, in an Irish context, we don’t do cities as much as towns, villages and even smart farms. We are indeed ‘urban’ in the sense of being connected even in the cab of a tractor using touch screens to control agricultural machinery. For me, it seems ‘Smart Cities’ is a idea which needs to scale down to the level of communities of people. Dan Hill pointed out that “the city is about it’s people. We don’t make cities in order to make buildings and infrastructure. We make cities in order to come together to create wealth, culture” and in the same Handbook Barefoot Doctor pointed out that

“A city is the product of ideas. You have an idea to build a house. You instruct an architect to transform your idea into a more specific idea, who instructs a contractor to transform that into a building, which comprises various components like wiring and plumbing, which themselves are the result of ideas. This building stands in a street which is part of a road system which originated from an idea. You could say that the one cohesive factor in a city, this one thing that makes it a city, is the force of ideas.”

So it isn’t just about people, but people and ideas, and while historically it is true that cities tend to be hot houses for ideas, ideas also need space for reflection. If much of what we do is about learning by using digital tools to find and share ideas to fix problems, from trivial to serious then the idea of smart cities needs to support exploring and developing ideas. But to paraphrase Helen Keegan the question then becomes :

“What do you think our learning environments will look like the [cities] streets, villages, gardens and forests of the future?

( Barefoot Doctors Handbook for the Urban Warrior is still around, and worth buying; Townsends Smart Cities is in various formats, including Kindle )