🐉 vs 🐒: KAIJŪ Communicator handbook

You are the guardian angel of the Smart City. In each issue, you see a flaw that can be repaired.

In this mode, you have to imagine how the action may solve the issue in relation with the specific place of the city you have chosen. Your solution has to generate positive externalities for the whole society.

You are one of the most prolific evil geniuses in town. In each issue, you see a potential flaw that, if exploited, could unleash chaos in the streets.

In this mode, you have to imagine how the action may aggravate the issue when linked with this particular place of the city. Your solution has to generate negative externalities for the entire community or for a specific population.

Make it a game. Set achievements. Earn points and badges. Impose the reign of fun. A gamified solution can foster motivation and involvement as well as constraining citizens’ behavior by telling them what has to be done and what is considered a success.

As social and physical environments are getting more and more complex, they may lack legibility. Making it visual succeeds when words fail to represent intricacies or to catch the attention of an audience. Visualizing reveals hegemonic processes and can highlight unexpected hidden interactions. But is it good to make everything transparent?

While digital and physical touchpoints are becoming more diverse across our life and our experience of the city, the simple fact of ensuring access is a first step towards equity. Then, there is the question of levels of access. Is it only about to be able to see something, to go somewhere or also to be able to have an impact on a situation?

Make it more human. This could mean to add a sense of community, desires or sensitive feedback, but also an ounce of irrationality, unpredictable emotions and antisocial behavior. It definitely could bring a new layer of unavoidable complexity.

Using digital devices and connected objects leaves traces. They are persistent artifacts of both our digital and physical presences in the hybrid urban spaces. These traces can be tracked and then recorded. Tracking and aggregating them may lead to anticipation and control.

Big buildings, big infrastructure and big ambitions. Things tend to grow, but the human scale remains unchanged. They are the symbol of our desire for an infinite expansion. Is it worth to see things a bit smaller?

New territories mean new identities, new identities mean new barriers and new borders. Containment has for long become a strategy to set points of reference, lines to not cross and elements to restrain. What or who will you contain? For what purpose?

Nowadays, things are programmed to go straightforward, not meaning they head for the right direction. You might help to set things right by hacking, tweaking, interfering and adding some glitches in the current processes. Start from the existing blocks and reconfigure them with your own adjustments.

Everything is going faster. This is not even a cliché anymore. Immediacy has become both a technological and a cultural expectation for connected things. What could be the outcomes if some processes were slowed down?

Good news, you are a brand. Bad news, everything has become kind of a brand. Marketing and brand content are pervasive and persuasive. As brands are joining forces in some unique ventures, what could be the next unexpected association in town?

Simplification is a necessity, but also a defense mechanism when having to handle a complex situation. Oversimplification may be driven by a lack of time, attention or rigor. Downside, it could lead to a wrong perception of reality. But seriously, who likes to deal with complex situations?

Cut it off from the network, from people, from space or from time. Think disconnection as an act of resistance or as an unwanted and endured situation. It is time to unplug things and people from the grid.

Forget about civilization. Unleash nature. Release wildness. Make it instinctive and primitive. Bring the animal back in the game.

Basically, it is all about turning something into a weapon, on purpose or not. Then, it grows into an instrument of power, reshaping established relations. Just remember, a weapon serves two goals, defense and attack. Which one would it be?

Before malls, there were shopping streets. Welcome to open-air streetside stores, offering both local products and global brands. Competition is harsh, some stores will survive while some others disappear without leaving any trace.

A green spot for recreational use and a conservation area for flora and fauna. Some of them even have nice playgrounds and highly allergenic pollen.

For all the last-minute grocery shoppers out there. Affordable products for everyday emergencies, longer opening hours, and a unique charm.

The smallest unit for commercial or informational purposes in the urban environment. Kiosks are also known to be hideouts for ill-used public touch screens.

Usually, located not very far away from the town hall and getting really crowded on celebration days. Also known as the best place in town for protests and demonstrations.

Not the most glamorous place in the city, but still one of the most badly needed. Public toilets provide a large range of hygienic issues, from bad smells to drug use. However, they are also a place of curious rituals such as posting classified or personal ads.

Affordable housing provided by State or non-profit organizations. In the old days, it was a progressive solution supporting social equity. Today, it is likely to be viewed as a neglected piece of the urban infrastructure, only depicted as a synonym for social troubles.

Where decisions are made. It hosts the representative governance of the city. It can reflect both the embodiment of a personified power and the place where transparency, accountability and collaboration stand for actionable values.

A place where everyone can access knowledge for free and without having one’s personal data sold. There are even rules to follow there, a bit old-fashioned if you ask.

Cars are still part of the urban landscape, with or without drivers. So are parking lots, being set in plain sight or buried underground. And what about a parking for bikes?

The main urban transportation hub, but also a small-scale city. It appears to be an inextricable mesh of accelerations and pauses, served by commercial services and supported by efforts to maintain a rational and efficient system.

Storing and showing artifacts which are not always coming from the past. More than any other place in the city, museums are facing questions about the transformation of spaces into lines of code as well as the challenges of digitizing physical artifacts.

As it was one of the foundations of antic cities, the architecture of places of worship keeps being a constant crossover between functionalism and spirituality. Temples, churches or mosques have been built as places for serenity, but age-old conflicts turned them into lightning rods for anger.

Public ways, mostly roads, accessible for everyone. These lanes are shared between an eclectic range of modes of transportation modes such as cars, drones, bikes, horses and even pedestrians. Yesterday ruled by laws, tomorrow by computer code.

By embedding sensors in the streets, the Smart City is under constant surveillance; monitored by public forces and private interests. Being able to track and record activities has erased the notion of anonymity promised by the urban structure and the crowd. Targeting marginality with these tracking systems is allowing to get rid of, physically and digitally, a specific population in a specific area.

Smart City logic is oriented on a proprietary philosophy. Using closed standards, it carefully picks whom to deal with among a list of designated institutional and business organisations or NGO. This is a locked environment led by market forces and strict partnerships, not by a collective experience. Don’t expect the permission to hack, to tweak or to fork the smart systems.

By integrating technologies into the urban fabric, it is bringing an intrinsic fragility to infrastructure initially protected from this vulnerability. In addition to the inherent risks of cyber-attacks, the absence of flexibility in the hardware and the lack of interoperability between the digital standards are leading to fatal errors. In every meaning of the word.

Smart City programs envisage the city as a concrete structure only. Soft textures of the city, such as subculture or invisible public are conscientiously forgotten. A Smart City is focused on efficiency as a final goal, not as a means to develop common goods. But a city goes beyond a simple ensemble of commodities and for sure deserves more than the promises of security, convenience or efficiency.

Designing the city smarter often means observing people behaviors from a bird’s-eye view, without focusing on the everydayness and the individual. It is missing the messiness of humanity, which will inevitably jam the quest for a perfect logical urban system. City builders are still learning that dealing with humans is all about unpredictability, wildness, irrationality or digital illiteracy.

Smart Cities feature the rise of situation rooms and control centers. These closed places provide a topdown control of the infrastructure, seeing the city through a dashboard. This centralized control and planning of urban facilities fail to stimulate incremental innovation by third parties. It can be considered governance by control rather than by community involvement.

From catalogs to streets, Smart Cities offer generic technologies without really caring about their adaptation to a precise context. Technological propositions from the Smart City provide cultural codes which are not necessarily fitting together with local values. If Smart Cities visions are rooted in a culture, it seems it is in a generic western lifestyle.

Greenwashing is an operational strategy in the Smart City sales pitch. With cities built from scratch and riddled with energy consuming devices, self-sustainability should be more than ever a primordial challenge. The promises of smart grids don’t stand in front the increase use of rare earth elements and their nonecological extraction in faraway lands.

Data-based decision culture takes roots into the over-reliance on digital technologies to solve social issues. Algorithms may be reassuring, but also create distance between policy makers and citizens; since data don’t foster empathy. Algorithms are not neutral, they embed ideologies and values from their creators. There is also a lack of transparency about which algorithms are used for decision-making.

This is both a governance and a democracy issue. Who is in charge in the Smart City? Elected representatives, technocrats, algorithms, or private partners? A Smart City is strongly dependent from its contractors and from outsourcing the updates of the urban tech infrastructure. It might lead to a lack of control in the liberalisation of and privatisation of public services.

Data can’t see everything. Even with a tight mesh of sensors, some urban activities are slipping away. Data also carry internal biases since they are a cultural construction, shaped by the choices made during the collecting and parsing processes of data. Looking for perfect knowledge is an unreachable goal, data providing only a biased and incomplete view of society.

Automation of the urban infrastructure is taking away responsibilities from citizens. Constraining behaviors with new kinds of reward or rule systems envisages citizens as consumers only. Smart City also fails at the necessary training of citizens to ethical stakes implied by tech in the city, preventing them from reclaiming control or assessing the smart infrastructure. So, what about smart citizens?

Smart Cities are not so different from classical computers. They are going to need vital updates for their software and hardware parts. Facing the challenge of getting old at the age of fast technological evolution, Smart Cities should start to stockpile spare parts to fix their future issues at the risk of becoming obsolete quicker than ever.

The use of militarized technologies such as drones or sensors to make streets safer could also undermine resistance or protests against a local government. While security is becoming the main goal to fulfill, digital defensible spaces and crowd control strategies find an echo in the central management of city resources. Someone has already had his finger on the urban kill switch.