Thank you for the responses.
Another wide topic is urban food production. Some interesting success cases to share? Besides the case mentioned above.
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Thank you so much to @BasBoorsma and @gordonfeller â and @RobvanKranenburg too for doing this AMA!
What I learned is this: the grim: âhigh modernistâ stance of 10 years ago is no more. We are left with the idea of a dusting of digital to enhance the dynamics of healthy cities.
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this was fun! thanks to all â and esp. for everyoneâs participation and engagement
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Yes thank for the great discussion. I was composing something here while trying to keep up. Much of what I had been thinking about was covered in one way or another. But here goes anywayâŚ
Hi John, can you elaborate on âordinary peopleâ, and "powerfulâ technologies? Define it a bit?
Hi Rob. That was me up there using a different account. what I think I was getting at with that statement/question is about public-private partnerships and their impact. And I think Gordon pretty well interpreted it as âtech choices made by government executives.â
One aspect is, what is the arena in which the partnership operates? There are different kinds. military and road building come to mind. And now these so-called âsmart cityâ approaches.
With the military, you have large amounts of tax money plus high public buy-in for equipment far too sophisticated and dangerous for anyone in the public to operate. So we trust them to do it, and we can pretty well get what itâs about: protection, killing and/or deterring more effectively. Roads and bridges are huge partnerships, but since we all use the roads and they are rather straightforward, we the public have a good understanding of how they work and when they donât work and why.
With highly sophisticated info and data tech, much about how it works is not that well understood by the public generally (not being that scientific or engineering oriented) and often not so much by the elected officials who authorize their deployment. And I think we agree that IoT tech deployed in public spaces has a kind of built-in political component. And we know it is in the interest of the private side for the public to develop a strong appetite for the new technology. You see this with 5G in the USA market. There is saturation advertising extolling the vast benefits and fun world that awaits us all. So public hopefully applies pressure to have it. (And potential downsides to the tech will not be mentioned, such as the fact that no health studies have been done about 5G.)
Unfortunately, elected officials who oversee all this tech for the public, also have to address the situation when it goes wrong. A fight over hot vs cold spots could be one of those areas.
Then new laws and rules come in and they can be âblunt instrumentsâ that overreach and lack sensitivity to the variety of applications in use. This is going on with the âSection 230â debate right now with the US Congress on the verge of revoking the whole protection for online services to punish the bad behavior primarily of Facebook.
So if government gets sold a bunch of tech that later creates unforseen problems that they then have to deal with, the law wonât really fit the problem that well.
Maybe too Rob is right - if you open up the data the problems get mitigated because a lot of good attention then gets paid to itâŚ
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I will join the live chat on March 29th, 18:00 CEST