WHY WHAT YOU THINK IS NOT HAPPENING?URBAN SETTINGS AND SOCIAL CONTEXT

MISMATCHED TOPICSby SKENDER KOLLCAKU

(Milan IT, 07/2017)

Be proud to call it home

“Over the past decades, cities across the continent, both big and small are striving to be economically

competitive, provide a high quality of life and create a place that people are proud to call home.”

"Why what you think is not happening? Urban settings and social context mismatched topics" by Skender Kollcaku

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Design a city which is not a computer

"Why what you think is not happening? Urban settings and social context mismatched topics" by Skender Kollcaku

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Capturing the “urban intelligence”

“Urban intelligence” is more than information storage, processing and transmission

While we assist to the following:

• attempts to program urban infrastructure in a predictive and ordered manner,

• starting from a zero existing block (building in the Internet era),

• planning all spatial solutions through digitization and visualization,

• centralize control in repetitive physical centers,

• local administration announces which demand scrutiny (politicians’ decisions impact us all - bureaucracy)

"Why what you think is not happening? Urban settings and social context mismatched topics" by Skender Kollcaku

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Design socially interactive neighborhoods

Real-life case:

I come from Kavaje, a small city in Albania. I lived near a big glass-production factory till 2001 (“Fabrika e qelqit”). At the time, myparents got unemployed after the Communism regime crashed andthe factory closed. My mother preserved her passion for hand-madeglassy objects.

• What if she opened a small shop with such products?

• What if she starts learning interested people about the glass production and creative art?

• How can the local community benefit from this?

• What is the symbolic and social value for the place itself (“social optimization” concept)?

"Why what you think is not happening? Urban settings and social context mismatched topics" by Skender Kollcaku

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After breaking the glass (the “Fabrika e qelqit” case)

“Fabrika e qelqit” (Kavaje, Albania) was an important factory where quality glass was produced. More than 1.200 employees used to work there.

"Why what you think is not happening? Urban settings and social context mismatched topics" by Skender Kollcaku

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Where to fit the city cultural memory?

"Why what you think is not happening? Urban settings and social context mismatched topics" by Skender Kollcaku

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Perfomativeknowledge

Ambient dataRituals,

celebrations

Dance and artistic events

Crowd happenings

Non semantic information

Identity and city vital organs

Quality public realm

Being (not) so smart

• Cities made of persistent terrains, and reliable environmental contain patterns that anchor all the unstructured data and image streams

• Numerous autonomous vehicles and pervasive cameras and sensors

• Advertising projects from important service players (public Cloud providers, multinational telecommunication operators…)

• Gathering huge amounts of data, but using them only to control the “inner” side of our cities

• Not considering privacy and security as a monumental concerns

• Lack of measuring the value of symbolic places (fixed architectures)

• Considering City-as-a-Service

"Why what you think is not happening? Urban settings and social context mismatched topics" by Skender Kollcaku

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Local community’s simple point of view

“How many years should I wait, before seeing public buses with support for pregnant women, transit in my

neighborhood?”

"Why what you think is not happening? Urban settings and social context mismatched topics" by Skender Kollcaku

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The challenge is being on time

With the rise of technological innovation and IoT, many things have changed, but:

• Slowly (give objectives in a limited quantity of time)

• Existing technology, but still not applied

• “Social” life of the connected objects (yet too many policies and standards)

• Unidirectional (in terms of profitability for businesses)

• Discriminatorily (some areas, usually city centers, are preferred than others)

• Forms of media communication (oral histories, physical and electronic records, archives, monuments…)

"Why what you think is not happening? Urban settings and social context mismatched topics" by Skender Kollcaku

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What to artificialize intelligently?

Illustration: Port of Hamburg, Germany's biggest seaport

"Why what you think is not happening? Urban settings and social context mismatched topics" by Skender Kollcaku

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Still not happening: altering the contexts

• Capability of transmitting a complex culture from generation to generation

• Enlarge the intellectual assets (examples: libraries)

• Community wisdom

• City as a complex organism that can learn

• Different approach from data-driven models when discussing about ethics (being careful when delegating decisions to machines)

• Long-term exposure to places (living for years in a neighborhood knowing its character)

• Sensory experiences (feeling community expressions and orientation; emotive conditions, anger, happiness, expectations…)

"Why what you think is not happening? Urban settings and social context mismatched topics" by Skender Kollcaku

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Crowd happenings and art generation to feed the cultural heritage

"Why what you think is not happening? Urban settings and social context mismatched topics" by Skender Kollcaku

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Illustration: Street art in a children park , round Bovisa quartier (Milan, Italy)

Thank you!

by SKENDER KOLLCAKU

(Milan IT, 07/2017)

keywords:

Milano, smart city, technology, IoT, urban innovation, city, Internet, Big Data, social, project, community, urban planning, future, connectivity, urban design, analytics, artificial intelligence,

infrastructure, city-as-a-service, neighborhood, interactive, public administration, art, heritage, local

"Why what you think is not happening? Urban settings and social context mismatched topics" by Skender Kollcaku

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