One thing Desiree Fields and Sabine Uffer make abundantly clear: treating housing as a liquefied asset with no conception of it as a place where people live is sure to lead to trouble. Common welfare is quickly left by the wayside, people are forced out of their homes, housing and neighborhoods become socioeconomically stratified. Housing is intimately tied to people’s lives and livelihoods, and the two cannot be separated. However, ignoring the broader market in which housing can be a form of capital is not a viable solution. [1]
In terms of promoting the common good, we have not only to consider the prosperity and diversity of a neighborhood, but also its history. Neil Smith says that the new pioneers of gentrification “seek to scrub the city clean of its working-class geography and history,” and in doing so erase and edit parts of the city’s social history. [2] This is not to say that dilapidated buildings must be carefully upheld in their state of deterioration, but that as the city changes it respects and acknowledges what is being left behind temporally. Both Fields and Smith call for a more holistic view to urban housing developments. All parties must be accounted for.
It is in the “holistic view” concept that I begin to doubt the realistic execution of David Crowley’s vision of the smart city. A space that “maximizes the requirements of the users” is not one destined for 100% success in any public setting. [3] The holistic view includes those who do not believe that people’s actions have a measurable effect on climate change. These people have significantly less incentive to change their behavior and act as sensors in smart buildings. Realistically, it seems that if the system relies on maximum participation, it should be paired with a system of incentive or penalty to stimulate usage.
Control of housing should come at a state level, and not be left open enough for profiteers to have access to existing communities. In Portland, the holistic view means taking into account not only the tourist industry that helps the city to thrive in the summer months, but the city’s year round residents. The holistic view means working actively to provide housing to people who come to Portland seeking it— even if they really don’t look like “Mainers.”
[1] Fields, Desiree, and Sabina Uffer. 2014. “The Financialisation of Rental Housing: A Comparative Analysis of New York City and Berlin.” Urban Studies, July.
[2] Smith, Neil. 2014 [1996]. “‘Class Struggle on Avenue B’: The Lower East Side as the Wild Wild West.” In The People, Place and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, et al, 318. New York: Routledge, 2014.
[3] Crowley, David N., Edward Curry, and John G. Breslin. 2014. “Leveraging Social Media and IoT to Bootstrap Smart Environments.” In Big Data and Internet of Things: A Roadmap for Smart Environments, edited by Nik Bessis and Ciprian Dobre, 379. Springer. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-05029-4_16.