When thinking about options for “smart” housing, my mind immediately jumps to the Crowley’s “system of systems.”[1]  The house would be designed to be extremely energy, time and ideally cost, efficient. In some ways, this could also be linked with the common good, namely a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. When I was in Denmark, I visited the headquarters of the Danish national energy transmission operator, Energinet. Their latest innovation was the “Smart Grid” – a house that was wired to reach maximum energy efficiency. The house would have solar panels that would contribute energy to the grid. All the appliances would have monitors that would run them at the most efficient time of day. For example, your laundry would begin at the time of day that had the lowest overall energy demand on the grid, and this would correspond to the times when the most energy going towards your task came from renewable energies. The incentive would be cost – the device told you the savings you would have if you waited to run the appliance. The difference between the “Smart Grid” and Crowley’s system however, is the social media element. Like we had discussed in class, the utilization of Twitter has both the potential for shaming, and the gathering of personal information for targeted marketing. Seeing as the home is often valued as a private space, the possibility of enabling public data collection to come out of the home itself can be jarring. It places the private space of the home in the virtual public space of the internet.

Returning to the idea of the Danish “Smart Grid,” it is important to note that it is made possible because all Danish energy comes from a single, public supplier. This makes it advantageous for everyone to contribute to a central grid, with the aim of reducing overall costs. In a capitalist society, particularly one that is moving towards privatizing housing, this would be much harder to enable. I fear that as houses get “smarter,” there will be an even larger gap between housing quality and availability among different classes. As we read in Fields and Uffer, the privatization of rental housing can lead to rent hikes, neglect for lower-rent housing, and the pushing of maintenance costs on to renters.[2] These factors contribute to the eviction of lower-income families to make way for people who can afford the units, and this leads to gentrification. We learned from Smith’s piece that the idea of moving into a previously low-income neighborhood is seen as romantic and appealing, analogous with the taming of the “Wild West.”[3]  Smart housing is at risk of becoming another mechanism in which to structurally limit opportunities for the poor, as housing not only becomes more costly for as a result of its location, it also becomes more costly for its infrastructure.

So what would be a useful form of smart city housing? I believe one that has a monitoring system that helps the inhabitant live more efficiently, particularly energy efficiently. It should not however, use social media as an alert mechanism, and should not collect personal information about the user. Unfortunately, I cannot think of a smart housing suggestion that contributes to the common good apart from environmental consciousness – at least not until this infrastructure can be made available in all housing regardless of class.

[1] Crowley, David N., Edward Curry, and John G. Breslin. 2014. “Leveraging Social Media and IoT to Bootstrap Smart Environments.” InBig Data and Internet of Things: A Roadmap for Smart Environments, edited by Nik Bessis and Ciprian Dobre, 379-99. Springer.http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-05029-4_16.

[2] Fields, Desiree, and Sabina Uffer. 2014. “The Financialisation of Rental Housing: A Comparative Analysis of New York City and Berlin.”Urban Studies, July. 13.

[3] 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, 314-319. New York: Routledge, 2014.