As cities grow and expand they are obliged to play catch-up with existing transportation technology, successively refitting themselves with systems that do not love them; urban space has been rent and scarred by railways and freeways, clogged and scored by pollution and metal.[1] As cities become smarter more and more layers of complex systems and technologies are built onto them; however, new technologies come at the price of diminishing public space.

As I have mentioned in my previous posts, we should not be judging how smart cities are just by the technologies that they implement. We can put all the technology we want into the city, but these efforts will be fruitless if people will not be able to live in it. A perfect example of this is Masdar City, it has all the imaginable technology but lacks the human character of cities that begins with face to face interactions.[2] Therefore, production of public space should be the central concern when developing infrastructure for smarter cities.

Open Source Urbanism described by Alberto Corsin Jimenez will be the most useful in promoting the common good, because it creates a system designed and managed by citizens eliminating the possibility of infrastructure serving the interests of a small group of people. The most exciting thing about open source urbanism is that in ensures high standards of produced infrastructure by implementing a recursive approach and preserving a permanent beta condition[3] i.e. always leaving room for improvement. Open source urbanism will enable us to create infrastructure that will better serve the needs of the community; Open source approach will also rule out the chance of encountering legacy systems due to the recursive improvement by people for people.

The transition to open source infrastructure is not going to be an easy one and it will definitely pose some challenges. One of the first things that will need to be done when implementing a large open source, peer-to-peer platform is reaching a consensus over methods, protocols, and standards;[4] this is will not only prevent the existence of incompatible systems but will enable us to create smart, universal systems capable of maintaining themselves by analyzing the data received from different parts of the infrastructure (as every part of the open source platform will speak the same language). Another thing that needs to be considered is the ease of making changes – in an open source project a community assumes political and expert management over its infrastructures – a mechanism controlling the ease of making changes will need to be implemented to protect the infrastructure from trolls that will try breaking the system just for the fun of it.

I think Portland could really benefit from the open source infrastructure and crowdsourcing ideas. Crowdsources data could be used by developers for creating efficient transportation apps that would be able to talk to the city infrastructure. Open source urbanism will spark innovation and create more incentive for city dwellers to actively participate in city life, knowing that their voices will be heard and their ideas considered.

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Citations

1.Sorkin, Michael. 2014 [1999]. “Traffic in Democracy.” In The People, Place and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, et al, 413. New York: Routledge, 2014.

2.Sorkin, Michael. 2014 [1999]. “Traffic in Democracy.” In The People, Place and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, et al, 413. New York: Routledge, 2014.

3.Jiménez, Alberto Corsín. 2014. “The Right to Infrastructure: a Prototype for Open Source Urbanism.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (2): 343.

4.Jiménez, Alberto Corsín. 2014. “The Right to Infrastructure: a Prototype for Open Source Urbanism.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (2): 343.