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E-book Equality in the City : Imaginaries of the Smart Future

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Penilaian

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Equality in the city is an aspiration. Cities have never been equal, equitable or fair. Now, optimum efficiency is celebrated as progress, and reconfigurations of urban spaces are focused on the clean lines of punctual service delivery. Smart cites are controlled cities, where data is the fuel that pumps through the heart. The common denominator in smart city rhetoric is the assumption that organization, planning and programmability will provide optimum conditions for comfortable urban life. Yet some aspects of our cities and our lives within them will never be machine- readable (Mattern 2014) and there may be a growing disparity between the natural and the constructed; the vagaries and messiness versus the program-mable and measurable life in cities. Giddens’s theory of social structure suggested that spaces and buildings are what people do with them – spaces themselves struc-ture social relations and practices, and therefore ‘relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life’ (Soja 1989: 6). If urban life is to be smart, digital and codified, then what becomes of the varied human experiences and how can we consider their relation to power? How can this be married to digital futures?The smart city emerges from networked urbanism, propagated by the promises of efficiency, using technologies to deliver and manage services to city dwellers; embedded sensors, drone surveillance and real- time monitoring to give us more effective transportation, waste, security and energy systems. Within this discourse, people are sources of data that are fed into algorithms; their experience of the city is muted in favour of the foregrounding of digital efficiency. Much great work on the neo- liberal ideals that underpin smart discourse has already been done (Kitchin 2014; Mattern 2017; Cardullo et al. 2018; Kitchin et al. 2018; Cardullo and Kitchin 2019). The various essays in this collection consider the promises of the smart future and provide some new discussions and provocations, moving beyond the field of human geography and urban planning to a social, personal and egalitarian approach.By theorizing and interrogating various theoretical approaches to the prom-ises of the smart city, we question how humans can feasibly have fair and equal access to those smart technologies that promise a better future. How can cities better support human life? What makes cities liveable in an era of growing urban inequality? While housing, service provision, health care, education and other important social needs are critical issues in imagining future cities, this collection looks more broadly at how we conceive of the city of the future and what sorts of steps can be taken to ‘take back the city’ in the digital future.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

307.76 CAL e

Penerbit

London : Intellect., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

288 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781789384659

Klasifikasi

307.76

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Urban Communities, Cities

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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