On October 10, 2017, I gave an open lecture for the Smart Cities Research Group at ITS-Rio (Institute for Technology and Society).
My starting point was:
Expanded by digital technologies, cities are complex networks that intertwine data from different sources, becoming the principal interface of the 21st century. This presence of data in everyday life is beginning to be incorporated into architectural projects and street furniture, especially in functions geared toward surveillance. The central question is: how can we rethink public space through the experience of data-rich environments without turning residents into trackable walking databases? This requires moving from the idea of digital citizenship toward practices of networked citizenship based on collaboration among different parties.
Projects such as Bueiros conectados, Fogo no barraco, Dancing Traffic Lights, Dronestream and the Mudamos application provide starting points for this discussion. By reinventing ways of occupying the streets, they prompt reflection on the density of informational territories. They point toward a critical revision of the corporate notion of smart cities, counterposing models of distributed intelligence and echoing the idea of “open-source urbanism.”
The recording of the lecture follows: