When my group listed inaccessibility as a common negative feature of cities, I thought immediately of physical accessibility: wheelchair ramps, preferred seating on public transportation. I also tried to think about other ways people are excluded from the city and what improvements could make a city more accessible to everyone.

Physical Accessibility 

If you look at a map of London’s Underground, for example, you might notice that many of its central stops are not wheelchair-accessible. Many more stops on the borders of the map are accessible than these central stops which tend to be older, less spacious, and more often underground. Is there a smart city solution to this problem?

Below, is an accessibility solution for public buses.

Unfortunately, many train stations and buildings have the added obstacle of stairs.

Escalators are a partial solution, but do not solve the transport problem for everyone. Elevators can and have been implemented in some tube stations, but the space and layout may not always allow for elevator installation. I’ve seen large wheelchairs that are designed to climb stairs, but I wondered if there was a stair-solution that could be available to everyone.

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What if there were some sort of public wheelchair stair lift for the elderly, unwell, injured, or wheelchair-bound? Space and speed would likely be issues.

 

Language and Cultural Accessibility 

Large cities draw visitors from all over the world. How basic signs and interactions be made accessible to people who are not familiar with them?

• Labels, signage
• Public transport announcements
• Speaking to cashiers at shops
• Sitting, ordering, paying at restaurants
• Public transport processes and payment

Language translation technology is advancing quickly. Small handheld tools like the one pictured below claim to translate almost instantly while offline. How could something like this be used for infrastructure a larger scale rather than for individuals?

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Financial Accessibility 

Cities tend to be some of the most expensive places to live, but employ people in all ranges of salary.

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Cost of living including rent, food, and clothing are often higher in the city than surrounding areas. The cost of commuting from a less expensive area into a city can also become a large expense.

Can a smart city lower cost of living?

This McKinsey report suggests that some features of a smart city may lower it slightly:

• Digitizing some of the more bureaucratic parts of the construction process could lead to the construction of more homes which could lower the cost of rent
• Smart applications could encourage the more stringent use of utilities like electricity and encourage more consistent use of healthcare

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-infrastructure/our-insights/smart-cities-digital-solutions-for-a-more-livable-future

 

Today, my group and I did a brainstorming session with post-it notes. We each wrote down terms that related to a city, then we reviewed them together, grouping similar terms. What we ended up with was five categories representing features of cities. We split these among us with the intention of exploring each through the filter of a smart city. I chose this category:

Originally, we had planned to call this group “negative characteristics”, but quickly realized that these notes were neither a requirement of an ideal city or even an existing city. We changed the name to “pitfalls” because the population density and age of cities sometimes make them prone to these features.

I chose this category because I was already interested in exploring the alleged”dirtiness” of cities as an extension of my previous post about infectious disease. On an entirely different note, I am passionate about accessibility in software design and I am excited to explore accessibility in cites – both physical and digital.

 

 

I saw this poster at CityBar and thought it was a hilarious and fun way to try and get people to come together and raise awareness for alternative energy while saving a bit of plant-generated electricity through exercise.

This reminds me of something I saw online a while ago about green gyms that use human-powered equipment to generate electricity.

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Kits to create your own electricity-generating bicycle are available for sale for personal use, but they’re currently very expensive. The most basic kit that I could find is pictured below and selling for $850 USD (bicycle not included!).

 

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http://www.thegreenmicrogym.com/the-story-of-the-upcycle-eco-charger/

If electricity-generating home workout machines were more widely available and affordable, I think people would be excited to buy them. Most workout machines would give the user a nearly identical user experience whether or not they generated electricity when used. While some machines like electric treadmills would function differently, stationary bicycles and elliptical seem like they’re perfect for this purpose.

My team decided to focus on the transnational nature of data in a smart (or current) city. In our video, we wanted to show the benefits that could be received by sharing your data and the possible risks and drawbacks. Although we chose to do this in a simplistic and slightly humorous way, data collection and (ab)use is a serious issue.

The way we “sell” our data isn’t always overt, but my team wanted to explore a scenario where it was a bit more obvious and visual. The first character in our video uses her phone to gain access to an exclusive lunch spot, receive a discounted meal, and meet up with her friend. At each step, she sheds data.

In our video, we showed that a drawback could be when this data falls into the “wrong hands”. Our character’s data is stolen in a mysterious breach and her personal information is visible to everyone. Other drawbacks of data collection are less nefarious, but still limit privacy.

Fortunately, some governments are trying to create legislation that would implement protections for privacy and data rights, like preventing “anonymous” data from being compiled and used to re-identify individuals. Hopefully, efforts like these and improving security will keep up with advances in data collection.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/08/uk-to-criminalize-re-identifying-anonymized-personal-data/?guccounter=1

When I imagine a smart city of the future with seamless, helpful technology everywhere, I wonder what data collection will look like then.  Will there be so many new ways to collect data that people won’t receive as much benefit in return? Will the benefit of smart technology so outweigh any loss of privacy that we will be happy?

https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/deloitte-review/issue-13/data-as-the-new-currency.html

https://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/what-if-web-users-could-sell-their-own-data/

When my group was brainstorming video ideas in class on Friday, we kept returning to the idea of community in the city. By community, we meant a small, social group or place where people could come together or feel like they belong.

We talked a lot about how it feels to move to a new place where you don’t know many people and if there was anything that could be done to create a sense of community even in a large and constantly changing place like London.

One theme that we kept coming back to was feeling safe. We decided that part of feeling like you can approach a new community had to do with trusting them and feeling safe and comfortable.

If you have to pack up your laptop and belongings so they aren’t stolen when you use a coffee shop bathroom, we thought you might not feel a strong sense of community toward your fellow coffee shop-goers. We also discussed that there are some cities and towns where it is safe to leave your belongings unattended and wondered if these places had stronger communities.

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I started reading about cities that were ranked as safe and generally about what makes cities safe and found that there is often a connection drawn between places with a predominantly collectivist culture and safety. Collectivism, very simply is putting the needs of the group before individual needs.

It is not clear to me, however, if there is a connection between collectivism and community as we defined it. Do cultures that value the common good have more of a desire to build communities with each other? Or are these completely separate ideas?

 

Update: While watching the documentary, Citizen Jane, some of her thoughts on safety in cities stood out to me. Jane was quoted as saying that streets are safest when people are walking on them continuously and the storefronts are facing the streets as if to watch them. No amount of policing or restrictions can protect an area where the natural order of people looking out for each other this way has broken down.

In the below excerpt from Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane writes “They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.”

Click to access 1961_Jacobs_TheUsesofSidewalksby_excerpt.pdf

I think my group was dancing around the idea of community making cities safer, but Jane was able to better articulate it and go further in explaining what we had been wondering. I’m still trying to figure out ways to encourage community within a city.

It seems like sometimes an inviting physical feature will encourage people to gather. Citizen Jane featured a water fountain where musicians gathered and played. In central London, people come and sit on the steps in front of the National Gallery every night to talk and drink.

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Cities tend to be densely populated places where people live and work very closely to each other. I am from a much smaller town than London and I have an immune deficiency so, of course, I ended up getting sick within my first two weeks here. This got me thinking about infectious disease in densely populated cities and if there was a way to limit the spread of germs on some of the things we all have to touch or filter the air we breathe in confined spaces.

Until I started reading about it, I hadn’t realized that the flu is actually pretty deadly. This article claims that by February of this year, the 2017-2018 flu had killed at least 254 people in the UK alone.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5368109/Flu-death-toll-hits-254-UK.html

The article goes on to say that the flu season lasts longer in cities than suburbs, but scientists think that individuals living in the city do not have a greater chance of catching the flu which confuses me.

 

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Researchers from London Metropolitan University tested different Underground lines for cleanliness and found them teeming with bacteria including E.Coli and a strain related to Toxic Shock Syndrome.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/transport/revealed-nine-of-the-world-s-deadliest-superbugs-found-on-tube-with-victoria-line-the-dirtiest-a3540051.html

Bacteria and viruses spread and infect differently, but surely if we are breathing someone else’s air or holding on to the same dirty rails when the tube is packed during rush hour, we are more likely to get sick? Even if this isn’t the case, I thought there might still be some way to decrease the risk.

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This Time article from earlier this year describes a UV light developed by scientists that could kill microbes, bacteria, and viruses (including the flu virus) in the air without damaging human eyes or skin. If something like this is truly safe and effective, it could be used to sanitize public places throughout the day. The article mentions doctors’ office waiting rooms. I think it would also be a great tool for underground trains and buses. If once an hour or even once a day, the tube and buses were sanitized, it seems like there could be a huge reduction in the spread of infection.

http://time.com/5142211/uv-light-kills-flu-virus/

Below is my sketch inspired by our sketch session in Creativity in Design. It depicts a skin-safe UV light sanitizing a tube car while passengers are still riding. Realistically, I wouldn’t imagine that it would be this fast. And, perhaps, not even while passengers were aboard.

 

My group decided that we should first compare our definitions of cities and smart cities as a way to share ideas and find out if any themes emerge from our overlapping visions. Though I had a large and vague definition for each of these cities in my mind, being forced to write them down concisely helped me focus on a few key parts.

What is a city?

A city is a densely populated area. Places people go inside a city are physically close together. People are highly dependent on each other and infrastructure for their needs. For example, food gets shipped into cities more than it is created in them.

What does a smart city look like to me?

To me, a smart city should help its citizens with daily issues like food supply and transportation in a way that’s so seamless and simple to use that people don’t always think about it or realize it’s happening. Some things that I think about when I imagine a smart city are everyone having affordable food and shelter, accessible and environmentally-friendly transportation, and cleanliness and limiting the spread of germs.