‘Smart City’ – keeping it human

Abstract

Over the past year or so, our lives have changed a lot due to the coronavirus. One of the small but biggest changes I feel is the QR code. Everywhere I visit, I must leave a mark that I have been here. It is arguably true that we must open up our privacy to prevent coronavirus, but it is also true that something feels uncomfortable. It is to avoid coronavirus from spreading, but I have the impression that my every move is being watched. Especially in South Korea, technologies such as QR code authentication devices installed everywhere, facial recognition body temperature cameras, and CCTV are watching people everywhere. This vision can be only too real even today if we look at North Korea. North Korea’s surveillance covers all its citizens. Surveillance lasts from birth to death. As surveillance closely penetrates their daily lives, their private lives are no longer private. Most of the time, they just naturally conform to it and follow it. The current situation around the world is similar to what Shoshana Zuboff argues. In the near future, mega corporates will dominate society, taking control of the markets and technologies. The general public will be monitored by telescreen and tracked by big data that accumulate data every second and they will be put under pressure and fear, which retrain their behaviour and acts. The thesis investigates how does ‘Smart City’, informed by technologies such as artificial intelligence and information related to big data, could become an ultimate surveillance device for corporates to spy and control people, an end game which could only but lead to a breakdown in open society as people are run by fear. What is this potential future scenario of a regulated and inhumanness technoscape? The given narrative of the thesis is a dystopian future where architecture is used to manipulate and control people with propaganda structures such as watch towers, loud speakers and cannibalistic robot arms that eat buildings away. Then the thesis asks how could these inhumane structures be re-appropriated into structures that are for people’s community and society? The resulting proposal is a series of re-purposed experimental interventions throughout the site, in which operations are twofold: first, to critique the dehumanising aspect of the disciplinary society of the ‘smart city’; and secondly, to subvert the critiques by proposing radical structures that engage with the marginalised urban commoners. As a result, the thesis re-envisions the site as a thematic urbanscape in which architecture serves as a channel for society's unheard voices and raises critical awareness of the current state of the 'smart city.' The thesis uses methodologies such as storyboarding, narrative/scenario and visualization to help visualize the outcome of the potential future.