technology - Tag Archive

Critical Digital Infrastructure

Leave a reply Jonny Hankins

What the Experts Say

In April I wrote about the Critical Infrastructure Lab, before attending its launch party in Amsterdam.

The lab aims to create space to co-develop alternative digital infrastructural futures that center people and planet over profit and capital, by establishing a community around three infrastructural subtopics (geopolitics, standards, environment), producing a sound body of research and developing actionable policy recommendations and strategic insights.

The 2-day launch event was fantastic, and I wrote about it in a post here on the Bassetti Foundation website. My report is a series of points and take-aways from the event from my own perspective in which I try to highlight a few of the questions raised about digital infrastructure: How can we imagine people-centred infrastructure? Do we have to think in terms of infinite infrastructure? Could democratizing infrastructure be an approach? Other topics include migration research and tracking, open internet, standardization, and the role of infrastructure in conflict.

The Critical Infrastructure Lab also produced a report on the event, available to download here. This is a very different style of report, offering another overview of topics addressed, and it’s very thought provoking.

Through the link below you can download lots of interesting publications, including a working paper about a workshop carried out at a Limits 2023 event, called The Climate Crisis is a Digital Rights Crisis: Exploring the Civil-Society Framing of Two Intersecting Disasters. This is a description of a workshop about exploring the intersection of the climate crisis and digital rights, which again raises lots of questions as well as offering loads of information.

Publications and Media

This report talks about both the material and the immaterial impact of digital infrastructures and new technologies, from mining to waste, energy consumption to water use, which are material, but also digital rights, power, justice, and surveillance. Digital infrastructures are presented as being a tool to mitigate the impact of global heating and help in climate protection, but we need to view this position more critically.

The European Union state that “digital technologies could play a key role in achieving climate neutrality, reducing pollution, and restoring biodiversity”, leading to a kind of twin transition being born. They have promoted the right to repair (technology should be repairable), ecodesign and the Circular Economy Initiative, estimating that repairable products that are thrown away create 35 million tons of waste, waste 30 million tons of resources and produce 261 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions in the EU every year.

And the production and life cycle of these goods sits within trade and political relationships that have existed since colonial times, raw materials taken from developing economies, used in wealthy economies, with the waste finding its way to other developing economies.

The Limits 2023 community dashboard offers lots of other papers too.

There is a lot to take from these documents, it’s thought provoking stuff and it is all open access.

Smart Pedestrian Crossings

Leave a reply Jonny Hankins

Climate Neutral and Smart Cities

As readers might remember, TechnologyBloggers has a partnership with the Bassetti Foundation. The Foundation participates in several European Union funded projects, and as I was learning about one of them, I discovered a connection with the city of Utrecht where I live.

One of the projects (MOSAIC) is funded through the EU Mission on Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities (Cities Mission), which aims to deliver 100 climate-neutral and smart European cities by 2030, while paving the way for remaining European cities to become climate-neutral by 2050. It works on a bottom-up approach which requires the participation of the entire local ecosystem and support from all governance levels.

It turns out that another project funded through the same mission is called IRIS, and one of the IRIS Project pilot Cities is Utrecht where I live, and so I went to see one of them, a smart pedestrian crossing with sound, air quality and traffic speed monitoring. Not only that but the white strips in the road actually light up as you approach and lights on the tops of the poles change colour according to the traffic situation creating the bright lit up crossing area in the photo above.

The crossing project takes in more of the area around it, with new street lights that can be dimmed or brightened and collect more data on the weather etc. The project was developed with the local population, the idea being that the local governance and urban management systems work with the people who live in the area to build and maintain the infrastructure that they feel they need.

From the MOSAIC website:

The mission presents a unique and unprecedented approach to the goal of climate neutrality. This new demand-led approach brings together all key stakeholders within a city, as well as the respective national/regional governments and the European Commission to work towards the same goal. The Climate City Contract provides a novel tool to ensure that all key actors – local authorities, private sector, academia, citizens/civil society – will work together towards the same ambitious goal via a joint strategy. The multi-sectoral and multi-actor dimensions will be key for the mission’s success.

The Cities Mission is therefore ideally placed to engage European citizens and stakeholders in the pressing global challenge of impending climate change, as it focuses strongly on the places where most Europeans live, work and move. While the overarching ambition of the mission relates to the issue of mitigating climate change, achieving success within this mission requires not only significant technological innovation but also a paradigm shift within the public sector, on local, regional, national and European levels, regarding the inclusion of the general public.

Check out the links in the article and the photos and video. A Rainy night in Utrecht.

Experiences of an Online Conference

2 Replies Jonny Hankins

adobe

Online Conference

Last month I attended a conference with a difference, The INSS annual meeting was held in 5 different cities at the same time, as well as online, in an attempt to cut down on travel for participants. I attended the London site and was one of only 2 people to fly to the event. This is remarkable considering that last year we all met in North Carolina and dozens of people flew internal and trans continental legs.

The physical Conference was held at UNC Charlotte in North Carolina, Oregon State university, Arizona State University, Michigan State University and University College London.

Very much an experiment, the practicalities of conducting a conference over several different time zones posed some issues, with early starts for those on the US West Coast and late finishes for those in Europe. The technology worked incredibly well, with very few glitches over the days’ events. Participants were able to ask questions, follow seminars in any of the sites they chose, and interact with the poster and key note presenters using online media.

The event was run out of North Carolina, and the web management was all taken care of from that site. I must say that I was rather skeptical at the beginning, having lived with Skype developments over the years, but how wrong could I be?

Communication Technology

The communication was taken care of using Adobe Connect, so anyone could participate through their own computer or by visiting any of the sites. We in London lost the last 5 minutes of a discussion after one of the lectures, but for the rest it all worked perfectly.

Now as someone who travels to a lot of these kinds of things I can only marvel at the progress made. Each site shared some seminars and papers, but all had different agendas. The London agenda included a day of field trips, as well as as a panel during which presenters discussed their experiences of building the Engineering Exchange, a university lead action group whose aim is to bridge the gap between communities and planners preparing urban regeneration projects. Read the abstract here.

We also toured some of the capital’s largest redevelopment projects, including a visit to Crossrail, a huge rail link and urban regeneration project that cuts through central London. A guided tour of the Elephant and Castle redevelopment area with the interest group “Social Life” followed, a context of urban regeneration that has caused many locals to question both existing and future plans in that area.

The context was also helped by the involvement of a member of a local interest group that aims to support people whose houses are under threat, and promote the idea of refitting houses to maintain communities, rather than rehousing and rebuilding. There is a lot more to think about in urban regeneration that you might imagine.

The Network

The closing panel was hosted in Charlotte and entitled Social Sustainability Initiatives in Planning and engineering Organization. Full details of all the participating site agendas can be found on the INSS website.

The network is open to all interested in participating, so keep an eye on the website for further information. We volunteer our time, we learn a lot, we try to raise social sustainability issues, and we always have a bit of a social at every event. I must say that the multi-site format was a worthy experiment that worked extremely well, and I think could offer a model for future events. Is the era of the online conference coming to life? Looks like it to me.