The editors of Guardian Cities (previously) saw my Toronto Life blurb about how a "smart city" could be focused on enabling its residents, rather than tracking and manipulating them, and asked me to write a longer piece on the theme: The case for ... cities where you're the sensor, not the thing being sensed is the result.

In it, I revisit my 2015 Locus column on the idea of an Internet of Things that treats people "as sensors, not things to be sensed" -- a world where your devices never share your data with anyone else to get recommendations or advice, but rather, where all the inanimate objects stream data about how busy they are and whether they're in good repair, and your device taps into those streams and makes private recommendations, without relaying anything about you or your choices to anyone else.

As I've often written, the most important thing about technology isn't what it does, but who it does it to, and who it does it for. The sizzle-reels for "smart cities" always feature a control room where wise technocrats monitor the city and everyone in it -- all I'm asking is that we all get a seat in that control room.

My editor tells me that this is the last piece that will be commissioned for Guardian Cities, and I'm sincerely honored to get to close out an outstanding, longrunning project on urban reporting and theory.

It’s a safe bet that the people who make those videos imagine themselves as one of the controllers watching the monitors – not as one of the plebs whose movements are being fed to the cameras that feed the monitors.

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http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/sPigWlLocBw/gods-eye-views.html