Climate-neutral and intelligent cities in Europe : Mission statements, paths, risks

The great transformation to climate-neutral cites in Europe, though often called for and widely advocated, is yet to come. This TATuP special topic underscores the necessity of integrative approaches that combine smart and intelligent urban technologies with socio-cultural innovations to open up paths towards urban climate neutrality. Edited by Cordula Kropp (ZIRIUS/University of Stuttgart), Astrid Ley (SI/University of Stuttgart), Sadeeb Simon Ottenburger (ITES/Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Ulrich Ufer (ITAS/Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Standardising the city: A material-discursive genealogy of CPA-I_001, ISO 37120 and BSI PAS 181

City standards are a rapidly growing and highly innovative new area of international standards development. They propose tools, techniques and guidelines for the governance of smart and sustainable cities. In this thesis, I survey the standards literature, develop a methodology for their study, and analyse three city standards, the institutions that support them and the material-discursive apparatuses that allow them to take shape. CPA-I_001 is a diagram for seeing, measuring and managing the city as a system of systems. ISO 37120 defines 100 performance indicators for assessing and benchmarking city services and quality of life. And BSI PAS 181 recommends practices for smart city leadership in the integration and management of government services. My decision to focus on the development, circulation and implementation of these standards prompted the use of semi-structured interviews and document analysis; methods capable of following their specific global movements. Drawing on data thus generated, I argue that city standards act as an effective political technology in three capacities: by propagating ideas, materials and techniques; by steering outcomes towards desirable goals; and by assuring city leaders and decision-makers. The case study analysis is augmented by an exploration of the broader intellectual traditions on which the three standards draw. This allows me to reveal their political assumptions and logics, and intervene upon their role in the production of future cities. My research contributes to: empirical work on standards in cities; research methodologies in human geography, and science and technology studies; and conceptual and theoretical debates within Foucault studies, the new materialism, nonrepresentational theory and urban theory

The World We Want to Live In

Digitalisation, digital networks, and artificial intelligence are fundamentally changing our lives! We must understand the various developments and assess how they interact and how they affect our regular, analogue lives. What are the consequences of such changes for me personally and for our society? Digital networks and artificial intelligence are seminal innovations that are going to permeate all areas of society and trigger a comprehensive, disruptive structural change that will evoke numerous new advances in research and development in the coming years. Even though there are numerous books on this subject matter, most of them cover only specific aspects of the profound and multifaceted effects of the digital transformation. An overarching assessment is missing. In 2016, the Federation of German Scientists (VDW) has founded a study group to assess the technological impacts of digitalisation holistically. Now we present this compendium to you. We address the interrelations and feedbacks of digital innovation on policy, law, economics, science, and society from various scientific perspectives. Please consider this book as an invitation to contemplate with other people and with us, what kind of world we want to live in

Information Feedback, Behaviour and ‘Smart Meters’: Using behavioural economics to improve our knowledge about the potential effectiveness of Smart Meters to use electricity efficiently

As part of the development of the European electricity grid, the EU has decided that ‘Smart Meters’ should be installed in 80% of the households of the EU by 2020. It is expected that this will lead to a reduction of energy use in the residential sector in the order of 10%. Driven by the so-called ‘Information-Deficit’ model, a critical assumption in this policy development is that provision of information, via ‘Smart Meters’, enables energy end-users to make more informed, and thus better, decisions in relation to their energy service demands (e.g. lighting). However, even if there is some evidence that feedback to consumers stimulate an efficient use of energy, the magnitude of this reduction is debated. In fact, findings from behavioural economics suggest that behavioural biases (e.g. loss aversion) and cognitive limitations restrict end-users from displaying purely rational behaviour, which in turn limits the effect (and policy expectations) of policies applying the information-deficit model. The thesis at hand addresses these issues explicitly and provides empirical analyses of how behavioural biases affects consumers’ response to energy-related information. To that end, experimental research covering eight field exercises and a Smart Meter experiment was conducted. The thesis aimed to generate knowledge about the applicability and implications of using behavioural economics to deliver feedback to electricity consumers. With due limitations, the experiments illustrate that a knowledge-gap exists, and that information can help correct consumer behaviour, but that the framing and salience of this information can affect the magnitude of the response. The Smart Meter experiment on loss aversion took place in a real-life setting where consumers actually used and paid for the electricity. Results show that the intervention group reduced its electricity use, and that those reductions were larger than those found for the reference group (for both daily and standby consumption). Compared to related research, findings revealed that reductions in electricity use were also larger than the average electricity reduction found in other studies of feedback on electricity use. As a whole, it is concluded that feedback information can contribute to efficient electricity use and thus contribute to meeting EU policy targets. However, the (expected) effects depend on how feedback is designed, framed and presented. The Smart Meter experiment indicates an enhanced effect on electricity use reduction as a result loss aversion, but further research (e.g. large scale trials) is needed for more conclusive and statistically significant results

Engineering humans : cultural history of the science and technology of human enhancement

This thesis investigates the technological imaginary of human enhancement: how it has been conceived historically and the scientific understanding that has shaped it. Human enhancement technologies have been prominent in popular culture narratives for a long time, but in the past twenty years they have moved out of science fiction to being an issue for serious discussion, in academic disciplines, political debate and the mass media.. Even so, the bioethical debate on enhancement, whether it is pharmacological means of improving cognition and morality or genetic engineering to create smarter people or other possibilities, is consistently centred on technologies that do not yet exist. The investigation is divided into three main areas: a chapter on eugenics, two chapters on cybernetics and the cyborg, and two chapters on transhumanism. All three areas of enhancement thinking have a corresponding understanding of and reference to evolutionary theory and the human as a category. Insofar as ‘enhancement’ is a vague and relative turn, the chapters show how each approach wrestles with how to formulate what is good and desirable. When this has inevitably proven difficult, the technologies themselves dictate what and how ‘enhancement’ comes about. Eugenics treats the human in terms of populations – as a species, but also in abstract categories such as nation and race. I follow the establishment of eugenics from the development of a statistical understanding of measuring human aptitude, with emphasis on the work of Francis Galton and the formulation of the regression to the mean. The following two chapters on cybernetics and the cyborg analyses how the metaphor of the body as machine has changed relative to what is meant by ‘machine’: associated with Cartesian dualism, cybernetics marked a shift in how we understand the term. Through a reading of the original formulation of the cyborg, I connect it to evolutionary adaptationism and a cybernetic ‘black box’ approach. The last two chapters look at a more recent approach to enhancement as a moral imperative, transhumanism. Since some transhumanists seek to ground themselves philosophically as the inheritors to Enlightenment humanism, the concept of ‘morphological freedom’ is central, representing an extension of humanistic principles of liberty brought into an age which privileges information over matter. The final chapter looks at how the privileging of information leads to a universal computational ontology, and I specifically look at the work of Ray Kurzweil, a prominent transhumanist, and how the computationalist narrative creates a teleological understanding of both human worth and evolution

Het binnenste buiten. Liber amicorum ter gelegenheid van het emeritaat van prof. dr. Aernout H.J. Schmidt, hoogleraar Recht en Informatica te Leiden

FdR – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde