A Prelude to Smart City Privacy — Our Past, Who We Are, and Why We Live This Way
In a series of posts (*) I will talk about the smart city and the privacy implications of living in such environments. Before starting this, I will look back in time -bear with me, there is method in my madness. I want to start at almost the beginning, at the start of sedentary civilisation. Knowing why we built cities may help us to build better, truly smarter cities, now.
Looking back often gives us time to reflect and knowing the path we took to get to a place, can give us a feel for why we wanted to be there in the first place. Human beings are animals first and foremost, and as animals, we have certain drivers that push us forward in our lives. The fundamental evolutionary driver of life is reproduction and the rest of the things we chose to do around this are packaged to make reproduction successful. This usually translates into resource control; resource being food, mates, and protection against the elements. Of course, in the wider world of humans, we also have many cultural and social overlays on top of these evolutionary drivers. Not all of us want or have children. But we all still want to be warm, have food in our bellies, feel safe and have purpose. Human beings have strived to find all of these things, and in doing so, our societies have tended towards bringing our species together into groups. Over time, these groups expanded; from a village grows a town, from a town grows a city. Over time we have made our cities fit for those purposes of safety, sustenance, and purpose in a myriad of ways.
The smart city is the next generation’s attempt to optimize this ongoing movement. Before exploring the smart city, let’s take a little time to walk the path of our elders and see the city through their eyes too — perhaps we will see that we have the same goals, just different methods of achieving them — perhaps we will also see that the privacy intrinsic in our being is the same then as it is now, and why this intrinsic need has to be carried over into the smart cities we build in our near future.
Evolving cities
This isn’t a treatise about origins, but it is will draw on where we have been. We have to step back to an earlier place in our history to work forward and this place is the agricultural or neolithic revolution. Before this revolution, human beings found their food and other resources by hunting and gathering. Hunting and gathering is a good system, still in existence today in some societies. But it is a limiting system. Hunting and gathering can only provide food for small group sizes. Various studies have been carried out to estimate the optimal size of group supported by this mode of subsistence. Biologist, Richerson (1) estimates the group size able to be supported under hunter-gatherer conditions varies depending on the ecology, but typically Richerson states, “Not only were the densities of most hunters and gatherers low, but typical settlement sizes are also small.” (1)
Hunting and gathering of food fed Homo sapiens and earlier hominid ancestors, for around 2.5 million years. Then a shift happened; cold winds came and warm winds took over and the available food changed. Instead of moving with the food in the hunt, we found ways of making the food ‘come to us’ — we discovered agriculture. The archeologist, Gordon Childe, in a seminal work in 1942 entitled “What Happened in History” stated:
“Our species, man in the widest sense, has succeeded in surviving and multiplying chiefly by improving his equipment for living”…
Continuing about how human beings, unlike other animals, create their own ‘non-natural’ equipment, he said:
“ Man has very little equipment of this sort and has discarded some that he started with during prehistoric tunes. It is replaced by tools, extracorporeal organs that he makes, uses, and discards at will; he makes picks and shovels for digging, weapons for killing game and enemies, adzes and axes for cutting wood, clothing to keep him warm in cold weather, houses of wood, brick, or stone to provide shelter.”
The actual root cause of the shift to a sustainable way of living using agriculture, has had many theories and continues to be debated. One thought postulated by Childe, was that climate change, bringing dry conditions, forced humans into oases where experimentation with seeds produced domestication. Other theories, postulate that naturally increasing populations at the time of the shift, put pressure on the wild food supplies. However, the neolithic revolution and agriculture was unlikely to be a sudden event. More likely it was a long drawn out process of experimentation, seeds being ‘gardened’’ as opposed to farmed. Long periods of experimentation with plants to create a hybrid that had the right mix of robustness with digestible matter.
The causes of the neolithic revolution and the resulting shift from hunter gathering methods, to domestication of plants and animals, meant that human beings could do one thing that would change everything — they could control their food source. So what, you may say, wouldn’t that just mean they had to work harder to make sure they had food supplies? Wouldn’t they need also to have the right tools and the right soil and so on? The answer is of course, yes, and this is all part of the driving force into the city. Agriculture allowed human beings to be still. They no longer had to follow the herd across the plains or spend most of the day gathering berries and seeds. Instead, they could create a more fixed abode, a sedentary lifestyle that opened up new ways of living and working.
Agriculture, however, may come back to haunt is in the modern smart city…
*Other posts in order (I will add to these over time as I build up the story):
- The first ‘smart’ city”…And So It Began
- Neolithic Privacy
- Smart City of the Future
- The Anatomy of a Smart City
References:
(1) Richerson, “Hunting and Gathering Societies”: http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/BooksOnline/He3-95.pdf