Abstract
This thesis seeks to speculate on the trend of unbridled technological implementation within our built environment, where the varied integration of and seemingly benevolent decisions made on technology in everyday lives may cumulate into an unstable and unsustainable future, without our realization of the consequences unleashed. Building on previous research on the hopes and pitfalls of today’s Smart Cities, three primary stakeholders are considered here: the people, the government, and corporate entities. Within this framework, the relationships and dynamics are investigated. Who has the ultimate control within the next generation smart city, and how truly smart are people in an inherently top-down smart city? How will data ownership, collection and surveillance tip the balance of power? Or will we be subjected to modular forms of control that penetrates throughout Deleuze’s Society of Control? Are Smart Cities merely facades of technocratic endeavours? Through the use of fiction and worldbuilding, a series made of three acts invites discussions on the Internet-of-Things of today, caricaturing and challenging established dogma. Architecture performs as a character within, taken into context and hosting this uncanny future.It presents a future Singapore that had been at the intersection of a divided line within a fragmented global economy, and as a result had sought to be the hub that connects decoupled giants and economic engines with starkly different modes of governance, beliefs and mechanisms.