Posted: January 25th, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Last week in Madrid, Fabien and I participated in a workshop at BBVA innovation about Smart Cities. Organized by Urbanscale (and more specifically by Jeff Kirsh, Adam Greenfield and Leah Meisterlin), it focused on opportunities to use networked data for the client. It basically followed up on the previous work we have done with this bank last year.
This workshop was followed by an open session entitled “Beyond Smart Cities” at BBVA’s Innovation Center, with Adam Greenfield, Kevin Slavin and yours truly.
My talk was a critique of the “prediction trope” in the discourse about Smart Cities. Slides are on Slideshare and I’ve included some notes in the document:
There’s a write-up of the event at the following URL
Posted: January 14th, 2012 | No Comments »
“A theory of smart cities” by Colin Harrison and Ian Abbott Donnelly offers an overview of the different theoretical bases for the “Smart Cities” trope. As the author mentions, “the current ad hoc approaches of Smart Cities to the improvement of cities are reminiscent of pre-scientific medicine. They may do good, but we have little detailed understanding of why“.
After a quick introduction in which they describe what is hidden behind this term (use of digital sensors, penetration of networks that allow such sensors and systems to be connected, computing power and new algorithms that allow these flows of information to be analyzed in near “real-time”), they highlight two theoretical approaches:
“One of these is work in scaling laws going back to Zipf, but enormously enriched in recent years by theoreticians such as West and Batty to name but two. (…) This body of work provides evidence that although many behaviours of complex systems are emergent or adaptive, nonetheless there are patterns or consistent behaviour at the level of macro observation.
(…)
The second body of work considers cities as complex systems. (…) This approach introduces concepts such as interconnection, feedback, adaptation, and self-organization in order to provide understanding of the almost organic growth, operation, decline, and evolution of cities.“
Why do I blog this? I’m preparing a speech that I’ll deliver at the “Beyond Smart Cities” event in Madrid next week at the BBVA innovation center. My aim is to give a critique of the prediction trope in Smart Cities projects. The aforementioned article offer a relevant starting point for this top happen, even though their perspective is quite partial in terms of academic references. The paper is also interesting to understand the kind of assumptions IBM make when addressing these issues (as attested by the partial list of references).
Posted: July 6th, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Preparing the Lift France 11 conference, and given our interest in a session about the future of cities, urban computing and its implications, we ran across this interesting column by Saskia Sassen about “Smart Cities” on a McKinsey digital. We liked it a lot and we invited her to the conference.
Few days ago, she kindly proposed to answer few questions I had about her perspective on this topic.
Nicolas: You recently wrote an essay about so-called “Smart Cities” at Mckinseydigital.com, I really liked your point about the need to “urbanize” the technologies deployed in Smart Cities projects. What do you mean by that and what do you think is missing in projects such as New Songdo or Masdar?
Saskia Sassen: This notion of urbanizing technology is one of several along those lines that I have been working out for a while. The starting point was not necessarily cities. It was the notion that in interactive domains the technology delivers its capabilities through ecologies that include non-technological variables –the social and the subjective, the logics/aims of users, for example finance uses the technology with different aims from Amnesty international, etc etc. Again, I make this argument for interactive domains, not, say, data pipelines.
There is another condition present in the interactive domain, separate from the technology itself. At the beginning I studied how the logic of finance (a sector that is deeply embedded in digital networks and digitized spaces) is not the logic of the engineer and computer scientist and software developer who made the digital domain. The effect is that the user (finance) does not necessarily use all the properties that the engineer etc. put into it. I also looked at civil society organizations along the same lines. This helps explain why the outcomes never correspond to what we may have predicted based on the capacities of the technology.
Now I am looking at cities through the same lens. Users bring their own logics to these technologies. In the case of a city with its vast diversities of people and what makes them tick, the outcome can be quite different from what the designers expected. And this matters. This keeps the city alive, and open. When you embed interactive technologies in urban settings, it is important to allow for this mutating as diverse types of users bring their own logics to those technologies. If the technology controls all outcomes in a routinized fashion ((as if it were a data pipeline) there is a high risk that it will become obsolete, or less and less used, or so routinized that it barely is interactive. More like buying a ticket from an automaton: yes you have choices, but you can hardly call this interactive.
The key, difficult, and ever changing question is how do we keep technologies open, responsive to environmental signals and to users choices, including what may seem quirky from the perspective of the engineer. The city is full of signals and quirky uses: given a chance , it would urbanize a whole range of technologies. But this possibility needs to be made – it is not simply a function of interactive technologies as we know them now, and it needs to go beyond the embedded feedback capability. Open Source is more like it.
Nicolas: Do you feel that networked technologies can lead to new forms of urbanity? Said differently, to what extent are the cities of the future shaped by our past urban experiences and infrastructures?
Saskia Sassen: Urbanity is a mutant. And this means it is made and remade along many different concepts/ideas/imaginations across the world. It can happen in sites where we, we of our westernized culture, might not see it. At night in working class neighborhoods of Shanghai bus stops become public spaces –that is urbanity. In some megacities the only spaces that the poor, often homeless have, are what during daytime hours we see as infrastructure: spaces where multiple bus lines intersect or end in. There are many many such examples of practices that destabilize the formal meaning of a space: this, again, takes making, and in that making lies an urbanity. I do think that urbanity is made; it is not only beautifully designed urban settings.
So yes! I think that networked technologies will also, and in fact, already are, leading to new forms of urbanity. The most familiar of these are of course using the tech to communicate about swarming an actual space –a square, a furniture shop—and diverse locational devices. Again, what intrigues me is to think beyond these somewhat “pre-scribed” possibilities: in two ways. One is through the unsettling, making unstable, the prescribed options embedded in the technology’s design. For instance, inserting a given technological capability into a different ecology of elements (in the sense I used this earlier –technical and non-technical elements). This is what hackers do, in a way. In the case of the city, it would mean bringing an urban logic into that ecology –the city as the hacker. .. a benign, positive hacker of a range of technological domains in cities. The other is what I like to refer to as “barefoot engineering” — this resonates with the so-called “barefoot doctors” in China’s villages during Communism –knowledgeable locals who knew the properties of plants and understood the village. We need urban “barefoot engineers”!
Nicolas: In the aforementioned paper, you use the term “open-source urbanism”. It’s interesting to see that metaphor coming from digital culture are currently transposed beyond their original realms. How do you think the “open source” concept can be applied to urbanism? What would be the limits and opportunities?
Saskia Sassen: As a technological practice of innovation, Open Source has not been about cities, but about the technology itself. Yet it resonates with what cities have and are at ground-level, where its users are. The park is made not only with the hardware of trees and ponds, but also with the software of people’s practices. There are manay examples, and each city has its own. In my city, NY, an example of such people’s software is New York’s Riverside Park in the 1980s which went from being a no-go zone, charged with dangers, to being a park for all those who wanted to use it. How did this switch happen? In part because dog-owners started to walk their dogs in large numbers. Having a dog was itself a function of feeling insecure in a city of high murder rates and much mugging. But the city as lived mutating environment allowed people to talk back: get a dog, walk your dog, go in groups, and you recover the territory of the park. Another example is the recent proliferation of urban agriculture; it was not a top-down decision. It resulted from a mix of conditions, primarily the desire of city residents to make, to green, to transform, and the romance with fresh produce. And now the push is for every roof, every empty plot of land to become a site for urban agriculture. Here we see that a thousand individual decisions created an urban possibility and transformation. There are many diverse initiatives that produce these kinds of “third space.”
These are ways in which the city can talk back. We can think of the multiple ways in which the city talks back as a type of open-source urbanism: the city as partly made through a myriad of interventions and little changes from the ground up. Each of these multiple small interventions may not look like much, but together they give added meaning to the notion of the incompleteness of cities and that this incompleteness gives cities their long lives, their flexibility, their capacity to mutate.
And this potential for distributed outcomes is a natural for open source technology. But beyond the technology proper, bringing open source concepts into multiple urban settings/domains strengthens these core features of cities, make them cities of people, strengthen the rights to the city.
In sharp contrast, I think that the model of “intelligent cities” as propounded by technologists, with the telepresence efforts of Cisco Systems a key ingredient, misses this opportunity to urbanize the technologies they mobilize. Secondly, the intelligent city concept if too rigid, becomes a futile effort to eliminate the incompleteness of the city, to get full closure/control. This is a recipe for built-in obsoleteness. Imagine if Rome could not have mutated across the millennia: it would be a dead city now. Third, the planners of intelligent cities, notably Songdo in South Korea actually make these technologies invisible, and hence put them in command rather than in dialogue with users.
Beyond the imagery of open-source urbanisms, can we strengthen this positive scenario of the city’s incompleteness by actually deploying open-source technologies in a variety of urban contexts
Posted: May 2nd, 2011 | No Comments »
“The Image of the City” by Kevin Lynch is an important contribution in urban design thinking. The perspective expressed by the author, as well as the methodology (description of mental maps drawn by residents in several cities such as Boston, Los Angeles and Jersey City), is insightful.
Interesting, Gabriel Pelletier, a graphic designer added a new perspective on this book using the following treatment:
“Excerpts from Kevin Lynch’s “Image of the City” were graphically treated according to their respective themes. The blue color was used throughout all the document is used to recall blueprints.
Each section’s beginning was created using the graphic symbols located throughout it’s pages. The cover was done in the same fashion, taking all graphic elements of the book and adding them to note the notion of unity when talking about the city’s elements.“
Why do I blog this? First because I like this book and enjoy this kind of graphic design. Second because it’s interesting to see how the material presented in the book can be enhanced through the kind of representations proposed by Pelletier. The idea of using blue shapes is intriguing as it is sort of reminiscent of building blueprints.
Posted: December 11th, 2010 | No Comments »
… is a new side-project of mine. It basically consists in the articulation between two sources of insights about the urban environment:
- Some pictures I’ve taken over the years in various territories. The photograph are converted into Black and White using a threshold filter to highlight certain characteristics of the environment: shapes, forms, grids, silhouette, outlines or directions. Given my interest to show stereotypical shapes, the focus of the pictures is certainly connected to my interests, obsessions and gut feeling when undertaking urban safaris. As much as I can, I’ll indicated where the pictures have been taken (which is not that difficult if you have an eye for peculiar scenes and buildings).
- Quotes from books written in the second part of the 20th Century about cybernetics, architecture, urbanism and design theories. I’ve bought these books recently at the flea market and in an architecture/design book shop and they seem to come all from the collection of a recently deceased professor from the University of Geneva. The quote I’ve chosen echoes with my interests and perception about what “matters” in these disciplines. It’s definitely a subjective choice and I enjoy the accumulation of such excerpts (as attested by the presence of commented quotes on this blog).
My aim was to select quotes and pictures so that a peculiar kind of relationship emerges out of the juxtaposition. To some extent, this articulation between the two elements could be seen as some vague correlation: sometime there is indeed a cause-and-effect relationship (the quote exemplifies a certain trend that has influenced the architecture of the building represented on the picture), sometimes there isn’t. The idea is to show that some notions, paradigms and system thinking either shaped urbanism or provided a certain framework/cultural Zeitgeist which led to the shapes and representations depicted on the B&W pics.
This is a work-in-progress thing. I guess some assemblage are better than others of course. Let’s see how things unfold, I’ll try to keep this going and select the best juxtapositions in a booklet once I have a certain quantity of material. My perception of this is simply that some patterns and categories will emerge at some point and perhaps a narrative could be constructed at some point.
As usual here, comments are welcome.
Posted: September 14th, 2010 | 3 Comments »
London, UK: the delicate use of a pointing finger.
Istanbul, Turkey: the finger is now turned into an arrow, that indicate the location.
Faial, Portugal: a common “you are here” symbol with a bullseye signage that replaces the finger/arrow metaphor.
Lyon, France: an interesting example of a semi-bullseye signage linked to an indication of a walking path. There’s a direct continuity between the two. Interestingly, this kind of representation shows a direction, where one could head to.
Paris, France. Perhaps the most intriguing as it says “vous êtes ici” printed on the sidewalk, a “you are here” indication that it not really useful as you already know that. Certainly a playful graffiti to indicate that there’s something relevant in the area (one of my favorite book shop in Paris: Bimbo Tower). What is curious here is the direct inscription of the symbol in the context of the person.
Why do I blog this? sorting out the main categories of “you are here” symbols with a limited sampling (recent encounters) allows to understand the evolution over time and the design space (possibilities). Nothing digital here but I’ll get to it later on.
Posted: August 24th, 2010 | No Comments »
An excerpt from this presentation by Ruedi Baur:
“We simply allow ourselves to be guided by the system, led by the hand, almost to the point of losing any notion of orientation in the process. So we can fairly easily imagine this future world in which everyone would be systematically guided by his device, connected to the synchronized global network, and gradually lose any sense of natural orientation. It is a matter of everyday observation that being guided considerable reduces our capacity to know where we are and have any spontaneous sense of the route towards our chosen destination. Neither is this phenomenon only connected with satellite navigation technology; more generally, any guidance by a reliable artificial system tends to reduce our capacity to orientate ourselves naturally, that is to interpret what is in front of us in the environment and independently take decisions that would truly enable us to find our way. (…)
What can we learn from disorientation? How can a design project leave room for individual choice? How can we orientate without guiding?“
Why do I blog this? Although the tone here is slightly over-deterministic, I like the design issue that is at stake when creating urban signage (supported by digital and non-digital means). There’s plenty of study about how people orientation but it would be good to grasp the user experience of disorientation… and use it as a starting point to create meaningful systems.
