cityofsound

Essay: On the smart city; Or, a 'manifesto' for smart citizens instead

Oh, the smart city. I have “previous” here, over about a decade of writing about the interplay between cities and technology. And particularly, having written about The Street As Platform, and the Personal Well-Tempered Environment, and The Adaptive City, and about New Songdo City, and "new smokestacks", and how it’s easier to crowd-source a revolution than a light-rail system, and so on. And then worked on many projects, which I hope to scribble more about one day here, from Barangaroo to Brickstarter, Masdar to Melbourne.

During this time, what we might call a Urban Intelligence Industrial Complex (led by IBM, Cisco, General Electric, Siemens, Philips et al) has emerged and continues to try to insert itself into urban agendas;  with little success, in comparison to the marketing spend, it must be said. One can imagine a quiet fading away of all those “Smarter Planet” promotional schemes soon, actually.

But it’s clearly not an idea that’s going to go away (for reasons good and bad.) I was be asked by both the London School of Economics and Volume magazine, separately, to write about the smart city (both were related to different speaking engagements.)

 

The piece for the LSE was a contribution to their Electric City conference newspaper (thanks Philipp Rode and Ricky Burdett). I spoke there about the Brickstarter project we started in Helsinki alongside many great contributions from the likes of Richard Sennett, Anthony Giddens, Saskia Sassen, Adam Greenfield, Greg Lindsay, Michael Kimmelman, Alejandro Zaero-Polo, Erik Spiekermann, Richard Rogers and others, all of whom lined up to critique the smart city idea, essentially. My talk was a little too hurried, I’m afraid, and I felt I failed to connect—which partly spurred me to present the following piece here.

 

While the LSE piece was written before Electric City, the Volume article was partly reflecting on an event in Rotterdam organised by the fascinating International New Towns Institute (only in the Netherlands, eh?), where I moderated a panel on New Songdo City. Their latest issue presents four case studies of new towns which can be seen as “smart cities” to some extent (Living PlanIT’s PlanIT Valley, near Oporto in Portugal; Lavasa in India; Strand East in London; New Songdo in South Korea). Really, however, they are contemporary variants on the new town idea—what Volume call “the city in a box” approach.

(Writer’s note: This may only be interesting to me, but faced with writing two pieces in quick succession, when I have essentially a single line of critique, I first of all did what I usually do, as regular readers know—I wrote too much—and produced one piece. I then snapped this in two, trimmed around the edges, and gave one half to LSE and the other to Volume, for further edits. Both published pieces have a distinct and self-contained critique, but they spring from same source, and both suggest the key idea of “smart, engaged citizens”. I’ve stitched them back together into one whole, cleaned up a bit and added a few ornamental details, and am sharing here as one single critique of the smart cities movement. It is different to the original, and so a fourth variation on a theme. It’s a peculiarly baroque and labour-intensive outcome (oh to be able to write precisely first time round) but as a process it had a certain value.)

So, as a whole this is different to the pieces published by LSE and Volume, but is constructed from the basic components of both. I hope you can’t see the join. Look carefully nonetheless, as this might appear at first glance like a destructive critique of technology in the city. It is not. Technology is culture; it is not something separate; it is no longer “I.T.”; we cannot choose to have it or not. It just is, like air. There are different forms of technology in different cities, of course, but given that technology and culture have fused (arguably, always had) the issue is now a cultural one; what kind of culture do we want in our cities? How do we orient ourselves, with regards to today’s particular technological cultures? 

We know how our cities were oriented as regards irrigation, language, currency, double-entry book-keeping, clocks, looms, trains, sewage, power plants, elevators, cars, containers—these are all forms of technology, which were in some way aligned to, and sprang from, the core urban dynamics of their age (and perhaps those eternal urban drivers of culture and commerce.)

So, how do we orient our cities as regards The Network? And how might this then address the core issues of our age?

So the goal is entirely constructive, and to shift the debate in a more meaningful direction, oriented towards the raison d’etre of our cities: citizens, and the way that they can create urban culture with technology. 

Although it says “manifesto” up there, this is not a manifesto in the sense that Marinetti would write one—probably for the best—but instead a quest for the right questions. As such, you might infer your own manifesto from it (even in opposition to it!)

The essay surveys three types of activities, and scenarios, demonstrating active citizens, noting some issues along the way, and then critiques the opposite—the production of passive citizens—before asking a couple of questions and suggesting some key shifts in attitude required to positively work with the grain of today’s cultures, rather than misinterpret it. (Read on below.)

Essay: 21st Century Gestures Clip Art Collection

A month or so ago, Nicolas Nova asked me to write an essay for a project he was doing. He said they'd been working on a catalogue of novel "gestures, postures and digital rituals" and could I write about that, please, as a kind of foreword.

"Curious Rituals is a research project conducted at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) in July-August 2012 by Nicolas Nova (The Near Future Laboratory / HEAD-Genève), Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon and Walton Chiu from the media design program. (It) is about gestures, postures and digital rituals that typically emerged with the use of digital technologies..."

It so happens that, for some years now, I'd been collating a catalogue of novel gestures and interactions myself and had never got round to doing anything with it. So Nicolas's kind request gave me the chance to get it off my computer and onto the internet. Thanks Nicolas!

One outcome of their project is a rather nice short film; another is their book, here. My "preface" is reproduced below. Please note: as you'll see, this is not intended to be thorough, complete or even coherent—but you'll get the gist. I would guess many of us have such a list. It's probably more about noticing as a kind of practice, as a curious ritual of its own, rather than the particular gestures themselves. Even though I spent a little too much time trying to get the hands right. (Only to get the arms all wrong.)

Journal: Flood

(1. Very sketchy initial notes from the last day or so, sent from a suburb of Brisbane as the Queensland floods hit. As I write, in the broader Queensland floods, there are 13 confirmed dead, and dozens more missing. With that in mind, we are incredibly fortunate here, and our experiences pale by comparison to those horrors. We're safe, and quite comfortable. But power is out, networks are fragile, and it's already quite an experience, shall we say, with tonight's 'king tide' still to come. It's late, so please excuse the scratchy nature of these notes, and the lack of links, images and an edit. You can follow the news via the ABC or equivalent. My Twitter feed will serve as notes for the last 2 days, and may cover updates, power permitting.)

(2. I wrote this last night, until about 0130, and then the power gave out as I was transferring from laptop to iPad, a tricky process at the best of times. So I posted this the following morning.)

I'm writing this by candlelight as the power at home went some 12 hours ago now. The irony of using an iPad by candlelight is not lost on me. The iPad is in 'flight mode' to conserve power. Though 'fight mode' might be better description, as we're staying put rather than heading out of town. 'Fight or flight mode' perhaps.

This house sits fairly high above Moggill Road in Chapel Hill, one of Brisbane's western suburbs, and should be high and dry. The floods hit in the last 24 hours essentially, and the big high tide - the 'king tide' - will hit around 4am tonight. There'll be another at 4pm, or thereabouts, and the flood water won't really subside until Saturday or Sunday. So this is the middle of it.

It's all happened remarkably quickly. Not quite with the severity of the 'inland tsunami' that hit poor Toowoomba a couple of days ago—here the Brisbane river is seeping slowly across the city, as opposed to the raging torrent that tossed four wheel drives around so effortlessly in several Queensland towns yesterday. And yet only yesterday morning we were blissfully unaware of what was about to happen. It had been raining for days, weeks, but I think it's fair to say that there was broadly no thought of a flood on this scale about to hit Australia's third largest city. There was absolutely no talk of all this.

We were going about our days as usual—we're on holiday up here, somewhat hilariously—until about midday yesterday.

cityofsound Am up here in Queensland for a few days. Brisbane, specifically. Quite extraordinary weather. River swollen and brown like milk chocolate.
1 day ago

Finlandia: the greatest architectural mistake ever made? Aalto's benign errors

I've been to Helsinki a couple of times this year. It's one of my favourite cities - civic, compact, cultured, curious, crafted. Charming but not overly so. Pale yellows, pale greys, pale whites, pale blues. Sea-borne and wrapped in rock and forest. Jugend and modern, eastern and western. Solid sometimes stolid. A quiet riot of componentry. Literate in most senses, especially in design. Cold and beautifully bleak, crisp in spring and soft and warm in summer, and so on and so on.

I've visited many times yet for some reason I'd never got round to visiting Finlandia, the concert hall designed by Alvar Aalto.

It's a quite fabulous structure, perhaps even the equal of Utzon's Sydney Opera House though certainly less well-known. in fact, it's a similar structure to Sydney, though without its soaring shells - which I admit is a little like saying it's like Miles Davis without a trumpet, but still.

Emergent Urbanism, or ‘bottom-up planning’

I was asked to write an article around ‘bottom-up planning’ by Architectural Review Australia a while ago. It was published in the last issue, and I’m re-posting here. ‘Bottom-up’ is hardly the most elegant phrase, but I suspect you know what I mean. Either way, I re-cast it in the article as ‘emergent urbanism’ which captured a little more of the non-planning approaches I was interested in (note also the blog of same name, which I didn’t know about beforehand).

It partly concerns increased transparency over the urban planning process but also, and perhaps more interestingly, how citizens might be able to proactively engage in the creation of their cities. While it applies to Australian cities most closely, I hope the ideas here might be more generally interesting.

And for those of you outside Australia, there are a few subtitles required to read this. The ‘iSnack 2.0 debacle’ refers to Kraft’s unbelievably wrong-headed approach to ‘crowd-sourcing’ (sort of) a new name for a new cheesy derivative on the legendary Vegemite spread - more here.

And regarding this broad idea of emergent urbanism, a particularly inspirational recent project over this way has been ‘Renew Newcastle’ (Newcastle, New South Wales that is) initiated by Marcus Westbury. I mention it briefly in the AR piece, but it’s worth spending a little more time on it.

I’ve been working with Marcus on The Edge project in Brisbane over the last year, and it’s been hugely heartening to watch the project’s development from relatively low-key beginnings to its now-evident success. 

In short, the city of Newcastle, NSW is the largest coal port in the world. Yet as the harbour has essentially become a giant open mouth belching coal to China, and people and other business have drifted to the suburbs (an over-simplification, but ...), the historic core of the city has hollowed out, leaving numerous vacant buildings. Heading into the heart of all this, the Renew Newcastle project enabled small businesses, artists, entrepreneurs and various creatives to find a temporary home in these largely unoccupied city centre spaces. By liaising with the building owners, the project found a way of offering super-short-term leases at peppercorn rents in all kinds of pretty vacant spaces. They overlaid a free wi-fi network, enabling basic connectivity, and offered a few other basic amenities. The smart trick of the rolling 30-day lease gave start-ups a contract they could afford to get into, and landlords a secure way of getting them out of it should a better offer arise. Simple. 

The project has been achieved without any meaningful funding at all (though funding came later - see comment from Marcus below). As a result, the almost derelict city centre is being used again, and the spaces are rapidly being reconfigured, becoming increasingly active, safe, productive.

I can think of few more positive examples of how to quickly make a genuine difference in cities I.e. not just at the surface layers of urban design, as important as that is, or festivals, or marketing, but at the very core of economic, cultural and social sustainability, with all the ensuring knock-on effects for repairing urban fabric and civic confidence. This is why cities exist, after all, and for Marucs and his colleagues to have addressed this aspect directly, with literally no funding, is thoroughly inspirational.

Do read Marcus’s account, written a few months ago now, and this update, which outlines the story. It’s chock-full of potential insight for urban projects elsewhere.

It’ll be interesting to observe how it develops from this point on. When we worked on the Northern Quarter Network about 15 years ago, the development of Network from start-up to ‘matured’ agency was tricky. It’s similar to the growing pains encountered by most start-ups, if they choose to take the ‘growth’ model of development. Renew Newcastle may fade into the woodwork, maintain its resourceful focus, grow to bigger and better things, franchise across different cities, or simply self-destruct (intentionally or not). In some respects this will be dictated by the development of Newcastle itself, but that’s now a symbiotic relationship. Whatever happens, these kind of stages are catalysts - akin to Jaime Lerner’s famous ‘urban acupunctures’ - and in that respect, it’s already done its job.

Since I wrote the piece, I've also discovered the YIMBY movement in Stockholm, which is one of the best things I’ve heard of recently in any field.

Yimby = Yes In My Backyard

This is evidence of what I was trying to get at with the piece below; that we need systems, structures, vocabularies, applications for enabling positive, progressive responses to our urban fabric that are derived from a love for the city.

With that, have a read. (And thanks to Mat Ward at AR for asking me to write it. And then secretly expecting, accounting for - and of course getting - double the word-count he asked for.)

Journal: For the life between buildings - some notes on the iPad

Many, many, many people have written about last week’s announcement of Apple's iPad. I don’t actually remember a response quite like it. Far more than for the iPhone, for instance, or for any contemporary product or service I can recall. Perhaps its omnipresence in the media is due to promise it appears to hold for the media itself. But the response outside of the traditional media also feels immense.

As for me, I couldn’t help but make a few observations - I'll try to take a different angle, at least initially, approaching it from urbanism as much as product/service design, particularly not having seen the thing in the flesh yet. To get the basics out of the way right away, yes, I think it’ll be incredibly successful. And yes, the name’s a bit iffy but will not be a problem in time because it'll be incredibly successful. And yes, it’s the first iteration of something that will be rapidly refined over the coming years.

 There’s been lots of talk of it being a ‘third’ product, in-between iPhone and laptop. To me, this reminds me of ‘third places’. That’s a Ray Oldenburg term, of The Great Good Place, and generally refers to cafés, bars, libraries etc. Thus the iPad to me feels more like a product for third places rather than a third product. Its form factor and service model is defined for in-between spaces. Although it will float around the home and the office perfectly well, it comes into its own in these third spaces in a way that that phone and laptop cannot, being either too small or too large respectively.

With this in mind, it also reminds me of Jan Gehl’s book, Life Between Buildings, in that the iPad is a device for the life between buildings. 

If we approach it spatially - in terms of context of use I mean, rather than the device itself - it becomes clear why I think it’ll be a success.

It’s a device for airplanes, taxis, public transport, park benches, coffeeshops, pubs, bars, bistros, co-working spaces, breakouts, studios, receptions, meeting rooms, plaza and piazza, public libraries, beaches and all manner of transient spaces, civic spaces. 

It’s a device for cities.

Towards a new architect: an interview with Carlo Ratti

I’ve just finished working with Carlo Ratti and various cohorts on a great little project, which I hope might see the light of day here before too long. In the meantime, I thought I’d post this discussion I had with Carlo late last year, which was recently published in Architectural Review Australia. We met at the Metropolis Congress in Sydney, where Signor Ratti had just given a presentation on his work at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, an outfit whose work I admire hugely, working as they do across many of my interests: interactive architecture, urban informatics, responsive envronments, multidisciplinary design and other implications of real-time networked pervasive information systems for the city.

(Incidentally, the interview was also recently published on the new-ish Australian Design Review website - which amalgamates AR with its sister publication (Inside) - and which is rather nice and proving more than a little useful. Kudos to Andrew Mackenzie and Mat Ward for steering that through so well.)

To the discussion/article ...

Robert Miles Kemp (Postopolis! LA)

Robert Miles Kemp’s talk was always interesting and occasionally spellbinding, most of all when showing the work in responsive robotic structures. His videos of simple blocks self-assembling into what he called “nano-architecture” are quite extraordinary (sometimes eliciting a collective delight similar to that of The Living at Postopolis! NYC). Kemp situated this within a wider context of interactive and informational architecture, centred around his work at Variate Labs and renowned new media deisgn firm Schematic (and his blog, Spatial Robots) described in a consistently interesting talk, covering many of the primary themes in contemporary interface design - and indeed extending the idea of where and what interfaces are.

Whitney Sander (Postopolis! LA)

NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here.

Another interview by David A and David B of ArchDaily, this time with Whitney Sander of Sander Architects, another LA-based firm. Their work is largely interesting due to the focus on prefab construction techniques - as noted previously, this is a consistent theme in some LA-based architecture.The Davids get Sander to talk about his Living Steel works by way of introduction, investigations into prefab construction. Sander notes that working out such projects would come in at $6000per sq ft was a breakthrough moment.

Sander describes how the prefabricated light-gauge metal building industry is actually about 100 years old, and now highly refined. He states it’s the most mature industry in the country (difficult to prove?); the patents wore out long ago. The Butler Box - or Butler Building - is the most well-known example. As it’s so mature now, the margins are very low. “The product is bullet-proof”, he says. “It’s computerised from the minute you place the order.“

(For more on Sander's prefab products, see their Hybrid House)

Essay: The Adaptive City

A few months ago, Scott Burnham kindly asked me to contribute to the exhibition catalogue for Urban Play, a project he conceived and then developed with Droog Design. It is being sponsored by the city of Amsterdam and is premiering there this September. In Scott's words, "Urban Play is about placing the individual at the heart of the city’s development and encouraging creative interaction between the individual and the physical city". You can also find out more at the Experimenta site.

Scott's posting up focus pieces on some of the interventionists featured in the exhibition, starting with the quite brilliant work of Gilberto Esparza, a Mexico City-based artist who creates 'Urban Parasites', "small robotic creatures made from recycled consumer goods which wander, climb, crawl and explore the marginal areas of the city." (Check the videos at Scott's site.)

To my small contribution: Scott asked me to write something about 'the adaptive city', noting some of my previous entries, such as 'Punching holes in Ciutat Vella; adaptive urban form in Barcelona' and 'Architecture and interaction design, via adaption and hackability'. That was pretty much it by way of direction, so I had some free rein to take those thoughts for a walk, and introduce them to some more recent ideas around urban informatics and urban information design, the impact of real-time data and collaborative planning on urban form, and so on.

I've reproduced the full essay below. I believe the other contributors to the catalogue were to be Usman Haque on open source architecture and Richard Reynolds on guerrilla gardening, so it'll be worth keeping an eye on. Many thanks to Scott for his considerable patience, and for asking me to contribute in the first place. It's a relatively speculative, deliberately optimistic piece, continuing some ideas from 'The Street as Platform'. Hope you find it interesting.