cityofsound

Journal: Of brains and cities; neuroscience and cultures of decision-making

From Emergence, by Steven Johnson

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in an event called the “North House Salon” (see previous entry: Passport Control to Pimlico). These salons are organised by Dr Sarah Caddick, neuroscience advisor to Lord David Sainsbury (ex-Minister for Science and Innovation in the UK government) and the Gatsby Foundation, and bring together various “expert groups” with select groups of neuroscientists. It was an absolute privilege to share a conversation with some of the UK’s leading scientists—for a start, it’s always fascinating to see another discipline at work, and we were also fortunate that they were all great communicators as well as great researchers.

This particular event was a collaboration with one of my old bosses at Arup, Dr Chris Luebkeman, Director of Arup's Global Foresight, and it concerned the potential correlations between our emerging understanding of the brain, and our understanding of cities. (Perhaps we should also say our emerging understanding of cities?) The event was dubbed "The Urban Nervous System"...

As Chris put it in his intro, we do have an increasingly shared vocabulary and way of thinking emerging about the systems of the brain and the systems of cities. This may partly be due to biomimicry shaping design discourse, partly the vogue for “smart cities” strategies, and partly because of recent advances in “brain science” (note: neuroscience is to some extent now seen as part of a continuum including behavioural psychology, behavioural economics, neurology, developmental biology and others. I'll be using the term "brain science" as short-hand for all that. At one point, we tried to discuss the limits of neuroscience. We didn’t get very far.)

Team Neuroscience (not that we lined up as teams, of course) consisted of Doctors Peter Latham (UCL), Semir Zeki (UCL), Daniel Wolpert (Cambridge University), Troy Margrie (National Institute for Medical Research/UCL), Dmitri Kullmann (UCL), Steve Wilson (UCL) the aforementioned Sarah Caddick, and Geoffrey West (Santa Fe Institute). (Note that Geoffrey is not a neuroscientist but a physicist, and could probably swap sides at half-time, should he want to, at least to some extent; again, boundaries were intriguingly eroding.)

On Team Urbanist we had Mark Bidgood and Duncan Wilson (both Arup), Robin Daniels (Living PlanIT), and me. Actually, the “teams” really were non-existent; the presentations were mixed up, as was the conversation—in a good way. (Unfortunately, as you can see, the gender (im)balance was not good, although that's partly because a few people couldn’t make it, sadly.)

The format was papers sent beforehand (I sent this, this and this), and on the evening, three-minute presentations from all participants—some slides, some not—followed by drinks reception and talking, followed by dinner and more talking, followed by pub for a few of us. (Sidenote: I think all the scientists used Macbook Airs or iPads. Make of that what you will.)

So how did the conversation start? The presentations in order …

Sketchbook: Melbourne Smart City, for City of Melbourne/C40 Cities (incl. a note on why it's easier to crowdsource a revolution than a light-rail system)

About a year ago, I helped design and run a workshop for the City of Melbourne, as part of Arup’s agreement to run a series of workshops for the C40 ‘climate leadership group’ of cities (the C40 is in partnership with the Clinton Climate Initiative, and is a consortium of what could be described as the world’s leading cities.) The workshop was free for each city, and they get to choose the topic.

To my delight, Melbourne chose information visualisation, real-time data and social media, and their role in enabling behaviour change around energy use, water use and so on. We ended up calling all this ‘Melbourne Smart City’. (Despite some issues with the ‘smart’ word, it can at least began to illustrate how pervasive the approach could be to the client, when applied broadly across the way they see the city. And it has some meaning in their networks already e.g.)

I won’t go into the detail of the two-day workshop itself. Suffice to say, it took a lot of effort, it was good—well-attended and with great contributions from participants—and has helped change aspects of the way the city is being run, subsequently stimulating associated strategies and policies (including the forthcoming transport strategies, as well as their ICT-led work), to prototypes and pilot programmes (including projects around street trees and urban noise), to even altering the vocabulary used across the organisation (altered ‘corporate’ vocabulary is always a useful bell-weather, often indicating the genuine absorption of new ideas into an organisation.)

Likely to be of more interest is the final report that I produced for the City, and which emerged from the Melbourne Smart City workshop. I wrote this, with contributions from my colleagues Léan Doody, Volker Buscher and Mark Watts at Arup London, and Andrew Wisdom at Arup Melbourne. This in turn led to me re-writing it more broadly, to become Arup’s Smart Cities strategy in general. (Michelle Tabet at Arup Sydney also helped with this aspect.) Matt Willcox and Alex Fearnside at the City of Melbourne were also instrumental in shaping the report and preceding workshop. Additionally, I’ll go into the visualisation sketches that my team produced (Jason McDermott, Pei-Hong Jessie Hsu and I, at Arup Sydney.) Here's the report, as PDF (I was in the middle of a H+FJ Vitesse phase, as you’ll see).

It's perhaps timely to publish this here at the moment, even though it's almost 18 months old in a fast moving sector, as New York City's Roadmap for the Digital City was published recently, with typical (and appropriate) chutzpah. While New York's is a good piece of work, and indicates the value of a city getting behind digital 'from the inside', it focuses mainly on the basic services of web, mobile, public wi-fi and so on. No criticism, as those are exactly the right things to focus on (and New York probably has a head start here with their Chief Digital Officer in place, valued, and probably doing all the hard work managing upwards and sideways within the organisation. In fact, in the year since our workshop, several US cities have moved through over this early terrain quite rapidly, not least with Boston's bravely-named and interesting Office of New Urban Mechanics.)

But the Melbourne work we did assumed that web, mobile and wi-fi are the easier things to get right—or at least that they ought to be—and focused more on the ways in which digital might manifest itself physically, in terms of informatics, urban spaces and architecture, as well as touching on the organisation of the city itself. This work should lead ultimately to a complete reconfiguration of what urban governance is, and although we couldn't go there with this, that was something we wanted to move the conversation gently towards. 

Sketchbook: 'Next generation check-in' experience from Qantas

Occasionally, I'll make a some quick notes about a new product or service designed elsewhere, unpacking what thoughts I have at the time, primarily as a reference and marker. The thing could be anticipated rather than experienced, as per the iPad, or quickly explored in order to make broader points, as with the redesign of The Guardian. What follows is probably about a few current interests: service design, identity and touch/wireless-enabled transactional spaces.

I fly a lot. A few thousand kilometers every week on average. I'm not proud of this, and as much as I remain fascinated by airports and aviation I'd really rather not fly so regularly. The reasons for regret are multiple, from family life to carbon footprint to the dismal lack of a high-speed rail alternative, but also because Qantas has an effective monopoly in domestic aviation in Australia. (As with many sectors here, privately-owned effective monopolies rule, from Qantas to Telstra to Coles supermarkets, which leaves punters with few of the benefits of either publicly-owned enterprises or of diverse, competitive markets. It's part of the reason why innovation in products and services is generally so thin on the ground in Australia.) As such, Qantas can deliver a patchy service and largely get away with it.

But, particular credit where it is due for their new frequent flyer check-in experience, which—at this admittedly early stage—is one of the most promising mainstream examples of touch technology and service design I've seen recently. 

Shanghai Expo 2010: universal narratives vs. universal values in the corporate pavilions

Back in May, I visited the 2010 Shanghai Expo. I was in China to help lead a creative cities symposium in Hong Kong and then as a speaker (with Finland’s/Kone’s Anne Stenros, The Young Foundation’s Geoff Mulgan, Shanghai academic Wenhui Shan and others) on a 'social life of cities' panel at Cisco's Partnership for Urban Innovation conference in Shanghai.

The Expo is old news now, in a way, as it's been covered elsewhere in depth (and breadth) and is coming to an end any day. Of course it is wonderful, thought-provoking, banal, confronting and inspiring all at once. Most of that coverage has focused on the architecture and other experience of the country pavilions, not unreasonably. There are some extraordinary buildings and spaces, for sure — such as Heatherwick's UK pavilion (the winner), the Netherlands, the Danish pavilion by BIG, Austria's, China's, Switzerland's, Spain's and Australia's— and I'll follow this with a few notes on what I saw of all that.

But it's worth noting that the country pavilions are only one part of the show. The site is vast, and they cover a good proportion of it, but there are also pavilions for cities, regions and themes, such as Urban Best Practices (which features your correspondent, of which more later). There are also pavilions for corporations and industries. You'll wander past a vast building with just 'OIL' written on it, for instance. 

I thought I’d write about two of these corporate pavilions, however, featuring some EXCLUSIVE (possibly, maybe) footage from both, as these experiences may be as revealing of 2010 as any other part of the Expo. In particular, I’m still trying to understand why the future city visions in both the General Motors and Cisco pavilion experiences share almost exactly the same narrative.

Contingent: recent films by BERG/Dentsu London and Keiichi Matsuda

Two (or three) recent films are worth watching for how they accurately depict the grain of the future. They are 'Making Future Magic' by BERG/Dentsu London:

And 'Augmented City'/'Domestic Robocop' by Keiichi Matsuda:

Both films - I'm counting Matsuda's as one film for the sake of argument - are interesting as they convey a sense of contingency in contemporary media technologies and informatics, or near-future extrapolations of such things. They indicate that such technologies are slightly awkward, incomplete, jittery, fizzing in and out of focus. And yet magical. Coverage is patchy, positioning vague, interaction is compromised yet the capabilities of people, buildings and cities are extended nonetheless. The aesthetic of both films - though quite different - is fascinating in terms of conjuring this sensation. (It's a sensation I tried to describe in text with The Street as Platform.)

Dentsu/BERG's reminds me of the work of Len Lye to some extent, and I can pay no higher compliment (and their collaborator Timo Arnall deserves special mention once again).

It's a form of light painting, which is as old as film itself in some respects despite their utterly contemporary methodology. And while it's difficult to see an application for it other than as raw aesthetic, and so lending itself neatly to branding and cinema, it's powerful precisely because of that aesthetic. 

As with Matsuda's masterful short film, the various augmented components twitch, jitter, blur, fade, wobble, jiggle, shiver, fade, snap, crackle, pop, hiss. Watching those blocky letters jelly about in mid-air is oddly familiar for something we've never seen before. For working with these and related technologies quickly reveals that they are contingent, awkward, unpredictable and far from the seamless experience generally depicted in films, promos (or my own designs for urban interaction, if I'm honest - though here we hit the tricky question of selling such ideas to clients, who in the case of city governments and property developers will rarely want to hear about contingency. Still, much of the most interesting, influential and useful work is without client at the moment.)

In Matsuda's worlds everything is interface and everything is social media, spam and partially relevant advertising, the holy trinity of internet background noise. This is an architect who understands that spatial intelligence now includes an understanding of data as material, just as architecture understands other materials such as glass, steel and plastic. And as such, an understanding of the essential limits, stresses, tensions and density of these new materials too. Or transmaterial as Mitchell Whitelaw would say. (Though watching the 3D 'Augmented City' without the glasses is probably even closer to how technology feels. Everything only just works, but even that is incredible.)

This sense of contingency can even be heard in the background noise incorporated into Matt Brown's soundtrack or in the crackly static Muzak underpinning 'Domestic Robocop'.

It's also a good example of how design itself can hover between research and art, being neither and both. Contingent. The BERGers are old friends, and though I don't know Matsuda, I'd guess that none of them would call themselves artists. Or researchers for that matter. But this work is, well, hovering in that indeterminate space, like a perfect 10 or a false 9.

There's something else: that these are films. Video is rapidly becoming the pre-eminent mode for communication of ideas (just as everyday photography is increasingly becoming video too). My day-job regularly involves discussions about whether animated 3D models or films are best for conveying ideas. Here both are used but film is the dominant medium, and the visions of all the designers here are interesting precisely because they can be situated in a film world with the gritty texture of reality, rather than the smooth polygons of pure animation.

Making Future Magic: BERG and Dentsu London
Keiichi Matsuda

World Design Congress 2009, Beijing: Victor Margolin: The politics of survival, the potential of data display

(Continued from World Design Congress 2009: Day two. Written at the time, last October.)

Victor Margolin was up next. Writer of numerous books, and he did focus on sustainability, and very directly.

In fact, after an introduction which sets the scene in terms of industrial development leading to climate change (probably not something many needed in the room, but you never know), he stressed the importance of COP15, and stated the need for “greater transparency” about the direct and indirect “causes of climate charge”. He noted that “environmental problems are global not just regional/local” and that there was a broad “public mistrust of companies, and of organisations to act in the interest of citizens.”

The “result” of this, as he sees it, is a “demand for more information on the one hand - and improved products and systems on the other .”

We’re engaged in a “politics of survival”, a “politics of protest.” As such, he sees a “new role for the graphic designer”. That there is a latent “demand for graphics and visual displays to help people understand condition of the world - (to create) explanations of what is happening on the planet as a result of human activity ...”

 

World Design Congress 2009, Beijing: Day two

(Continued from World Design Congress 2009: Opening ceremony, World Design Congress 2009: Day one and National Centre for Performing Arts. Written at the time, last October.)

After the sunshine, blue skies and glamour of the opening day, the morning of day two of the ICOGRADA World Design Congress at least has the courtesy to be grey. And after the spectacle of the National Centre for Performing Arts, today the bus takes us from the hotel to the main conference venue of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA).

CAFA turns out to be an even more interesting venue in many ways, as I get to know the college over the next few days (again, thanks to Yuan for showing me round, and through a few of the classrooms.) But over and above just being in a working college, this place also indicates how Beijing is raising the bar through design, as the stunning college museum is an Arata Isozaki building. Neither of my colleges in the UK even had a museum, never mind one designed by Arata Isozaki.

More on the college later, but straight into today’s talks. I’m attending the stream called ‘Balance’, largely as that’s the one in which I’m speaking, but the various talks prove to engaging and stimulating either way.

 

 

 

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.)

Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium 2010, New York

As I started writing this, it was hovering around 39˚C here in Sydney. Gusty, burning hot air. Too hot. It could not have been more different to New York, where I'd been a week or so earlier, where the temperature had been hovering around -7˚C and down to -15˚C with the windchill. I was in Manhattan for a Microsoft Research event: their annual 'social computing symposium', and this year was loosely focused on 'the city'. Many thanks to Tom Coates + Matt Jones, Liz Lawley, Clay Shirky et al for the invite.

Here are my notes on the event, with a dash of local colour thrown in for good measure.

Notes on New Songdo City. Or, What does your Seoul look like (Part 1)

(Much of this originally written at the time, September 2009.)

A day trip to Seoul. Depart Sydney Thursday midday, arrive in Seoul Thursday night, depart Friday late-afternoon back to Sydney. I'm in international airspace for longer than I'm on Korean soil. Don't ask.

What follows is a series of thoughts, vignettes and photos from your tired but intrigued correspondent.

I'd love more time to even begin to explore this city, but not this time. And actually I'm not really in what most would think of as Seoul at all, but New Songdo City. (The taxi driver called it Songdo New City; others call it New Songdo City. Who knows. I was actually visiting the Songdo International Business District. Which is part of Incheon Free Economic Zone. There's a furious series of city branding skirmishes going on over here.)

New Songdo City is a vast new development on reclaimed land — the Song Do tidal flats, in fact, just on the edge of Incheon and Seoul. I arrive at around midnight on the Thursday night. My taxi driver waves his hand towards the lines of lights ascending into the murky sky, describing loose outlines of skyscrapers.