Courses on Urban Computing

This semester I will passively observe two complementary courses on urban computing. At NYU, Adam Greenfield and Kevin Slavin teach Urban Computing focus on the observations and literature on co-evolution of urban architectonic (i.e. the physical city), the metropolitan experience (psychological, emotional and affective dimensions of the city) and ambient informatics.

We will be building the city up from an array of primitives – physical patterns or archetypal situations – asking what set of functions each has served over time, how people have used and understood them over the history of human settlement, and what happens to each of them when computation saturates the urban environment at every scale. We want to consider them both in isolation, and in their interaction; our intent is to privilege neither the virtual nor the actual, being much more interested in how these two conditions inform, interpenetrate and condition one another.

The reading list is available.

On a more applied level, MIT colleagues Carlo Ratti and Assaf Biderman organize an Ambient Informatics workshop that takes the technological aspects of the real-time city as pivot of thoughts. It will It focuses on developing concepts and applications for enhancing our experience of the built environment using real-time information and pervasive computing

Our experience of our cities, homes, and social interactions is changing profoundly as technology becomes distributed throughout the built environment. Seamless integration of real-time information about events, resources, and personal experience within physical spaces opens the door for key applications in urban planning, resource management, emergency response and much more. It can also strengthen our perception of the built environment as a place for social inclusion and collaboration. The workshop will meet once a week and include an organized visit to Scotland and/ or Copenhagen.

Flyer of this semester’s SENSEable City Workshop on Ambient Informatics