Life in the Real-time City: Mobile Telephones and Urban Metabolism

Townsend, A. M. (2000). Life in the real-time city: mobile telephones and urban metabolism. Journal of Urban Technology, 7(2):85–104.
Back in 2000, Anthony Townsend wrote Life in the real-time city: mobile telephones and urban metabolism, an article that argues that new mobile communication systems are fundamentally rewriting the spatial and temporal constraints of all manners of human communications. As signs of this radical change, accessibility becomes more important than mobility and mobile phones increasingly add an element of uncertainty about physical location to our urban interactions. For instance, as many as one-fifth of cell phones users lie about their location when talking on a mobile phone. “For urban planning, it might mean that the city will change far faster than the ability to understand it from a centralized perspective, let alone formulate plans and policies that will have the desired outcomes”.

As decision-making and management of everyday life is increasingly decentralized, the complexity of these systems become greater and therefore less predictable. In parallel, this decentralization creates myriad new interactions and potential interactions between individuals that is dramatically speeding the metabolism of urban systems, increasing capacity and efficiency.The “real-time city” in which system conditions can be monitored and reacted to instantaneously, has arrived. [...] Real-time systems are defined by an ability to constantly monitor environmental conditions vital to the operation of the system.

In fact without efforts to develop new knowledge and tools for understanding the implications of these new technologies, city planners run the risk of losing touch with the reality of city streets.. Townsend takes an urbanist’s perspective on the application of new communication technologies within cities by their inhabitants (i.e. how do they reshape basic aspects of urban life). However contrary to traditional urban planning, which often assigns agency to a city as a unit (e.g. the city is busy, the city in unfriendly), there are tools for understanding complex systems like cities as consequences of many interactions of individuals. Yet, these tools must go beyond the classical approaches taken in urban planning “the widespread bit-by-bit reconstruction of cities is going largely unnoticed by planners accustomed to visualizing cities through aerial photographs“. In consequence, individuals must become the unit of analysis instead of the institution, neighborhood, city or region. These types of new insights can be gained from interpretive methods such as ethnography (e.g. Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City) or a psychoanalysts approach. Then the significance of individual-level technological interventions on larger-scale social systems such as cities could be simulated through agent-based modeling.

Also blogged by Nicolas in Increasing pace of interactions in our cities.

Relation to my thesis: This text refers to some pieces of my works. First, similarly to Antoine Picon’s suggestions last week, Townsend stresses the focus on individual interactions (micro events) that make the city. There is also a reference to some sort of glocalization of the city generated by the telephone and mobile phones (decentralizations in urban sprawl and intensification of the center). Second, there is a practical discussion on how taxi driver’s archaic profession was transformed by mobile phones. “The mobile phone permits dynamic reallocation of the taxi system’s resources, resulting in less wasted time searching for fares“. Something that I can argue with my taxi driver study and the importance of satnav not only to improve the efficiency, but also to decrease the stress (improve the quality of life). Third, there is a reference that mobile technologies add uncertainty to our urban interactions (CatchBob!). Finally, this text revives agent-based modeling as a potential output of my thesis.