Sketching the Networked and Adaptive Cities

Physically anchored by some heavy urban data drilling activities, I could not make the trip to Jeju, Korea for this year’s Lift Asia. Its session on network cities discussed the fusion of digital technologies into contemporary urban environments. Fortunately Nicolas Nova and Bruno Giussani reported their notes. In a follow-up of his the City is Here for You to Use, Adam Greenfield argued that the invisible and intangible overlay of networked information that enfolds in the city is taking over the urban fabrics as drivers to our choices and actions. This becomes particularly true with a long here of layering a persistent and retrievable georeferenced histories and a big now of real-time accessibility to this information at a local and global scale (video of the talk). With the control of these two conditions, networked cities will have the capabilities to respond to the behavior of its residents and other users in like real time, underwriting the transition from browse urbanism to search urbanism. This proposal of the city “à venir” with its new new patterns of interactions echoes very well with Dan Hill’s latest The Adaptive City (follow-up of Sketching the Street of the Near-Future)

These newer nervous systems, not centralised but distributed, and predicated on digital networks of networks in which every object is informational and every movement or behaviour is trackable, could combine to form a new kind of lattice-like informational membrane, hovering magically over the physical fabric of the city. As if one of Calvino’s imaginary cities comprised solely of information, a limitless multidimensional data-based shadow structure represents the life of the city in real-time.
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The built fabric becomes less important than the behaviour of the city itself, and we finally have a sense of the latter. As Reyner Banham suggested all those years ago, services and infrastructure become far more relevant to the way the city feels.

but captured realities networked information feeds back to us only partially correlates the complex reality of a city, as reported in our Real-Time Cities Round Table last Spring and highlighted by Hill:

Not all of the life, of course. There are limits to such models, as there are limits to the perceptive capabilities of sensors and of filters to interpret the data. Real life continues in parallel with the real-time city model. In an inversion of the body, where the human subconscious is capable of processing vast amounts of data not perceived by its conscious self, the real-time city model can only capture a tiny fraction of the information present within the city. So the city information model cannot approach the subconscious of the city, but can provide a facsimile of consciousness.

The model is already being built. With only the simple visualisation of data scraped from the management systems of bike-sharing networks Vélib’ and Bicing we can already see the pulse of the city, Barcelona’s bikes heading to the beach into the sun, whereas their Parisian counterparts saunter from the Périphérique inwards to the centre, mirroring the city’s intrinsic wider rhythms of work and play.

yet these mirrors of the urban reality, even slightly distorted can change the practice of designing cities and their spaces with better/cheaper metrics for post-occupancy evaluations:

Everyday design could become a conversation within social software networks, and citizens have data and tools that urban designers can only dream of. In fact, professional urban designers have this data too, and thus their practice is transformed.

Relation to my thesis: Cities’ evolutions into information spheres, generating wider set of accessible data. Their analysis create novel perspective (or stories as Hill would say) that might affect the way the city sees itself and thus behaves. Ben Cerveny provides in Models of urban dynamics his abstract Look at the way we behave in the real-time city

Yet we are still at a very early stage in which stake holders are actually still not clear on what to do with the data they have been sitting on for years (Données publicques montrez-nous une meilleure voie) and how they could be fed back in a meaningful way.