Sketching the Street of the Near-Future

Fantastic post by Dan Hill sketching and discussing in “The street as platform” the near-future implications of the digitization of the city with technologies embedded in, propped up against, or moving through the streets, carried by people and vehicles, and installed by private companies and public bodies. “It’s still remarkable to even sketchily consider how much data is already around us, and is near-invisible to traditional urban planning perspectives“.

We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

Inspired by Archigram, who suggested that “When it’s raining on Oxford Street, the buildings are no more important than the rain”, the way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye. For instance, holes in data may become more relevant than the pothole in the pavement.

The narrative describes many aspects of the digital city I have been touching: digital traces, revealing the invisible, seamfulness, and user adoption. Unusually for this type of exercise describing the street of the future, Dan mentions the possibility to better inform the practice of post-occupancy evaluations:

At another building on the street, a new four-storey commercial office block inhabited by five different companies, the building information modelling systems, left running after construction, convey real-time performance data on the building’s heating, plumbing, lighting and electrical systems back to the facilities management database operated by the company responsible for running and servicing the building. It also triggers entries in the database of both the architect and engineering firms who designed and built the office block, and are running post-occupancy evaluations on the building in order to learn from its performance once inhabited.

Relation to my thesis: Quality in the data, citizens appropriation of the technologies in the cities, the temporality of the space and the data defining it:

Her phone’s Google Maps application triangulates her position to within a few hundred metres using the mobile cell that encompasses the street, conveying a quicker route to the café. Unfortunately, none of their systems convey that the café is newly closed for redecoration.