Program of the Round Table on Real-Time Cities

So, ok the program for Monday’s Round Table on Real-Time Cities is now set. The informal aspect of the event should make it easy to rearrange it on the fly if necessary.

I will start of by introducing and defining the subject; Mentioning that, cities are by definition real-time, but the deployment of geo-information, mobile, wireless and sensor technologies allow to reveal the global, emerging aspects that can be reacted upon. In other words, a “real-time city” is a city in which system conditions can be monitored and reacted to instantaneously (Townsend, 2000); Making real the narrative of Archigram that suggested that the way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye “When it’s raining on Oxford Street, the buildings are no more important than the rain”. The visions behind “real-time cities” often refer to “pulsing cloud of data, instantaneous information, seamlessness integration, empowerment of the citizens, enhancement of our perception, reveal the city as we experience it, patterns of behavior, observe and improve“. For instance here and there I could find sentences such as: “Seamless integration of real-time information about events, resources, and personal experience within physical spaces” or “Strengthen our perception of the built environment as a place for social inclusion and collaboration” or “Before transport planning was about predict and accommodate and now it becomes more observe and improve“. This round table takes the opportunity to gather researchers in urban planning, geographic information systems, architecture, computer science, social sciences, and interaction design and share our perspectives on this new object of research. In 3 hours there will probably be no much more time than to break the ice and raise an awareness of the multiple issues inherent to the design, deployment and integration of real-time information systems in cities.

The session will be split in 2 main parts. At a first step, informal presentations and discussion around 3 topics:

Topic 1: New resources to describe cities (talks: Raj Singh, Paul Torrens)
Topic 2: The city as a platform for innovation (talks: Jonathan Raper, Georg Gartner)
Topic 3: Implications of the deployment of ubicomp technologies on the reconfiguration of cities (talks: Adam Greenfield, Carlo Ratti)

Then, in a second part, as long as time allows, discussion on three stakeholder perspectives

Citizens: What is a good real-time city?

Research: How can we define this research object? What drives us?
Practitioners: What are the expertise to design/manage a real-time city? What is the process (action vs. reaction)?

The round table will be directly followed by an MIT open lecture by Adam Greenfield entitled “The City Is Here For You To Use“.

Relation to my thesis: I guess at no other places than MIT, I would have been able to gather such a top set of people to discuss themes at the core of my thesis: digital traces, revealing the invisible, urban modeling and simulations, user-centered datasets and location-based services.