Report on the Real-Time Cities Round Table

The round table on Real-Time Cities that took place last month ended up being quite a success. The aim of this event was to gather experts that influence the visions of real-time cities and discuss about the issues, promises and implications inherent to their development. About 25 scholars, practitioners and students from the fields of urban planning, social sciences, architecture, geography, cartography, computer science, interaction design, industrial design and digital media filled the room. We asked 6 main speakers (Georg Gartner, Adam Greenfield, Jonathan Raper, Carlo, Raj Singh, and Paul Torrens) from different disciplines to talk about their work and the resulting implications to real-time cities.

I have summarized the interventions and discussions into 8-pages report now available on the event web page. I mixed Andrea Vaccari‘s details transcripts with Bernd Resch and Jon Reades notes with my own recollection of thoughts generated by this afternoon. It covers the key themes presented and discussed: new information resources for cities, describe real-time dynamics of the city, smart environments (the example of wayfinding), ambient information (the example of Location-Based Services), the city as a Real-Time Control System, and the vision on the opportunities and their implications.

The introduction to the topic of the round table goes as follows:

A city is, of course, by default real-time as exemplified by the street sell of umbrellas when it starts to rain in Barcelona (Figure 1). However, people moving and acting in a city base their decisions on information that is, in most cases, not instantaneous as rain drops and not synchronized with their present time and place. In recent years, the increasing deployment of sensors and handheld electronic devices environments has reshaped these processes and impacted the urbanization of the city. In a real-time city, citizens can be aware and react to events that they can’t see in their immediate vicinity or that took place days before. While humans still set the boundaries, more and more of the critical life support systems of the city are instrumented to both sense and make sense of the world around them . Or as in the “Synchronic Society” envisioned by Bruce Sterling every object worthy of human or machine consideration generates a small history. These histories are not dusty archives locked away on ink and paper. They are informational resources, manipulable in real time .

In the literature on ubiquitous computing and urban planning, the descriptions of the real-time city often employs the terms: 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. They highlight the revolution in urban informatics that gets embedded in the fabric of our lives and giving us the ability to show previously invisible urban processes. Moreover, real-time data have the ability to reveal a city as a whole, instantaneously, in excruciating detail, but for the first time also alive. This information become crucial to monitor the urban system and react to its conditions instantaneously.