Systems are for Cities, but Cities are for People

With the availability of video of Adam Greenfield’s talk at Lift Asia last Fall, I could complete some of the notes I took from his Picnic07′s “The City Is Here For You to Use“. Adam adds the urbanist expertise to his repertoire from a strong influence of 50-60s Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander or Bernard Rurdofsky. In contradiction to post-war urban planners such as NYC’s Robert Moses who were mainly focused on the macro-level aspect of the cities, these thinkers understood the magic of the street (intimate, social, pleasant) and were concerned about nurturing the micro organic beauty of the city. Their generosity is exemplified by Alexander: For centuries, the street provided city dwellers with usable public space right outside their houses. Now, in a number of subtle ways, the modern city has made streets which are for “going through,” not for “staying in. In the past decades, cars, traffic, overplanning, the “repeating module of doom” (succession of franchises) actively made the city unpleasant (reminding me of James Howard Kunstler: The tragedy of suburbia talk at TED). Even worst, the post 9/11 era sees the increasing amount of, insults to the citizens (e.g. defensible spaces), non-places, anonymous space, junk space (places not worth caring about) or as geographer Stephen Flusty would describe: ‘stealthy spaces – that cannot be found’, slippery spaces – spaces that cannot be reached‘, ‘prickly spaces – that cannot be comfortably occupied’, ‘jittery spaces – that cannot be utilised unobserved’.

However, “nostalgia is for suckers!”. Adam advocates that we now have technological and social possibilities to build upon the inspiration of Jacobs, Alexander or Rurdofsky. The availability of everyware at the level of the body and the city start to disolve in people’s behaviors (to the point of creating new behaviors such as “schizogeography”). Ambient informatics in the form of individual sensors + public sensors + economic data + marketing data become accessible to individuals in a physical context on a way it can be acted upon. This is the very novel way we experience the life in the city. We can start to build new visualizations of the cities and the patterns of their use (no conventional map) and have a city that that response to the behaviors of the users. When designed correctly it make the city more efficient and sustainable and eventually new ways to use the city will emerge. In the downside this new digital layer might create information overload and new types of classes and privileges. In that stage we shall not forget that systems are for cities, but cities for people.

See also Nicolas’ Picnic notes.