This Associated Press story, GPS locators map out paths with online photos, describes geotagging potential and its utility, along with current methods. “But relatively few photos are posted with location information yet — Flickr estimates 5 percent“.
Via The Map Room.
Relation to my thesis: collecting information on the trends driving the potentials of Tracing the Visitor’s Eye.
Townsend, A. M. (2000). Life in the real-time city: mobile telephones and urban metabolism. Journal of Urban Technology, 7(2):85–104.
Back in 2000, Anthony Townsend wrote Life in the real-time city: mobile telephones and urban metabolism, an article that argues that new mobile communication systems are fundamentally rewriting the spatial and temporal constraints of all manners of human communications. As signs of this radical change, accessibility becomes more important than mobility and mobile phones increasingly add an element of uncertainty about physical location to our urban interactions. For instance, as many as one-fifth of cell phones users lie about their location when talking on a mobile phone. “For urban planning, it might mean that the city will change far faster than the ability to understand it from a centralized perspective, let alone formulate plans and policies that will have the desired outcomes”.
As decision-making and management of everyday life is increasingly decentralized, the complexity of these systems become greater and therefore less predictable. In parallel, this decentralization creates myriad new interactions and potential interactions between individuals that is dramatically speeding the metabolism of urban systems, increasing capacity and efficiency.The “real-time city” in which system conditions can be monitored and reacted to instantaneously, has arrived. [...] Real-time systems are defined by an ability to constantly monitor environmental conditions vital to the operation of the system.
In fact without efforts to develop new knowledge and tools for understanding the implications of these new technologies, city planners run the risk of losing touch with the reality of city streets.. Townsend takes an urbanist’s perspective on the application of new communication technologies within cities by their inhabitants (i.e. how do they reshape basic aspects of urban life). However contrary to traditional urban planning, which often assigns agency to a city as a unit (e.g. the city is busy, the city in unfriendly), there are tools for understanding complex systems like cities as consequences of many interactions of individuals. Yet, these tools must go beyond the classical approaches taken in urban planning “the widespread bit-by-bit reconstruction of cities is going largely unnoticed by planners accustomed to visualizing cities through aerial photographs“. In consequence, individuals must become the unit of analysis instead of the institution, neighborhood, city or region. These types of new insights can be gained from interpretive methods such as ethnography (e.g. Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City) or a psychoanalysts approach. Then the significance of individual-level technological interventions on larger-scale social systems such as cities could be simulated through agent-based modeling.
Also blogged by Nicolas in Increasing pace of interactions in our cities.
Relation to my thesis: This text refers to some pieces of my works. First, similarly to Antoine Picon’s suggestions last week, Townsend stresses the focus on individual interactions (micro events) that make the city. There is also a reference to some sort of glocalization of the city generated by the telephone and mobile phones (decentralizations in urban sprawl and intensification of the center). Second, there is a practical discussion on how taxi driver’s archaic profession was transformed by mobile phones. “The mobile phone permits dynamic reallocation of the taxi system’s resources, resulting in less wasted time searching for fares“. Something that I can argue with my taxi driver study and the importance of satnav not only to improve the efficiency, but also to decrease the stress (improve the quality of life). Third, there is a reference that mobile technologies add uncertainty to our urban interactions (CatchBob!). Finally, this text revives agent-based modeling as a potential output of my thesis.
Some notes and thought from Antoine Picon‘s informal talk at this morning Ambient Informatics course. Picon is Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at Harvard. His background make him a perfect observer of what is happening today and skeptical of the benefits of technologies. His conversation started by agreeing that digital media is changing the city as we experience it. However, the nature and the scope of this change remain unclear. For instance, unlike William Mitchell evocation in City of Bits of the dematerialization, we now know that it is far from being the case, physical circulation has increased in direct proportion to the rise of the electronic exchanges. Similarly, there has been the assumption that electronics link to the dispersion of cities (e.g. sprawl) such as in the Silicon Valley. In fact, this perspective is in contrast with the reality of the importance of centers and concentrated urban senses (see Manuel Castells or Saskia Sassen‘s works). Finally, we can assume that new means of communication will affect primarily urban life and urban experience rather than the urban layout and fabric. This contradicts the current developments of social softwares such as facebook that builds communities based on who you know physically. In fact, as suggested by Steve Woolgar virtual interactions are all more vivid when they are based on a material reality of some kind.
So should we consider that the digital media city is just the city we know with hypertrophied characteristics, more circulation, a more complex sequence of centers and peripheries, more networks? Or as suggested by Marc Augé‘s discourse we might very well live in a state of supermodernity and in supermodern cities rather than being on the verge of a different mode of existence.
Urban mapping is a mean to lead us to explore further what is happening today in the urban realm. Picon presented the evolution of the map representation of the city. In the Renaissance, many maps were about presenting the portrait of the city, its physiognomy, like a person, and its main monuments. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, maps were more and more often about urban geometry. In the nineteenth century, maps conveyed notions about new dimensions of the city like its networks (e.g. sewer maps, what happens in the network. such as surveillance, state of traffic). Nowadays, with the complexity of cities, Even their centers are hard to understand using the traditional means of cartography. Contemporary maps might come with two scales. First, mapping globably what is happening (i.e. global perception). These maps present us the city from a control room perspective. As highlighted by Bruno Latour, these maps only represent selected point of view of the city. Second, mapping what is happening to the individual (i.e. particular and local aspects, such as the use of satnav systems). These maps show us the city as we experience it, with the nearby possibilities offered to us. Beyond being produced using digital technologies, these two scales share another property: they how occurrences, events, situations, scenarios rather than objects, arrangements and organizations. The first type functions at the scale of the city, the second at the scale of the individual. Since the 50s and 60s, the city is more and more defined as a program of events. Archigram‘s work reflects very well this evolution. Similarly, the Paris evoked in the Debord’s psychogeographic maps was a matrix of events and situations. Nowadays, it is those events, festivals, celebrations of all kinds that define cities as surely as monuments. In fact even pieces of architecture become events (e.g. the Guggenheim in Bilbao)
In fact, very often nothing happens in the city, but the city is the event (e.g. being in Eurodisney is part of the event) with all its “hyper-local” micro-events. The weather or traffic conditions have been transformed into an everyday event. We have now the capacity to reveal them in real-time. However, it is not yet entirely clear what should one do with this real time possibilities.
Then Picon went to on talking about the suspention of the cricis of historicity. That is that we currently live in the circle and to get out of it we must think about apocalyptic changes. Digital media is making promises, but in practice it shows nothing on how it changes the world or the city. It does not aim at a radically different future. Digital technology is proliferating without promises. Therefore we live in a suspended present. Real-time maps developed at the SENSEable City Lab shows life how it is and no how it could be. In fact, in the media map how it could get worse, and digital media participates to that. As a provocation, Picon mention the purpose now is not to open doors as the MIT Media Lab has been doing. This kind of ideology of figuring out the “how” is over. The real-time maps are a mean to engage the discussion but of course do do not solve the problem. Therefore we should focus on the “why” and what is really problematic today and engage in the construction of a possible future. For instance, digital media could help introducing sustainability more sexy way (such as what Tim Taylor presented at Lift08). I liked the comment that our current approach is very similar to biological science: we try to understand a living system through observations, and then think on how this knowledge can solve problems, develop medicaments and cure diceases. In summary, we have an agenda, but we are not really clear about it. What do we do with all these real-time data?
Junno wrote some follow-up thoughts.
Relation to my thesis: Antoin Picon historical description of the city from its physiognomy, then infrastructures and finally global and individual events is very relevant to sketch a future instantiation of WikiCity that will feature how to connect these maps of events to people.
Two projects mapping the predicted real-time positions of trains. Since train operators do not disclose the actual location of a train, these services must use indirect ways to collect these data. Where Are Trains (France) parses online schedule boards of different stations such as the one of Paris Montparnasse. The position of the train obtained in real-time upon Arrivals and with at least a 1-h delay for departures. Then the system uses pre-builded time profiles to estimate the current location of trains by-passing potential stopovers. Similarly Train Map (Switzerland) uses train timetable, and does not yet show the actual GPS-positions of the trains. “But, as Swiss trains are almost always on time, most of the time the position is accurate”.
Tracking a train in Zürich with Train Map.
Relation to my thesis: The predictive approach used in this systems generates uncertain data that determine a location in space (where is it) and time (when was it there). Does the temporal granularity of these location information affects the decision making? In what kind of scenario would people rely on these informations
Mapping real-time train traffic follows the trend of vessel tracking (e.g. planes and boats)
In partnership with Orange Labs in Paris, faberNovel developed Urban Mobs a spatio-temporal animation of the mobile phone network activity (density of voice communication I guess) during the “Fête de la musique” in Paris in 2007. The visualization, very similar to Real Time Rome, is based on a dataset of 24 hours (video of the result).
During Lift, Bernard Paques posted some measures of the fluctuating quality of service of the WiFi network. While the quality of a space can be revealed by its physical aspect, wireless services have very little if no affordances. What is interesting is everybody builds its own general awareness of the quality of a “cloud of connectivity“, from the past experiences in similar environments and folk psychology. The “communicating bamboo” project developed by Orange Labs shows this necessity to reveal the availability and quality of a wireless service.
On Wednesday the New York Talk Exchange (NYTE) project will debut as part of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition, “Design and the Elastic Mind.” Based on the data of telecommunications traffic (voice traffic + IP traffic) flowing to and from New York City, the project aims at visualizing and exploring the connection that the city neighborhoods entertain with the rest of the World. It should reveal how the heart of New York pulsates, how it changes over the space and time, and how the city’s neighborhoods differ from each other by maintaining special and distinct relationships with particular cities and countries.
World Within New York shows how different neighborhoods reach out to the rest of the world via the AT&T telephone network. The city is divided into a grid of 2-kilometer square pixels where each pixel is colored according to the regions of the world wherein the top connecting cities are located. The widths of the color bars represent the proportion of world regions in contact with each neighborhood.
See the Press Release.
Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities is now publicly available online. Enjoy the content on walabab.com or download the PDF.
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.
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.
