[Bogotá City Blues by Coso Blues]
Wired UK reports on the digital city. Here are some utopian, critical and imaginary highlights:
Digital Cities: ‘Sense-able’ urban design
By Carlo Ratti
“By receiving real-time information, appropriately visualised and disseminated, citizens themselves can become distributed intelligent actuators, who pursue their individual interests in co-operation and competition with others, and thus become prime actors on the urban scene. Processing urban information captured in real time and making it publicly accessible can enable people to make better decisions about the use of urban resources, mobility and social interaction. This feedback loop of digital sensing and processing can begin to influence various complex and dynamic aspects of the city, improving the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the places we inhabit.”
Digital Cities: Words on the street
By Adam Greenfield
“[T]he technologies that the networked city relies upon remain opaque, even to those exposed to them daily. In fact, it’s hard to be critical and make sound choices in a world where we don’t understand the objects around us … In the networked city, therefore, the pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening up these occult systems, explaining their implications to the people whose neighbourhoods, choices and lives are increasingly conditioned by them. This will be a primary occupation for urbanists. If we’re reaching the point where it makes sense to consider the city as a fabric of addressable, queryable, even scriptable objects and surfaces – to reimagine its pavements, building façades and parking meters as network resources – this raises an order of questions never before confronted, ethical as much as practical: who has the right of access to these resources, or the ability to set their permissions?”
Digital Cities: London after the great 2047 flu outbreak
By Geoff Manaugh
“Public squares were rebuilt using data taken from air-circulation studies and the physics of the human cough. The distance a sneeze could travel took on architectural form. The congestion charge was applied to pedestrians, keeping transmissibility to a minimum; you could cross from borough to borough only with the written consent of a GP. Movement was controlled; public gatherings of people with incompatible immunities were made illegal; even the floorplans of flats and houses were carefully reshaped in accordance with medical regulations. Being at home felt like quarantine (and often, it was: if your daily skin tests didn’t look so good, you’d find your front door temporarily sealed). It was cold; some said dystopian. Until the prescription districts started to appear.”
Same day update: Also worth checking out are Ben Hammersley’s comments on this and related things.