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The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future – Future metro – io9
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Adam Greenfield, a design director at Nokia, wrote one of the defining texts on the design and use of ubiquitous computing or ‘ubicomp’ called “Everyware” and is about to release a follow-up on urban environments and technology called “The city is here for you to use”. In a recent talk he framed a number of ways in which the access to data about your surroundings that Hill describes will change our attitude towards the city. He posits that we will move from a city we browser and wander to a ‘searchable, query-able’ city that we can not only read, but write-to as a medium.He states:
The bottom-line is a city that responds to the behaviour of its users in something close to real-time, and in turn begins to shape that behaviour.
Again, we’re not so far away from what Archigram were examining in the 60’s. Behaviour and information as the raw material to design cities with as much as steel, glass and concrete.
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Ego City: Cities Are Organized Like Human Brains – Annotated
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Cities are organized like brains, and the evolution of cities mirrors the evolution of human and animal brains, according to a new study by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
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Comparing infrastructure to neural networks. Hm – legitimate, scientific, or overwrought metaphor? I can certainly see that “maintaining sufficient interconnectedness” is a problem for both brains and cities. -
How Long is Your City’s Tail? – O’Reilly Radar
Excellent article by John Geraci on how/why “the long tail” analogy has to come alive in cities, and what it would mean.
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Most cities right now are models of closed, rigid systems, systems that rely on a few, top-performing agents to get civic tasks done and keep quality of life high for residents. Most of these agents are departments of the city itself, though some are outsourced. Either way, cities rely on one agent per issue, no more. (…)
…imagine instead a city that has totally open, unrestricted access to data (say, San Francisco or DC in 2011). What does it look like? It has all of the familiar city-run departments providing all of the services and assistance they’ve always provided – that’s not going away. Then it also has public services offered by the mega companies, the Google Traffic, IBM’s Smarter Cities, and so forth. Those are huge added value to these open cities – they’re used by a large percentage of residents and make life in those cities better. But THEN, it also has an insane long tail of services set up and run by anyone with an interest in doing so, just by hooking into city data, distributing it in a new way, improving on it, mashing it up, giving it back to the city, etc. These services each individually get used by a small minority of people, but collectively they get used by more than any other single source in the city.
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It’s interesting to think about the differences between Canada and the US here. In the US, all government data is owned by the people – governments can’t keep it back. But in Canada, all government data is owned by the Crown. That means, Canadians have to first get someone in authority to grant them access to it and they have to get permission to use it. #fail #deadendfeudalism -
Storefront for Art and Architecture | Pike Loop, a Robot-Built Installation in NYC
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Gramazio & Kohler’s work represents the cutting edge of innovation in the field of digital fabrication in architecture. For many years architects have relied on digital manufacturing processes such as CNC milling or 3D printing as a tool for formal research at model-scale. For the first time, Gramazio & Kohler’s work explores the potential of mobile digital fabrication techniques that can fabricate at 1:1 scale on site.
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Urban Planning Tools for Climate Change Mitigation
QUOTE “Land use and urban form are key contributors to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) through the physical arrangement of streets, building types, and land uses that influence vehicle use and energy consumption in buildings. City and regional officials now facing new emissions reduction requirements are increasingly turning to urban design as a key component of climate mitigation. But, this approach requires decision support tools that illustrate the GHG implications of land use and transportation options. While a wide spectrum of tools currently exists, few have the capacity to work simultaneously at both the regional and local scale, or to capture both building performance and transportation demand analysis.
This report reviews existing tools by scope, scale, methodology, and policy support, and presents four case studies illustrating how existing tools at various stages of development have been used. ” UNQUOTE
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.