(2009-09-21) Jones City Battlesuit Future

Matt Jones on the City (Urban) as machine-for-surviving-the-future.

In particular I examined the radical work of influential 60's architecture collective Archigram, who I found through my research had coined the term "SocialSoftware" back in 1972, 30 years before it was on the lips of Clay Shirky and other internet gurus.

Last year I saw him (Richard Rogers) give a talk in London where he described the near-future of cities as one increasingly influenced by telecommunications and technology. He stated that "our cities are increasingly linked and learning" - this seemed to me a recapitulation of Archigram's strategies, playing out not through giant walking cities but smaller, Bottom-Up technological interventions.

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.

Hacking post-industrial cities is becoming a necessity also. The "shrinking cities" project is monitoring the trend in the west toward dwindling futures for cities such as Detroit and Liverpool. 2009-06-13-BulldozingCities Urban computing and gaming specialist, founder of Area Code and ITP professor Kevin Slavin showed me a presentation by architect Dan Pitera about the scale and future of Detroit, and associated scenarios by city planners that would see the shrinking city deliberately intensify - creating Urban Farming zones from derelict areas so that it can feed itself locally. Import Replacement writ large.

His presentation file.

The car (AutoMobile) changed the development of the city irreversibly in the 20th century. I'd claim the Mobile-s will do the same in the 21st.

Update:

• KazysVarnelis questions the cheerleading. The research being done into networked urbanism is tied very closely to industry and even to military operations (how distinct are these under Network Culture anyway?). As we cheer on the latest (literal) battle suit, do we ask how these technologies will be deployed in the Iraqs and Afghanistans of the future? Or how the devices with which we activate the city control us and allow us to be tracked? Projects that critically interrogate the sentient city, as for example Mark Shepard's Hertzian Rain does, are precious few.

• As does Ben Hammersley: I lived for a year in Dongguan, the even-more-hyper neighbour to Guangzhou - and since then have spent enough time in maximum cities, failed cities, edge states and post-nation state localities to know that what's entertaining in fiction positively sucks in reality. The whole tooled-up to buy some groceries, hope I don't get typhoid thing is romantic, for sure, but we used to do it in London too and the finest minds of the 19th century dedicated themselves to stopping it. The Victorian Mega City One wasn't any fun at all after a while... It's not a battlesuit, because this isn't a battle. Much as one might want to be Bourne or Batman or the dude from Mission Impossible, at the end of the day, none of us are. The Layer-s of modern life aren't grand missions to vanquish evil, or the preparation for the time that we'll be called to action, activated by the Global Frequency. Instead our cities are made of, and our lives build up, layers and layers of soft actions. We're already massively networked. We can already read the city's data, it's just that it's encoded in patina, in fashion, in accents, in flirting. Why is this important to remember? Because if we want to predict the future by inventing it, we'd (i.e. us 30-something white male post-digital types) might want to remember everyone else - the people who don't have a theme tune running in their head when they run out of the tube station.

Relevant to Climate Change.