VURB

The Medium is the Metropolis

neb — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:55:27 +0000

The age of ubiquitous computation is condensing around us even as you read this. The various systems throughout a modern city that you probably interact with everyday are beginning to maintain persistent memories of their own use, communicate with each other about their status, and even reconfigure themselves based on your dynamic needs.

In the same way that social networks and digital representation have had profound consequences on the cultures of print, music, and video, so too will the urban fabric of the city itself be transformed into an information layered, collaboratively shapable medium.

Civic Information Systems

neb — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:41:45 +0000

The modern city is built not just upon physical infrastructure, but also patterns and flows of information that are always growing and transforming. We are only now beginning to develop the tools that allow us to see these patterns of information over huge spans of time and space, or in any local context in realtime.

Just as the industrial age transformed cities with the addition of towers to the skyline and far-reaching transit networks, the digital age will bring new urban-scale infrastructure into everyday experience. Where the products of industrial urban evolution were huge physical manifestations that celebrated the magnitude of urban culture, the digital era is instead producing equally impressive manifestations that live “in the cloud”.

Collaborative Redevelopment

neb — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:09:02 +0000

The city is forever changing. While it is essential to preserve and nurture many environments and characteristics that give a city it’s texture and unique life, the needs of citizens often evolve beyond the purposes or constraints upon which buildings or infrastructure were initially constructed. The problem of designing urban redevelopment to meet new needs without disrupting the texture and life of the city has frustrated many a planning department.

Digital culture has been evolving strategies to approach it’s own development challenges. The production of complex programs like operating systems require the orchestration of countless intricate tasks across hundreds of participants, while the building of massive online references like Wikipedia combine the efforts of thousands. We can build tools that provide the same massively collaborative framework around the transformation of the city itself.

Urban Systems Literacy

neb — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:41:44 +0000

As a culture, we are evolving more and more ways to perceive patterns in complexity. Most of our scientific pursuits in the last half a century have been in mapping the behavior of complex systems. We have even developed an entire field of entertainment, game design, to tap the enjoyment we instinctively feel in understanding ‘rule spaces’. These new literacies can now be focused on the web of relationships that make up a city. Modeling techniques popularized by science, and made both popular and culturally meaningful by game design, can now be used by people on the streets to get a better understanding of what is shaping the world right around them.

Responsive Environments

neb — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 21:30:25 +0000

Within a dynamic urban infrastructure, city-scale services like power, data, and transportation begin to adapt in realtime to the changing needs of the public. Potentially, other digital services like projection and audio systems, or even the transformation of physical space, could be layered into the public sphere. What are the mechanisms by which these services are provisioned by the tasks that citizens utilize them for?

Urban Interface Policy

neb — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:51:36 +0000

As the city becomes the site of dynamic systems that can provide services and transform environments in public space, it is imperative that we consider carefully the ethics and politics of these infrastructures. In the smart city, what is written as programmatic software ‘code’ can easily become defacto ‘law’ as it imposes permissioning schemes and identity regimes on it’s participants. So far, the internet, and the open source software that powers much of it, has remained remarkably adaptable to the ideals of democratic and egalitarian societies. Every infrastructural advance, however, goes through a watershed moment where the governing design principles of the technology itself begin to influence the types of societal experiences they might produce. We need to attempt to understand the cultural ramifications of such infrastructural design decisions in this context.