The digital revolution & city evolution

Imagine a city where you know in real time what is happening around you and where you can connect to other people and worlds so that ‘you being here’ and ‘you being there’ are one experience. Well it is already happening. The digital world is changing dramatically how we see, perceive and interact with the city. We can both extend our self through social media and extend our understanding of the how the city works and its dynamics in interesting ways.

Two links are useful to get you into this world. The first is MIT’s SENSEable City project run by Carlo Ratti and colleagues (www.senseable.mit.edu). This uses the power of data for the city to reveal itself in dynamic ways. When you bring various data streams together in new configurations and make them active a new world is opened out. So far the central problem has been data separation and static display.
The second is the website of Rob Aalders (www.robaalders.com) who explores the connection between the physical, augmented reality and virtual space.

Enriching experience, immersion, interactivity, real time transactions and co-creation are the watchwords. Everything can come alive. Objects covered in pixels take on a life of their own, so a building can feel as if it is moving. You can follow your RFID coded trash as it navigates its journey to the dump which may be far too far away to be sustainable. Together liberated data, social media driven applications and shared experiences and imagineering can give us a new sense of reality. This can be accessed by smart phones or public digital displays.

The lesson is that data is normally collected by individual organizations and is useful to them. Yet bringing information say about traffic movements, mobile phone calls and events together potentially offers much more value when creatively combined through new applications that are accessible to users. This allows people to be and to feel that they are synchronizing with their environment and to make decisions accordingly.

People moving within a city mostly have to base decisions on information that is static not reflecting the actual state of systems or urban dynamics, such as printed time tables, fixed opening hours, or going to a shop where what you want is out of stock. Yet companies and local authorities increasingly manage networks in real-time, always aware of what is going on.

Take Arlene Birt’s Malmo project ‘visualizing sustainability’. This closes the feedback loop between people moving in the city and the digital real-time data collected in multiple usually separate networks. You get the data back from the actions you take, such as reducing CO2 emissions, when you are cycling as in Arlene’s project. This makes people more aware of the effects of their actions and can lead to behavioural change.

Take SENSEable city’s Trash Track project in Seattle which tagged 3000 pieces of diverse rubbish and then followed the immense distances your trash travels so making you aware of your behaviour and perhaps engendering a change in awareness.
Another example of data capture is the ‘Apps for Democracy’ project (www.appsfordemocracy.org/) which in autumn 2008 opened Washington’s vast data catalogue and encouraged citizens to come up with solutions for urban problems using an open source logic with creative commons licensing (www.creativecommons.org/). The catalogue includes, for instance, real-time crime feeds, school test scores or poverty indicators and is the most comprehensive in the world.

The old way - the Web 1.0 way – the project felt would cost a couple of $million by outsourcing it to a single supplier to analyse and come with solutions they felt would not deliver good products. Intuitively they sensed combining with citizens’ talent would be far more effective. The results had to be shared and be useful for citizens, visitors, businesses and government agencies.

The first edition contest cost the municipality $50,000 and returned 47 iPhone, Facebook and web applications with an estimated value in excess of $2,600,000 to the city. They include: A carpooling organizer, new biking maps, a ‘We the People Wiki’ peer-led community reference website that anyone can edit based on the public data, an application called ‘Aware Real Time Alerts’ on crime reports, building permits and the like. Helsinki’s Forum Virium project was inspired by it and follows similar aims (www.forumvirium.fi)

‘Live Singapore!’ is another initiative that seeks to develop an open platform to collect, combine and fuse as well as distribute real-time data originating from many different sources.

The overall aim is to create feedback loops between people, their actions, and the city by giving them access to the real-time dynamics in experientially rich formats so they can understand the urban eco-system. This can enable them to take decisions more in harmony with their environment and what is happening.

To do this well requires new collaborations and mixed teams. With silo working, departmentalism and old forms of governance the synergies cannot happen. Urban planners need to meet computer geeks and both need good links with visualizers and experience experts or specialists in microelectronics as well as those in the soft sciences.

Yet the revolution has only just begun as many developments are occurring in digital space that will have a huge impact on how we negotiate and interact with the physical world. The city is increasingly influenced by new cultural and economic forces and processes such as social media or mobile internet. How we move in and navigate the real is influenced by what we do in the virtual. This will affect what kind of shops we will have will and retailing in general, how and where we meet with ultimate effects on everything from the prices of real estate to how businesses develop. The issue is can we turn the technology and associated cultural shifts to the public good.