/// urbanism

• Understanding Place

  cities, place, and urbanism

  December 12, 2011

  The Project for Public Spaces defines placemaking as a formal process of improving public spaces, but I'm wondering if there isn't personal or vernacular form of placemaking that occurs as an emergent property of individual and community behaviors. My brother, with a masters in Urban Planning, says that placemaking only pertains to the process at the formal level and ceases to have meaning in informal settings. So what do we call this form of intrinsic placemaking - what is the name for the behaviors that help us understand and connect to a place?

  I've been thinking about this recently because of two articles from the December 5, 2011 issue of the New Yorker. While the subject matter is dramatically different, both consider place through personal and communal lenses. You'll need a subscription to access the articles in their entirety, but the quotes convey the basic gist. I'm going to pour another beer and engage my brother in a deeper discussion. Hopefully we'll come up with something...

  The Tao of WiFi by Lauren Collins

  Like architecture and restaurants, wireless names suggest the character of a neighborhood.

  A literary approach to wardriving, Alexandra Janelli sleuths wifi networks to uncover the very particular and personal characteristic of neighborhoods.

  Mapping Home by Aleksandar Hemon

  I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul. Physically and metaphysically, I was placed.

  Because anonymity was well nigh impossible and privacy literally incomprehensible (there is no word for “privacy” in Bosnian), your fellow-Sarajevans knew you as well as you knew them. If you somehow vanished, your fellow-citizens could have reconstructed you from their collective memory and the gossip that had accrued over years. Your sense of who you were, your deepest identity, was determined by your position in a human network, whose physical corollary was the architecture of the city.

  In which the author tracks his personal history from old Sarajevo, to Chicago, to new Sarajevo and begins to understand place through the process of learning a new city and remembering the old.

• The Street As Public Space

  cities, publics, and urbanism

  November 27, 2011

  In each of these cases, I would argue that the street, the urban street, as public space is to be differentiated from the classic European notion of more ritualized spaces for public activity, with the piazza and the boulevard the emblematic European instances. I think of the space of “the street,” which of course includes squares and any available open space, as a rawer and less ritualized space. The Street is a space where new forms of the social and the political can be made, rather than a space for enacting ritualized routines. With some conceptual stretching, we might say that politically “street and square” are marked differently from “boulevard and piazza”: the first signals action, and the second, ritual.

  The Global Street Comes to Wall Street

• The City Interface

  cities, interaction design, and urbanism

  August 21, 2011

  In his talk, "New Soft City" during Interaction '10, Dan Hill emphatically illustrates an approach to urban informatics that utilizes the fabric of the city as a medium for visualization ((While not discussed in much depth, he does mention two trends that inform this position: 1) The ease in which screens can be co-opted for the purpose of advertising and 2) the efficacy of urban screens is dramatically decreasing as people learn to block them out)).

  Hill presents a diverse range of projects he's been involved with over the years, the majority of which attempt to expose consumption metrics externally and make the invisible visible. All of the projects are incredibly inspiring (checkout the responsive architecture project for the design of the Masdar City Center), but I'm particularly struck by the collaboration with the State Library of Queensland for Sense and Sustainability, a platform for public art. For this project, the building housing The Edge was layered in a sensor network in order to capture data generated by the building, which was then turned into an API. Dan has already written about the street as a platform, and I think the building as API is a nice corollary.

  In combination with initiatives like the EEML, a protocol for sharing real time sensor data, and the open source approach of the Urban Versioning System, a framework is starting to emerge that will give people the vocabulary and material to experiment with more complex feedback loops. We'll have access to data generated not only by our social and financial activities, but by our environment as well. While I'm not sure what this means for urban growth and development or where it lies in dialogue around "smart cities", I do think the four questions Dan closes with are something to consider:

  • How do people expect systems to behave?
  • How does information work as material?
  • How should we extend the capabilities of people, buildings, and infrastructure?
  • What new cities does this enable?