Dan Hill has written a fascinating essay called The Adaptive City. It’s an in depth look at what the city of the future could look like. In his vision, Hill imagines a place where a constant stream of feedback helps city planners design more effective solutions, and everyday people live better lives. Data about what’s happening is used to make planning decisions, recalculate resource usage and more.
Hill explains:
Everyday design could become a conversation within social software networks, and citizens have data and tools that urban designers can only dream of. In fact, professional urban designers have this data too, and thus their practice is transformed.
The model is already being built. With only the simple visualisation of data scraped from the management systems of bike-sharing networks Vélib’ and Bicing we can already see the pulse of the city, Barcelona’s bikes heading to the beach into the sun, whereas their Parisian counterparts saunter from the Périphérique inwards to the centre, mirroring the city’s intrinsic wider rhythms of work and play. Systems deliver immediate information on air quality to mobile phones when texted a zip code. The smokestack of a power station in Helsinki is illuminated with high powered laser to provide feedback on output to the surrounding neighbourhood, who alter their patterns of electricity use in response. Collaborative mapping projects feed voraciously from every aspect of published public data about a neighbourhood, and create maps of crimes, film locations, lost and found postings, and building permits, creating a new hybrid of journalism. Bicycle networks are built along the routes that people have already indicated they take, plotting their journeys on shared maps.
City of Sound: The Adaptive City
[via Jan Chipcase]
