This is a wonderful piece (the unabridged version of what was recently published in WIRED’s UK edition of its Digital City issue) by Adam Greenfield on how cities are currently taking (and will continue to take) shape around technology. Here’s how he gets right to the point and frames the discussion:
It is by now clear that over the last decade a great number of people on Earth, in the developed and the developing world both – certainly the overwhelming majority of those reading these words – have embraced the digital mediation of everyday life, to such a ferocious extent that it can already be difficult to remember how we ever got through our days without the networked things around us.
Without necessarily considering the matter with any particular care, as individuals or societies, we have installed devices in our clothing, our buildings, our vehicles and our tools which register, collect and transmit extraordinary volumes of data, and which share this data with the global network in real time. If some of us once – and recently! – thought of this as the domain of “ubiquitous computing,” the words are already starting to sound obsolescent, as clunky as “horseless carriage.” This is simply the way we do things now.
And barring the usual panoply of potential catastrophes, it is only likely to be more so as time goes by, for an ever larger proportion of us. Under such circumstances, it’s only natural to expect that a great many of these systems will wind up speaking directly to the challenges cities were designed to resolve, as well as those with which they cannot help but confront us…
You’ve probably heard the point before, if not repeatedly: that the advance of technology has happened at such a pace as to “lap” our own ability to perceive it, such that we are tending towards the consideration of it in retrospect (e.g. “Oh yeah, I can send email, listen to music, take pictures, and make telephone calls all with the same portable device!”). What Greenfield is doing here is pointing out that when technology has such a shaping power over society, then the ways in which we are able to envision the future shaping of urban planning and architecture- in other words, how we will live- are challenged by our own myopia. His thoughts here are fascinating, and I encourage you to read the entire article.
Here’s one last pertinent quote:
it’s surpassingly hard to be appropriately critical and to make sound choices in a world where we don’t understand the objects around us. Understanding networked urbanism on its own terms, however wise it might be, requires an investment of time and effort beyond the reach of most…
In the networked city, therefore, the truly pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening these occult systems up, demystifying them, explaining their implications to the people whose neighborhoods and choices and very lives are increasingly conditioned by them.
