The Data-City - Building Futures Talk
I recently attended a debate on the ‘Data City: Doom or Boom’ put on by RIBA and Wired at the Apple Store in Regent street. The question posed by the moustachioed chair of the debate, Ben Hammersley, was ‘Are pervasive digital devices and open data changing the way we interact with the city?’. The panel assembled was split down the middle between Usman Haque and Dr Rachel Armstrong on the boom side and academics Prof. Susuannah Hagan and Juliet Davies on the doom.
The question posed was obviously answered by a unanimous ‘yes! we all agree the current boom in networked devices and resultant data is changing the way we interact with cities’ and thus the talk predictably descended into value judgements on whether the current pace of technological development is a positive or negative trend; the beginning or the end; empowering or disabling. Essentially the sexy effervescence of the techno-utopian versus the pensive caution of 21st century marxist academic. The talk being in Apple’s flagship store in central London made it all the more interesting as there is no place where astounding invention and cult like allegiance are so scarily evident.
Lots of interesting and divergent things were said even if a coherent debate around a single point was not quite established. Usman Haque espoused open data as a dialing up of our democratic rights and freedoms: a shift in knowledge from the powers to the people. Susannah Hagan said pervasive devices cued an increased lift-off from the physical - a further division of mind and body - and that the environmental impacts of technological devices are often masked behind it’s position as ‘the answer’. The scarily impressive Rachel Armstrong wanted us to look at data beyond the digital, to move beyond a digital-natural divide and to begin to develop an architecture and an urban fabric where we use data to explore the city as an organism in order to create built environments that can answer the demands of climate change. Phew! Lastly Juliet Davies invoked the marxist urbanism of Castell’s to rightly point out digital access is uneven and thus reinforces the inequality of the capitalist city. She also raised questions over whether networked society and a kind of ‘wired domesticity’ actually gave us the freedom we believe it does.
I actually really enjoyed all the perspectives, they all had merit. Essentially they expressed ways in which we interact with city, or how a more technological city guides our lives, and how this dialectic is evolving as we adopt new behaviours both individually and collectively.
Reflecting back on the talk a week or so later I think the point is that these debates are really important in building a critical discourse around how we harness this data to progress and develop our built environment on every level. It is important both sides remain heard as both sides are needed; those that can see and believe in the opportunity and those that can critique and thus guide this process. However the progression of this discourse and the advancement of this knowledge must continue at pace. This is critical, because if you see the city as a network of interaction between people, things and ideas as I do, then pervasive digital devices and the resultant data change the game in how we see and understand the networked city. On a micro level they allow us to trace, learn and breakdown the false dichotomy of the subjective and objective city worlds in which we exist. At a macro level they begin to allow us to see and to illustrate the communities of things to which we belong. Why is this important? Well it dramatically advances our understanding and our knowledge of our position within cities (encompassing a huge range of things from people to vehicles to buildings to animals) and how our actions can positively or negatively affect the worlds around us. As population in urban centres continues to grow this knowledge becomes invaluable to all.
