Helsinki heads-up

Hey hey! We’re back in HEL for a few hours, at the tail end of a bad jag of travel: two conferences and two additional speaking appearances on two continents in two weeks. (And you wondered why I hadn’t been writing here.) Thanks to everyone at AT&T and Sonae; to swift & steady Claudio; to my good friends at Nordkapp and all the participants in last weekend’s Touchscapes workshop; and especially to Anab, Michelle, Juha and Sarah for sharing some quality AMS time with us.

Stand by for some thoughts on the ethics of making do and adaptive reuse; appropriate and mistaken approaches to serving “emerging markets” at the “bottom of the pyramid”; and some advice from a speaker’s perspective on how (and how not) to organize conferences and other events.

On this week’s agenda: a talk and mini-walkshop in Oulu, part of the Second Open Ubiquitous City Seminar, prep for a speaking appearance in Berlin next week and the Barcelona Systems/Layers walkshop week after that (!).

My back pages: Spimed

Originally published 17 October 2004 on my old v-2.org site. Very, very interesting for me to see how my feelings have evolved, and where they remain consistent; there are probably as many instances of the former as of the latter. Plus, all those “Sterlings” now feel so stilted and formal and unnatural. (Hi, Bruce!) At any rate: enjoy.

If spam simply isn’t annoying enough to suit your needs, or you’re the kind of person who’s disappointed by the disarming ease you encounter when upgrading your laptop’s operating system to a new version, then boy does Bruce Sterling ever have a vision of the future for you.

Refining the message of his much-linked speech from this year’s SIGGRAPH conference in a new piece for Wired, Sterling draws us a picture of a coming time when intelligent, deeply internetworked and self-authenticating objects dominate the physical world: an “expensive, fussy, fragile, hopelessly complex” world, where entirely new forms of “theft, fraud [and] vandalism” await us.

I preface my comments the way I do because Sterling isn’t warning us about this world. He’s enthusing about it.

To some degree, in the SIGGRAPH speech, Sterling’s thrown us a definitional curveball. Having previously defined a “blobject” as an artifact of digital creation “with a curvilinear, flowing design, such as the Apple iMac computer and the Volkswagen Beetle,” he now asks us to step back a level of abstraction, and understand the word instead to mean an object that contains its own history digitally. Possibly realizing that this bait-and-switch presents abundant opportunities for confusion, he rescues himself at the last moment by substituting for “blobject” a new coinage, “spime”: “an object tracked precisely in space and time.”

And then he proceeds to imagine a world in which this self-documenting, self-tracking, self-extending stuff he calls spime dominates utterly, or is allowed to become utterly dominant. (Whatever one thinks of this particular coinage and its descriptive utility, there clearly was the need for a word here. As Sterling quite correctly points out, this is a class of objects without precedent in human history.)

put this product into service

I have a lot to say about the notion of such chimeric object/product/service hybrids, both because I think Sterling’s onto something important and real, and because the direction he takes it in worries me.

He’s got unusually fine and sensitive antennae; as a novelist, fabulist, extrapolator, raconteur and ranter, he’s terrific. But as a designer and an organiser of design, oh…let’s just say Sterling’s taste leaves something to be desired. So when he starts talking about “an imperial paradigm…a weltanschauung and a grand schemata [sic],” for designed objects, my ears perk up.

And it’s when he suggests that we have little choice but to prepare ourselves for a world of

- spime spam (vacuum cleaners that bellow ads for dust bags);
- spime-owner identity theft, fraud, malware, vandalism, and pranks;
- organized spime crime;
- software faults that make even a mop unusable;
- spime hazards (kitchens that fry the unwary, cars that drive off bridges);
- unpredictable emergent forms of networked spime behavior;
- objects that once were inert and are now expensive, fussy, fragile, hopelessly complex, and subversive of established values…”

that I begin to get truly uncomfortable.

It’s not that Sterling’s identified the hazards improperly. Just the opposite: these are precisely (some of) the unpleasant eventualities we need to plan for in any setting of pervasive or ubiquitous “intelligence” (and which I discuss in an forthcoming article entitled “All watched over by machines of loving grace“). [Note: This article was essentially the genesis of Everyware.]

The problem is that he appears to be suggesting that “cop[ing] with” these headaches is about all that we can do, so obvious is the superiority of spime, and so inevitable its hegemony. Locked into technological determinism, he does little to challenge this here, beyond suggesting that, oh yeah, now that you mention it, this “imperial paradigm” might not necessarily be maximally convenient for its human subjects. This “ideal technology for concentration camps, authoritarian regimes, and prisons” is, yes, “a hassle. An enormous hassle.” But relax: “[I]t’s a fruitful hassle.”

With his unusually acute vision, Sterling can see something like this looming on the horizon and still be so cavalier as to suggest that, if we can only “cope with” these “hassles,” “spimes will be a massive improvement over the present closed, blind regime.” (Haven’t we heard all this better-living-through-chemistry noise before?) Such a stance strikes me as a not inconsiderable abdication of the role of anyone gifted with foresight. (It also strikes me as presuming a parallel abdication among designers, but we’ll get to that in a bit.)

It’s frustrating because I share, almost without exception, Sterling’s larger goals. He simply wants to save humanity from itself, from a situation in which we seem hellbent on drowning ourselves and whatever posterity we may achieve in tidal surges of our own noxious effluvia, and he’s looking for any help he can get from the technical side of the house. I get this, the essential good will undernetting the vision of spime.

But while I share a lot of Sterling’s faith in the ferment of human creativity, I’m not nearly as comfortable as he is with assuming that the results will always be “fruitful.”

the user and the used

I derive my suspicions not a little bit from what I know of the history of open-source software, in which applications that should by rights dominate their respective niches for their robustness or power or utility fail time and again to find the wider audience they deserve. I lay a lot of this to their user interfaces, which, designed by geeks for geeks as they are, almost invariably fail any other kind of user. The distributed nature of open-source creation seems to militate against the consistency required for a smooth, consumer-grade user experience.

Of course, one might point out that this inconsistency is inevitably implied in the core logic of open-source development, or anything like it: that notions of highly crafted user interfaces and content architectures are just so many farty, self-indulgent Rick Wakeman solos, bound to be cut down before the whirling DIY thresher of the new mutant thing.

Unless I’m badly mistaken, from what I’m able to gather from two decades of reading him this stance seems to capture something of Sterling’s position — that he doesn’t have much room for designers, mewling pitifully from the sidelines in all the impotence of their top-down, command-and-control obsolescence. Technology is destiny. The street will find its own uses; do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law; great shall be the rejoicing.

It’s a weird thing to find myself on this side of history, given my other interests, and I’m not sure but that it may be a strategic mistake to even accept this framing of things, but here I go:

I do not believe that we want to live in a world where the best we can hope for is “wrangling” a surge of fast, cheap, out-of-control, autocatalytic blobjects. I simply do not believe that what we give up is worth less than what we are promised, even if what we are promised is delivered in anything close to full.

Control isn’t all DRM, you know. Control also means design with compassion, which is something whose complexities I believe we are just beginning to get a handle on. Control also means permitting (some) introduction of randomness in the service of a defined end. And for sure it means getting out ahead of foreseeable problems and taking measures to prevent their emergence.

To surrender this measure of control — to insist that all bottom-up, all the time is any kind of a path to a better world, and that all we can or should do is get out of the way — is fatuous, even negligent. (Indeed, “allowing otherwise avoidable dangers to manifest” defines negligence in the Anglo-American jurisprudential tradition.) Just in the last ten minutes, as I’m writing this, a correspondent tells me that an SMS-based survey inquiring as to who users believed the 100 Greatest South Africans to be had to be abandoned by its originators because the notorious fascist Eugene Terreblanche popped out at the top.

Importantly, I don’t believe that Bruce Sterling believes any such thing, either. I don’t think for a moment that he would propose that we accept, or accept himself, a situation in which people gave up all control over the things we build.

I just know, all too well, what happens to nuanced distinctions in the wild.

i contradict myself/i contain multitudes

Let me also take this opportunity to problematize even the notion that an object can usefully contain its own history. It’s a fetching, even an intoxicating idea, and you can easily see how all the ways in which such a thing might be desirable. But whose history are we talking about, exactly?

Nurri’s work on the New York Public Library’s African-American Migration Experience project provides us with a nice capsule illustration of some of the problems involved when an item is recursively accompanied by descriptive information as it travels down through time. One of her responsibilities at the Digital Library is verifying that archival images have accurate metadata, fields describing the contents of an image.

Imagine that she’s come across a picture from 1920′s Strivers’ Row, with a scrawled annotation on the back of it: “Some prominent local Negroes.” (This is not at all an atypical example.) An accurate provision of metadata, of course, requires transcribing the contemporaneous description word for word. But obviously, “prominent Negroes” is not going to fly as an object descriptor in 2004 — and nor should it, less from any feeling of political correctness (though there is that) than from the simple reason that few in 2004 are likely to search a database using the keyword “negroes,” unless it’s in a context like “Negro League baseball.”

And here the infinite regress beckons. Say you append both contemporary and historical tags to the image: “Images – Harlem – African-Americans” and “Caption – 1927 – ‘Some prominent local Negroes’”. You may have covered the obvious bases, but that’s nothing like a full history. To ensure the full understanding of someone arriving at the object from some context external in space, time, or both, you would also have to include information about the evolution of the English language and the society in which it’s used, just to explain why the 1927 label wasn’t considered appropriate a mere seventy-five years later. You see where this is going? (Sterling himself points out that “[o]nce we tag many things, we will find that there is no good place to stop tagging.”)

Sure, memory is cheap, and will be cheaper. It’s not storing such a bottomless effusion of autodescription that I’m concerned about. It’s how useful this metadata will be, any of it, when its reliability will be hard to gauge – when different parts of an object’s record, introduced at different junctures in “space and time,” may well have differing degrees of reliability, and little way to distinguish between them!

We know from the Web and from various p2p applications that, in the wild, metadata is close to useless because it can be gamed so easily; as a result, no credible search engine relies on it nor has done so for years. Is that really the new Metallica single, or is it five minutes of Lars Ulrich telling you to go fuck yourself? Is that really a captive about to be decapitated by Islamists, or is it a commercial for a crappy movie you never would have clicked on had it represented itself honestly? (Who has the authority to append metadata? Who has the responsibility, or even the technical wherewithal, to verify it?) I’m surprised that someone as savvy as Bruce doesn’t seem to grasp the implications of this for spime.

unspiming

I believe, with Bruce Sterling, that some watershed is fast approaching, past which ordinary objects will be endowed with such information-sensing ( -processing, -storage, -synthesis and -retransmission) power that both the way we understand them and the very language with which we refer to them will need to change.

Where I part ways with him, however, is in my belief that we don’t have to meekly bend over and try to “cope with” the negative consequences of any such development. As Lawrence Lessig rightly reminds us, in the destiny of any designed system, some possibilities are locked in, and others forestalled, at the level of architecture. And fortunately for all of us, when asked to submit to regimes of antihuman banality, some designers have historically had other ideas.

I can do little more than hope that this will always be the case: that those people endowed with the ability to see what’s coming over the horizon not merely describe what reaches their senses, but actively intervene to forestall the worst contingencies arising. Such an undertaking requires care and insight and discretion beyond that which we ordinarily display — myself as much as anyone else — but I firmly believe that we can choose our futures rather than have them imposed on us. In this season of decision, it is clear that in more ways than one, such a moment is now upon us.

If you want a closer look at the “spime metadata” I ginned up to serve as an illustration of this piece, it’s downloadable as a PDF here. It’s intended to represent the self-description (at time of first consumer purchase) of a notional Nike-brand t-shirt.

Join us in Helsinki on May 22nd for a Touchscapes workshop (updated)

Just in case folks here in town are feeling neglected, fear not: we’re doing events here as well.

As part of Helsinki’s World Design Capital 2010 Ideas Forum, and collaboration with our good friends at Nordkapp, I’m delighted to announce a workshop called “Touchscapes: Toward the next urban ecology.”

Touchscapes is inspired, in large part, by our frustration with the Symbicon/ClearChannel screens currently deployed around Helsinki, how little is being done with them, and how far short of their potential they’ve fallen. Our sense is that we are now surrounded by screens as we move through the city — personal devices, shared interactive surfaces, and now even building-sized displays — and if thinking about how to design for each of these things individually was hard enough, virtually nobody has given much thought to how they function together, as a coherent informational ecosystem.

Until now, that is, because that’s just what we aim to do in the workshop. Join us for a day of activity dedicated to understanding the challenges presented by this swarm of screens, the possibilities they offer for tangible, touch-based interaction, and their implications for the new urban information design. We’ll move back and forth between conceptual thinking and practical doing, developing solid ideas about making the most meaningful use of these emerging resources culturally, commercially, personally and socially.

Attendance is free, but spaces in the workshop are limited, so I recommend you sign up at Nordkapp on the Facebook event page as soon as you possibly can. See you on the 22nd!

How to bring a Systems/Layers walkshop to your town

Crossposted with Do projects.

The response to the Systems/Layers walkshop we held in Wellington a few months back was tremendously gratifying, and given how much people seem to have gotten out of it we’ve been determined to set up similar events, in cities around the planet, ever since. (Previously on Do, and see participant CJ Wells’s writeup here.)

We’re fairly far along with plans to bring Systems/Layers to Barcelona in June (thanks Chris and Enric!), have just started getting into how we might do it in Taipei (thanks Sophie and TH!), and understand from e-mail inquiries that there’s interest in walkshops in Vancouver and Toronto as well. This is, of course, wonderfully exciting to us, and we’re hoping to learn as much from each of these as we did from Wellington.

What we’ve discovered is that the initial planning stages are significantly smoother if potential sponsors and other partners understand a little bit more about what Systems/Layers is, what it’s for and what people get out of it. The following is a brief summary designed to answer just these questions, and you are more than welcome to use it to raise interest in your part of the world. We’d love to hold walkshops in as many cities as are interested in having them.

What.
Systems/Layers is a half-day “walkshop,” held in two parts. The first portion of the activity is dedicated to a slow and considered walk through a reasonably dense and built-up section of the city at hand. What we’re looking for are appearances of the networked digital in the physical, and vice versa: apertures through which the things that happen in the real world drive the “network weather,” and contexts in which that weather affects what people see, confront and are able to do.

Participants are asked to pay particular attention to:

- Places where information is being collected by the network.
- Places where networked information is being displayed.
- Places where networked information is being acted upon, either by people directly, or by physical systems that affect the choices people have available to them.

You’ll want to bring seasonally-appropriate clothing, good comfortable shoes, and a camera. We’ll provide maps of “the box,” the area through which we’ll be walking.

This portion of the day will take around 90 minutes, after which we gather in a convenient “command post” to map, review and discuss the things we’ve encountered. We allot an hour for this, but since we’re inclined to choose a command post offering reasonably-priced food and drink, discussion can go on as long as participants feel like hanging out.

Who.
Do projects’ Nurri Kim and Adam Greenfield plan and run the workshop, with the assistance of a qualified local expert/maven/mayor. (In Wellington, Tom Beard did a splendid job of this, for which we remain grateful.)

We feel the walkshop works best if it’s limited to roughly 30 participants in total, split into two teams for the walking segment and reunited for the discussion.

How.
In order for us to bring Systems/Layers to your town, we need the sponsorship of a local arts, architecture or urbanist organization — generally, but not necessarily, a non-profit. They’ll cover the cost of our travel and accommodation, and defray these expenses by charging for participation in the walkshop. In turn, we’ll ensure both that the registration fee remains reasonable, and that one or two scholarship places are available for those who absolutely cannot afford to participate otherwise.

If you’re a representative of such an organization, and you’re interested in us putting on a Systems/Layers walkshop in your area, please get in touch. If you’re not, but you still want us to come, you could try to put together enough participants who are willing to register and pay ahead of time, so we could book flights and hotels. But really, we’ve found that the best way to do things is to approach a local gallery, community group or NGO and ask them to sponsor the event.

At least as we have it set up now, you should know that we’re not financially compensated in any way for our organization of these walkshops, beyond having our travel, accommodation and transfer expenses covered.

When.
Our schedule tends to fill up 4-6 months ahead of time, so we’re already talking about events in the (Northern Hemisphere) spring of 2011. And of course, it’s generally cheapest to book flights and hotels well in advance. If you think Systems/Layers would be a good fit for your city, please do get in touch as soon as you possibly can. As we’ve mentioned, we’d be thrilled to work with you, and look forward to hearing from you with genuine anticipation and excitement. Wellington was amazing, Barcelona is shaping up to be pretty special, and Taipei, if we can pull it off, will be awesome. It’d mean a lot to us to add your city to this list. Thanks!

Recap for the week ending 9th May 2010

Yeah, that’s what the calendar says. I kind of refuse to believe it my ownself, seeing as the thermometer registers forty-one degrees miserably Fahrenheit.

Nevertheless, another week of 2010 down. Here’s what happened on Speedbird this week:

- We celebrated the third of MAY twenty-TEN, the day on which the action of John Brunner’s towering 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar begins;
- paused to consider that streets were something that had to be invented, and asked what similarly obvious innovations might remain to be claimed;
- essayed a nowcast of the network weather, by way of clarifying my fundamental stance on technology;
- argued that a free-as-in-beer transmobility would pay for itself many times over, and in some very important ways;
- described beginner’s mind, and how to get it;
- and finally, cast a jaundiced eye on the fall of Empire, and what happens to cities (and people) in its aftermath.

The upcoming is — volcano gods willing — a travel week, so not too much content in the offing. I’ll be at FutureEverything in Manchester between Wednesday and Friday, and in New York and Chicago for the six days after that. Ping if you want to get together for a chat, a drink, an etc., and I’ll see you here as and when able.

Blog some bookmarked pages: The City Shaped

So I’ve been working my way through the late Spiro Kostof’s monumental study The City Shaped over the last few weeks, as I’ve found the time, and it’s been one of the most voluptuously enjoyable reading experiences I’ve had in years. If Kostof’s prose is occasionally a little turgid, the payoffs are both genuine and reliably regular. The book has already blown my mind once, and continues to stop me in my tracks every few paragraphs, so I can have another swallow or two of coffee and ponder what I’ve read.

This is not to say that it isn’t also, on occasion, fairly depressing. There’s a specific historical example — or, I guess, set of examples — that Kostof uses to challenge the notion that there’s a useful distinction to be made between planned cities and more “organic” processes of urban structuration. It’s what happens in city after city in the few centuries following the fall of Rome:

The background for the urban retrenchment and readjustment in post-Roman Europe is well known — depopulation, reduced circumstances, and a social revolution that consigned towns built for a pagan culture…to the monotheistic religions…

With the impairment of municipal controls in the post-Roman city, natural movement soon carved shortcuts through the large rigid blocks of the grid. Tracks skirting or crossing the ruins of those public buildings for which there was no longer any use also crystallized into new streets. (p. 48)

“Impairment of municipal controls”! Yeah: otherwise known as “having anyone who might stand in their fur-swathed way being put to the sword by barbarians.” Here’s the motif again, in these comments on the “superimposition of a medieval agrarian settlement pattern over a Roman grid” at the German town of Grier, a few pages later:

By the 12th century a greatly contracted Trier had redrawn its defensive perimeter, excluding about a third of the area formerly enclosed. The great Roman public institutions…thermae, amphitheater, and forum — were abandoned, their ruins appropriated for private use. (p. 50)

In reading these simple, flat, declarative statements, I can’t help but translate them into more visceral terms — and truly, the world implied by them could not possibly be less pretty. Outside the city gates, The Road; within, a bleak bürgerlich peace, imposed and maintained by a brutally patriarchal familial order. For centuries. The sheer human waste involved reminds me of that ultimate dork-elegiac image of my childhood: the Rick Sternbach illo, in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, of the Roman starship launched by a culture that had never sacked the library at Alexandria.

This was Christian Europe. Elsewhere, of course, there was the superimposition of a different structuring logic, no less inimical to any notion of a public sphere. From pp. 62-63:

Neighborhood cohesion based on kinship, tribal affiliation or ethnicity was strong enough…to re-arrange an inherited pre-Muslim grid of Greco-Roman origin, and fuse and invert its [public-facing modular elements] into exclusive superblocks…

How was this privatized urban order wrought? The main thing to remember is that city-form was allowed to work itself out subject only to the respect of custom, ownership, and the Muslim’s right to visual privacy. You were not told what to do, what kind of city to design; you were only enjoined from doing things that threatened accepted social behavior. The concern for privacy, for example, determined where doors and windows would go on building fronts and how high buildings would rise. Visual corridors were consequently avoided, whether at the fine scale of a cluster of houses, or in the broader sense of urban vistas. More basically, this concern asserted itself in the introversion of the house, the appearance toward the street being unimportant.

Sure, the language verges on loaded here. Even putting that to the side, though, I’d be a lot more comfortable with this thought of designing for privacy if I didn’t primarily understand it to mean a proprietary concern for the visibility of women, and the concomitant “promotion of virtue and the suppression of vice.”

Medieval Islamic urbanism had some fairly impressive provisions, and in its later stages at least gave rise to by far the most cosmopolitan cities the pre-modern world would ever know. But living out one’s life in a world built on bonds of “kinship, tribal affiliation or ethnicity” sounds nightmarish to me — as nightmarish as anything cooked up by medieval Christendom, if not more so, and I’m a man.

What’s clear to me is that, as both Islam and Christianity literally and physically turned away from Roman notions of public space, a broad sweep of the world that had once been knit together shattered into ten thousand mutually incommunicant particles. Provinces into towns and bishoprics; towns into isolar, fortified blocks; streets into passages. And free citizens into, at best, villagers — unless you happened to be female, in which case you became something with the status and value of property.

For, again, a thousand, maybe fifteen hundred years. Call it forty generations.

I already knew this story, and so did you, but Koslof’s immensely thorough and detailed review of the physical evidence brought the human cost home to me in a way few other texts ever have. Whatever you think about Empire — and in its current incarnation, I cannot possibly be numbered among its fans — it’s sobering to be reminded of what generally comes in the wake of its passing.

• Further reading:
- The wonderful “How to Build a City: Roman Operating System,” in the Harvard Project on the City volume Mutations. (On p. 3, this PDF offers a brief taste, but believe me, it’s worth digging up the full text.)

Always new horizons

So I think it’s fair to ask why someone who’s coming from outside the field suddenly takes a dive into discussions of transit economics and policy. You’d be justified in asking what I expect to achieve, and if I really expect to have anyone take note of the thoughts I share here, let alone act on them.

All I can offer by way of answer is that I rarely, if ever, expect the things I write to result in any effect at all: not in the discourse-worlds we spin for ourselves, certainly not “out there” in actuality. At most, if I’ve done a very good job, and have gotten very lucky besides, something I write may move the Overton window one or two notches in the right direction. (That’s a pretty good definition of success, right there.)

But to be honest, a not-insignificant part of my motivation in trying new things on for size is selfish. I’m aiming to recapture that wonderful quality practitioners of Zen call “beginner’s mind,” after a lecture by the Soto master Shunryu Suzuki.

As Suzuki described it, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” If you’re coming fresh to a field of endeavor, no direction is a priori foreclosed to you. You’re still able to ask the “stupid” questions — the questions that often do, in fact, pan out to be stupid, but occasionally produce revelatory insight.

You’re also exquisitely careful to observe correct form, whether that form involves sitting meditation, driving a stickshift or starting a business. You’ll likely get most everything wrong, of course, but you haven’t yet learned to be casual about it. Your every nerve ending will sing with the effort of sensing where you’ve succeeded, and where correction is required. Your entire body becomes consecrated to a single purpose.

Taking up a challenge that requires total dedication — whether that challenge is intellectual, social or physical — is one of the more reliable methods I know of inducing peak experience, but that sense of acute bodily awareness gets driven to extinction pretty quickly. It fades rapidly with habituation, with the acquisition of competence, let alone expertise. So anybody wired to get off this way has to keep looking for new things at which they can be a beginner.

That’s what I’m after, at least in part, any time I try to frame meaningful thoughts in a field not my own, and it’s the thrumming current running underneath a CV that otherwise looks an awful lot like a professional dilettante‘s. Always new horizons.

Free mobility, social mobility…transmobility (part III)

This last installment of our series (I, II) on networked mobility is more of a coda than anything else, and it goes directly to the question of systemic cost, and who bears it. (In the interest of full disclosure, I ought to mention that I’ve been having some lovely conversations with Snapper, the company that provides farecard-based payment services to the transit riders of Wellington, and now Auckland as well, and that I have a stake in the success of their endeavor.)

Any time you’re shifting atoms on the scale presented by even a small town’s transit infrastructure, there’s obviously going to be expense involved, and that has to be recovered somehow. Maintaining such a network once you’ve brought it into being? Another recurring expense, on a permanent basis. Rolling stock, of course, doesn’t grow on trees. Training and paying the front- and back-of-house staff — the people who oversee operations, design the signs, drive the trams, clean the stations, even the folks who get to snap on blue latex and haul the belligerent piss-drunks off the buses — another enormous ongoing outlay. Pensions, unplanned overtime, insurance coverage: these things don’t pay for themselves. All stipulated.

So why do I still believe that transit ought to be free to the user?

Because access to good, low- or no-cost public institutions clearly, consistently catalyzes upward social mobility. This was true in my own family — the free CUNY system was my father’s springboard out of the working class — and it continues to be quantifiably true in the context of urban transportation. The returns to society are the things most all of us, across the center of the political spectrum broadly defined, at least claim to want: greater innovation, a healthier and more empowered citizenry, and an enhanced tax base, for starters.

I’m going to make a multi-stage argument, here, first about the optimal economic design of public transit systems, and later about how the emergent networked technologies I’m most familiar with personally might best support the measures and policies I believe to be most sound. Most of what you’re about to read is bog-standard public-policy stuff; only toward the end does it veer toward the kind of Everyware-ish material regular readers of this blog will be comfortable with, and everyone else may find a little odd. Politically, its assumptions ought to be palatable to a reasonably wide swath of people, from social democrats on the center-left to pro-business Republicans on the right; with suitable modifications, anarchosyndicalists shouldn’t find too much that would give them heartburn.

- Let’s start with the unchallenged basics. Access to reliable transportation allows people to physically get to jobs, education and vital services (e.g. childcare) they might not otherwise.

- Jobs obviously have a direct effect on household wealth; post-secondary education tends to open up higher-paying employment opportunities, and generates other beneficial second-order effects; and services like reliable childcare allow people to accept (formal and informal) employment with time obligations they would not otherwise be able to accommodate.

- A regional transportation grid sufficiently supple to connect the majority of available jobs with workers rapidly and efficiently is never going to be cheap.

- The return on such an investment is, however, considerable — when savings due to reduced road and highway depreciation, etc., are considered as well as direct benefits, on the order of 2.5:1. This isn’t even remotely in the same galaxy as the kind of multiples that get VCs hot & bothered, but it’s not at all bad for a public-sector expenditure. (Note, too, that the proportion of systemic costs generally retired due to user fees is comparatively small.)

- Being able to spread the fixed costs of a transit system over a significantly expanded ridership would increase the economic efficiency of that system, and thus represent a different kind of savings. Given two types of riders — dependent, people for whom public transit is their only real option, and discretionary, folks who choose public transit over other modes only if it’s markedly cleaner, safer, more convenient, cheaper, etc. — how to maximize both?

- Increasing dependent ridership is relatively easy. I’m going to propose that a greater expansion in the number of transit riders would be achieved by reducing the cost of ridership from relatively-low to zero than by a comparable reduction from relatively-high to relatively- or even absolutely low. Another way of putting it is to say that a significant number of potential riders are dissuaded by the presence of any fare at all. (Strictly speaking, a reduction of fees to zero would be a Pareto-optimal outcome, though this is true only if we agree to consider genuine concerns like increased crowding and greater systemic wear-and-tear from higher loads as externalities. Which, of course, they are not.)

- Maxing out the number of discretionary riders is a little tougher. What both dependent and discretionary riders have in common, though, is the requirement that network apertures be located in as close proximity as is practically achievable to origins and foreseeable destinations. And here’s where the argument arcs back toward the things we we’ve been talking about over the last week, because the transmobility system described accommodates just this desire, by forging discrete modal components into coherent journeys. Trip segments dependent on more finely-grained modes like walking, shared bikes or shared cars, primary at origins and destinations, are designed to dovetail smoothly with the systems responsible for trunk segments, like buses, BRT, light rail, subways, metros and ferries.

∴ That transit system is of most social and economic value to a region which fuses the greatest number of separate transportation modes and styles into a coherent network; which minimizes friction at interline and intermodal junctures; and which does this all while presenting a cost to the rider no greater than zero.

Fully subsidizing any such system would be expensive…inarguably so, immoderately so. But if my conjecture is right — and oh, how I would love to see data addressing the question, one way or the other — a total subsidy produces disproportionate benefits even as compared to a generous subsidy. Success on this count would be the ultimate refutation of the zero-sum governance philosophy that took hold in the outsourcin’, rightsizin’ States during the 1990s, and has more recently and unaccountably migrated elsewhere. (I say “unaccountably” because you’d think people would have learned from America’s experience with what happens when you leave things in the hands of a “CEO President.” And also because, well, there hasn’t turned out to be much in the way of accountability for all of that, has there?) Municipalities ought to be conceiving of transit fees not as a potential revenue stream, but as a brake on a much bigger and more productive system.

To me, this isn’t a fantasy, but rather a matter of attending to the demands of basic social justice. For all too many, bad transport provisioning means getting fired because they couldn’t get to work on time, despite leaving the house at zero-dark-thirty. Or not getting hired in the first place, because they showed up late to the interview. Or not being able to take a job once offered, because the added expense of an extra bus trip to put the baby in daycare would burn every last cent one might otherwise eke out of a minimum-wage gig. Anyone who’s ever been trapped by circumstances like these intimately understands cascading failure in the for-want-of-a-nail mode. (Not buying it? See if you can’t dig up a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich’s seminal Nickel and Dimed.)

I’ve recently and persuasively seen privilege defined — and thanks, Mike, for digging up the link — as when one’s “social and economic networks tend to facilitate goals, rather than block them.” As I sit here right now, my mobility options are as infinitely finely grained as present-day practices and technologies can get them: which is to say that my transportation network, too, facilitates the accomplishment of whatever goal I devise for it, whether that means getting to the emergency room, my job, the SUNN O))) gig, the park or the airport. What I’ve here called “transmobility” is an opportunity to use our best available tools and insights to extend that privilege until it becomes nothing of the sort.

Finally: How do I expect my friends at Snapper to make any money, if everything I imagine above comes to pass? Even stipulating that cost to user is zero, there are multiple foreseeable transmobility models where a farecard is necessary to secure access and to string experiences together, before even considering the wide variety of non-fare-based business use cases. And anyway, my job is to help people anticipate and prepare for emerging opportunity spaces, not to artificially preserve the problem to which they are currently the best solution.

OK, I’ve gone all SUPERTRAIN on you for umpty-two-hundred words now; I need a break, and I’m sure you do too. I fully expect, though, that two or maybe even three of you will have plowed all the way to the bottom of this, and are even now preparing to launch the salvos of your corrective discipline, in an attempt to redress faulty assumptions, inflated claims & other such lacunae in my argumentation as you may stumble over. Trust me when I say that all such salvos will be welcome.

Don’t get me wrong

What follows is something I’ve been meaning to post for awhile, ever since I realized it had become necessary. I would have thought this point was already quite sufficiently clear to all concerned, but since there’s apparently been some fairly significant confusion out there regarding my fundamental position on the things I discuss here:

Please do not make the mistake of believing I endorse or embrace technological interventions, whether in urban space or in everyday life, simply because I spend the lion’s share of my time talking, reading, thinking and writing about same.

I spend so much time considering these issues because I believe that both our experience of a given place, and the choices available to us in that place, are already heavily conditioned by the network weather. We needn’t wait for some maximalist vision of urban computing to come to pass: this is all true now, right now. What people are saying about you online, how they rate the businesses around you, which social networks their customers are using — these are the things which now tell.

You don’t have to like what this all implies. Most days I myself do not; I tend to think that there are very few ways you could augment, say, dinner with friends that would actually improve the experience. But if you care about cities and what people can do with them, you do need to understand these technologies and their potential.

The irritating guy with the popped collar standing next to you at the bar? He paid less for his G&T than you did, because he’s the Mayor of this place on Foursquare, and the management has cannily decreed Mayors get a 5% discount. Ten minutes from now, the place is going to fill up with his equally annoying buddies, absolutely ruining your hope of a quiet drink. And they’re going to show up not because he did so much as call them to tell them where he’d be, but because he’s got things set so his Foursquare account automatically posts to his Facebook page. Buddies of his that don’t even use Foursquare will come, to slouch at the bar, stab at their phones and try and figure out where the party’s going next.

You’ll settle up and leave, miffed, and ease on down the road a spell to a place you know where you can get a decent bowl of penne — nothing special, but good and hearty and cheap, and you’ll chase it with the big bouncy house red, and all will be well and right with the world. Except the Italian place is gone, gone because it racked up too many nasty reviews on Yelp, or somebody Googlebombed its listing, or its hundred healthcode violations made it positively radioactive on Everyblock.

Two years from now, these names will most likely be different. But the point will remain: if services like these are opaque to you, if you don’t know what they are and how they work, you’ll never have the foggiest clue why things shook out the way they did. Your evening will have a completely different shape and texture than what it would have prior to the advent of ubiquitous mobile Internet. You’ll have been tossed this way and that by the gusts and squalls of network weather.

Of course, you could just as easily argue that your evening out would be inflected in all sorts of delightful ways by the prevailing winds. Either way, though: inflected it will be.

And that’s why, as someone who enjoys all the things cities do for us, I’ve taken on the project of anticipating trends in technical development as they apply to urban experience. My aims are to challenge and contest visions of the networked city that seem to me to be designed in ignorance of everything we know about how cities (and people) work; to encourage literacy in the networked and other complex systems that now undergird so many urban interactions; and to instill in all of us a sense of our own agency in these matters.

Networked urbanism, read/write urbanism, open-source urbanism…sure, these things are in their infancy. But if the whole domain retains some plasticity, it’s also beginning to be shaped by parties motivated solely by their own interests, and absolutely not by any larger affinity for urban life and its benisons. To be blunt, I don’t want the IBMs and Ciscos and Microsofts of the world defining what networked urbanism can be for me…or, forgive my presumption, what it can be for you, either.

I still believe, as Howard Rheingold used to say, that “what it is…is up to us.” But only if we’re willing to get our hands dirty, challenge ourselves, and pursue insight even if it originates from outside our comfort zone. It’s what I’ve been trying to do myself, these last twelve years or so, and it would be particularly gratifying if you interpreted my efforts here in this light.

Street, invented; mind, blown; cowpaths, traced

So I’m sprawled across my bed last night, reading Spiro Kostof’s The City Shaped, alternately being irritated by its unwieldy size and reveling in the huge, detailed illustrations that size affords, when I trip over this passage:

Khirokitia in Cyprus had a street, the first I know of, and the unwalled settlement stretched along its length in a pattern of growth that was potentially open-ended.

Had a street. The implication here won’t have escaped you, any more than it did me: As if any such thing was a novelty. As if all the human settlements that came before lacked linear path elements. As if the very idea had had to be invented. By someone.

How grateful am I that at the age of forty-one, I can still have my mind well and truly blown, by a sentence thirty pages into a book I could have picked up at any point in the last nineteen years? And because that is what one does these days when one’s mind is blown, I tweeted it.

Obligatory GMTA: a few hours after I hit post, David Smith mailed to remind me of this Matt Webb gem from 2006. (Rereading Matt’s comments, it’s just remotely conceivable that if my copy of The City Shaped sported heat maps of frequently highlighted passages, I wouldn’t have found the coincidence so startling.)

But back on topic: If something so fundamental to our conception of the world as a street had to be proposed by some specific human or group of humans, what measures that our posterity will regard as equally staggeringly obvious and self-evident remain to be invented?