Stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly and jittery redux: On design interventions intended to make space inhospitable

From Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk, 1999. The context is a discussion of various physical interventions that have been made in the fabric of New York City’s Pennsylvania Station:

On a walk through the station with [director of "homeless outreach" Richard] Rubel and the photographer Ovie Carter one summer day in 1997…I found it essentially bare of unhoused people. I told Rubel of my interest in the station as a place that had once sustained the lives of unhoused people, and asked if he could point out changes that had been made so that it would be less inviting as a habitat where subsistence elements could be found in one place. He pointed out a variety of design elements of the station which had been transformed, helping to illustrate aspects of the physical structure that had formerly enabled it to serve as a habitat.

He took us to a closet near the Seventh Avenue entrance. “We routinely had panhandlers gathering here, and you could see this closet area where that heavy bracket is, that was a niche.”

“What do you mean by ‘a niche’?”

“This spot right over here was where a panhandler would stand. So my philosophy is, you don’t create nooks and corners. You draw people out into the open, so that your police officers and your cameras have a clean line of sight [emphasis added], so people can’t hide either to sleep or to panhandle.”

Next he brought us to a retail operation with a square corner. “Someone here can sleep and be protected by this line of sight. A space like this serves nobody’s purpose [emphasis added]. So if their gate closes, and somebody sleeps on the floor over here, they are lying undetected. So what you try to do is have people construct their building lines straight out, so you have a straight line of sight with no areas that people can hide behind.”

Next he brought us to what he called a “dead area.” “I find this staircase provides limited use to the station. Amtrak does not physically own this lobby area. We own the staircase and the ledge here. One of the problems that we have in the station is a multi-agency situation where people know what the fringe areas are, the gray areas, that are less than policed. So they serve as focal points for the homeless population. We used to see people sleeping on this brick ledge every night. I told them I wanted a barrier that would prevent people from sleeping on both sides of this ledge. This is an example fo turning something around to get the desired effect.”

“Another situation we had was around the fringes of the taxi roadway. We had these niches that were open. The Madison Square Garden customers that come down from the games would look down and see a community of people living there, as well as refuse that they leave behind.” He installed a fencing project to keep the homeless from going behind corners, drawing them out into the open [emphasis added]. “And again,” said Rubel, “the problem has gone away.”

This logic, of course, is immanent in the design of a great deal of contemporary public urban space, but you rarely find it expressed quite as explicitly as it is here. Compare, as well, Jacobs (1961) on the importance to vibrant street life (and particularly of children’s opportunities for play) of an irregular building line at the sidewalk edge.

The quantified self

Sometime in the early 1980s — I can’t have been any older than 14 — I tagged along with my father on a trip he made to New York to commission some work from the artist Agnes Denes. You shouldn’t get the idea that my father was any sort of Medici, or generally has taste quite as refined as his choice of Denes suggests; that I know of, this was the only time he ever did anything along these lines, and certainly there weren’t a whole lot of hard-drinking, Lacan-reading conceptualists in our family life.

Agnes immediately struck me as one of those force-of-nature types, and her studio was everything you’d expect and hope, a cabinet of curiosities furnished entirely with the everted contents of her own mind. The things I saw that day, little shardy glimpses of SoHo and the daily lifestyle of a SoHo artist circa 1983, remain indelible in my mind.

There was one piece of hers in particular I’ll never forget, at least in its general outlines. It was an open glass bowl, containing what to all appearances was a mound of incinerated human remains, bone chunks and all. And the placard mounted alongside the bowl read something like this:

These are the earthly remains of Firstname Lastname, who lived 71 years, 10 months, 13 days, 3 hours, 26 minutes and 17 seconds. In his lifetime he experienced 2,521,490,585 heartbeats and breathed 605,491,268 times. He urinated 39,280 times, for a total output volume of 48,872 liters, and experienced 24,718 bowel movements. In the course of his life he married twice, and enjoyed 3,668 sex acts with these two wives and 16 other partners (fourteen women and two men); including 12,463 acts of masturbation, mostly to completion, these resulted in a total of 15,531 orgasms.

I’m pretty sure about most of that stuff being there. (I’m absolutely certain of the word “orgasm,” because I’d never seen it outside of a verrrry furtively thumbed book before, and there it was on the wall in screaming 48-point Helvetica.)

What I’m less sure about is whether or not I’ve embroidered into the memory a final statistic, which was a figure representing the weight of the ashes. Anyway, that’s what I think of every time I hear someone talk about “the quantified self.”

Further to notes on a diagram of Occupy Sandy

Yes, enumerate the carriage parts — still not a carriage.
When you begin making decisions and cutting it up rules and names appear
And once names appear you should know when to stop.

- Tao te Ching, tr. M. LaFargue. (For the record, I prefer the Stephen Mitchell translation, but this seemed more pointedly relevant to the work at hand.)

You lookin’ at me?

I confess to being both heartened and frustrated by John Geraci’s new post on “the user experience of New York City,” which you should go take a look at. The “heartened” part is easy: I’m delighted that John raises the issue of the Passenger Information Monitor — the touchscreen interface mounted on the rear surface of a New York City taxicab’s protective partition — because it’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time. The “frustrated” part has very little to do with John or his admirable optimism, and much more to do with the fact that, well, I have been thinking about this precise issue for a very long time, as have a great many designers more talented than I, and not all our efforts combined have been able to alter the badness of the taxi-passenger experience one whit in all that time.

As far as I’m concerned, the primary problem with the PIM is that it provides real-time GPS mapping and other situational information to passengers — but not the driver. This gives rise to an informational asymmetry that only exacerbates whatever issues of mutual mistrust and class, ethnic and linguistic-cultural tension may be latent (or explicit) in the encounter between the two parties.

Anyone who takes cabs in New York City with any frequency whatsoever will surely have noticed that a very large number of drivers are not merely recent immigrants but recent immigrants from Pakistan or Bangladesh. This, of course, is not a neutral pattern of fact, in either the American imaginary or the reckoning of the various Federal agencies charged with enforcing immigration law and upholding homeland security. Drivers from the Subcontinent, particularly, do absorb the suspicion and hostility of a post-9/11 public, and therefore may have some justification for a belief in otherwise hard-to-swallow conspiracy theories about the “real” reasons for the in-vehicle deployment of locational technologies. (How do I know they hold such beliefs? I know this ’cause I ask drivers for their opinions on the PIM whenever I get the chance, and the notion that DHS or some similar entity is tracking their personal movements through in-car GPS arises spontaneously about a third of the time.)

Even absent this specific consideration, the placement of the screen carries along with it a not-so-subtle implication that the driver is out to screw the passenger, and if left to their own devices will surely do so. The particular message of the PIM is that the driver needs to be supervised, their microbehavior monitored and their choices (e.g. of routing) verified from moment to moment. Compare this to the dashboard-mounted GPS navigation systems used by cab drivers in, say, Seoul, which are more clearly there to assist the driver in their negotiations with the cityscape — a primary use of such screens which does nothing to prevent their also being used to coordinate agreement between driver and passenger as to appropriate courses of action.

Finally, as John points out, and in what has to be reckoned an extraordinarily clumsy and hamfisted way of undermining any common feeling between the person in the front seat and those behind the partition, the PIM screens run ads. These are predictably loud and irritating, they load automatically and continue running unless manually shut off, and they generate revenue for the taxi operator every time they are viewed. (The passenger is provided with an Off button, but it is designed so as to be relatively obscure and hard to engage.) The cab driver is therefore incentivized to tolerate a system behavior that’s clearly detrimental to the experience of the paying customer.

These are design decisions. There is nothing inherently wrongheaded with choosing to site a passenger interface on the back of a taxi’s partition, nor is there necessarily anything wrong with providing the passenger with information that will reassure them as to the wisdom of the driver’s choices. But in each of the above cases, as a result of bad design, the interests of driver and passenger have been allowed to become uncoupled from one another, with terrible repercussions for their ability to trust and feel comfortable with the other — both locally to this specific ride, and across whatever rides take place in the future, for as long as this particular envelope of technological and design decisions remains intact.

I share John’s hope that this and the other moments that constitute stumbles in the user experience of the city can be rectified by design — I hope obviously so, given my investment of time, effort, reputation and life savings in a company intended to do just this. But I can’t help but note that we New Yorkers appear to live in a place, a time and a culture in which considerations of design are all but invariably shunted to the back of the line when budgetary and other resources are apportioned. In situations like this, I’m so often put in mind of Stafford Beer‘s observation that “the purpose of a system is what it does.” If, in all the years since Vignelli, New York City and its institutions have mostly failed to produce high-quality citizen-facing design, it’s difficult to conclude anything but that on some level, and from some party’s perspective, this is an intentional outcome.

A rough road ahead for the would-be designer of good urban user experience, then — but a clarion call to greatness, as well. Tomorrow’s Vignellis surely have their work cut out for them. But should you succeed in such tasks even partially, you’ll know that your intervention is improving the texture of someone’s life tens of thousands of times a day, every single day. By my lights, anyway, there are not a whole hell of a lot of things on Earth more worth the effort.

Introducing Urbanscale

And this is what everything that came before was leading up to: Urbanscale, design for networked cities and citizens.

Urbanscale is a New York-based boutique practice committed to applying the toolkit and mindset of human-centered interaction design to the specific problems of the metropolitan environment. We aim to make cities easier to understand, more pleasant to use and more responsive to the desires of their inhabitants and other users. And yes, we’re hiring.

You can find us via the above site, or @urbnscl on Twitter.

The Rockefeller Foundation on “the future of crowdsourced cities”

Crossposted on Urbanscale.

I had the pleasure of spending Thursday and Friday of week before last immersed in a conversation on “the future of the crowdsourced city” convened by the Rockefeller Foundation, and ably moderated by Carol C. Coletta of CEOs For Cities and the Foundation’s Associate Director for Urban Development, Benjamin de la Peña.

As I understand it, the Foundation is contemplating funding and supporting projects in the urban informatics space, considered broadly — but only as long as such interventions would further their goals of enhanced inclusion and social equity. This two-day session, featuring contributions from a mix of invited experts, was intended to help them get a better sense of both upside potential and the inevitable complications. (Urban Omnibus’s Cassim Shepard has an excellent round-up of the first day’s presentations here.)

In my own thinking and writing, I tend not to use the phrase “crowdsourced”; it’s one of those jargony terms that seems to create more perplexity than light. In this case, however, participants agreed that we were consciously using it as shorthand for some technosocial regime that hadn’t quite yet clarified, but that probably had one or more of the following characteristics:

• The use of data visualization by municipal government to refine the delivery of services, more precisely target interventions, and otherwise realize latent efficiencies;
• The use of data visualization to deepen the collective understanding of the spatial distribution of issues and resources in cities;
• The use of networked informatics to connect citizens directly with municipal government;
• The use of networked informatics to support initiatives in deliberative democracy, and other forms of collaborative problem-solving;
• Most excitingly to me: citizens using networked informatics to coordinate their own activities, and supplant the inadequate measures of underfunded or entirely absent government.

This is already quite a laundry list, and understanding how all these pieces may or may not relate to one another is no easy task — especially when you take into account the riotous diversity of individual and institutional actors implied, each with their own agenda and cherished set of priorities. Perhaps, then, it’s no surprise that in trying to wrap our heads around the implications of networked urbanism, many of us instinctively retreat to the safe, familiar binary of Jane Jacobs-style, bottom-up activism vs. Robert Moses-style command-and-control development, as I certainly have in the past, and as Greg Lindsay does in this otherwise-excellent piece for Fast Company. But if we’re collectively going to develop any meaningful or usefully actionable insight on the issues raised in the course of the two days, I think we’re going to have to take a deeper cut.

For starters, I’m not sure that the Jacobs/Moses schema necessarily makes much sense anymore, either sheds enough light or does enough work to justify its continued deployment. For one thing, Metcalfe’s law suggests that the real benefits of certain technologies are only likely to become apparent at scale, or when a significant percentage of a population is connected to a given network. (The emergent utility of Facebook, when something approaching ten percent of humanity has an account there, is a perfect illustration.) Since, the example of Facebook aside, it tends to be difficult for local, purely bottom-up initiatives to achieve the kind of consistency required of infrastructure, there’s an argument to be made for certain types of centralized planning.

Further, some interventions in the urban fabric that are later widely acknowledged as public goods would clearly never have been approved had they been subjected to the full rigors of democratic process; as the Institute for the Future’s Anthony Townsend points out, it might now take three hours to get from Manhattan to JFK had Robert Moses not rammed through at least some of his planned expressways, with all that implies for the region’s ability to function and compete.

There are also some inherent issues with any foregrounding of a technologized vox populi.

The most obvious is that recourse to “crowdsourcing” dovetails all-too-neatly with the neoliberal retreat from governance, in a process that Laura Forlano forthrightly calls “offloading” (a more felicitous term for what I’ve previously called “responsibilization”). There may well be a thousand points of light in the naked city, but there are a great many worthwhile ends in municipal management that neither the market nor even the best-coordinated activity of voluntary actors can provide for.

As well, even the best of the current generation of bottom-up citizen intelligence engines — SeeClickFix, for example — are still subject to incoherent rants and the airing of petty or noxious grievances. Here’s an example from this morning:

I am sick and tired of these youth, who I understand may have not had the best upbringing but enough is enough already with these pitiful sentences handed out to them. I am sure they must think that going away for only a few months is just a “holiday”. I lost a cousin to the “Boxing Day Killer” in Regina coming on 4 years and now the machete wielding 14 year old who attacked the cab driver (who I happen to know) when will the judges in this country wake up and hand down a harsher sentence?

This — with all due respect to the poster, and however blessedly purgative it may have felt to share it — is nothing but noise in the system. And yet, as things stand now, it still enjoys the same weight as reports of broken water mains and errant herbicide sprayings.

Of course, everyone who’s ever attended a school- or community-board meeting is familiar with the figure of the gadfly (who may even be correct on the merits of their claim), who, whether through loneliness, frank instability or an exaggerated sense of their own entitlement, hijacks the deliberative process. Such individuals typically see themselves as principled champions of an underappreciated viewpoint, speaking truth to power; everyone else regards them as a nuisance, and an obstacle to getting anything of consequence done in the time allotted.

This is why we have rules of order, and it suggests a parallel requirement for some buffering mechanism in our technological frameworks for citizen responsiveness. Not — never – to suppress the expression of minority viewpoints, but simply to ensure that the crank tickets don’t take up the bandwidth (literal, institutional and psychic) required to address legitimate issues.

Finally, as the recent WikiLeaks drama should have made abundantly clear to everyone, transparency cuts not merely both, but all ways. Total transparency is something none of our institutions yet seem capable of encompassing. If you have any doubts as to just how small and ugly people can be, treat yourself to a leisurely trawl through the comments on the Web site of just about any local newspaper or television station. This unseemly flow can of course be moderated — has to be, especially, if public entities want to avoid any color of endorsing the opinions expressed via the accomodations they provide — but moderation requires staffing and care. And this is precisely the kind of expensive human intervention many institutions figure they’ll be able to cut out of the loop by embracing crowdsourced innovation.

The broader question of what we do with the social facts exposed by this new transparency is posed by the work of invited speakers Laura Kurgan and Sarah Williams at Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab. Their justly-celebrated essay in critical cartography, Million Dollar Blocks, is built on nothing “networked” or “digital” per se, merely open access to civic data. And yet it stands as an implicit rebuke to an idea widely prevalent in the more techno-utopian discussions around data visualization: that merely bringing a pattern of fact to light will somehow cause communities of interest capable of effective action to crystallize around it.

This may well happen on occasion, but there’s no guarantee that it will always…or ever. As crusading investigatory journalists learned decades ago, however transcendent the call to justice, it will still need motivated, motivating individuals to act as its agents in the world. If it’s the clear hope of a great many people, myself very much to be numbered among them, that carefully-crafted, well-designed information visualizations may in time furnish our communities with just precisely that kind of motivating call to action, there’s still an uncomfortable amount of daylight between that hope and any evidence of its realization. (For that matter, there’s not enough space on the Internet to detail all the many ways advocacy visualizations can be cooked, just as maps and statistics were before them. Sliders and knobs, pans and zooms: these things ought never to imply that one is in the presence of Truth.)

These are some of the easily-foreseeable problems with purely bottom-up approaches to urban informatics. None of this is to denigrate the legacy of Jane Jacobs, of course, who remains a personal hero and a primary touchstone for my work. And none of it is to argue that there oughn’t be a central role for the democratic voice in the development of policy, the management of place and the delivery of services. It’s just to signal that things might not be as straightforward as we might wish — especially those of us who have historically been energized by the presence of a clear (and clearly demonizable) opponent.

If I’ve spent my space here calling attention to the pitfalls of bottom-up approaches, I hope it’s obvious that it’s because I think the promise is so self-evident. (I’d hardly have built a practice around designing these systems otherwise.) Personally, I was delighted to hear Anthony Townsend’s prognostication of/call for a “planet of civic laboratories,” in which getting to scale immediately is less important than a robust search of the possibility space around these new technologies, and how citydwellers around the world will use them in their making of place. It’s a moment I’m both honored and terribly excited to be a part of, in even the smallest way.

Thanks to Carol and the Rockefeller Foundation for inviting me to the table, for framing the conversation so productively, and for hosting such a stimulating group of people. Judging from what I heard, I can’t imagine better guides to meaningful action if and when you do choose to make interventions in this space.

And with that, I think the time has come to thank you for your readership and let you know that I’m shutting Speedbird down. I posted here for just a touch over four years, and while it was a great platform and home to some wonderful conversations, I feel like my contributions are going to be taking different forms from here on in. (You may, as ever, put that word in quotes if you feel so inclined.)

There are way too many of you to thank by name, so forgive me if I do so collectively. You’ve challenged, supported, goaded, helped and taught me hugely, and you’ve been exceedingly patient as regards The City Is Here For You To Use — a book which, I will ask you to believe, is not merely a million times better for the delay, but forthcoming in the not-ridiculous future. If I have a parting wish, it’s that all of your ventures will feel as rewarding as Speedbird has and does for me. Be seeing you.

Harvey Milk, community development and the digital balance sheet

For a very long time now, I’ve been inspired by the story of Harvey Milk, his serial failed campaigns for public office and his final, triumphant election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. (If you’re my age, or you’ve seen Jeff Spicoli’s wonderful portrayal of him in the eponymous feature film, you know what happens next: I refuse to use the word “tragedy” because of its implication that hubris called down what happened, and not a hate-driven murderer.)

What’s always been most impressive to me is the way Harvey nurtured a community through successive stages of self-consciousness, collective awareness, and conscious agency. It wasn’t just a matter of coming along (or out) in the right place, at the right time, though few of us will ever be lucky enough to have skills and potentials so ideally suited to our historical moment. It was sweat equity.

He built his constituency painstakingly, one engagement at a time. The late Randy Shilts, in his detailed history The Mayor of Castro Street, emphasizes that the eventual electoral success was built on a foundation of coalition-building maneuvers, like the early collaboration with the Teamsters on a strike against Coors Beer (thus securing the allegiance of ethnic and blue-collar voters who would not naturally have considered voting for an openly gay man) and the organization of the first Castro Street Fair (1974).

It’s always been clear to me that these engagements themselves grew out of Harvey’s situation — his sitedness — in the Castro. Harvey’s storefront base of operations, Castro Camera, served the community as drop-in center, political clubhouse and all-purpose social hub, which made it the nexus and catchment basin of multiple social networks. He made himself into a local character, turning nod-line encounters into conversations, and conversations into opportunities to press his case, epitomizing Jane Jacobs’ dictum that the “trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts.” Together, man and site comprised a notably effective intelligence collection and influence network, founded on street-level interaction.

All of this, of course, led me to wonder how one might go about building a contemporary equivalent. Putting aside for a second — understanding full well that truly, it cannot be put aside, that it was the very crux of the matter — the sense of urgency and personal existential threat his community lived under, how would you develop a Milkian enmeshment in a given place and its affairs today?

You would have to start, I figure, by considering the technosocial balance sheet, all of the things that have changed since the mid-1970s in the way people use their tools to communicate, construct their sense of themselves and organize themselves into larger collectivities:

- In the liability column, the practical difficulty-verging-on-impossibility, given their immersion in a world of texts and earbuds, of communicating with anybody on the street anymore. The mutual paranoia, hostility, risk-aversiveness and sense of stranger-danger we seem to have nurtured in our public spaces. The splintered nature of attention, the shattering of the public sphere into ever-smaller clades.

- On the other side of the ledger, the undeniable smart-mobby power of texting, Facebook, Meetup, and Twitter, especially when instantiated on mobile devices, as demonstrated in the Green, Orange and People Power II revolutions, even to a lesser extent the US Presidential election of 2008. The sense crystallizing around Foursquare and Gowalla that social services in general won’t really come into their own until they reckon with real-world locations. (My own conviction is that even so, they won’t produce anything particularly interesting until they come up with some construction richer than “venues,” but the direction is clear.) Everyblock, which in a single service gives you an unbelievably useful dashboard to place.

There’s no question that you can rapidly develop and then maintain an impressive, even godlike awareness of the things going on in a given neighborhood using these tools, even in the absence of richly braided interpersonal contacts. You can keep a weather eye on tides of concern as they sweep over a place, infer issues of interest from fact patterns revealed by data analysis. What does this suggest for politicians specifically?

The conclusion I draw from datapoints like Andrew Rasiej’s brave, unsuccessful candidacy for New York City Public Advocate (2005) is that the latter set of tools aren’t likely to be decisive in and of themselves. Rasiej ran a quasi-guerrilla campaign, notable for its reliance on what are still comparatively cutting-edge techniques of audience building and message dissemination, and garnered a disappointing outcome. (Then again, Harvey ran for public office on three separate occasions before securing his seat on the Board of Supes; maybe Andrew’s got an election or two left in him.)

There’s also a lot of daylight between getting a single person elected, no matter how emblematic of their constituency they may feel themselves to be, and mobilizing an entire community in the name of its own ongoing empowerment. I would like to believe that this can be done affirmatively, in the absence of some perceived external threat, but history (and my recent observations of the Tea Party) suggest that nothing fuses a disparate assembly into a politically effective whole like fear of the other. Perhaps the Coffee Party can do better — but reflect that they, too, are founded in negation.

The only thing that’s relatively clear to me in all of this is that anyone wanting to catalyze a community and channel its aspirations in these days is going to have trouble doing it the way Harvey did: at retail, as it were, stacked up one investment at a time. By the same token, though, they’ll have a spread of one-to-many tools of awesome power available to them — and for free, too! As powerful as these may be, they can’t be used willy-nilly: spamming potential constituents isn’t going to get you anywhere, nor is anyone much going to sign on to a campaign just because it’s all high-tech and buzzword-compliant.

What’s more likely to be pivotal is the canny use of the latter to leverage the former: ensuring that every casual contact goes into a database, every issue raised by a constituent (or inferred from a pattern of facts on the ground) is captured and tracked, everything that shows up in the gillnet of your feeds is exploited for its propaganda or organizational value.

And I keep coming back to situatedness, something a whole lot of the people I know got to spend some time thinking about this last volcano weekend. What does it mean to be in place, to draw your identity from an investment in locale? I can’t imagine that this is anything but crucial; if every Castro needs a Harvey Milk, every Harvey Milk needs a Castro Camera. A robust fan page on Facebook goes a long way toward replicating the functions of such a base, and indeed does a whole lot of things it can’t. But from what I can see, it cannot function adequately as a substitute for that base. Showing up is still half the battle.

In the end, of course, none of what made Harvey who he was is at all replicable. Would-be students can certainly draw inspiration and energy from his struggle, even a few canny, practical lessons. Thus far, anyway, our era of networked digital communications seems to be awaiting his equivalent — or maybe the message is that we’re all his equivalent, waiting for the moment our ten thousand tweets and status updates are sintered into a coherent voice.

Zeitgeist week ’09

If you’re at all interested in questions of networked urbanism, digital fabrication or interactive architecture – and let’s be honest: you’re here, so I know you are – there’s a pair of must-see events, bookending the Atlantic, that open/happen next week:

- If you’re lucky enough to be in New York, you have a solid two months to take in Toward the Sentient City, the Architectural League show curated by Mark Shepard and constituting a culmination of the two-year Situated Technologies process.

Sentient City is just jammed with the provocative work of good friends David Benjamin and Soo-In Yang, Usman Haque, Carlo Ratti, Anthony Townsend and Laura Forlano, and I cannot imagine that you’d come away from seeing it with anything less than a head full of new ideas about urban space and how to use it. At the League space, 457 Madison Avenue, through 7th November 2009.

- Equally ludicrous in the degree of its thrill-power, but concentrated into a single day, the Digital Architecture London conference features Tony Dunne, the ubiquitous Usman, yon BERGman Matt Webb, and more squamous, imbricated, invaginated, Voronoi-ular and otherwise procedural dynamics of structuration than you can shake a stick at. 21st September at The Building Centre, Store Street, London WC1E 7BT.

Go to one, go to both, come away inspired.

Update: D’oh! Not to mention, this year’s Conflux is that week. As usual, too much going on to namecheck properly, but for sure see Urban Omnibus‘s Cassim Shepard, Mark’s Sentient City Survival Kit, Eve Mosher’s Insert _______ Here, the Waterpod, and Transportation Alternatives‘ POP.Park: Reclaim Your Street. Also, tons of distributed ZOMG-grade awesome at Conflux City. Looks like Conflux is bigger and better’n ever.

UO me

Hey, just wanted to point you-all at a quick piece I did for Urban Omnibus, reacting to the recent announcement that MSNBC had acquired Adrian Holovaty’s splendid Everyblock service.

Since the expiry, on June 30th, of the Knight Foundation grant that had been sustaining operations, I’d been more than a little concerned that the service and all the hard work that went into crafting it would disappear, so I couldn’t be happier that Everyblock has found a path to survival. You know, though, that I have questions about whether an organization like MSNBC will truly be able to keep its mitts off everything that makes Everyblock great, and I even wonder whether thinking of it as a discovery engine for “news” isn’t selling its potential a trifle short.

And that’s what the piece is about. I hope you enjoy it. (While you’re there, by the way, you should check out the other wonderful things UO is doing. In a lot of ways, it’s like a love letter to New York City, and I don’t hear its name on enough lips. Maybe you might could fix that.)

The January agenda

Just a reminder for those of you who may be interested: I’m doing two public talks in January, one on either edge of the Atlantic, and it’d be great to see you at either or both of them.

- The first is in Paris on the afternoon of the 8th, where I’ll be making an “intervention exceptionelle” (!) at the Villes 2.0 conference, alongside friends like Fabien Girardin and Daniel Kaplan. Do try to come if you’re in town; I’ve really been looking forward to this.

- And, as already noted, in New York City I’ll be joining Rachel Abrams and Soo-In Yang at White Rabbit on Houston the evening of the 14th for a gathering of “The Urbanists,” on behalf of SVA’s fledgling Interaction Design program. And yes, as one commenter has already pointedly inquired, I too am less than thrilled with that program’s apparent emphasis on “business success” as the overriding rationale for sound design, but I also suspect that wording may be about right for SVA’s target audience. If you’re still het up over this, come on the 14th and we’ll ponder the matter over drinks. I’ll even introduce you to the department head, and you can take up the matter with her directly. : . )

That’s about it for now. I’d been working on an end-of-year post for tomorrow, but we’ve had some sad news here and what I was writing suddenly seems kind of trivial by comparison, as, frankly, does the above. Come anyway, and we’ll do our best to assert some normality and maybe even work our way toward something that feels like cheer.

In the meantime, do me a favor and be extra-excellent to each other. And if your beloved asks why you’re squeezing so hard when you hug them, tell ‘em that’s the bit from me.