Transmobility, part II

Part II of our exploration of transmobility. I want to caution you, again, that this is very much a probe.

Perhaps it’s best to start by backing up a few steps and explaining a little better what I’m trying to do here. What I’m arguing is that the simple act of getting around the city is in the process of changing — as how could it not, when both paths themselves and the vehicles that travel them are becoming endowed with the power to sense and adapt?

Accordingly, I believe we need to conceive of a networked mobility, a transmobility: one that inherently encompasses different modes, that conceptualizes urban space as a field to be traversed and provides for the maximum number of pathways through that field, that gathers up and utilizes whatever resources are available, and that delivers this potential to people in terms they understand.

Yesterday, I posed the question as to how we might devise a transmobility that met all of these conditions, while at the same time acknowledging two additional, all-but-contradictory desiderata. These were the desire, on the one hand, to smoothen out our interactions with transit infrastructure until vehicular transportation becomes as natural as putting one foot in front of another, and on the other to fracture journeys along their length such that any arbitrary point can become a node of experience and appreciation in and of itself. Any system capable of meeting these objectives would clearly present us with a limit case…but then, I believe that limits are there to be approached.

Finally, I’m addressing all of these questions from a relatively unusual disciplinary perspective, which is that of the service, interaction or experience designer. The downside of this is that I’m all but certainly disinterring matters a professional transit planner or mobility designer would regard as settled questions, while missing the terms of art or clever hacks they would call upon as second nature. But there’s a significant upside, too, which is that I’m natively conversant with the interactive systems that will increasingly condition any discussion of mobility, both respectful of their power and professionally wary of the representations of reality that reach us through them.

So petrified, the landscape grows

In addressing the questions I posed yesterday, then, I’m inclined to start by holding up for examination some of the ways in which trips, routes and journeys are currently represented by networked artifacts. Maybe there’s something that can be gleaned from these practices, whether as useful insights or musts-to-avoid.

I would start by suggesting that the proper unit of analysis for any consideration of movement through urban space has to be the whole journey. This means grasping the seemingly obvious fact that from the user’s perspective, all movement from origin to destination comprises a single, coherent journey, no matter how many times a change from mode to mode is required.

I say “seemingly obvious,” because the interactive artifacts I’m familiar with generally haven’t represented circumstances this way.

Take a simple example: a trip that involves walking to the nearest bus stop, riding the bus downtown, and finally walking from the point you alight from the bus to your ultimate destination. Some of the more supple route-planning applications already capture this kind of utterly normal experience — HopStop, for example, is quite good, at least in New York City — but you’d be surprised how many still do not. To date, they’ve tended to treat journeys in terms solely of their discrete component segments: an in-car GPS system plots automotive routes, a transit route-planner provides for trips from station to station, and so on.

But people think about movements through the city in terms that are simultaneously more personal and more holistic. We think of getting to work, stopping off to pick up a few things for dinner on the way home, or heading crosstown to meet friends for drinks.

So contemporary representations already seem well-suited to one of our criteria, in that the seams between methods of getting around are stark and clear, and perhaps even stark and clear enough to imply the self-directed moments of experience that attend a journey on either side. As far as a GPS display is generally concerned, what happens in the car stays in the car, and what happens next is up to you.

Certainly as compared to some overweening, totalizing system that aimed at doing everything and wound up doing none of it well, there’s something refreshing about this humility of ambition. On the other hand, though, such systems manifestly do not lend themselves well to depicting an important variety of end-to-end trips through the city, which are those trips that involve one or more changes of conveyance.

Think back to our rudimentary example, above. It would be useful if, for the portion of the journey on which you take the bus, that bus “understood” that it was essentially functioning as a connector, a linkage between one segment traversed on foot and another.

And this is still truer of journeys involving intermodal junctures where both traffic and the systemic requirements of timetables and schedules permit you less freedom in planning than walking or cycling might. Such journey plans need to be adjusted on the fly, drawing in data from other sources to accurately account for unfolding events as they happen, with signaling carried through to the infrastructure itself so that some delay, misrouting or rupture in the original plan results in the traveler being offered a panoply of appropriate alternatives.

What if, instead of living with the vehicle, the representational system lived with the traveler, and could move with them across and between modes? On this count, we’re obviously most of the way there already: with turn-by-turn directions provided by Google Maps, the iPhone and its Android-equipped competitors spell howling doom for the single-purpose devices offered by Garmin and TomTom. The emergence of truly ambient approaches to informatic provisioning would guarantee that a traveler never lacked for situational awareness, whether or not they had access to personal devices at any given moment.

What if we could provide these systems with enough local intelligence to “know” that a specified endpoint offers n possibilities for onward travel? What if this intelligence was informed by a city’s mesh of active public objects, so that travel times and schedules and real-time conditions could all be taken into account? And finally, instead of presenting journey segments as self-contained, what if we treated them as if they enjoyed magnet physics?

Then, should you want (or be forced by exigencies beyond your control) to alter your travel plans, you could snap out the mode you’re currently using, and swap in another that met whatever bounding constraints you specified, whether those had to do with speed or accessibility or privacy or shelter from the weather. The RATP‘s head of Prospective and Innovative Design, Georges Amar, speaks of enabling transmodality, and this is just what we begin to approach here.

The distinction I’m trying to capture is essentially the same as that Lucy Suchman drew between global, a priori plans on the one hand and situated actions on the other. The result would be a more responsive journey-planning system that, given any set of coordinates in space and time, is capable of popping its head up, having a look around and helping you determine what your best options are.

Moments in modal culture

This isn’t to say that we don’t also conceive of mobility in terms of particular modes of travel, and all the allegiances and affinities they give rise to. As Ivan Illich put it, “Tell me how fast you go, and I’ll tell you who you are.”

It’s not simply the coarser distinctions that tell, either. These shades of meaning and interpretation are crucial even among and between people who share a mode of transport: a fixie rider self-evidently has a different conception of the human-bicycle mesh than a Brompton fan does, while New Yorkers will know perfectly well what I mean if I distinguish two friends by describing them respectively as a 6 train rider and a 7 type. (Though not directly analogous, you can summon up similar images by evoking the L Taraval versus the J Church, the Yamanote-sen against the Hibiya-sen, or the 73 bus against the 15.)

Those of us who ride public transit form personal connections with our stops, our stations and even with particular linkages between lines, and I can only imagine that both our cities and our lives would be impoverished if we gave that up. But there’s no particular reason we need to; all I’m suggesting here is that the total journey needs to be represented as such by all the networked systems traversed in the course of a given outing.

Neither, in devising our transmobility system, can we afford to neglect the specificities and particularities of the component systems that furnish us with its articulated linkages. If one train line isn’t interchangeable with another in the hearts and minds of their riders, the same is true of other kinds of frameworks.

For example, we can’t merely plug some abstract shared bicycle service into the mesh of modal enablers and call it a day. Consider the differing fates of two apparently similar bike-share networks, the Parisian Vélib and Barcelona’s Bicing. In their diverging histories, we can see how differences in business model wind up percolating upward to impact level of service. By limiting the right to use Bicing to residents, by requiring that users open accounts, and having those accounts tied in to the usual variety of identification data, the system provides would-be bad actors with a strong disincentive. You’re personally liable, accountable…responsible.

There are real and problematic downsides to this approach, but the difference this set of decisions makes on the street is immediate and obvious. A rank of Vélib bikes, even in a posh neighborhood, looks like a bicyclical charnelhouse, with maybe three or four out of every five saddles reversed, in what has become Parisians’ folk indicator to one another that a particular bike is damaged to the point that it’s unavailable for use. The Bicing installations that I saw, including ones seeing very heavy use in core commercial districts, aren’t nearly as degraded.

This goes to the point I was trying to make, earlier, by contrasting the older conception of a vehicle as an object to the emergent way of understanding it as a service. Even though they may be physically identical — may draw current from the same grid, may be housed in the same lot, may present the driver with the selfsame control interface — a ZipCar Prius doesn’t function in just exactly the same way as a City CarShare Prius does. You could design a transmobility system so it accounted for either or (preferably) both…but not interchangeably.

Smooth sailing

Again, though I want to enable smooth transitions, I’m not arguing for perfect seamlessness in transit, or anything like it. Kevin Lynch reminds us, in The Image of the City, that “[a]ny breaks in transportation — nodes, decision points — are places of intensified perception.” We ought to welcome some of this heightened awareness, as a counterpoint to the automaticity that can all too easily accompany the rhythms of transit ridership, especially when experienced on a daily or twice-daily basis. On the other hand, it’s true that some of this “intensified perception” is almost certainly down to the anxiety that attends any such decision under circumstances of time pressure, human density and the urgent necessity to perform modal transitions correctly — and this is the fraction I’d argue we’d be better off designing out of transmobility.

At most, I mean for transmobility systems to bolster, not replace, human intuition. Where alternative modes or routings exist, we’re already generally pretty good at using them tactically to optimize against one or another criterion. Sometimes you know the subway’s the only way you can possibly beat the gridlock and get to your appointment on time; other times you choose a taxi instead, because you need to arrive at a meeting looking fresh and composed. One day you have the time to take the bus and daydream your way downtown, and the next it doesn’t get you nearly close enough to where you need to be.

You know this, I know this. So if we’re going to propose any technical intervention at all, it had better be something that builds on our native nous for the city, not overwrites it with autistic AI.

And before we can even begin to speak credibly of integrated mobility services, we’d need to see existing systems display some awareness of the plenitude of alternatives travelers have available to them, some understanding of all the different real-time factors likely to influence journey planning.

To take the most basic example, journey planning for walkers requires a different kind of thinking about the city than, particularly, turn-by-turn directions for drivers. This isn’t simply for the obvious reasons, like car-centric routings that represent a neighborhood as a an impenetrable thicket, a maze of one-way streets all alike, that a walker would stroll on through placidly and unconcernedly.

It’s because, as thinkers from Reyner Banham to Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch to Ivan Illich have reminded us — and as anyone who’s ever ridden in a car already understands quite perfectly well — velocity is something like destiny. You simply attend to different cues as a walker than you do as a driver, you notice textures of a different gauge, different things matter. And of course the same thing is true for cyclists vis à vis both walkers and drivers.

Over the past eighteen months, I’ve finally seen some first sentinel signs of this recognition trickle into consumer-grade interactive systems, but we’ve still got a long, long way to go.

Musique concrète

A final step would be to design the built environment itself, the ground against which all journeys transpire, to accommodate transmobility. Why wouldn’t you, at least, plan and design buildings, street furniture and other hard infrastructure so they account for the fact of networked mobility services — both in terms of the hardware that underwrites their provision, and of the potential for variability, dynamism, and open-endedness they bring to the built landscape?

In other words: why shouldn’t a bus shelter be designed with a mobile application in mind, and vice versa? Why shouldn’t both be planned so as to take into account the vehicles and embedded sensors connected to the same network? When are we finally going to take this word “network” at face value?

Of course these technologies change — over time they get lighter, more powerful, cheaper. That’s why you design things to be easy-access, easily extensible, as modular as can be: so you can swap out the CAT5 cable and spool in CAT6 (or replace it with a WiMax transponder, or whatever). Nobody’s recommending that we ought to be hard-wiring the precise state of the art as it existed last Tuesday morning into our urban infrastructure. But anyone in a position of power who, going forward, greenlights the development of such infrastructures without ensuring their ability to accommodate networked digital interaction ought to be called to account by constituents at the very next opportunity.

You know I believe that we used to call “ubiquitous computing” is now, simply, real life. Anybody who cares about cities and the people who live in them can no longer afford to treat pervasively networked informatic systems as a novelty, or even a point of municipal distinction. It’s always hard to estimate and account for, let alone attach precise dollar figures to, missed opportunities, to count the spectral fruits of paths not taken. But given how intimate the relationship between an individual’s ability to get around and a region’s economic competitiveness is known to be, there is no excuse for not pursuing advantage through the adroit use of networked systems to enhance individual and collective mobility.

What we ought to be designing are systems that allow people to compose coherent journeys, working from whatever parameters make most sense to them. We need to be asking ourselves how movement through urban space will express itself (and be experienced as travelers as a cohesive experience) across the various modes, nodes and couplings that will necessarily be involved.

The challenge before us remains integrating this tangle of pressures, constraints, opportunities and affordances into coherent user-facing propositions, ones that would offer people smoother, more flexible, more graceful and more finely-grained control over their movements through urban space. Then we could, perhaps, begin to speak of a true transmobility.

Transmobility, part I

This is a quickish post on a big and important topic, so I’d caution you against taking any of the following too terribly seriously. Blogging is generally how I best think things through, though, so I’d be grateful if you’d bear with me as I work out just what it is I mean to say.

In the Elements talk I’ve been giving for the past year or so, I make a series of concatenated assertions about the near-future evolution of urban mobility in the presence of networked informatics. What I see happening is that as the prominence in our lives of vehicles as objects is for most of us eclipsed by an understanding of them as networked services, as the necessity of vehicular ownership as a way to guarantee access yields to on-demand use, our whole conception of modal transportation will tend to soften into a more general field condition I think of as transmobility.

As I imagine it, transmobility would offer us a quality of lightness and effortlessness that’s manifestly missing from most contemporary urban journeys, without sacrificing opportunities for serendipity, unpressured exploration or the simple enjoyment of journey-as-destination. You’d be freer to focus on the things you actually wanted to spend your time, energy and attention on, in other words, while concerns about the constraints of particular modes of travel would tend to drop away.

When I think of how best to evoke these qualities in less abstract terms, two memories come to mind: a simple coincidence in timing I noticed here in Helsinki not two weeks ago, and a more richly braided interaction I watched unfold over a slightly longer interval during a trip to Barcelona last year.

The first was something that happened as I was saying goodbye to a friend after meeting up for an afterwork beer the other day. It was really just a nicely giftwrapped version of something I’m sure happens ten thousand times a day, in cities across the planet: we shook hands and went our separate ways at the precise moment a tram glided to a stop in front of the bar, and I had to laugh as he stepped onto it without missing a beat and was borne smoothly away.

A whole lot of factors in space and time needed to come into momentary alignment for this to happen, from the dwell time and low step-up height of the tram itself to the rudimentary physical denotation of the tram stop and the precise angle at which the bar’s doorway confronted the street. Admittedly, service and interaction designers will generally only be able to speak to some of these issues. But what if we could design mobility systems, and our interfaces to them, to afford more sequences like this, more of the time?

The second image I keep in mind speaks more to the opportunities presented by travel through a densely-textured urban fabric, and how we might imagine a transmobility that allowed us to grasp more of them.

This time, I was lucky enough to capture the moment in a snapshot: the woman on the bicycle casually rode up to the doorway, casually engaged a friend in conversation, casually kissed her on the cheek and casually pedaled away. The entire interaction, from start to end, may have taken two minutes, and the whole encounter was wrapped with an ineffable quality of grace, as if we’d stumbled across some Gibsonian team of stealth imagineers framing a high-gloss advertisement for the Mediterranean lifestyle.

Again, the quality I so admired was enabled by the subtle synchromesh of many specific and otherwise unrelated design decisions: decisions about the width of the street and its edge condition, about the placement of the doorway and the size of the bike wheels. But it also had a great deal to do with the inherent strengths of the individual bicycle as a mode of conveyance, strengths shared with skateboards, scooters and one’s own feet — among them that the rider has an relatively fine degree of control over micro-positioning and -routing, and that she alone decides when to punctuate a trip with stops and starts.

Watching what happened spontaneously when people were afforded this degree of flexibility made it clear to me that this, too, was a quality you’d want to capture in any prospective urban mobility system. And that to whatever extent we possibly could, we ought to be conceiving of such systems so they would afford their users just such moments of grace.

So on the one hand, we have just-in-time provisioning of mobility, via whatever mode happens to be closest at hand (or is otherwise most congenial, given the demands of the moment). On the other, a sense that any given journey can be unfolded fractally, unlocking an infinitude of potential experiences strung along its length like pearls. It’s not hard to see that these desires produce, at the very least, a strong tension between them, and that we’ll have to be particularly artful in providing for both simultaneously.

How might we balance all of these contradictory demands, in designing networked mobility systems that represent urban space and the challenge of getting through it in terms human beings can relate to? This question brings us to something we’ve discussed here before — the classically Weiserian notion of “beautiful seams” — and it’s a topic we’ll take up in Part II of our series on transmobility.

Urbpocalypse now

A piece I wrote for last month’s Wired UK, a mag you should totally be reading if you aren’t already.

Near the beginning of Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 District 9, the camera swoops low over the film’s eponymous setting: a refugee camp for a population of chitinous extraterrestrials, marooned on earth these last twenty-eight years. Denied participation in the human community surrounding them, the aliens eke out a kind of existence — what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” — in a fenced-off wasteland shoehorned into the sprawling slums of Johannesburg.

Blomkamp isn’t particularly subtle in his portrayal of this desolate zone and the possibilities of life there. The streets of District 9 are little more than dusty tracks lined with tumbledown shacks of corrugated aluminum, garlanded with the infinite tangles of pirate infrastructure; shreds of rotted-out plastic bags waft in the slightest breeze, the air itself laced with filth from the sooty fires that burn the day through.

A few derelict shipping containers and the rusted hulks of overturned cars make a market square, where the hapless aliens queue up to haggle with the juked-up (human) gangsters who control access to everything that matters. To the extent that there’s anything resembling governance at all, it’s that imposed from without, public order having been outsourced to the paramilitary arm of a multinational. Blomkamp’s point couldn’t possibly be clearer: District 9 is the Worst Place In The World.

Unless, that is, you think that title ought rather belong to Bexhill.

The Bexhill Refugee Camp, to give it its full name: in the 2027 of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, the green & pleasant land itself totters on its last legs, while the poky seaside resort town has been cordoned off, pressed into service as nothing less than a concentration city. Inside its perimeter, a babel of ethnic factions huddle up against the damp misery of a Kentish winter, squabbling over the pitiful few scraps left in the wake of total ecosocial collapse. The physical landscape is a by-now-familiar scatter of corrugated shanties, oil-drum fires and improvised chicken coops of shattered breeze-block.

We’re told these scenes are transpiring in some time yet to come: in both cases, the corruption we see is the ostensible outcome of some unspecified but clearly long-drawn-out embaddening process, by way of which the world we know has been laid to wrack and ruin. But while it’s great fun to titillate ourselves with this kind of worst-case scenario while ensconced in a plush theater seat (or alternately, sprawled on the sofa, iPad propped up on our knees), there’s one thing we might want to bear in mind: for a great many people on Planet Earth, what’s up on the screen isn’t the future at all.

These — like other familiar science-fictional depictions of urban collapse and chaos, from Soylent Green and Blade Runner to Minority Report — are reasonably accurate portrayals of present, real-world conditions for a billion or more human beings living in the favelas, slums and informal settlements of the Global South, from El Monton to Klong Toey.

I point this out not by way of guilt-tripping anyone, but rather, in an attempt to backstop another set of extrapolations about the urban next, those peddled by technology think tanks, consultancies and corporate research labs. As someone who spends much of my time thinking about the future of cities, it strikes me as being somewhat useful to first reckon with the circumstances under which an awful lot of citydwellers actually lead their lives.

So how do people get by when their everyday reality looks like the darkest science fiction? Ingenuity and adaptability — that hard-to-define quality that Americans call “hustle.” Mutuality, though there’s more than enough exploitation at the so-called bottom of the pyramid to demolish any sentimental notion of inherent human solidarity. Above all, the ability to endure the worst ruptures and reversals uncomplainingly, an attribute which is very often the product of profound religious faith.

These human qualities strike me as key to understanding the cities of the future we’re actually going to get. Along with the Maslovian fundamentals and the sad certainties of discrimination and abuse, they’re the ultimate bounding context in which any emerging technology will take its effect.

If, as the cliché has it, the supposedly futurist visions of science fiction are really just funhouse reflections of the present, films like District 9 and Children of Men are an aperture through which an awareness we’ve otherwise managed to suppress leaks into our lives. The urban chaos and squalor they depict is both an inescapable reality for many and, if certain less felicitous scenarios come to pass, a way of life more of us will be getting used to. Maybe we ought to be paying particularly close attention.

• Further reading:
- Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
- State of Exception
- Mike Davis, Planet of Slums
- Daniela Fabricius, “Resisting Representation: The Informal Geographies of Rio de Janeiro.”
- Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World
- Andreas Seibert, From Somewhere to Nowhere: China’s Internal Migrants

Neopanoptical

We’re all familiar with the Panopticon, right? The notional prison devised by the eighteenth-century English utilitarian Jeremy Bentham?

No? OK, let me gloss it for you, and people for whom this is a familiar story will forgive me and, I’m sure, point out my mistakes of fact, emphasis or interpretation.

Bentham imagined a prison built in the form of a gigantic ring, with cells by their hundreds disposed around its inner wall. In the very middle of the structure’s central void stood the prison’s sole watchtower, atop which he placed a guard shack with 360-degree visibility.

How to maintain control over the prisoners with but a single tower and a relatively small cadre of guards? For all its formal ingenuity, Bentham’s real innovation was this: the cells lining the periphery were to be brightly illuminated at all times, while the guard tower itself was never lit. The guards were therefore free to observe activity in any cell, at any moment…while the contrast between their brightly-lit cells and the watchtower’s mute windows meant prisoners could never be certain if the guards were observing them, someone else or no one at all. (In principle, the prison administration could go a step further and achieve the same docilizing results without even staffing the tower. How would the inmates even know? After all, they were, and would remain, literally in the dark.)

And there was one final visibility-related wrinkle. The prison would be sited on a hill just outside of town, always there as a vivid reminder that any trespass of the social order would come at a price.

Bentham called his device the Panopticon, and the twentieth-century philosopher of power Michel Foucault famously used it as a jumping-off point for his own dissection of the ways surveillance, visibility and discipline work in contemporary society. One of Foucault’s arguments was that over time, this internalization becomes an entirely unconscious process, that we carry disciplinarity into the ways we move, speak, act and hold our bodies.

We can see this at work on the most literal level in the way we react to the presence of surveillance cameras. An ordinary CCTV camera’s gaze is directional. It sees you, but you see it seeing you. And should you be interested in evading its gaze, you’re free to tailor your actions accordingly.

As Anna Minton notes, though, in last year’s invaluable Ground Control, the simplest possible material intervention — housing the selfsame camera under an opaque polycarbonate dome, costing at the very most a few tens of dollars — achieves precisely the same innovation as that Bentham placed at the heart of Panopticon. Once the mechanism itself is screened by the dome, anything you do in the 360-degree field around it is potentially in its field of vision. You’re no longer quite certain whether you’re actually under surveillance at any given moment — in fact, there needn’t even be a functioning camera under the dome at all — but are in the interests of prudence forced to assume that you are. You’re compelled to internalize the sense that you’re being watched.

Domes are cheaper than cameras, but of course signs are that much cheaper still; I often suspect that the big yellow notice warning me that I’m under CCTV surveillance is unaccompanied by any actual gear to speak of. What could possibly be a more effective deterrent than the watcher that can’t be seen at all?

What’s the harm in all of this neopanopticism? While there have been cases in which this latent apparatus of control has proved decisive in bringing criminals to justice, or at the very least provided us with a few moments of lulzy fun, longer-term statistical analysis paints a different picture. London’s Metropolitan Police admits that CCTV imagery was used in the resolution of less than four out of every hundred crimes. All that watchfulness may be having some effect on behavior, but it sure isn’t buying the public any particular increment of personal safety.

Minton points out that long-cherished civil liberties may not be the only thing being damaged by the presence of CCTV. She compares Britain with CCTV-free Denmark, and from her review of the available data concludes that pervasive surveillance is actually counterproductive. (The conjectured causative mechanism: because people feel that the implicit presence of supervisory authority makes someone else responsible for dealing with crime, they tune out the incidents they witness, or otherwise choose not to intervene.)

In practice, technologies like CCTV surveillance are always exceedingly difficult to weigh in the balance, the more so when technical developments like doming change the envelope of affordances and constraints in which they operate. The complications are redoubled when those of us who are concerned with public space can only wield dry abstractions like “civil liberties” against hot-button appeals and the human reality of victimization. In this light, it’s not unreasonable to argue that some loss of anonymity is acceptable if it meant the capture and punishment of muggers and rapists and hit-and-run drivers. (I wouldn’t happen to agree with you, personally, but it’s not an outright ridiculous belief to hold.)

But we should be very clear that that’s the trade-off we’re being offered. Furthermore, proponents of technologies like CCTV should also be conversant with — and forthright about — the potential for mission creep inherent in them. Systems already deployed are turned toward unforeseen uses; frameworks we already recognize (and therefore, we reckon, understand sufficiently well) are endowed with entirely new potential as easily as you’d blow new firmware into your phone or digital camera. And this happens every day: when we were in Wellington, for example, we were told that the surveillance cameras that voters approved to help manage traffic congestion had been repurposed for crime prevention, without a corresponding degree of public consultation.

Let the image stream coming off of them be provided with a facial-recognition algorithm, and you’ve got an entirely different kind of system on your hands, with entirely different potentials and vastly expanded implications. Yet the cameras, domed or otherwise, look no different from one day to the next. How are people supposed to inform themselves, or avail themselves of their existing prerogatives, under such circumstances?

And all of this is still confining our discussion to the visual realm! Yet the real relevance of this neopanoptical drift will only become obvious to most of us as more data is gathered passively in public space, through location-aware devices, embedded sensors and machine inference built on them. It’s these developments which will, as I’ve argued elsewhere, “permanently redefin[e] surveillance,” and it’s these that I’m more worried about than any simple plastic dome. If we don’t get a collective handle on what disciplinary observation means for our polities and places now, we’ll be in genuine trouble when that observation gets infinitely more distributed and harder to see.

Frameworks for citizen responsiveness, enhanced: Toward a read/write urbanism

We’ve been talking a little bit about what we might gain if we begin to conceive of cities, for some limited purposes anyway, as software under active development. So far, we’ve largely positioned such tools as a backstop against the inevitable defaults, breakdowns and ruptures that municipal services are heir to: a way to ensure that when failures arise, they’ll get identified as quickly as possible, assessed as to severity, brought to the attention of the relevant agencies, and flagged for follow-up.

And as useful, and even inspiring, as this might be, to my mind it doesn’t go nearly far enough. It’s essentially the lamination together of some entirely conventional systems, provisions and practices — something that already exists in its component pieces, something, as Bruce points out here, that’s “not even impossible.”

But what if we did take a single step further out? What if we imagined that the citizen-responsiveness system we’ve designed lives in a dense mesh of active, communicating public objects? Then the framework we’ve already deployed becomes something very different. To use another metaphor from the world of information technology, it begins to look a whole lot like an operating system for cities.

Provided that, we can treat the things we encounter in urban environments as system resources, rather than a mute collection of disarticulated buildings, vehicles, sewers and sidewalks. One prospect that seems fairly straightforward is letting these resources report on their own status. Information about failures would propagate not merely to other objects on the network but reach you and me as well, in terms we can relate to, via the provisions we’ve made for issue-tracking.

And because our own human senses are still so much better at spotting emergent situations than their machinic counterparts, and will probably be for quite some time yet to come, there’s no reason to leave this all up to automation. The interface would have to be thoughtfully and carefully designed to account for the inevitable bored teenagers, drunks, and randomly questing fingers of four-year-olds, but what I have in mind is something like, “Tap here to report a problem with this bus shelter.”

In order for anything like this scheme to work, public objects would need to have a few core qualities, qualities I’ve often described as making them “addressable, queryable, and even potentially scriptable.” What does this mean?

- Addressability. In order to bring urban environments fully into the networked fold, we would first need to endow each of the discrete things we’ve defined as public objects with its own unique identifier, or address. It’s an ideal application for IPv6, the next-generation Internet Protocol, which I described in Everyware as opening up truly abyssal reaches of address space. Despite the necessity of reserving nigh-endless blocks of potentially valid addresses for housekeeping, IPv6 still offers us a ludicrous freedom in this regard; we could quite literally assign every cobblestone, traffic light and street sign on the planet a few million addresses.

It’s true that this is overkill if all you need is a unique identifier. If all you’re looking to do is specify the east-facing traffic signal at the northeast corner of 34th Street and Lexington Avenue, you can do that right now, with barcodes or RFID tags or what-have-you. You only need to resort to IPv6 addressability if your intention is to turn such objects into active network nodes. But as I’ve argued in other contexts, the cost of doing this is so low that any potential future ROI whatsoever justifies the effort.

- Queryability. Once you’ve got some method of reliably identifying things and distinguishing them from others, a sensitively-designed API allows us to pull information off of them in a meaningful, structured way, either making use of that information ourselves or passing it on to other systems and services.

We’ve so far confined our discussion to things in the public domain, but by defining open interoperability standards (and mandating the creation of a critical mass of compliant objects), the hope is that people will add resources they own and control to the network, too. This would offer incredibly finely-grained, near-realtime reads on the state of a city and the events unfolding there. Not merely, in other words, to report that this restaurant is open, but which seats at which tables are occupied, and for how long this has been the case; not merely where a private vehicle charging station is, but how long the current waits are.

Mark my words: given only the proper tools, and especially a well-designed software development kit, people will build the most incredible ecology of bespoke services on data like this. If you’re impressed by the sudden blossoming of iPhone apps, wait until you see what people come up with when they can query stadium parking lots and weather stations and bike racks and reservoir levels and wait times at the TKTS stand. You get the idea. (Some of these tools already exist: take a look at Pachube, for example.)

- And finally scriptability, by which I mean the ability to push instructions back to connected resources. This is obviously a delicate matter: depending on the object in question, it’s not always going to be appropriate or desirable to offer open scriptability. You probably want to give emergency-services vehicles the ability to override traffic signals, in other words, but not the spotty kid in the riced-out WRX. It’s also undeniable that connecting pieces of critical infrastructure to an open network increases the system’s overall vulnerability — what hackers call its “attack surface” — many, many times. If every exit is an entrance somewhere else, every aperture through which the network speaks itself is also a way in.

We should all be very clear, right up front, that this is a nontrivial risk. I’ll make it explicit: any such scheme as the one sketched out here presents the specter of warfare by cybersabotage, stealthy infrastructure attrition or subversion, and the depredations of random Saturday-night griefers. It’s also true that connected systems are vulnerable to cascading failures in ways non-coupled systems cannot ever be. Yes, yes and yes. It’s my argument that over anything but the very shortest term, the advantages to be derived from so doing will outweigh the drawbacks and occasional catastrophes — even fatal ones. But as my architect friends say, this is above all something that must be “verified in field,” validated empirically and held up to the most rigorous standards.

What do we get in return for embracing this nontrivial risk? We get a supple, adaptive interface to the urban fabric itself, something that allows us not just to nail down problems, but to identify and exploit opportunities. Armed with that, I can see no upward limit on how creative, vibrant, imaginative and productive twenty-first century urban life can be, even under the horrendous constraints I believe we’re going to face, and are perhaps already beginning to get a taste of.

Stolidly useful, “sustainable,” justifiable on the most gimlet-eyed considerations of ROI, environmental benefit and TCO? Sure. But I think we should be buckling ourselves in, because first and foremost, read/write urbanism is going to be a blast.

Frameworks for citizen responsiveness

In the past, I’ve often enough described cities as being “all about difficulty“:

They’re about waiting: for the bus, for the light to change, for your order of Chinese take-out to be ready. They’re about frustration: about parking tickets, dogshit, potholes and noisy neighbors. They’re about the unavoidable physical and psychic proximity of other human beings competing for the same limited pool of resources….about the fear of crime, and its actuality.

If this is so, and I continue to believe that it is, are we compelled to accept it? Or is there anything that can be done about it? And especially, might the constellation of tools we’re just starting to wrap our collective heads around offer us any recourse in our struggle against this tangled welter of hassles and frustrations we call life in the big city?

Well. Some measure of friction is unavoidable in urban life — both endemic to any physical system anywhere near as complex as this and, truth be told, not such a bad thing. But there’s no reason why we can’t use our new capabilities to get on top of the roil, see what’s going on, and maybe even keep the less felicitous contingencies from solidifying.

Prior art

Two services that I’m familiar with address this set of concerns, each representing a slightly different way of framing the problem: New York City’s 311 gateway to non-emergency services and, in the UK, mySociety‘s awesome FixMyStreet. There are others — many, many others — as well as roughly congruent resources facing other domains, but as far as municipal services are concerned these two are the best-known, arguably the most successful, and the most faithfully representative of their respective approaches.

As an official utility of the City of New York, 311′s stated mission is to:

- Provide the public with quick, easy access to all New York City government services and information while maintaining the highest possible level of customer service;
- Help agencies improve service delivery by allowing them to focus on their core missions and manage their workload efficiently;
- Provide insight into ways to improve City government through accurate, consistent measurement and analysis of service delivery Citywide.

…while FixMyStreet’s proposition is a little simpler: it allows its users to “report, view or discuss local problems.”

Despite the clear differences in aim and ambit, I think of both as frameworks for citizen responsiveness. Their essence is that some issue arises — a pothole, a fallen branch, an open fire hydrant or a wandering elder — is identified by a member of the public, and is then raised to the attention of whatever municipal authority is empowered to respond to it. (We’ll get to the weakness of this last link in the chain in a bit.)

While it does provide an online point of entry, 311 is in my experience predominantly something you engage over the phone. It’s an easy number to remember, the city’s representatives have repeated the mantra “911 for emergencies, 311 for everything else” until it ought to be second nature and, nicety of niceties in this IVR age, your calls are answered by a human being. Every time I’ve ever had cause to engage it, my calls have been answered in seconds, not minutes.

In fact, this is the nicest aspect of 311. There’s a certain deep satisfaction in venting your frustrations to someone listening with (at the very least a convincing simulacrum of) empathy, and I’d imagine this has practical consequences, too — that a decent swath of incoming complaints are prevented from escalating via the simple expedient of hearing the caller out.

When navigating a beast like municipal government, though, even the best and most sensitive operator is unlikely to have all the answers at his or her fingertips. So 311 operators are coupled to a reasonably good search database, and from what I’ve seen they’re usually able to point you at the proper resource or department in short order, whether your problem is a registering a noise complaint, a shattered bus shelter, or tracking down the taxi driver who drove off with your briefcase.

But that’s where 311′s utility largely ends. Once this connection is made, the caller is deposited right back into the universal thicket of big-city bureaucracy. Worse, the categories into which the catching department will sort your issue are likely to be brittle, and there tends to be little provision for following up on the status of an issue — or for that matter, identifying the single team or individual responsible for resolving the complaint.

Similar things are true of FixMyStreet, which collects issues on its users’ behalf and then forwards them to the relevant department of government. Despite offering users a range of tools that 311 lacks, and which ought by now to be table stakes in the domain, like the ability to pinpoint issues on a map, or document them with pictures, you get nothing in the way of confirmation or response other than a terse notification that the complaint was “Sent to Kensington & Chelsea Borough Council 1 minute” after its entry.

Seeing the city as software

So how would you close the loop? How would you arrange things so that the originator, other members of the public, the city bureaucracy itself and other interested parties are all notified that the issue has been identified and is being dealt with? How might we identify the specific individuals or teams tasked with responding to the issue, allow people to track the status of issues they’re reported, and ensure that observed best practices and lessons learned are gathered in a resolution database?

In a talk I heard him give a few months back, technology entrepreneur Jyri Engeström suggested stealing a page from the practice of software development as a way of addressing shared problem spaces more generally. He pointed out that, during his time at Google, employees turned the tools developed to track open issues in software under development toward other domains of common experience, like the shuttle buses the company provides to haul them back and forth between San Francisco and Mountain View.

When hassles arose with the bus service, employees treated them just like they would known issues in some application they were working on: they entered their complaints into an existing bug tracker, which provided each case with a unique identifier, a space to characterize it more fully…and perhaps most importantly, the name of a party responsible for closing out the ticket.

The general insight Jyri derived from his experience got me to thinking. An issue-tracking board for cities? Something visual and Web-friendly, that’s simultaneously citizen-facing and bureaucracy-facing? Heck, that begins to sound like a pretty neat way to address the problems with systems like 311 and FixMyStreet.

You provide citizens with a variety of congenial ways to initiate trouble tickets, whether they’re most comfortable using the phone, a mobile application or website, or a text message. You display currently open cases, and gather resolved tickets in a permanent archive or resource. You use an algorithm to assign priority to open issues on a three-axis metric:

(a) Scale. How many people are affected by the issue? Does this concern just me, me and my immediate neighbors, our whole block, the neighborhood, or the entire city?
(b) Severity. How serious is the issue? In descending order, will it result in imminent loss of life, injury or the destruction of property? Is this, rather, an aesthetic hazard, or even simply a suggestion for improvement?
(c) Urgency. How long has the tag been open?

Because a great many urban issues are going to crop up repeatedly, routinely, perennially, perhaps you offer the kinds of tools content-management software for discussion sites has had to evolve over the years: ways to moderate tickets up or down, or mark their resolution as particularly impactful.

You assign tickets to specified agents.

Then, of course, you apply the usual variety of visualizations to the live data, allowing patterns to jump right out. Which city department has the best record for closing out tickets most quickly, and with the highest approval rating? What kind of issues generally take longest to address to everyone’s satisfaction?

So. To reiterate. As I see it, a contemporary framework for citizen responsiveness suited for big cities would offer most if not all of the following features:

- Two aspects of 311, an easy-to-memorize universal point of entry and a catching mechanism of empowered human operators lying just behind it;
- A useful spread of other points of access, including desktop and mobile applications;
- The kind of location-specific overview provided by services like Everyblock, with maps as one obvious and logical way in;
- An appropriate prioritization algorithm;
- Moderation tools;
- The accountability, transparency and ticking clock-to-resolution offered by an open-ticket system;
- A persistent archive of resolved issues;
- Top-notch graphic design, capable of holding its own with best contemporary Web practice; and
- A layer of data analytics and visualization.

Beyond trouble tickets

As is well-known, I tend to be skeptical when the replacement of human systems, however clumsy, with novel and untested technical frameworks is contemplated. I’m also acutely aware that the purpose of a system is what it does, and there may well be occult reasons why urban systems that appear intractably broken are allowed to remain that way, i.e. they’re actually functioning just fine in support of some agenda.

No issue-tracking system, even the best-designed and most cleverly devised, is going to quash the frustrations of city life completely. I believe, though, that the system I sketch out here would give cities a supple and relatively low-cost way to close the loop between Jacobian “eyes on the street,” and the agencies that serve and are fully empowered to respond to them. What I’ve described here is, if nothing else, a way to harness the experience and rich local expertise of ordinary citizens.

I’ve always taught my students that if you scratch a New Yorker, you’ll find a committed urbanist — someone with intense and deeply-held opinions about the kind of trees that ought to be planted along the sidewalks, or the right way to organize bike parking, or ways to reconcile the conflicting needs of dogwalkers and parents with children in city parks. And the same thing, of course, is true of Mancunians, Singaporeans and Cariocas.

The point isn’t that all of their notions are going to be fair, practical, practicable or even remotely sensible, but that an immense body of pragmatic insight and — more importantly, in my view — passion for the city is going untapped. Pundits, bobbins and bureaucrats talk constantly about improving the efficiency of municipal services, but if improved information is a driver of that efficiency, why aren’t we even trying to gather all the incredibly rich data that’s just lying there, more or less literally begging us to use it? We have the tools, we have the models, we know what they’re good for and where they fall down. It’s past time to build on this experience and bring its lessons to bear on the places we live.

Carfree by choice

When I was up in Umeä last year for the Spring IxD Summit, I happened to spot a book called Carfree Cities lying on a drafting table in the school’s vehicle design program, which shares space with the interaction design faculty. Well, you know me: I ordered it from Amazon on the spot, and found it waiting for me at home in Helsinki a few days later. (I should note my delight at the fact that it was a vehicle design program where I encountered the book, lying there like the proudly-flaunted samizdat of a despised minority party. I’d, myself, be so much happier if the planet’s design faculties decided en masse to teach Mobility Design instead.)

It’s a dead giveaway from the title, but what I appreciate about Carfree Cities is that its author, JH Crawford, is willing to think about the relationship between mobility and urban quality of life in a deeper way than is generally the case, and propose proportionally more radical solutions. Having decided for ourselves that we’ll never own one again, I’m clearly already sympathetic to the idea that the car simply isn’t as necessary to getting around cities as we’ve come to believe it is.

Crawford spends the first part of his book marshaling the usual (but by no means unpersuasive) evidence against the automobile: the pollution, the injury and fatality figures, the waste. I was pleased to see someone putting empirical flesh on my gut take that where cities, at least, are concerned, the seriously inimical artifact isn’t the gasoline engine at all, but the private car built around it. Or, to put it another way, that as a society you could replace the stinking V8s with hybrids, electrics and hydrogen fuel-cells to whatever degree you wanted, but would be likely to find that the problems attendant upon the car haven’t evaporated quite so readily as the clouds of monoxide.

Having identified vehicular traffic as the cause of urban ills beyond number, though, Crawford proceeds to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. The title, again, rather says it all regarding the essential weakness of the solution he proposes, because I don’t in my heart believe that any city but the most self-consciously twee and tourist-oriented will ever manage to go completely carfree, and none at all above a certain size. And it’s a shame, because the second half of the book consists in large measure of self-evidently painstakingly worked-out schemas — you can see some of them here, here and here — that Crawford’s devised to provide cities with transit, logistics, supply and maintenance in the absence of cars and trucks.

They’re brilliant, and kind of demented: the kind of thing you might spy a shabby-looking guy sketching out on a stack of legal pads in an all-night donut place on San Pablo, and be genuinely unable to tell whether he’s the next Corb or simply Section 8. Either way, like most “solutions” that require the top-to-bottom reinvention of universal practice, they strike me as an awful lot of effort to go to for results that could probably be approximated in less burdensome ways — and, like the more heartbreakingly utopian passages in A Pattern Language, impossible to achieve in any event unless you were starting de novo.

If you want to cut down on the damage cars clearly cause, for my money the wiser approach — the one more likely to bear fruit for more people — has to be one of harm reduction, using Monderman and Gehl strategies to increase the total surface area available for pedestrians, bicyclists and other uses. But this is already orthodoxy, and properly so; if New York City’s Street Design Manual embraces your way of thinking, you can be sure you’ve left the realm of the radical.

Carfree Cities is a useful text, then, if for no other reason that by espousing an ultra position, it moves the Overton window that much further along the continuum. But as with any stance built around the suffix “-free,” its adherents run the risk of trying to build a coherent way of doing things on a framework of essentially negatory tactics, and this strikes me as a hard uphill slog and a harder sell. What affirmative vision can we mine from Crawford’s text?

We can start by examining just what he thinks is going to happen in a landscape freed of cars. Where I myself would tend not to be quite so determinist, Crawford has no compunction at all about drawing a causal chain tying together transport, topography and affect. Here’s his thesis, directly stated:

Because city form greatly influences the nature of social life in public spaces, the prevailing transport technology exerts a strong influence on the congeniality of every city.

Are we tracking, here? To Crawford, the mode of transportation that dominates in a given place shapes its physical development, which in turn becomes the terrain on which all potential human interactions turn. I’m willing to entertain the notion that here he’s not entirely wrong, though I continue to believe this privileges transportation just a little bit too much.

Los Angeles is probably the example par excellence: it would be foolish to deny that this place above all has been shaped by the internal combustion engine, and its maximum expression in the form of the individual private automobile. Nor would anyone in their right mind be particularly likely to argue that huge swathes of the LA basin — from the Valley down to Orange County and the ocean straight out to San Bernardino — aren’t in fact constrained in the possibilities for social engagement they’re able to offer because of the way the landscape has evolved to support automobility.

Or we could look at Tokyo, more than any other in my experience a city of trains, their elevated rights-of-way and grade crossings. (What captures that city better than the melancholy mechanical gonging of the train approach warning? I can hear it in my mind right now.) Tokyo has unquestionably coevolved with the train: the city’s first subway stations were laid down to mesh with the grand dowager department stores of Ginza, while the commercial development of districts like Shibuya blossoms from railheads established in the 1960s, like some hypertrophic mutant offshoot of the railway towns that went before them. Beyond that, and more to Crawford’s point, rail-driven modes of thinking and doing absolutely condition the city’s social contours, from planning an evening out so it deposits revelers neatly on the last train, right up to the way in which people choose to take their own lives.

So the claim here obviously isn’t completely wrong. But is Venice — the original Venice, that is, not the one lying to the south of Santa Monica — is it really shaped by its reliance on vaporetti? Is the social space of Venice framed in any meaningful way by this transportation choice? Wouldn’t it be more sensible by far to say that here the physical terrain has constrained the choice of transportation mode?

I ask because, while this is surely an edge case among conurbations, it is specifically Venice that Crawford has chosen to use as a template for his project:

We should build more carfree cities. Venice, the largest existing example, is loved by almost everyone and is an oasis of peace despite being one of the densest urban areas on earth.

So there are the affirmative criteria: our aim ought to be the design of cities that are “loved by almost everyone,” that are capable of remaining “oases of peace.” Never mind for a second that Venice’s enjoyment of these qualities is thoroughly overdetermined by its history; Crawford is going to tell you that it’s primarily down to the locally dominant mode of transportation.

The book is not unrelievedly Eurocentric: Carfree does at least glance for inspiration at other places where the car is a de facto impossibility, like the medinas of Morocco. Throughout, though, Crawford clearly situates the grandeur in a recognizably European mode of urban structuration. We recognize the cobblestoned laneways and four-storey blocks not from demassifying Detroit, nor the boomtowns of the Pearl River Delta, but from practice in Scandinavia and the Low Countries, with maybe just a touch of nostalgia for the Mediterranean paseo.

And there’s nothing particularly wrong with the easygoing, café-centric, light-rail-and courtyard urbanism Crawford wants to bring into being. Anybody nurtured on Rudofsky and Alexander and Gehl will find it immediately and intimately familiar (if achingly far from realization in most of the world); I wouldn’t mind living in a place like the ones he’s imagined my ownself, for at least part of the time. But the specific layouts he’s plotted wind up bringing him perilously close to certain long-discredited Corbusianisms; with their vertically-segregated traffic and islands of housing amidst sprawling expanses of green, they remind me of nothing so much as a latterday, clean-tech gloss on GM’s original Futurama at the 1939 World’s Fair.

Finally, though, my biggest beef with the carfree conurbation Crawford proposes is that for all its radicalism, it’s in its essence a profoundly conservative vision — typical of its ilk in that it ignores fifty years’ worth of technosocial development. Much of the harm done by the car, I believe, has already been addressed by various conceptions of the shared street, and much of the rest will be undone when the selfsame physical object is reconceived of as a network resource, fused with taxis, shared bikes and public transit in integrated mobility services and coherent journeys.

If good design begins with constraint, and I believe it does, then the realist act of accepting the presence of cars in our cities is probably the right kind of boundary condition you need to produce truly insightful solutions. Do I believe in doing everything possible to discourage, disincentivize, undermine and displace the century-long hegemony of the private car? I think you can already tell that I do, for all the reasons JH Crawford enumerates and my own besides. But while there’s a lot of energy, passion and clever thinking to be found in Carfree Cities, I’m afraid I find its spinal thesis ultimately untenable for most of our places. I’m glad it exists, but mostly as an outer marker of a certain style of thought, to which we can occasionally turn for tactical insight and the infectious inspiration of the profoundly convinced.

Rework and the city

Two slim books, each illuminated in the light of the other.

I just finished reading Rework, 37signals‘ song of themselves; by my watch, it took me fifty-four minutes start to stop, including bio break. Was this an hour well spent? Hard to tell yet. Whatever you think about 37signals — and I’m not a fan, particularly, but so what — you can’t deny that they’ve built a highly successful enterprise by epitomizing “small, fast, ruthless…all Edge.” This is a shop that does very well by surfing (and in a few cases forging) the zeitgeist, so if they have meaningful wisdom to impart, I’m all ears.

Given this very quality, though, I’m less interested in their advice on building successful businesses than in what their own structural decisions might imply as a bellwether. Between certain traits of their core audience and the brash self-assurance with which they issue advice, the way 37signals does it now is likely to influence the way any number of startups choose to do it next year, so I paid particularly close attention to those passages in the book that described the company’s spatial and temporal organization. Here’s a rough map of their world, from the chapterlet entitled “The best are everywhere”:

Our headquarters are in Chicago, but more than half our team lives elsewhere. We’ve got people in Spain, Canada, Idaho, Oklahoma, and elsewhere.

Five, six locations, then. This may not sound like a lot…but they’re talking about a shop of sixteen people.

And these sixteen people — flung around the globe, working to their own schedules, unbound by meetings and the usual corporate inanity — clearly generate an impressive power-to-weight ratio. Between them, they make Web-based tools that are easily competitive with, and frequently enough superior to, anything the market has to offer otherwise.

Compact elements, relatively loosely coupled. Global reach, from ludicrously few actual points of presence. Refusal of size for its own sake. All this put me in mind of another slender volume I devoured recently, over a barely longer interval: Frank Duffy’s Work and the City. As Duffy has it, “A map of the spatial configuration of many businesses has become a global network of interactions. Core physical space is diminishing while interactions that transcend and spill beyond the walls of office buildings are multiplying.”

Here’s Duffy on what happens when work is something that can be accomplished just as easily from a Starbucks (or a smartphone, wherever it should happen to be) as from a dedicated office:

The big, open-ended question is, “Why should empowered and self-reliant people, equipped with increasingly powerful information technology, ever come to work at all?”

37signals’ answer is clearly that they needn’t. Why would anyone sane want them to, when they can accomplish many times what a traditionally office-bound worker can, without exposing the enterprise to the overhead and liability of maintaining physical plant?

Eventually, of course — this is one of Duffy’s central points — decisions made by institutions about how to organize themselves in space and time fold back onto the form of cities, and how it feels to live in them. For example, institutional mass generally means headcount…and headcount means that it’s far too expensive to house your workers in city centers, so they wind up stashed in built-to-impress digs on the highway out of town.

And the Möbius loops: the way an enterprise is housed, and especially where it is located physically, significantly inflects what its employees can achieve. Whether we’re talking about Redmond or one of those interstitial exits on the NJ Turnpike, whenever scale compels an organization to flee the city center, I make this a lose-lose. The urban core misses out on the dynamism, the ancillary business and, yes, the taxes thrown off by hundreds or thousands of workers; while the enterprise forgoes the vitality and daily inspiration that only truly come from engaging metropolitan surge.

There may be industries where this isn’t so relevant, but I think you’ll find that those currently thought of as “creative” are not to be found numbered among them. The quality that has latterly become the focus of so much interest depends on having the street and its currents ready to hand, almost by definition. That there’s an affinity between creativity, new organizational forms and high-quality, service-dense urban life is implicit in both Work and the City and Rework — occasionally breaching the surface in the latter, as when a passage on sticking to principle is inspired by the get-’em-while-they’re-fresh dogma of Vinnie’s Sub Shop.

Between them, the texts limn a world in which smaller, faster, lighter organizations (Robert Fripp‘s “small mobile intelligent units”?) all but effortlessly out-innovate competitors many times their size, both driving and requiring changes in the way cities are organized to support them.

If you’re an MBA, this shouldn’t come as any surprise a’tall: you’ve been prepared for this moment by years of rhetoric about creative destruction, disruptive innovation, “rightsizing” and refactoring, to the point that you’re more dedicated to the Body-without-Organs than any actual Deleuzian I’ve ever met. In this light, Rework‘s just another collection of sonnets to the asymmetrical threat.

If you’re running a city, though, there’s stuff here you probably ought to be paying attention to. The message is that in the long run you’re clearly better off underwriting a vibrant ecosystem of these than shelling out one tax break after another in the hopes of enticing (or retaining) corporate headquarters. Beyond the pecuniary, the payoffs are many, whether they show up as improved robustness and resilience, enhanced quality of life, or a reputation for enabling healthier work/life patterns. And I, for one, would be delighted to see that happen.

People are creative; industries, not so much. And cities?

So it looks like I’ll be in Amsterdam next month to speak at WCIT 2010: the seventeenth annual World Congress on Information Technology, an event whose theme is “Challenges of Change.” (Lot of challenges this year, I guess, and that’s even before your civilizational transportation grid is brought to its knees by the merest grumblings of an Icelandic firegod.)

I am of course delighted to be at WCIT, but I have to say I’m a little perplexed by the relevance of anything I have to say to the track I’ve been assigned, “Creative Industries.” People I have a great deal of respect for have found institutional homes in departments so named, so there must be some there there, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why a rubric so fuzzy and problematic has risen to prominence so quickly.

Actually, I find the recent emphasis on “creative” X, Y and Z more than a little troubling. Part of this is simply a lifelong aversion to flavor-of-the-month thinking and empty jargon, but it’s also that it all seems to be down to the influence of Richard Florida — and in my mind, Florida’s seeming advocacy of things I care about deeply winds up trivializing and ultimately undercutting them.

Methodologically, of course, Florida’s original work leaves a great deal to be desired, so much so that the serious social scientists I know preemptively cringe when they can sense his name about to be uttered. The problems start right off the bat, with Florida’s definition of “creative”; in his hands, the term becomes so elastic as to be effectively meaningless, unless you truly believe that surgeons, hairdressers and cabinetmakers are all responding to the same primary imperatives in their choice of occupation.

But then it’s not clear that even if they did, they would think of themselves as a self-conscious class — i.e. a group with overriding shared or collective interests — at all. The sprawling cohort Florida anoints as creative for the purposes of making his case have so little in common otherwise that it’s hard to ever imagine them constituting a coherent constituency, voting bloc, market or audience.

I also wish somebody would tell me just which fields of human endeavor constitute these supposed “creative industries.” The laundry list of criteria that have been advanced strikes me as more self-congratulatory than diagnostically useful, and just about Borgesian into the bargain.

The error is compounded when some well-meaning effort is made to attract both class and industries to what are now being dubbed “creative cities.” Believe me, I have absolutely no problem if you want to attract creative people to your city, nor would I complain in the slightest if you rigged the machinery of municipal policy so as to render your part of the world that much more welcoming to gay men and bicyclists. We could all use a leisurely ride every once in awhile, and so far as I know no city has ever done anything but make money and have a good time during an International Bear Rendezvous. That is all well and good.

But don’t for a moment make the mistake that by so doing, you’ll automatically become Silicon Valley 2.0, let alone catapult your two-bit burg into the stratum of Sassen-class world cities. Convincing the startups, the venture money, and the young innovators that your part of the world would make a congenial home, in the hopes of cultivating a robust and sustainable tax base, is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do. But the honest truth is that not every place is or ever will be equally set up to succeed in these things, and anybody who suggests otherwise is selling you a bill of goods.

The cynic (or the realist critic of neoliberalism) points out that investment is attracted by a “stable” local political environment and a docilized labor market contained by business-friendly wage and collective-bargaining laws. The Floridian, ever so slightly more evolved, will argue that sidewalk cafés, plentiful bike parking, and a neighborhood that breaks out in fluttering rainbow bunting come Pride each year are more likely to attract the clean, green twenty-first century investment you’re presumably really looking for. Better to snare Jamba Juice and the Apple Store and the kind of people who shop in them, goes the argument, than Pig Iron Smelting Joint Venture No. 4.

That’s all fine, as far as it goes. But I believe there’s a single factor that makes one or another region more attractive to the kinds of people and investment that apparently now signify above all others — and I’m sorry, Metz, it’s not having a starchitect-designed museum. It’s a factor I think of as organic sense of place.

Amsterdam, Barcelona, San Francisco, New York and London all have persistent local ways of doing and being, and that’s what makes them compelling places to work and settle, despite the inevitable hassles attendant upon doing so. These lifeways obviously evolved over historical time, and the harsh truth we can conclude from this is that there’s no turnkey way to join their ranks, no book you can read or seminar you can attend that can tell you how to be one of them. This has got to be a bitter pill to swallow, I know, if you’re Masdar or Sejong City.

I understand that times are tough, competition between cities is relentless and those of you responsible for making urban-scale decisions are desperately interested to hear from someone, anyone at all, who seems confident about having the answers. I’m simply begging you not to swallow Richard Florida’s ideas whole (or mine, or anybody else’s at all).

If you care about queer lives and two-wheeled transit, by all means take measures to support them. But do so on their own terms, in, of and for themselves, and not because you’re following some pop sociologist’s half-assed recipe for urban renaissance in the hope of luring development. Who knows, maybe a sincere effort at the former will wind up fructifying your town in all kinds of unexpected ways; it’s not as if it’s ever a particularly bad idea to underwrite civilization and amenity.

But if all you care about in the end is the flow of investment, talent and human capital through your town, you can probably save yourself the half-hearted effort at draping yourself with the Creative Industries mantle. There are plenty of other ways to attract capital, and though they’re neither as glamorous nor as generative of the instant cred that goes hand-in-hand with having purchased this year’s model, they work and work reliably.

I’ve never heard anyone accuse Zürich, for example, of having a blistering DJ scene, cutting-edge galleries or forward-leaning popup shops. Yet they seem to be doing OK when it comes to the cheddar, you know? Better a world of places that are what they are, and stand or fall on their own terms, than the big nowhere of ten thousand certified-Creative towns and cities with me-too museums, starchitected event spaces and half-hearted film festivals.

Serendipity Cities: Of services and situations

As I’d mentioned previously, I’m going to be curating a showcase of urbanist iPhone apps at next month’s inaugural FutureEverything festival in Manchester, as part of the Serendipity City Challenge. I figured I’d take the opportunity to work out just what I thought these words taken together might mean, and more specifically how my feelings have changed since I first gave the topic any consideration back in 2003.

Serendipity, of course, doesn’t simply mean “surprise.” Strictly speaking, the word means accidentally discovering something wonderful in the course of a search for something unrelated. The genuine occurrence of serendipity necessarily implies a very powerful order of richness and texture in the world and, to my mind anyway, when you experience it in cities it’s a clear indicator of a healthily functioning urban ecosystem.

Given that the essence of serendipity is its unexpectedness, though, I tend to be wary of products and services that promise to enhance or “accelerate” it. An artificially accelerated serendipity strikes me as leaving precious little room for the real thing to emerge, and us with a set of instincts so attentuated we may not recognize it when we do encounter it.

Accordingly, in the selection of applications I made for FutureEverything, I allowed myself the leeway of a rather loose interpretation. I looked for applications that offered residents and other users of the city instant reads on the state of things, allowing them to change their behavior in response to evolving conditions or to take advantage of unexpected juxtapositions, however momentary.

It’s this ability to pivot on the moment’s demands that strikes me as so essential to the development of urban savoir faire. The nature of cities is such that life in them exposes each of us to the greatest possible variety of conflicts, difficulties, affronts and challenges, even simply desires that are in tension with one another. Learning to deal with these tensions, to negotiate them with aplomb and assurance, is something that generally takes years of experience with a given place. (Indeed, for English-speakers, this understanding of sophistication is encoded in our very language: that’s what it means, after all, to be “urbane.”)

This strikes me as a process which actually can be usefully accelerated by mobile applications and services, as opposed to trying to pin down something as aleatory as serendipity in its truest form. In order to succeed at this, developers will need to help their users actively reconceive of unplanned, emergent circumstances not so much as disruptions in orderly flow and more as opportunities, even potential “nodal points” in their lives.

The lightness and openness I’m looking for in the next generation of mobile services recall an older sense of the fertile unpredictability urban life might entail. This is André Breton, in 1924: “The street I believed was capable of causing surprising turning-points in my life; the street, with its restlessness and its glances, was my true element: there, as in no other place, I received the winds of eventuality.”

To my mind, this is just why we celebrate the street in the humanist-urbanist tradition. Canonically, it functions as mixing-chamber, randomizer, instigator of situations par excellence. I wonder, though, if this can fairly be said to be the case any longer.

If I’m to be honest, it’s only rarely that I experience that kind of charged moment on the street anymore, or in public space more generally. Mostly, I’m head-down and on my way somewhere — and at that, one of a very few consistent places — and if I can judge fairly by their outer demeanor, so are most of the people around me who might have furnished a great measure of the potential “turning-points.”

By contrast, it’s fair to say that something like this happens to me all the time when I’m online: I’ll follow a series of links and wind up somewhere completely wonderful and, equally, unexpected, or get sent a link to some article, image or video that takes me on a similar journey. When the “winds of eventuality” find me these days, I’m generally sitting in front of my laptop.

One of these days, somebody clever is going to figure out how to use mobile services to bring this effortlessly connectionist logic back to street life. With any luck, they turn out to be a way back to the bracing air of possibility the simple act of being on a great metropolitan sidewalk once entrained.

In fact, if done with any verve to speak of, I can see such services giving rise to the moments of heightened awareness and potential I associate with Situationist rhetoric, those precious intervals during which some fortuitous alignment of people, place and circumstance reminds you what life is for and why it’s worth the effort. (For those of us who savor such ironies, it would be particularly delicious if the final triumph and apotheosis of the flaky, incoherent Parisian left of the Sixties was delivered on the shoulders of systems like GPS and the Internet, originally devised, designed and deployed by the military-industrial apparatus for its own ends.)

And that, in turn, finally meets my own personal definition of “accidentally discovering something wonderful in the course of a search for something unrelated.” The technologies of just such a networked urbanism are here, are available, are in our hands — are, in fact, just about begging us to take them up and make use of them in our cities. Who wants to go first?