As many of you know, in 2005 I started framing out the book that would eventually see the light of day as Everyware. As a first-time author with no track record, proposing a speculative work on what was then still very much an emergent area of practice, I assumed that there would be, at best, limited publisher interest in my pitch. So I settled for the first one willing to invest in my proposal, the New Riders imprint of Berkeley-based technology house Peachpit Press. (You should know that Peachpit is itself a subsidiary of the SOPA-supporting Pearson Education, but that’s a story for a different day.)

In retrospect I clearly could and should have held out for not merely a different publisher, but a different kind of publisher. New Riders has never had the foggiest idea what to do with Everyware, from the original editor they assigned to the book — a mommyblogger! — to this entirely-serious proposal for the cover to the slapdash way they handled converting the book into an electronic format.

A lot of this, in naked point of fact, is nobody’s fault but my own. I chose poorly. That’s all on me, and properly so; consider me chastened by the experience.

But New Riders continues to have responsibility for Everyware, and they continue to serve it poorly, in ways that undermine its chances of making money for them. There’s absolutely no excuse for this kind of thing. What’s that? That is how Everyware shows up on Readmill, an exciting new social-reading application. That’s how your book would show up on Readmill, too, if you entrusted its publication to New Riders.

You see the way there’s no cover image for the book, like there is for every other book on the service? You see the way Readmill thinks “Mobipocket” is part of the book’s title? These artifacts are not Readmill’s fault. Nor are they Amazon‘s, or any other vendor’s. They’re part and parcel of the way the publisher has hamfistedly treated the digital edition: as an afterthought, as something not even worth the few minutes’ effort fixing these blunders would have required.

None of this might have mattered, particularly, in the days when digital books were niche propositions. But given Everyware‘s subject and target audience, I have to imagine that the overwhelming majority of people who’d be interested in the book in the first place would be inclined to engage it digitally. Wouldn’t it make sense to treat these people — these paying customers — not like second-class citizens, but like the valued, appreciated readers they are?

Like I say, I’ve learned my lesson. But if there are any among you who are contemplating authorship, please try to profit from my mistakes. Seek a publisher who understands and will support your work — and, just as importantly, who displays some capability and intention of investing in you. If you can’t find a publisher who meets this description, better you launch your title yourself. You have Kickstarter, you have Amazon, you have a ton of great tools and distribution channels that didn’t exist or weren’t fully robust even a year ago.

Trust me on this. New Riders may well be a poster child for everything that’s wrong with the publishing industry, but they’re not alone. If you believe in your ideas and have invested effort and craft in expressing those ideas in the form of a book, you deserve better…and so does your book.

I had wanted to do some thinking about why I so often prefer to stay in a hotel room when travelling – even to cities where I have many friends with room to spare, and even when I can’t really afford it. I want to clarify, for myself if no one else, just what it is that I am looking for, and why I so often find myself disappointed.

I think we can take it as read that Hotel is more than a place to stash one’s body and personal effects while on the road; otherwise the capsule hotel, priced appropriately to its dimensions, would have more than curiosity appeal.

But I’m also assuming that the proposition goes quite a bit further, even, than the evoking the space of home in unfamiliar surroundings. In many regards, I’m imagining, it is precisely the condition of home that Hotel aims to transcend. (Witness the curious reimportation into the domestic milieu of “hotel-grade” mattresses, linen, bath appointments, and so on.)

The element of reinvention is certainly at play here, the opportunity to try on new masks and guises that has always been afforded by travel. But there is also a potent set of inducements operating at the rawly material level:

- Hotel is always clean[ed], even sterile. Hotel is always a blank slate, an idealized terrain not subject to the cluttering accumulations and biological drifts of everyday life. Designed to be serviced, it holds forth the promise of a new beginning with every passing day, “sanitized for your protection.”

- Nested somewhere within the idea of Hotel is that of Concierge, of some human guide to the social, physical and temporal complexity that is city. Bundled up in the Concierge pattern are notions of access and privilege: they can get you reservations or tickets that are otherwise impossible to acquire, accomodate and smooth transactions that would otherwise require extensive nemawashi.

The prime attribute sought here is that of discretion: the Concierge arranges, but never judges. Or so I’d want to believe – never having actually availed myself of concierge services anywhere, the access symbolized by those golden keys remains a potent fantasy for me. The reality (i.e. “good” seats at tonight’s showing of The Lion King) is probably a great deal sadder and less romantic.

- Hotel is always perched precisely on the borderline between public and private. Once you close the door of your room, it’s as if you’ve decoupled utterly from the world and its demands – until the moment that you require something from beyond its walls. In the ideal case (that generally suggested by ads, brochures, and other marketing collateral), the guest finds that sustenance of most any sort is merely a phonecall away. This unusual ability to toggle at whim between public and private, detached and intensely connected, constitutes one of the primary attractions of Hotel.

- Hotel is a stage set on which the guest is free to act and enact some idealized version of his or her self and life. Room and public areas invoke a certain insouciance or lightness of spirit; the all-important element of glamour is provided by the furnishings, the location, the design, and never least by the spectral presence of other guests historic or contemporary.

- Hotel is a realm where you are unusually free to act without (apparent) consequence and where, to a great degree, you simply needn’t consider anyone else’s prerogatives in making your own choices. You come and go as you please; you act as you and you alone see fit; you emit whatever noises, smells and traces you will.

And here, of course, is where a significant element of bad faith surfaces, because unless you are unusually callous – and I like to think that I am not – the guest always retains the consciousness that someone has to clean it all up. And by the same token, that that someone is building up an impression of the guest based on their leavings. Of course, to put it with maximum bluntness, such perceptions have historically been safe because the people holding them do not matter to the guest, socially, economically, or otherwise. Suppression of one’s consciousness regarding all of this is a sleight-of-hand absolutely necessary to enjoyment of the Hotel condition.

- At its best, Hotel is always both prospect and refuge, offering (in its public spaces at the very least) a view from the commanding heights matched only by the security with which the guest retreats from others’ gaze.

- Ideally, Hotel is near-clockless, time here reduced to the shifting of the offshore breeze…the daily lighting of the lanterns…the setting-out of the breakfast buffet.

- There is always in Hotel a note of the louche, even in the most elegant surroundings and however subterranean. For me, anyway, Hotel is always an intensely erotic machine, a potent cocktail of privacy, disinhibition, borrowed glamour and relative anonymity. Much of the pleasure of Hotel living ultimately resolves to what it promises the guest in the exercise of their sexuality. The best Hotels understand and acknowledge this, but don’t beat you over the head with it.

Following on from this is a specific geometry which has always been all but irrelevant to me personally, but which presumably furnishes much of the attraction of Hotel for a great many: backstairs sexual intrigues of guest and uniformed staff, fueled by the power and economic differentials between the participants just as a tornado is fueled by stark gradients of heat and humidity. You can’t convince me that the desk staff at the Standard or the W aren’t hired with this in mind, or don’t consider it in applying for work there.

- And this brings me, finally, to the question of why I so rarely find these elements held in just the right balance. (I discount, with sad ease, nine of ten nights spent on the road, in hostelries variously too corporate, too generic or tone-deaf or self-consciously swank to enjoy.)

Some simply try too hard, throwing every conceivable vista, gadget and obsequious gesture at the Guest in the hope of securing acquiescence to the particular paradigm of luxury on offer. But excess for its own sake isn’t really the point of Hotel, at least as far as I am concerned, unless you mean the deeper and truer privileges of abundant time and space and air.

Even when the level of material luxury has been gauged properly, some – many – get its tenor all wrong. For Hotel to work for me at all, it can’t smother the Guest with wet “glamour” of the Versace/Trump/Cristal variety, or anything even remotely close. I’m not asking for an ashram, but to err on the side of astringency is frankly preferable. Too rustic, too winking, too bustling, too efficient: easy pitfalls to stumble into, and terribly hard to recover from.

Ultimately, I think, it’s the quality of modulated privacy that determines whether Hotel is experienced as restorative or as something to be endured. A lodging can fail on every other aesthetic and practical ground and still succeed, in my book, if only it lets the Guest establish a temporary base of operations that transitions rapidly and readily between sanctuary and conviviality.

Happily, of course, some do far better at resolving these challenges. Even the big chains occasionally demonstrate an understanding of real comfort. And once in a blue moon, someone gets almost everything right.

What’s Klout?

- It’s an algorithm-driven attempt to put a literal number next to a person’s name, a number derived from an analysis of that person’s Twitter interactions (!) that ostensibly crystallizes their social influence into a single metric.

- It’s essentially the long-standing, if vile, idea of “A-list” and “B-list” people, reified into a unidimensional, opaquely machine-determined value.

- And if this article is any guide, it’s at risk of becoming an accepted index of social worth, proffered by a commercial organization whose determinations — beyond everything that’s ethically wrong with the idea — are frequently laughably, grotesquely wrong.

Above and beyond the fact that the parties described in the Times piece are exactly the sort at which no person with a modicum of self-respect and a functioning douchery detector would be caught dead, this is precisely the sort of thing I was concerned would happen if we allowed values, motifs and metaphors derived from software to overwrite existing social etiquettes and protocols. It has all kinds of disturbing implications, on a bunch of different levels, and I believe it’s a practice we’re best served by strangling in the crib. So I make to you this promise — call it the “zeroklout” pledge:

I will never attend a party, gathering or other event where, to my knowledge, Klout or a similar social influence ranking algorithm has been used as a selection criterion for invitation.

For what it’s worth, right? Maybe if enough people make this sort of pledge, visibly enough, we can at least collectively force some clear lines to be drawn. (One such line might be the one between the kind of people who are worth knowing and having as friends, and those who believe personhood and worth can effectively be conveyed by a score.) Better still would be an action of such scale as to devalue the algorithm entirely, which — god forbid and perish the thought — would force us back to reliance upon our senses and instincts in determining who we want to associate with. Either way, you’ll know where I stand.

One final note: the content here closely corresponds with the basic talk I’ve been giving over the last few months (at PICNIC in Amsterdam, Strelka in Moscow, and at GSAPP the other day). If you missed any of those occasions, you can get a pretty strong flavor of what you would have heard me say here. I hope you find it useful.

Monday.

My name is Adam Greenfield, and I’m the founder and managing director of a New York City-based design practice called Urbanscale, which is dedicated to design “for networked cities and citizens.”

I understand if this description causes you to scratch your head a little. You’re probably familiar, though, with the notion of the “smart city,” and the idea that ubiquitous information technology is transforming the way humanity designs, understands and lives its urban settlements. It’s fair to say that this is the domain we work in at Urbanscale.

The interest in what happens at the intersection of the urban and the technological is natural — and possibly even inevitable, given the convergence of two seemingly ineluctable trends. The first is the ongoing urbanization of our planet. There’s an oft-quoted observation from the statisticians of the United Nations Population Division that the end of 2008 marked the first moment in human history at which more than half of us lived in cities. In the wake of this finding, it’s reasonable to argue that henceforth any consideration of the human is necessarily a consideration of the urban…and vice versa. We are apparently a citying species.

At this same moment in time, we see an ever-greater proportion of the objects, surfaces and relations we encounter in our everyday experience of these cities colonized by information technology. Increasingly, we live in places where thoroughly ordinary things like buses, recycling bins, and parking spaces are instrumented with embedded sensors, where nearly everybody walking down the street carries a device that is nothing less than an aperture onto the global network (and an interface to whatever functionality is connected to it).

Somewhere in the merging of these two tendencies is the very potent idea that the environment in which the majority of twenty-first century humanity lives can consciously be reimagined as a platform for computational applications and services — as a “smart city.”

As it happens, though, we don’t actually use this phrase in our practice, nor do we entirely endorse many of the assumptions that are bound up in it. What I’d like to share with you over the next few days is an accounting of the reasons why. I’m going to be challenging some of the orthodoxies that have already cropped up in the short life of this idea, some of the failures of imagination that are preventing us from making the best possible use of networked technology in the cities of this urban century. And together, maybe we can grasp some of the more radical potential we see in the space.

Tuesday.

Yesterday we discussed the increasing prominence of rhetoric around something called the “smart city.” As it’s generally described — and, increasingly, built and delivered — this is a place in which the buildings, streets, infrastructural elements and other aspects of the built environment have been equipped with embedded sensors. The flow of water through a city’s pipes, traffic through its streets, and people through its public spaces is mapped and modeled. Information derived from the widest possible array of municipal agencies and activities — applications for building permits, visits to drop-in clinics, restaurant health-and-cleanliness inspections — is gathered and subjected to computational scrutiny. The cleverer versions of this even use sentiment analysis applied to geocoded posts on Twitter to assess the collective mood of a place. The intention is to make every unfolding process of the city visible, to render the previously opaque or indeterminate not merely knowable, but known — and actionable.

There’s probably no better current example of this tendency than the “intelligent operations center” IBM’s Smarter City unit built for the city of Rio de Janeiro, billed as a “citywide monitoring and response-management system.” This is municipal government reimagined as some combination of automotive dashboard and war room, with live data used to direct and inform the disposition of a city’s available resources in something close to real time. It’s not a terrible idea, and it has perfectly honorable antecedents — notably the Cybersyn operations network cyberneticist Stafford Beer built for the Chilean government of Salvator Allende between 1970 and 1973 (!).

But there are certain problems with this approach, problems that as far as I can see are unacknowledged in any of the hype around the project. For one thing, any data gathered by a grid like the one IBM envisioned in Rio is never “just” the data, not at any point a neutral, objective quantity. As Laura Kurgan — director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and one of my intellectual heroes — has pointed out, we measure the quantities that it is politically expedient to measure. We deploy the sensors that are cheap to deploy. There is always contingency, always a selection process, always a choice of what to gather…and always decisions made by some historical agent about how to label, characterize and represent the information that does get collected.

In the overwhelming majority of the discussions I’ve seen around IBM’s “intelligent operations center” and the many proposals like it, this mystification of “the data” goes unremarked upon and unchallenged. The result is that inherently political and interested decisions acquire an entirely unearned gloss of technical neutrality. Ironically, an ever-so-slightly different, more sensitive design of the system would allow users of data to see and correct for its inevitable bias— or to ask different and potentially more fruitful questions of the same grid of inputs. But to be blunt, we’re not likely to ever see that craft or care in design from institutions like IBM or its vendors.

If there’s a saving grace in any of this, it’s that Rio is at least a genuine place — nothing if not an environment with its own distinct history and texture. In tomorrow’s post, we’ll see how that sets it apart from a great many of the current crop of “smart cities.”

Wednesday.

At present, any time you hear the phrase “smart city,” the odds are very good indeed that your interlocutor is referring to nominally futuristic visions like Korea’s New Songdo, Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, or the unfortunately-named PlanIT Valley in Portugal — settlements built from scratch, on what urban planners call “greenfield” sites. In other words, these are places where there wasn’t anything, or anyone, before.

By building their cities up from nothing, in the middle of nowhere (or, in the case of Songdo, on land that was reclaimed from the East China Sea and literally did not exist ten years ago) the developers of these places get to live perpetually in that always-just-around-the-corner time researchers Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish call the “proximate future.” They don’t have to reckon with all that messy history, with existing neighborhoods and the claims and constituencies they inevitably give rise to, with the dense mesh of ways of doing and being that makes any real place what it is.

What’s worse, these are barely cities: Masdar City is being designed for 90,000, PlanIT Valley for 150,000. Even at a projected population of 500,000 — which, if my observations over this last summer are any guide, will take years to fill out — Songdo is best thought of as an appendix to the immense Seoul-Incheon-Ansan conurbation. On a planet of seven billion, we don’t believe this makes any sense. Despite the blistering pace of construction in places like the Pearl River Delta, these ground-up cities aren’t places where the overwhelming majority of us live, or ever will.

At Urbanscale we defer to the wisdom of the legendary American robber Willie Sutton, who targeted banks “because that’s where the money is.” If we’re going to imagine urban interventions based on networked information technology, we’re going to design them for the cities people already live in.

There’s another reason why we might want to do this. Whether they quite know it or not, anyone proposing to deploy “smart city” technology necessarily partakes of one of two alternative conceptions of urban structuration. (I should point out that my reading here owes a lot to James C. Scott’s framing of things in Seeing Like A State, a fantastic book I unreservedly recommend.)

The first approach is something that can be broadly characterized as “watchfulness from above,” which Scott identifies with the modernist architect Le Corbusier. In this construction of things, cities ought to be designed so that they observe a clear visual order, with rigid segregation between land uses (residential, industrial, commercial), and between those uses and the systems of circulation that support them.

This is intended to make it easier for an administrator to disentangle the various threads that make up the urban skein, to quite literally see what’s going on, to facilitate managerial intervention and regulation. It’s an aesthetic with distaste for the messiness and complexity of metropolitan life, and, equally, with clear political implications: the Corbusian city is one consecrated to administration, where the potential for any organic development is subordinated to the needs of managers. (Le Corbusier was thinking and writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, but this fetish for clear visual order only really comes into its own in the age of Google Earth.)

And it’s this vision that’s inscribed, knowingly or otherwise, in most contemporary descriptions of the “smart city.” Corbusian descriptions of the serene and masterful guidance of the city-as-machine-for-living are strikingly reminiscent of IBM, albeit couched in a different register of language.

But we can contrast this with a very different process of urban development, something that I think of as “spontaneous order from below,” and which Scott identifies with the great American urbanist Jane Jacobs. Tomorrow we’ll come back to this notion of spontaneous order from below, and what it might have to offer us as an appealing alternative model of networked cities.

Thursday.

Yesterday we discussed the first of two competing conceptions of urban order, a top-down vision that has its origins in the failed high modernism of Le Corbusier, and survives in the contemporary rhetoric around cities like Masdar and New Songdo and PlanIT Valley.

But there’s another way of thinking of things, which strikes me as not merely more appealing, but more empirical, more pragmatic…and ultimately more effective. This is a perspective often associated with urbanist Jane Jacobs, who devotes considerable space in her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities to the ways in which a functioning urban community produces order from the bottom up, in an infinitely of small, unconscious acts.

Her most famous example has to do with the safety of well-trafficked streets, in which a diversity of building uses and schedules generates a reliable flow of passers-by throughout the day, and well into the night. This, in turn, produces what economists call a positive externality: nobody’s intentionally setting out to patrol the neighborhood, but with so many “eyes on the street,” untoward incidents are that much less likely to occur, and can be rapidly and appropriately responded to when they do.

Anna Minton, in her recent Ground Control, provides a potent — and disturbing — illustration of how the difference between these two conceptions plays out in the contemporary city. It’s a case study drawn from London, a city which deploys one CCTV camera for every seven of its 7.7 million residents, making it the most surveilled city on the face of the planet.

Minton poses the obvious, but heretofore apparently unspeakable, question as to whether all those cameras actually make Londoners any safer. Her research finds that, perversely, the opposite is true — that the presence of a CCTV camera makes pedestrians less likely to take personal responsibility for emergent situations like accidents, muggings or acts of harassment. People apparently assume that there’s someone (uniformed?) on the other end of the camera lens, duly empowered to respond to such incidents. They don’t need to intervene themselves…so they don’t. Minton’s findings suggest that CCTV fails entirely in the roles of crime deterrence and prevention. It’s Jane Jacobs’s point all over again: a functioning human community is bound together by an elaborate weave of organic relations that takes years or decades to build up, which can be destroyed in weeks or months through the clumsy application of technology.

What does any of this have to do with smart cities? Rather than the heavy — indeed, heroic — infrastructural investments involved in the Masdar/Songdo/PlanIT Valley way of doing things, rather than the necessity of starting the city all over again from scratch, mightn’t we imagine interventions that have a lot more to do with the places we already live in and the devices the great majority of us already have? Is there any possibility that we could use networked technology to preserve the intricate order and innate, pre-existing intelligence of our great urban places?

Tomorrow, in our final installation, we explore just what this might look like.

Friday.

I believe that there’s a final reason why the vision of the smart city appears so vividly at this particular moment in history. At least in the United States, government is retreating from the provision of many services it used to provide as a matter of course; we’ve stumbled into a vicious cycle in which ascendant neoliberal rhetoric interacts with, and reinforces, a collapsing tax base and a brutal underlying economic reality. The result is an urgent imperative on the part of municipal administrations to do more with less, and a palpable hunger for any tools that will help them achieve this aim.

Into the breach step the theoreticians of the smart city, promising improved managerial oversight, greater resource-utilization efficiency, and predictive models to help keep the chaos at bay. I ultimately think that many of these interventions will prove heir to all the philosophical weaknesses and limitations of the Corbusian model, and will largely fail to deliver on their promise.

Is there a valid competing vision of the networked city, something that we might we offer instead? One of the most fascinating things I’ve witnessed in the last year was a management consultant from McKinsey — the most buttoned-down, Oxford-and-chinos kind of guy you could possibly imagine — forthrightly describe a vision of networked, self-organized place that would not have sounded out of place at the Barcelona Telephone Exchange in 1936, during the period that it was successfully managed by the anarchist CNT-FAI union.

You can certainly accuse me of making a virtue of a necessity, but I found this hopeful. If someone that entrenched in contemporary modes of technological development is comfortable with the thought that the art of municipal management hasn’t reached its final form, that in fact we may be on the verge of frankly radical reassessments, then the potential scope for creativity in everything that’s coming may well be far greater than we might have suspected. The downside is that most of us are going to have to take a lot more responsibility for managing the circumstances of our own lives. But the opportunity, the wonderful thing…is that most of us will get to take a lot more responsibility for managing the circumstances of our own lives.

What I want to emphasize is that the constraints aren’t primarily technological. We already have everything we need to achieve this aim, materially and conceptually. What limits us is a collective dearth of imagination, and a recourse to the same brain-dead processes of specification, procurement and development that resulted in the shoddy information-technological tools so many of us are perforce compelled to work with. (Anyone who’s ever tried to use an SAP tool to file an expense report knows precisely what I mean.)

It’s almost as if the space of possibility we’re now presented with is so large and daunting that we’re collectively more comfortable retreating to the relative certainties of the ways we’ve been doing things for ages, whether or not they make any particular sense amid our present circumstances. If we want to design supple, responsive networked places — if we want to invest all the considerable power of contemporary informatic technology in making places that are worth living in — I believe we can surely do so, but it will mean taking bold and decisive steps beyond the stale rhetoric and dubious intellectual heritage of the “smart city.”

For the past two years, I’ve found myself working for a gigantic and rather dowdy global corporation, an organization whose sterile pile of a headquarters is tidily located on a nowhere-ish expanse of motorway. For better or worse, this is where most days of my life take me.

By way of compensation, perhaps, our London office is nestled in the heart of Soho. For a lover of urban texture, of course, this is nothing less than a dispensation of grace: depending on the particular corporate-approved hotel I happen to be stashed in, my route to work will see me cutting beneath the Pillars of Hercules, past John Snow’s water-pump or the hallowed 100 Club. And not infrequently, loping down a narrow lane lined with Korean restaurants, courier services and “licensed” sex shops, past an unremarkable-looking strip club called the Windmill.

I had some sense of the postwar Italian wave, of course, and the tutelage in coffee, wine, sharp suits and scooters that particular wave of immigrants brought to the district. I knew that Soho, as one of London’s premier red light zones and later its gay ghetto, was a lazy byword for louche. The things that happened in these streets in blistering ’76 and the Jubilee summer of ’77 — these were all stories I learned growing up an ocean away in Philadelphia. And of course, as a consequence of my work, I am unavoidably and intimately familiar with the more recent gloss of ad agencies, consultancies and new-media shops that’s settled over the district like a hip miasma.

But for the lattermost set of circumstances, though, I had all this knowledge intellectually, by way of books and films and an obsessive, near-lifelong interest in the Mod and punk subcultures. It wasn’t and isn’t body-knowledge: in its phenomenological, affective and kinesthetic particulars, I could no more reconstruct an average pill-driven night of Soho 1963 than I could the evening of an Etruscan grove. Except in the most pallid, attenuated way, those sensations and experiences are lost to history.

What happens, then, to places — and this neighborhood more than most is filled with them — where what happens on, at, in and to the body is the very point of their existence? Their stories are lost to history in a most particularly annihilating way. You’d never, ever know it from the sad table-dancing club that currently occupies the site, but in twentieth-century British history, the Windmill turns out to have been one of the more important such places.

Behind the rather aggressive touts stationed at the door of the club lies a place where the daring, the salacious and, I’d argue, a particular modern conception of female beauty were engineered. Like Anna May Wong‘s ferocious performance as Shosho the Chinese Dancer in the 1929 silent Piccadilly, the “girls” of the Windmill moved as though they were willing modernity into being with their bodies, beneath what was then still the high-technology glamour of electric light.

The club’s audaciously nude tableaux vivants just skirted the indecency laws, made erotic entertainment safe for consumption by the middle class. (The gentry, of course, had always had a pass.) The sense you get from contemporary descriptions of the audience is one of delight in their own naughtiness, Thirties London’s equivalent of the nervous, giggling New York couples of 1975, who rushed to see Deep Throat so as to earn their bona fides as true children of the Sexual Revolution.

And there’s no way for any of us who came of age afterward to know what any of that felt like, to experience the deep-down, giddy-electric, liberatory thrill of it. The meaning of the place didn’t stick to the stones, to the point that years later I could walk down Great Windmill Street and not have so much as the foggiest clue of all the things that had transpired mere meters away. Those experiences would have had to have been continuously reanimated, reinscribed with acts of the living body, and were not and are not — today’s strip club, in fact, by offering just about the least interesting gloss on the site’s history, quite thoroughly inverts the meaning of what came before.

Who among us who was not there can really say what this Soho felt like in the bones, whether in the blacked-out days of the Blitz, as it came to an espresso-machine boil at the end of the Fifties, or during the anarchic summers of punk? Those brassy coffee bars, narrow doorways and dark chthonic stairways, even where physically extant, just don’t mean the same thing. Even if we were able to interview them at length, those with the relevant memories would find — no doubt to their own dismay as well as ours — that they can no longer quite conjure up the gestalt.

I point this all out not by way of licensing nostalgia but, if anything, just the opposite. What I’ve understood from my immersion in Soho’s history is that we are all of us making and remaking the places we live in on a constant basis, speaking them into reality through the things we say and the comments we leave on blogs, knitting them into being with bicycles and cars and our own two feet. We bring them to life with our custom and our traffic, our peregrinations and the exercise of our habits. And if we want to leave legends behind, we’d better get busy. These particular streets, richly shrouded in story as they are, demand no less.

I hope you’ll forgive the moments of redundancy, the result of a droning airplane which kept circling overhead and necessitating the reboot of one or two questions. I have less of an excuse for the inarticulation and hand-wavy quality…but all in all it’s not too shabby an outing for someone who was freezing and had to pee pretty mightily. I hope you enjoy it.

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.

- As you probably know, Nurri and I have been running Systems/Layers “walkshops” under the Do aegis for the last year or so, in cities from 65°N to 41°S.

As we define it, anyway, a walkshop is an activity in which anywhere up to about twenty people take a slow and considered walk through the city together, carefully examining the urban fabric and the things embedded in it, and then sharing their insights with one another and the wider world. (Obviously, you could do a walkshop on any particular urbanist topic that interested you, but we’ve focused ours on looking at the ways in which networked information-processing systems increasingly condition the mretropolitan experience.)

We’ve gotten a huge kick out of doing the Systems/Layers walks, but the simple truth is that there are so many competing claims on our time and energy that we can’t dedicate ourselves to running them full-time. We’ve also been encouraged by the result of our first experiment in open-sourcing the idea, the Systems/Layers event Mayo Nissen held in Copenhagen last June.

So when Giles Lane at Proboscis asked us if we’d consider contributing to his Transformations series, we knew right away just what we’d do. We decided to put together a quick guide to DIY walkshops, something to cover the basics of organizing, promoting and executing an event.

Last Monday, with Giles’s patient support, this idea came to fruition in the launch of Do 1101, Systems/Layers: How to run a walkshop on networked urbanism as a Diffusion eBook pamphlet. As with most things we offer, the pamphlet is released to you under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license, so we expect that some of you will want to get in there and repurpose the content in other contexts.

We’ll most likely be rereleasing the Systems/Layers material our ownselves in the near future, in an extended dance mix that includes more detail, more structure, and more of Nurri’s pictures. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the pamphlet, and let us know about the uses to which you put it.

- This week also saw the release of Do 1102, Nurri’s Safety Maps, a project which would have been unimaginable without the expert guidance and hard work of Tom Carden and Mike Migurski.

Safety Maps is a free online tool that helps you plan for emergency situations. You can use it to choose a safe meeting place, print a customized map that specifies where it is, and share this map with your loved ones. (As it says on the site, the best way to understand how it works is simply to get started making a Safety Map of your own.)

It’s been a delicate thing to build. Given the entire framing of the site, it and the maps it produces absolutely have to work in their stated role: coordinating the action of couples, households and other small groups under the most trying of circumstances, when communications and other infrastructures may simply be unavailable. They have to do so without implying that a particular location is in fact safer than any other under a given set of conditions, or would remain accessible in the event of disaster. And they have to do so legibly, clearly, and straightforwardly.

These are utilitarian preparedness/resilience considerations, and they’re eminently appropriate. But in the end, the site springs from a different set of concerns: in Nurri’s original conception, the primary purpose of these artifacts is to prompt us to think about the people we love and the utter and harrowing contingency of the circumstances that allow us to be together. We obviously hope people find Safety Maps useful in challenging moments, but we imagine that we’d hear about this either way — whereas it’s difficult, if not impossible, for us to ever know if the site works in the way she intended it to.

Even though it was an accident of timing, Nurri also had some questions about releasing Safety Maps so soon on the heels of the Sendai earthquake/tsunami; she didn’t want us to appear to be opportunists reaping ghoulish benefit from the suffering of others. I think it was the right decision, though: sadly, there are in truth precious few windows between natural or manmade catastrophes of one sort or another. And there may be no more productive time for a tool like this than a moment in which disaster is in the news and fresh on a lot of people’s minds.

From my perspective, there’s been one other notable feature of the journey Safety Maps has taken from conception to release: but for an inversion of name, emphasis and colorway (from “Emergency Maps” in red to what you see at present), the site looks, feels and works almost identically to the vision Nurri described to me in Helsinki in October of 2009. In my experience, this almost never happens in the development of a website, and it’s a tribute both to the clarity and comprehensiveness of her original idea, and to Tom and Mike’s resourcefulness and craftsmanship.

I’m also quite fond of the thoughtful little details they’ve built into every layer of the experience, right down to the animated GIFs on the mail you get when you send someone a map. It’s just a lovely thing, and I’m terribly proud to have had even a tiny role in helping Nurri, Tom and Mike build it. Our thanks, also, to Cloudmade and the entire community of Open Street Map contributors, without whom Safety Maps would have remained nothing more than a notion.

I thought it was a great question, especially as the subject is going to crop up again in the near future, in my writing and my daily work. Fortunately for me, I’d been thinking about the question for so long that I was able to pop the following out, just about word for word:

To me, power is…
- an ability expressed within an immanent grid of relations superimposed on the phenomenal world, from which it’s effectively impossible to escape;
- the ability to shape flows of matter, energy and information through that grid of relations, and most particularly through bodies situated in space and time (including one’s own);
- the ability to determine outcomes where such bodies are concerned;
- this ability consciously recognized and understood.

By this definition, power can be exerted locally or globally, at microscale or macro-.

In the negative mode, the mode with which we’re all of us most familiar, its prerogatives are enjoyed, to varying degrees, by a schoolyard bully, a rapist, a meeting of technical experts to determine the level to which a brand of cigarettes will be mentholated, the owner of a media conglomerate…the Wannsee Conference.

But power can also be expressed in more beneficial forms: a change in diet, a choice relating to one’s habits of media consumption, the decision to share a link, the decision to bind one’s life with another, even bring a life into the world. Power can take the form of environmental regulations, or the movement of a community toward self-determination.

Power can be resisted. To varying degrees, depending on where in time and space your body happens to be situated, you can claim power over yourself. Power can be shared, extended, used for transformational or liberatory purposes.

There are limits to power: situational, juridical, neurological, endocrine, historical, ethical, practical…

You could probably fairly describe my life project as the reclamation of power over my own body and the effort to help others achieve similar reclamations, to which I would add the renunciation of directly coercive power over another’s body, except in certain strictly delimited circumstances. Beyond that lies the renunciation of indirectly exploitative power over others, and given the particular grid of relations in which I find myself, that’s a much harder thing to achieve.

For those who care about intellectual pedigree, and the process by way of which I arrived at a framing like this: my take owes a little bit to actor-network theory, some to Hardt and Negri, some to Richard Dawkins (!), Gayatri Spivak, David Harvey and Naomi Klein, and a great deal to Foucault. Deleuze & Guattari: inevitably. Earlyish exposure to anarchism, feminism and Buddhism colors just about everything I think. In all cases, I’m sure, we’re talking about my own lazy, mistaken or shallow misreadings of source material, and in one or two, my deliberate twisting of an emphasis to suit my own needs.

Coming up next: some specific, concrete examples of some ways I see power working, on my body and those of others.

- First and most important point: there is progress, but life keeps intervening in ways that have made it difficult for me to pick up an easy writing rhythm.

The block of time in Tokyo I had arranged so I could lay low and finish the book was interrupted by some unexpected health issues. We came home to a renovated apartment that, while surpassingly lovely, took much longer to complete than we’d expected, resulting in four months in various sublets, spare bedrooms, hotels, and AirBnB situations. And as if none of that was daunting enough, I started a company somewhere in there.

As usual, none of this is meant by way of excuse, just context. There was a good long while that we weren’t waking up in our own bed, or anything like it, and I found it just as exactly disruptive to my writerly needs for consistency, stability and routine as you’d imagine. It’s beginning to feel, though, like that phase of our lives is blessedly receding in the rearview mirror, for everything that implies about the establishment of new rhythms and the space to think and write they create.

- After three years of wrestling with the material, I’ve finally found an organizing principle that feels appropriate to the content. The book is now organized as a stack of “layers,” rather than conventional chapters, and I encourage readers to understand these exactly as you would Photoshop or Illustrator layers: reorder them, turn them on or off as relevant, lock them in place when they produce the result you’re comfortable with. The layer on responsive buildings isn’t germane to you? Switch it off, ignore it. Want to bundle the layer on data visualization with the material on city-as-fabric-of-networked-resources? Go ahead and do so.

It’s a little gimmicky, but the layers conceit satisfies my need to draw connections between as many facets of the networked city as possible, without suggesting that any one of them is necessarily a privileged lens of interpretation. That I have a preferred read is pretty strongly implied by the layers’ ordering, at least when presented as a physical artifact, and you’re of course more than welcome to read them in that order. (The arguments I’m trying to make will certainly cohere best that way.) But if I’ve gotten it right, each layer will both stand on its own and build on all the others.

We shall see. By which I mean: you’ll let me know if I’ve blown it.

- Thanks so much for (publishers) your kind inquiries or (friends) offers to introduce me to acquisition editors and the like. I’m both flattered and humbled by your interest in and support for the title. Given what an awful experience it was to work with my previous publishers, however, I still think the book will be better served by publishing it under the Do projects aegis.

- If you want a sneak peak at some of the book’s spinal arguments, you could do worse than to read this. The post, long as it is, constitutes just about a third of what was originally supposed to be Layer 0; for the purposes of publishing it on Urbanscale, I trimmed almost everything technical out of it, but it’ll still give you a good taste of the book’s conception of connected urban resources.

As the title implies, I want to get past all the “smart city” rhetoric, and start talking about cities that help us make smarter decisions. The distinction is so much more than semantic…but if you’re reading this, it’s almost certain that you’re already inclined to agree. So we talk about resources of various sorts, and the technical, legal and practical circumstances under which people can mobilize those resources for their own ends. And while I imagine that those parties will certainly have a role to play, as I frequently enough note, this is not the futuropolis/futuretopia that e.g. Cisco and IBM and Oracle want to build for you; it’s a place we’re going to have to build ourselves.

I’ll leave it there for now. As usual, drop me a line, leave a comment, or ping me on Twitter if you’ve got thoughts on the subject — you know I look forward to hearing them.