This article was taken from the November issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
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When rumours of the project later revealed to the world as the Segway personal transporter first surfaced, back in 2001 - in the days when the curious had little more to go on than inventor Dean Kamen's reputation, and the cryptic codename "Ginger" - one of the tantalising titbits of information that emerged was Steve Jobs's reported reaction: "If enough people see the machine, you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it. It will just happen." "Architect cities around it": now that fired the imagination.
What innovation could possibly be so fundamental that it would compel us to rethink something so deeply entrenched in culture, and so hard to alter, as the way we make cities? Speculation regarding the machine and its nature went on for months. Had Kamen come up with an ultra-efficient power source? Some breakthrough in materials science? No one knew. Lying just underneath, though, were more important questions, especially to anyone who'd grown up on
Blade Runner, Judge Dredd and Angus McKie book jackets. If people really did come to devise cities around Kamen's machine, what would those cities be like?
Whatever heights the imagination may have scaled in these months, we know how the story ended. Already suffering from impossibly inflated expectations, the Segway launched into a world still reeling from September 11, and in no mood for overscaled flourishes of dotcom-era technotriumphalism; to say it has not been widely adopted in the years since would be generous. It's had no appreciable effect on the cities of humanity at all, beyond the occasional column of tourists doing their best to sightsee while tilted forward at a 10° angle. But the potent set of expectations that surrounded the Jobs pronouncement - that technological innovation would reshape the way we collectively make and understand cities, that we would see it happen in our lifetimes, and maybe even play a role in its outcomes - this possibility lingered.
Over the last decade a great number of people on Earth have embraced the digital mediation of everyday life. Without considering the matter with any particular care, as individuals or societies, we have installed devices in our clothing, our buildings, our vehicles and our tools which register, collect and transmit extraordinary volumes of data, and which share this data with the global network in real time.
Under such circumstances, it is only natural that a great many of these systems will be used in the planning and management of cities. In the interest of managing traffic and, ostensibly, enhancing public safety, our streets are ringed with networked cameras, salted with embedded sensor grids. We traverse urban space in networked vehicles that are GPS-tracked and leased to us as hourly services like Vélib' and Bicing and City CarShare, or tap our way on to mass transit with RFID-enabled payment cards like London's Oyster.
The data sheeting off these systems can show us where muggings and assaults happen, when and where the worst traffic arises... or simply if there are any nearby Vietnamese restaurants open. These things are a fait accompli, well on their way to being unremarkable. Never mind that this kind of god's-eye perspective on the city was impossible just a few years ago: cheap, ubiquitous, networked information processing has reshaped urban potential as dramatically as the car did the cities of the last century. And all of it in the absence of top-down guidance or orchestration: you won't have to convince them to "architect cities around it". It will just happen.
But as is so often the case, there's a catch: the technologies that the networked city relies upon remain opaque, even to those exposed to them daily. In fact, it's hard to be critical and make sound choices in a world where we don't understand the objects around us. Understanding networked urbanism on its own terms requires an investment of time and effort beyond the reach of most. ("I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original," said the great 20th-century architectural critic Reyner Banham, and the systems we're talking about are orders of magnitude more complex than mere cars and roads.)
In the networked city, therefore, the pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening up these occult systems, explaining their implications to the people whose neighbourhoods, choices and lives are increasingly conditioned by them. This will be a primary occupation for urbanists. If we're reaching the point where it makes sense to consider the city as a fabric of addressable, queryable, even scriptable objects and surfaces - to reimagine its pavements, building façades and parking meters as network resources - this raises an order of questions never before confronted, ethical as much as practical: who has the right of access to these resources, or the ability to set their permissions?
All of this will be messy and contentious. It will make for a less satisfying narrative than the heroic genius singlehandedly reshaping cities with his wondercart. But it's the work we have cut out for us, it is profoundly worth doing and the rewards will pay out in increments of better quality of life and a deeper engagement with the places and people that surround us.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
