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
The full Digital Cities package:
Networked information will reshape our cities
'Sense-able' urban design
London after the great 2047 flu outbreak
The transport of tomorrow is already here
Before a Sunday-afternoon stroll through Brooklyn, I pass the moments spent waiting for my wife in the obvious way, scrolling the Facebook feed on my iPhone. It's business as usual: inside jokes and meticulously described brunches. Kenny thanked everyone for "the birthday wishes!!!". Eva had "pulled out the violin" (a real violin or a euphemism?). Miriam "went to the Flea" (the flea market, I presumed). Out on the street a few minutes later, Eva herself appeared, violin case slung over her shoulder. It wasn't until we bumped into Miriam a few blocks later, bags full of second-hand trinkets, that it hit me: my Brooklyn neighbourhood had become Facebook Live.
Conventional wisdom says that technology is bad for real-world communities, that we are often alone at home in front of blue screens. This is no doubt true. But we are also out on the street stealing glances at smaller screens, and interacting in more meaningful ways because of it. When it comes to technology and cities, today's thrilling development - "thrilling", that is, if you like real cities and corporeal people - is that social networking is enhancing urban places. I may have been only affirming face-to-face the interactions I just had in cyberspace, but that act was significant for the future of our cities.
The bandwidth of urban experience has increased. The ancient ways are still there: the way a place looks, the neighbours we wave at and the hands we shake. But now, there is an electronic conversation overlaid on top of all that: tweets and status updates, neighbourhood online message boards, detailed mobile electronic maps, and nascent applications that broadcast your location to your friends. This is far more interesting than what we were promised a decade ago: the proverbial coupon blinking on your mobile as you walk past Starbucks. (I have yet to experience this.)
Anthony Townsend, an urban planner and forecaster at Silicon Valley's Institute for the Future, calls this phenomenon "blended urban reality". It is neither cyberspace nor an urban landscape blanketed with blinking television screens, but the regular old city, albeit socially fused with real-time electronic interactions.
And it goes way beyond maps provided by satnavs. The new iPhone, for example, with its GPS and compass, tells you not only where you are but which way you're facing, thereby taking us a step closer to a real-time overlay of information.
But here's the fascinating thing: Townsend sees it as no accident that this is happening concurrently with the rise of megacities. "It makes them manageable," he says. "Cities may be much bigger, but the social graph is the same size." In 1975, there were three cities with a population greater than ten million; today there are 26. IT - particularly mobile technology - exerts a civilising influence, aiding and abetting their growth. It allows us to take the scale and chaos of the city as given, while harnessing the technology as a tool for coping. For example, it lets us coordinate a rendezvous in a train station with 12 exits.
It welcomes the real-time adjustment of plans, so that we spontaneously hop from café to pub and back home again, depending on the crowd. In cities, the virtual enhances the physical. Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, puts it this way: "As we leave behind the 20th century, it is almost as if we have come full circle back to the village where everyone potentially knows your business."
Property developers are beginning to seize on the idea. On 600 hectares of landfill near Seoul's Incheon Airport, New York-based Gale International is building Songdo, a new city for 65,000 people. The first buildings opened in August, with a sales pitch of a sustainable metropolis modelled on the best bits of the world's cities. The developer's collaboration with Microsoft on a purpose-built social-networking system for residents, U-Life, is nowhere evident in its appearance; indeed, its most striking feature is the increase in density. Will we accept less room to live in if we can organise our communities to our greater satisfaction? It would appear so.
Yet tech is not a panacea. The arrival of all this new bandwidth doesn't cede the task of designing cities to technologists and web developers. Density increases the need for thoughtful public space.
For the cities of the future to work, the physical and the virtual have to stick together.
On that Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn, our destination was a gourmet ice-cream truck that announces its location via Twitter.
When I was handed a sugar cone of strawberry, I put my phone away.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
