This article was taken from the January 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 bysubscribing online
If you're a regular reader you'll know all about "the future of the city". In fact, if you're a regular reader of any magazine you'll know all about "the future of the city". A feature on urban futurosity is essential in any modern title, along with watch ads and caustic columnists. The only way you could be better informed about the look-out for large built-up areas is by reading blogs or attending techy conferences, where metropolitan speculation is almost always the order of the day.
And that's fine, because as someone will inevitably point out, 50 per cent of the world's population lives in cities. They are where most of us are going to live, which means that urban informatics and computing, networked urbanism and all those things are vital and fascinating projects. But they shouldn't be all we do. After all, half of us still don't live in cities and it's probably the less prosperous, less mobile half that merits more attention. It is time to think about how future technologies might affect their lives, and to wonder why we are so beguiled by the future of the cities.
Much of our city-centric thinking is good old metropolitan bias; they have been centres of money, power and influence and are winning the battle for global control. And just as victors write the histories, it seems that they also author the futures. So we appear to accept a single vision for all cities - one that doesn't acknowledge that Tromsø and Shenzhen are incredibly different places. We roll them into a single megacity vision, chuck a dome over them and get on with the ubicomp. The non-urban on the other hand is an incredibly diverse set of places without all-encompassing future-myths. It includes suburbs, small towns, villages and hamlets, landowners, agribusinesses and blacksmiths, strip-mining and sticklebacks. And cinematic visions of these places are limited in appeal - the non-urban future seems to be constructed entirely of Mad Max-style scorched Earths or villages with blank-eyed children and carnivorous plants.
City-thinking is core to the aesthetic bundle of the futurist classes. The designer/architect/futurologist/ technologist tends to be rigorous and modernist, favouring black coffees and black collars, disliking cars, suburbs and compromise. So for him, though there's a place for nature, it tends to be another efficiently deployed service element - caged in hydroponics or running vertically up buildings. The idea of growing stuff in large, flat messy squares on the ground - fields, you might call them - is far too jejune.
All of which makes me long for a school of thinking around non-urban computing, because the practical, deployed stuff is so far ahead of the equivalents. It is clear that GPS and locative services, core to lots of urban networking ideas, are more useful outside the city - more beneficial to a hiker than they are to a flaneur. Serious tagging has been happening in the wild for years, albeit the radio-tagging of birds and animals rather than pizzerias for another desperate AR app. Farmers, climbers, gardeners, birdwatchers, rural teens, small-town librarians, parish councillors - all serious and effective users of connective and social technologies. Or look at the emerging generation of technology-enabled anglers: combining quiet contemplation with high-tech fibres, real carbon rods and Underworld tracks on their iPods, blending rural and technical to make streampunk. And there's a tradition of rural technologies, perfected in the arduous outdoors being co-opted by the city; look at Land Rover, Barbour and Timberland. How soon before an impressively ruggedised laptop becomes the cool thing to be tapping on next to your flat white?
Of course, the ultimate aim is to use social and information technologies to reconnect urban and rural, rather than erect firewalls and domes. Maybe the mighty city economies can be reconnected to their surrounds - so those who move to favelas to escape poverty won't have to. Most city-dwellers are not forced to confront other species but perhaps they could do via Facebook. Cities are clearly the future, but not for everything, and celebrating the mechanics of rural life might create a richer technological ecosystem for us all.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
