Month: July 2011

Minority Internal Migration in Europe Conference

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University of Manchester, UK September 5th-7th 2011 Register now and find more information at http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/events/mim/. Places are limited (50 delegates) so early registration is recommended. This conference will bring together leading scholars from across Europe to present original findings on the internal migration of immigrants/ethnic minorities. We invite you to attend the event and join in discussions that […]

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Conferences

Observing from afar or joining the action: OSM and GIScience research

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At the State of the Map (EU) 2011 conference that was held in Vienna from 15-17 July, I gave a keynote talk on the relationships between the OpenStreetMap  (OSM) community and the GIScience research community. Of course, the relationships are especially important for those researchers who are working on volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), due to […]

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Concepts, Conference, Geographic information science, GIS, OpenStreetMap, OSM, VGI, Volunteered Geographic Information

Beta

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Cities as Software

Betaville · An open-source multiplayer environment for real cities · BxmC (2010)
[ source ]

Undoubtedly, the city is always in beta. The miscibility of concepts in urban planning and software development has been evident for several decades. This interchange is most pronounced in Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, an unwitting boundary object of a book that resonated with the nascent object-oriented software community of the 1980s – ‘smalltalkers’ looking for new means of building modular systems.

In an age of ubicomp and real-time civic information we can only expect this mingling of paradigms to intensify. There is a feeling that the tangled history of these two fields — peaking in the systems planning heyday of the sixties, with the proliferation of cybernetic control rooms and the chimeric utopia of a perfectly ‘balanced’ social order — is set to enter a new phase in which they assume a more complex relationship.

Let us define software development as a process of structured systems design focused on minimising a range of costs – namely development, maintenance, growth and usability.

Urban planning is inextricably bound to similar costs – constructing, maintaining, using and growing the city are the chief costs to planners and citizens.

A range of strategies are used in software development to minimise these costs, from principles like orthogonality and compactness, to decoupling and cohesion, modularity and scope-creep, to methodologies like use cases and A/B testing. Importantly, any tendency to create a monolithic plan (see: Mega, Beautification) is countered by these principles.

What would an urban scale A/B test look like? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in action. I’d like to be able to sign up as a TfL beta tester though.

Some of these software principles are borrowed from the broader field of systems design and already pervade the design of cities. Take for instance decoupling, a guiding principle in multi-modal transport networks – improving resilience, fault tolerance and reducing maintenance. From the small scale (the parts in a train) to the urban scale (the design of entire networks), this is an engineering principle which shapes our environment.

Design Patterns · Analogy in reverse: Christopher Alexander’s town planning book (left) had a direct influence on design patterns in Object-Oriented software, most notably the ‘Gang of Four’ book (right).
[ source ]

As networked citizens, we all have a legitimate claim to act as designers and developers of our urban realm. Whilst there is general agreement that modern planning tools need to scale for inclusivity, it’s not clear what best practices are required to aid consensus-driven planning to deliver. As such, there is an increasing interest in software development methodologies as urban planning goes collaborative.

Agile methodologies haven’t infiltrated urban planning, a discipline which contains projects of the requisite scope and complexity. Agile software practitioners have understood that projects of this nature demand an incremental, test-driven methodology for cost minimisation.

Iterative and collaborative design are complementary, as at each increment various stakeholders (read: residents, council members) are consulted. These methods do not map easily to the policy maze and institutional hierarchies that currently make up the apparatus of urban planning.

Betaville introduces the concept of version history via a wiki-like interface, but other methodologies worth exploring in planning are decentralised version control (ie. Git) for more complex read/write planning systems, and REST API design for public urban resources.

Cities are highly non-deterministic social systems. At most scales and resolutions, a city is orders of magnitude more complex than any software to date. Any branch of systems design is only applicable within severe limits. Attempts to ‘control’ the organic mechanisms of society seem anachronistic in the same way any attempt to control the whole of the web seems absurd: Because we have a new found appreciation for self-organised order. This shift in planning towards the stimulation of forms of activity that benefit long-term goals (densification, mixed-use zones, public transport uptake etc), rather than prescriptive practices is already widespread.

Perhaps though, software development has something substantial to offer the design of the urban realm in a network society: An appreciation of modes of networked group cooperation in the service of a complex functioning whole.

Issue tracking, infrastructural A/B tests, more accessible public changelogs, comprehensive APIs, and shorter, more inclusive iterations might be logical next steps for cities looking to lead the way towards more participative planning practices.

See Also: Mega, Data, Cybernetics, Instant City, Beautification, Civic, Publics

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Uncategorized

Beta

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Cities as Software

Betaville · An open-source multiplayer environment for real cities · BxmC (2010)
[ source ]

Undoubtedly, the city is always in beta. The miscibility of concepts in urban planning and software development has been evident for several decades. This interchange is most pronounced in Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, an unwitting boundary object of a book that resonated with the nascent object-oriented software community of the 1980s – ‘smalltalkers’ looking for new means of building modular systems.

In an age of ubicomp and real-time civic information we can only expect this mingling of paradigms to intensify. There is a feeling that the tangled history of these two fields — peaking in the systems planning heyday of the sixties, with the proliferation of cybernetic control rooms and the chimeric utopia of a perfectly ‘balanced’ social order — is set to enter a new phase in which they assume a more complex relationship.

Let us define software development as a process of structured systems design focused on minimising a range of costs – namely development, maintenance, growth and usability.

Urban planning is inextricably bound to similar costs – constructing, maintaining, using and growing the city are the chief costs to planners and citizens.

A range of strategies are used in software development to minimise these costs, from principles like orthogonality and compactness, to decoupling and cohesion, modularity and scope-creep, to methodologies like use cases and A/B testing. Importantly, any tendency to create a monolithic plan (see: Mega, Beautification) is countered by these principles.

What would an urban scale A/B test look like? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in action. I’d like to be able to sign up as a TfL beta tester though.

Some of these software principles are borrowed from the broader field of systems design and already pervade the design of cities. Take for instance decoupling, a guiding principle in multi-modal transport networks – improving resilience, fault tolerance and reducing maintenance. From the small scale (the parts in a train) to the urban scale (the design of entire networks), this is an engineering principle which shapes our environment.

Design Patterns · Analogy in reverse: Christopher Alexander’s town planning book (left) had a direct influence on design patterns in Object-Oriented software, most notably the ‘Gang of Four’ book (right).
[ source ]

As networked citizens, we all have a legitimate claim to act as designers and developers of our urban realm. Whilst there is general agreement that modern planning tools need to scale for inclusivity, it’s not clear what best practices are required to aid consensus-driven planning to deliver. As such, there is an increasing interest in software development methodologies as urban planning goes collaborative.

Agile methodologies haven’t infiltrated urban planning, a discipline which contains projects of the requisite scope and complexity. Agile software practitioners have understood that projects of this nature demand an incremental, test-driven methodology for cost minimisation.

Iterative and collaborative design are complementary, as at each increment various stakeholders (read: residents, council members) are consulted. These methods do not map easily to the policy maze and institutional hierarchies that currently make up the apparatus of urban planning.

Betaville introduces the concept of version history via a wiki-like interface, but other methodologies worth exploring in planning are decentralised version control (ie. Git) for more complex read/write planning systems, and REST API design for public urban resources.

Cities are highly non-deterministic social systems. At most scales and resolutions, a city is orders of magnitude more complex than any software to date. Any branch of systems design is only applicable within severe limits. Attempts to ‘control’ the organic mechanisms of society seem anachronistic in the same way any attempt to control the whole of the web seems absurd: Because we have a new found appreciation for self-organised order. This shift in planning towards the stimulation of forms of activity that benefit long-term goals (densification, mixed-use zones, public transport uptake etc), rather than prescriptive practices is already widespread.

Perhaps though, software development has something substantial to offer the design of the urban realm in a network society: An appreciation of modes of networked group cooperation in the service of a complex functioning whole.

Issue tracking, infrastructural A/B tests, more accessible public changelogs, comprehensive APIs, and shorter, more inclusive iterations might be logical next steps for cities looking to lead the way towards more participative planning practices.

See Also: Mega, Data, Cybernetics, Instant City, Beautification, Civic, Publics

Continue reading »
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Two Line Elements

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Prompted by the final space shuttle launch of Atlantis, I thought I would have another look at two line elements (TLEs). These are coded lines of data that describe the orbital dynamics of a space vehicle. The last time I looked at this was when I was working on a GPS tracking project and we wanted […]

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Lecturer/ Senior Lecturer in Urban Geography – University of Queensland

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Lecturer/ Senior Lecturer in Urban Geography Job No.: 492219 Area: Faculty of Science Salary: Advertised at multiple classifications Work type: Full Time – Continuing Location: St Lucia The School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management consists of a dynamic group of academics, researchers and students, with a focus in the disciplines of Geography, Environmental Management, […]

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Jobs

CUPUM Notes First Day

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It was a fairly busy day, the first of a three day conference in Lake Louise, Canada. The weather was brilliant, the views amazing and the tables had table cloth on. Already the opening has been visited in good numbers and so did the sessions.

The first keynote by Ken Lindmark focused on a local project, a elaborate model for the city of Calgary forecasting scenarios for a 60 year period. A number of the local people were involved with this project. The setting for the model was very large and looking far outside the city boundaries in order to create a fairly accurate picture of the traffic and commute volumes.

As things go and different interests colide, the actual report coming out of the study was reduced to the city boundaries dramatically limiting the models capacity. But still the city of Calgary now has a decent plan for the future for its mobility. For details see plan|it|Calgary.

RealTime Rome
Image taken form Sensable City lab / RealTime Rome project visualising sensor data.

Kristian Kloeckl from the MIT Sensable City lab presented the work he had done with his colleagues on the Live Singapore project. A very ambitious data visualisation project covering the whole country state in real time. They are extending on previous projects such as RealTime Rome and WikiCity Rome.

For the Singapore version the team is aiming to develop a very flexible platform capable of handling many hundreds of independent data sources at a speeds of up to 300 updates per second. The concept is to only provide the platform, but not to host the data. This simplifies the ownership and responsibility requirements as well as the infrastructure load. Its really the engine and not a data repository.

This allows for a lot of flexibility and the team to focus on questions beyond the data management. For example the interesting bit is not the data but how the different data streams are combined and how the services are used. The project will log these details and there is a lot of capacity to learn from the usage details where real value can be generated.

Currently the test model is running with real time mobile hone data, real time Taxi GPS data (from 16’000 taxis), real time shipment data, real time airport traffic data as well as real time electricity consumption for industry and business. This is possible through partnerships with a range of high profile companies based in Singapore.

Erik Kjems presented the project of a 3D Model used as a User-Interface for energy system modeling. There was some interesting approaches to visualise scenarios based around the options of future energy solutions for the city of Copenhagen. The cit was rebuilt in 3D were each module was capable of processing information and transform according to the scenario settings. User were able to put power plants an windfarms and watch their city transform.

Peter Zeile and Antonio Nelson da Silva discussed their collaboration for a Smart Sensoring prototype supporting barrier free planning. The sensing is measuring individual stress levels via skin conductance, also known as galvanic skin response (GSR). The concept is very similar to some of Christina Nolde’s Bio Mapping and Emotional Cartography projects.

RealTime Rome
Image taken form CPE TU Kaiserslautern / COncept sketches and prototype of the Smart Sensor and GPS.

The group at University of Kaiserslautern has developed a wristband that monitors and records the stress levels and is in sync with a GPS. The project focus is on detection of excluding barriers in urban contexts for a variety of disabilities. The current wrist band prototype is still quite expensive at about €1000, but could be optimised for the use in a scaled up study. Also they are currently working on a mobile phone connected version of the tool. It will be Android based and transmit the GSR levels to a central data strage.

Simona Sofronie from PHL University College in Hassel, Belgium discussing the project ‘An Ubiquitous Urban Game’ she is developing for her PhD. The project is based around GPS tracking of individuals adding a group task feature to foster experimenting with spatial navigation and questioning of established routines. See her presentation below.

It was a great day with a lot to talk about later on during dinner. Looking forward to two other days of great inspirational talks.

Continue reading »
cupum, presentation

CUPUM Notes First Day

Posted on by

It was a fairly busy day, the first of a three day conference in Lake Louise, Canada. The weather was brilliant, the views amazing and the tables had table cloth on. Already the opening has been visited in good numbers and so did the sessions.

The first keynote by Ken Lindmark focused on a local project, a elaborate model for the city of Calgary forecasting scenarios for a 60 year period. A number of the local people were involved with this project. The setting for the model was very large and looking far outside the city boundaries in order to create a fairly accurate picture of the traffic and commute volumes.

As things go and different interests colide, the actual report coming out of the study was reduced to the city boundaries dramatically limiting the models capacity. But still the city of Calgary now has a decent plan for the future for its mobility. For details see plan|it|Calgary.

RealTime Rome
Image taken form Sensable City lab / RealTime Rome project visualising sensor data.

Kristian Kloeckl from the MIT Sensable City lab presented the work he had done with his colleagues on the Live Singapore project. A very ambitious data visualisation project covering the whole country state in real time. They are extending on previous projects such as RealTime Rome and WikiCity Rome.

For the Singapore version the team is aiming to develop a very flexible platform capable of handling many hundreds of independent data sources at a speeds of up to 300 updates per second. The concept is to only provide the platform, but not to host the data. This simplifies the ownership and responsibility requirements as well as the infrastructure load. Its really the engine and not a data repository.

This allows for a lot of flexibility and the team to focus on questions beyond the data management. For example the interesting bit is not the data but how the different data streams are combined and how the services are used. The project will log these details and there is a lot of capacity to learn from the usage details where real value can be generated.

Currently the test model is running with real time mobile hone data, real time Taxi GPS data (from 16’000 taxis), real time shipment data, real time airport traffic data as well as real time electricity consumption for industry and business. This is possible through partnerships with a range of high profile companies based in Singapore.

Erik Kjems presented the project of a 3D Model used as a User-Interface for energy system modeling. There was some interesting approaches to visualise scenarios based around the options of future energy solutions for the city of Copenhagen. The cit was rebuilt in 3D were each module was capable of processing information and transform according to the scenario settings. User were able to put power plants an windfarms and watch their city transform.

Peter Zeile and Antonio Nelson da Silva discussed their collaboration for a Smart Sensoring prototype supporting barrier free planning. The sensing is measuring individual stress levels via skin conductance, also known as galvanic skin response (GSR). The concept is very similar to some of Christina Nolde’s Bio Mapping and Emotional Cartography projects.

RealTime Rome
Image taken form CPE TU Kaiserslautern / COncept sketches and prototype of the Smart Sensor and GPS.

The group at University of Kaiserslautern has developed a wristband that monitors and records the stress levels and is in sync with a GPS. The project focus is on detection of excluding barriers in urban contexts for a variety of disabilities. The current wrist band prototype is still quite expensive at about €1000, but could be optimised for the use in a scaled up study. Also they are currently working on a mobile phone connected version of the tool. It will be Android based and transmit the GSR levels to a central data strage.

Simona Sofronie from PHL University College in Hassel, Belgium discussing the project ‘An Ubiquitous Urban Game’ she is developing for her PhD. The project is based around GPS tracking of individuals adding a group task feature to foster experimenting with spatial navigation and questioning of established routines. See her presentation below.

It was a great day with a lot to talk about later on during dinner. Looking forward to two other days of great inspirational talks.

Continue reading »
cupum, presentation
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