Category: Cities

IBM 5 in 5 – smart city induced utopia? According to…

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IBM 5 in 5 – smart city induced utopia?

According to IBM’s 5 in 5 predictions:

“…cities can be hard unforgiving places to live…cities are tough, because they require us to live on their terms, but in five years the tables will turn. With cities adapting to our terms, with cloud-based social feedback, crowdsourcing, and predictive analytics, we’ll shape our cities to our evolving wants and needs, comings and goings, and late-night pizza hankerings. By engaging citizens, city leaders will be able to respond directly to our needs, and dynamically allocate resources…and pizza.”

There is an increasingly concerned chorus of critics objecting to the marketing language used by some proponents of “smart cities”, because they sense that corporate interests and government departments may well try to leverage the new technologies from the top-down, instead of the bottom-up approach preferred by an increasingly empowered citizenry.

There is a bit of truth mixed-in with the hype. For example, it is true that bottom-up crowdsourced information feedback allows the city to self-organise – to dynamically adapt to both new and old opportunities and challenges – and to develop a sort of self-regulating city ‘consciousness’. But a more nuanced view is necessary when it comes to forecasting the end of all evils due to the the implied top-down mastery of all things complex…

A more rounded perspective can be found in new books by Anthony Townsend and, from a scientific perspective, Mike Batty, with a solid review of both books available from the New Scientist.

Continue reading »
Cities, IBM5in5, modernism, predictions, Smart Cities, technology, utopia

IBM 5 in 5 – smart city induced utopia? According to…

Posted on by

IBM 5 in 5 – smart city induced utopia?

According to IBM’s 5 in 5 predictions:

“…cities can be hard unforgiving places to live…cities are tough, because they require us to live on their terms, but in five years the tables will turn. With cities adapting to our terms, with cloud-based social feedback, crowdsourcing, and predictive analytics, we’ll shape our cities to our evolving wants and needs, comings and goings, and late-night pizza hankerings. By engaging citizens, city leaders will be able to respond directly to our needs, and dynamically allocate resources…and pizza.”

There is an increasingly concerned chorus of critics objecting to the marketing language used by some proponents of “smart cities”, because they sense that corporate interests and government departments may well try to leverage the new technologies from the top-down, instead of the bottom-up approach preferred by an increasingly empowered citizenry.

There is a bit of truth mixed-in with the hype. For example, it is true that bottom-up crowdsourced information feedback allows the city to self-organise – to dynamically adapt to both new and old opportunities and challenges – and to develop a sort of self-regulating city ‘consciousness’. But a more nuanced view is necessary when it comes to forecasting the end of all evils due to the the implied top-down mastery of all things complex…

A more rounded perspective can be found in new books by Anthony Townsend and, from a scientific perspective, Mike Batty, with a solid review of both books available from the New Scientist.

Continue reading »
Cities, IBM5in5, modernism, predictions, Smart Cities, technology, utopia

IBM 5 in 5 – smart city induced utopia? Apparently, we are…

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IBM 5 in 5 – smart city induced utopia?

Apparently, we are rapidly approaching the dawn of a technologically induced utopia – a promised land of sorts – a (not so) new claim that all of our problems are rapidly becoming a thing of the past…because overcrowded busses and late pizza will be resolved by the smartening-up of cities.

According to IBM’s 5 in 5 predictions:

“…cities can be hard unforgiving places to live…cities are tough, because they require us to live on their terms, but in five years the tables will turn. With cities adapting to our terms, with cloud-based social feedback, crowdsourcing, and predictive analytics, we’ll shape our cities to our evolving wants and needs, comings and goings, and late-night pizza hankerings. By engaging citizens, city leaders will be able to respond directly to our needs, and dynamically allocate resources…and pizza.”

No wonder there is an increasingly concerned chorus of critics objecting to the marketing language used by some proponents of “smart cities”, because they sense that corporate interests and government departments may well try to leverage the new technologies from the top-down, instead of the bottom-up approach preferred by an increasingly empowered citizenry.

There is a bit of truth mixed-in with the hype. It is true that bottom-up crowdsourced information feedback allows the city to self-organise – to dynamically adapt to both new and old opportunities and challenges – and to develop a sort of self-regulating city ‘consciousness’. But a more nuanced view is necessary when it comes to forecasting the end of all evils due to the the implied top-down mastery of all things complex… and this due to the somewhat simplistic notion of government officials sitting behind giant screens in new control centres.

A more rounded perspective can be found in new books by Anthony Townsend and Mike Batty, with a solid review (of both books) available from the New Scientist.

Continue reading »
Cities, IBM5in5, modernism, predictions, Smart Cities, technology, utopia

Steve Rayner on Path Dependence in Cities An interesting…

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Steve Rayner on Path Dependence in Cities

An interesting presentation by Steve Rayner in which he discusses the significance of Path Dependence and “lock-in”.

Path dependence explains how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant. (Wikipedia)

Steve explains that our cities are significantly impacted by past innovations and decisions…such as the location of streets, the invention of the car, and technologies like electric light, flushing toilets, and elevators.

Lock-in through path-dependence can end up causing cities and processes to work in ways that are no longer efficient or sensible. Some kind of mechanism is necessary to allow for flexibility or a radical break in order to escape from the status quo. This is largely what Steve’s Flexible City website is about.

A particularly amusing example in Steve’s presentation is that the size of the space shuttle’s rocket thrusters were determined by the width of a horse’s ass…see the video for details.

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Cities, Evolution, flexible city, invention, path dependency, technology

Steve Rayner on Path Dependence in Cities An interesting…

Posted on by

Steve Rayner on Path Dependence in Cities

An interesting presentation by Steve Rayner in which he discusses the significance of Path Dependence and “lock-in”.

Path dependence explains how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant. (Wikipedia)

Steve explains that our cities are significantly impacted by past innovations and decisions…such as the location of streets, the invention of the car, and technologies like electric light, flushing toilets, and elevators.

Lock-in through path-dependence can end up causing cities and processes to work in ways that are no longer efficient or sensible. Some kind of mechanism is necessary to allow for flexibility or a radical break in order to escape from the status quo. This is largely what Steve’s Flexible City website is about.

A particularly amusing example in Steve’s presentation is that the size of the space shuttle’s rocket thrusters were determined by the width of a horse’s ass…see the video for details.

Continue reading »
Cities, Evolution, flexible city, invention, path dependency, technology

Steve Rayner on Path Dependence in Cities An interesting…

Posted on by

Steve Rayner on Path Dependence in Cities

An interesting presentation by Steve Rayner in which he discusses the significance of Path Dependence and “lock-in”.

Path dependence explains how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant. (Wikipedia)

Steve explains that our cities are significantly impacted by past innovations and decisions…such as the location of streets, the invention of the car, and technologies like electric light, flushing toilets, and elevators.

Lock-in through path-dependence can end up causing cities and processes to work in ways that are no longer efficient or sensible. Some kind of mechanism is necessary to allow for flexibility or a radical break in order to escape from the status quo. This is largely what Steve’s Flexible City website is about.

A particularly amusing example in Steve’s presentation is that the size of the space shuttle’s rocket thrusters were determined by the width of a horse’s ass…see the video for details.

Continue reading »
Cities, Evolution, flexible city, invention, path dependency, technology

Luminous Cities: offering an alternative way of geotag

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Image1. The webpage of Luminous Cities_Manhattan

Studying human behaviours and communication in time and space has been regarded as the important factor of modern urban planning. In this digital era, collecting online data and analysing the data provide an opportunity to understand the intention and the process of the behaviours and the communication which had not been revealed.
Geotag, which is attached on Social Network Service (SNS), is concerned as one of connecting link between the internet and urban. Mainly, there are two types of geotag. One is user-generated geotag that SNS users identify the places on their contents. The other is automatically generated with spatial coordination by the services. It represents the political, social and economic characteristics of the places as well as the physical location of the user or the data produced.

There are many good examples of mapping the geotag data of SNS. Eric Fischer’s well known mapping images reveal not only the density of the geotag data but also social aspects in cities such as the invisible dimensions of tourism in New York (Image 2). Twitter Languages in London by James Cheshire and Ed Manley shows the popularity of languages depends on different locations in London ((Image 3).

Image2. The mapping geotag data of locals and tourists by Eric Fischer 

Image3. Twitter Languages in London, James Cheshire and Ed Manley

Luminous Cities is the project to demonstrate the interactive map of Flickr geotag data supported by CASA at UCL and CSAP at the University of Leeds. It has developed by Gavin Baily and Sarah Bagshaw. The project does not remain the displaying density and distribution of the geotag, but offers in-detail contents of the geotag such as user, tag, time of the day and timeline over 50 cities in the world. With the multiple contents, Luminous Cities could be a platform to check out the geotag data of Flickr based on personal interest, and to view their cities from a different side. When it comes to Networking City, who is interested in protest and demonstration in the city, it would be a helpful tool to examine the relationship between protests or occupy tags of Flickr in London and actual events of them. Also, some interesting results may be emerging when we compare two data sets: Flickr and Twitter.

Image4. Berlin user geotag map from the webpage of Luminous Cities

Image5. London occupy geotag map from the webpage of Luminous Cities

Image6. Tokyo geotag map, Zoom out, from the webpage of Luminous Cities

Image7. Tokyo geotag map, Zoom in, from the webpage of Luminous Cities

You can find more things from following links.
Flickr was shown as the highest growing application in 2013 by Mashable

Mapping the world with Flickr and Twitter by Guardian

Infographic Of The Day: Using Twitter And Flickr Geotags To Map The World

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664462/infographic-of-the-day-using-twitter-and-flickr-geotags-to-map-the-world

Continue reading »
Big Data, CASA, Cities, CSAP, Eric Fischer, Flickr, geo-coded, geotag, SNS, Social Networks

Luminous Cities: offering an alternative way of geotag

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Image1. The webpage of Luminous Cities_Manhattan

Studying human behaviours and communication in time and space has been regarded as the important factor of modern urban planning. In this digital era, collecting online data and analysing the data provide an opportunity to understand the intention and the process of the behaviours and the communication which had not been revealed.
Geotag, which is attached on Social Network Service (SNS), is concerned as one of connecting link between the internet and urban. Mainly, there are two types of geotag. One is user-generated geotag that SNS users identify the places on their contents. The other is automatically generated with spatial coordination by the services. It represents the political, social and economic characteristics of the places as well as the physical location of the user or the data produced.

There are many good examples of mapping the geotag data of SNS. Eric Fischer’s well known mapping images reveal not only the density of the geotag data but also social aspects in cities such as the invisible dimensions of tourism in New York (Image 2). Twitter Languages in London by James Cheshire and Ed Manley shows the popularity of languages depends on different locations in London ((Image 3).

Image2. The mapping geotag data of locals and tourists by Eric Fischer 

Image3. Twitter Languages in London, James Cheshire and Ed Manley

Luminous Cities is the project to demonstrate the interactive map of Flickr geotag data supported by CASA at UCL and CSAP at the University of Leeds. It has developed by Gavin Baily and Sarah Bagshaw. The project does not remain the displaying density and distribution of the geotag, but offers in-detail contents of the geotag such as user, tag, time of the day and timeline over 50 cities in the world. With the multiple contents, Luminous Cities could be a platform to check out the geotag data of Flickr based on personal interest, and to view their cities from a different side. When it comes to Networking City, who is interested in protest and demonstration in the city, it would be a helpful tool to examine the relationship between protests or occupy tags of Flickr in London and actual events of them. Also, some interesting results may be emerging when we compare two data sets: Flickr and Twitter.

Image4. Berlin user geotag map from the webpage of Luminous Cities

Image5. London occupy geotag map from the webpage of Luminous Cities

Image6. Tokyo geotag map, Zoom out, from the webpage of Luminous Cities

Image7. Tokyo geotag map, Zoom in, from the webpage of Luminous Cities

You can find more things from following links.
Flickr was shown as the highest growing application in 2013 by Mashable

Mapping the world with Flickr and Twitter by Guardian

Infographic Of The Day: Using Twitter And Flickr Geotags To Map The World

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664462/infographic-of-the-day-using-twitter-and-flickr-geotags-to-map-the-world

Continue reading »
Big Data, CASA, Cities, CSAP, Eric Fischer, Flickr, geo-coded, geotag, SNS, Social Networks

Modelling Movement in the City: The Influence of Individuals

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‘Modelling Movement in the City: The Influence of Individuals’ was the title of a talk I gave at the AGILE conference in Avignon, France last week. For the conference I actually initially prepared a poster that never ended up seeing the light of d…
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ABM, Agent Based Modelling, Cities, Cognition and Behaviour, Complex Systems, london, Route Choice, Spatial Modelling, Transportation
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