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This Monday, after the roundtable on real-time cities, Adam Greenfield took the lead of the group with a formidable talk titled “The city is here for you to use - urban form and experience in the age of ambient informatics”.

Here are the notes I took during his talk.

Adam first talks about his background, which is in user experience and previously in information architecture. He is an instructor at the New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, the author of Everyware, and he has recently joined the Nokia Design Team as head of design direction. He then confesses his biases, telling that he learned to be an urbanist through the work of Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, and Bernard Rudofsky. He explains that even if some of their works might be outdated nowadays, what he really loved was the generosity of their spirit and the luminous sense of urban life that they imparted.

Adam then comments on the points of departure from the traditional idea of urban form and experience that was typical of the pre-information age. From the repeating module of doom with examples of the stereotypical shops in NYC to the birth of junkspace, like the Westfield Horton Plaza in San Diego that I just visited in occasion of ETech 2008, and non-places (i.e. places that do not have an inherent identity), from the stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly, and jittery urban elements of modern cities (e.g. the bench in the park in Tokyo, Japan) to the symptoms of withdrawal of people rejecting the physical reality of space in favour of digital blurbs, Adam suggests that we have lost something and that we know it in our bones.

So, how can we rediscover all that made the cities of Jacobs, Alexander, and Rudofsky vital in a way that is organic to our age? While the answer is not clear, it lies hidden in the concept of ubiquitous computing in its purest form of simple devices that are embedded (in floors, walls, shoes, clothes, …), wireless, imperceptible, interconnected to multiple processing engines, deployed in the everyday life, and implicitly accessible to a vast user space.

Under such conditions, ubiquitous computing will enable an informatics of the ambient where:

• networked processors show up in new places, at the scale of the body and of the street
• information about cities and patterns of their use is visualized in new ways and made available locally, on demand, and in a way that it can be acted upon
• information processing dissolves in behaviour which has a real economic effect (like girls in the Hong Kong subway system that beautifully wave their bags to activate their smartcards without taking them out, thus increasing the throughput of the station itself)
• the city is made of a fabric of addressable, scriptable, and/or queryable objects, screens and surfaces (read/write api, open secure api are the future of public objects)
• the city responds to the behaviour of its residents and other users, in something like real time: from browse to search

The city therefore becomes the platform, but many issues need to be addressed:

• we can map what we can sense (cheaply), and we can sense just a small fraction of the reality
• what does risk actually means? (crimespotting versus falling in the bath tub)
• differential permissioning (do you have a credit card?), without effective recourse in real-time (reading the EULA before using bathroom)
• rights of use and enjoyment: strictly local and accidental? (chairs measure how long you have been sitting and charges you accordingly)
• from way finding to way showing to waying: we no longer need landmarks, there are schelling points where we unconsciously decide to meet
• solutions tailored to the particular geography and history of each city, not generic one-size-fits-all bolt-ons (London versus NYC)
• emergent behaviour (pretty girls dont ride the subway…), liability of security systems (driver killed by automatic bollard…), and so fore

Adam then proposes some possible solutions to the above problems, like:

• building new environments with lots of hooks for digital information systems, physical as well as API’s
• wherever possible, using (and fighting for) open standards (in NYC there are four incompatibles GIS systems in the back of taxis)
• whenever possible, underspecifying since we will never be able to understand and predict all the uses that the system will be applied to

Adam closes the talk explaining that entirely new behaviours are emerging and will emerge. People on the phone are not present in the physical space, except for the bounding envelope that contains them, and places are not designed taking this into account. This and other issues will have to be taken into consideration. How will we regulate the dissemination of digital information? Manuel Castells suggests that if digital access will be ubiquitous, people will never appropriate public spaces and will always live in their digital blobs. But Adam replys that such control shouldn’t be centralized and should emerge from the people. The debate is open.