andreavaccari.com

On Monday, April 14 I joined a round table on real-time cities organized by the SENSEable City Lab and Fabien Girardin. The meeting started with a presentation of our lab our latest works. Then Fabien kick started the discussion, going over the concept of real-time cities and underlining that there is a need to raise awareness of the multiple issues that are inherent of the design of real-time cities.

The ‘real-time city,’ in which system conditions can be monitored and reacted to instantaneously, has arrived.
–Anthony Townsend

Pulsing cloud of data, instantaneous information, seamlessness integration, empowerment of the citizens, enhancement of our perception, reveal the city as we experience it, patterns of behavior, observe and improve.
–Fabien Girardin

Following are my notes from the 3-hour long discussion.

Raj Singh, MIT DUSP and Open Geospatial Consortium

Raj Singh starts the discussion talking about the new GIS-based information resources for the cities. The main statement of Raj is that to understand what will be the future of cities and GIS technologies we simply have to follow the money: what will people pay for?

Money motivators for the development of these technologies are:

• homeland security
• emergency preparedness
• humanitarian assistance and disaster relief
• natural resource protection
• climate change

Raj suggests that it is necessary to look at things from the big organizations’ point of view (Government, Military, NGO’s, …) which at the end have to deal with the same issues of private firms: coalitions (both collaborative and competitive), competition for status, for funding, and of course for power.

He also states that the motto sensors all the time will become more and more legitimate. From Google’s and Microsoft’s universal data collection, to technical innovations like the LIDAR sensors (Light Detection And Ranging is an active sensor that transmits laser pulses to a target and records the time it takes for the pulse to return to the sensor receiver; it can be used for high-resolution topographic mapping), we can now collect bigger amount of data faster. However, he notes, we still have to learn how to analyse it, which will probably be the focus of future research on GIS systems.

At the end of the presentation Allan Doyle adds that we also have to take into consideration the role of geo-hackers: dialogue should be facilitated between them and big organizations, since big money work on ideas that not necessarily are the most relevant for consumers. Adam Greenfield, who recently joined the Nokia Design Team, comments that big organizations are embarrassingly aware of the work of geo-hackers.

Paul Torrens, Arizona State University

I already have the opportunity to listen to Paul Torrens at ETech 2008 earlier this year. He tirelessly modelled and implemented from scratch many agent-based simulations of urban density and urban dynamics, from small scale environments like kindergartens, to large scale environments like cities themselves.

Paul goes through some of his most relevant works, which conjugate complex modelling of human behaviours with accurate computer animations to track and simulate people movements throughout different environments. I strongly suggest to visit his site, geosimulation.org, and in particular the demo section. Personally, I love his modelling of crowd behaviour, the analysis of wifi geographies, and the analysis of urban growth.

The main arguments of Paul are that traditional approaches are insufficient to describe real-time dynamics and that it is necessary to move from space analysis to time-space analysis (this reminds me of Bruce Sterling’s spimes). He also suggests that we need to move away from the conventional tools used to analyse the city and and people, and to try out new methods like cross-linked social networks’ analysis and automata-based modelling of urban phenomena.

At the end of the presentation Adam Greenfield asks why the simulation don’t look real: somehow, some parameters are still missing. Rex Britter follows asking how we can formally evaluate such models, and Paul explains that this is a difficult questions to answer to, since most of his simulations involve scenarios where you cannot reliably get real data (for example rioting), and that the only method we have is to run what-if simulations.

Georg Gartner, Vienna University of Technology

Georg Gartner talks specifically about way finding. He starts explaining that on his way to the workshop he had to find the MIT room where he is talking right now. While most people think that the natural way to do this is to read a map, he instead suggests that the environment and the people around you have a lot more to say.

He explains that when he first started to study the problem of way finding, he tried to install digital maps on Nokia phones, just to find out that this was not the right approach (quite interesting since Adam Greenfield, also present at the workshop, just joined the Nokia Design Team).

When i look for something, I want the environment to be smart and give you the information.

What he is doing now is to look at the behaviour of people. If people are behaving in a particular way, then some things are simply not necessary, he says. He does this by monitoring people in shopping streets to find out if there are different types of shopping behaviours (and yes, there are). This can help to develop environments that help people find their way while shopping.

The way we communicate and describe places have a direct correlation with the conceptual image that we build in our mind. While 2D maps limit our ability to represent complex 3D environments, he wants to overcome this limitation and to develop semantic descriptions of places and paths: go to the library, then turn right, and walk until you see the bathroom on your left.

Another important concept that needs to be investigated, Georg says, is that of emotional landmarks. People connect emotions to physical places; for example they will try to avoid places where they have been pick pocketed. Georg is trying to model and map these emotional landmarks, building on the idea of spatial awareness, that is of a fuzzy but complete perception of the overall space to a detailed syntactic representation of a small part of it.

More in general, his objective is to create a new language for locationing and way finding, that should take the place of 2D maps and their inherent communicative limitations. Currently, he is collecting data from volunteers that accept to carry a tracking device when entering a shopping mall and that fill out a questionnaire when leaving.

Jonathan Raper, City University London

Last but not least is Jonathan Raper, who talks about location-based services and presents seven current applications — the top applications currently available — he adds. LBS’s, Jonathan argues, are becoming more and more relevant in urban decision making because cellphones, on their side, are becoming information appliances, whose capabilities are only limited by users’ motivations and skills. LBS’s can become personal decision support tools, if they are compelling/easy/cheap and your friends have them, thus enabling situational decision making. What are the likely effects on the city, however, is yet to see.

The first application that he presents is Navitime, a pedestrian navigation system available in Japan with more than 2.5 million paid subscribers. The benefits of Navitime are:

• greater mobility
• efficient travel
• reduction in lost
• new image of the city

The second application is Camineo from France, a web-based platform for mobile guides for leisure and tourism. Benefits are:

• bring information where the questions are
• sharing e-interpretations leading to m-democracy
• connection of location and media, new narratives

The third application is Plazes from the United States, which is basically a mobile social nework. Benefits are:

• friend finder and activity management via SMS’s
• social coordination becomes ad-hoc
• location can be obtained for others
• need privacy enhancing technology
• monitored people will risk more or less (not telling people where you go becomes suspicious)

Zillow from the United States is a mobile real estate valuation tool. Benefits are:

• loosening of social ties
• increase in purchasing due to ad-hoc discovery
• real estate tourism

Placr (cannot find the homepage, drop me a line if you know the link) from UK is a congestion tracking information system. Benefits are:

• capture of long term traffic speeds for all rads in city (this trip is longer but faster, this street is quiter, …)
• sourced from courier
• more efficient routing
• citizens campaigns
• traffic redistribution

AllSportGPS from USA is a GPS-based training application. Benefits are:

• sport planning and real-time progress
• easier exercise programming
• more adventurous runs
• more use of public spaces

iGO My Way from Hungary is a mobile search and way finding tool. Benefits are:

• satnav (personal nav)
• way finding more successful
• orientation impoverished
• search around
• no situational search available yet

At the end of the presentation Fabien points out that out of seven applications, only one can be considered successful (Navitime), and he asks why. JR suggests that the problem lies in the value chain of LBS’s where the different players are closed and do not facilite intercommunication and exchange of information:

• satellites
• location infrastructure
• chipsets
• handsets
• operators
• middleware
• portals
• authentication
• mapping

Final discussion.

The final discussion raised some very interesting questions. Is more information inherently good? And can people resist more information? What happens when information becomes overwhelming: do people just choose to filter information so to reinforce what they already believe in? And finally, even assuming that people are able to successfully process all the information that can be made available, how do we such information into the right context?