I set up a round table at the SENSEable City Lab on “Real-Time Cities” that will take place before Adam Greenfield’s talk next Monday (April 14th 2008, 2pm-5pm. Room 3-401). The pitch goes as follows:

The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure. The goal of this round table is to discuss and anticipate these changes from a critical point of view.

We will cover the theme of “Real-time cities” with specific discussions on (but not limited to): New resources to describe cities, the implication of the deployment of ubiquitous and sensors technologies on the reconfiguration of cities, the city as a platform for innovation, and what is a good real-time city?

I took the advantage the 2008 Association of American Geographers annual meeting to bring together some people who’s work I admire to discuss research works and visions linked to “urban computing” (“the integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies in everyday urban settings and lifestyles“). I am pretty confident in the line-up of main speakers:

+ Georg Gartner, Vienna University of Technology
+ Adam Greenfield, Nokia Design and NYU
+ Jonathan Raper, City University London
+ Carlo Ratti, MIT SENSEable City Lab
+ Raj Singh, MIT/Open Geospatial Consortium
+ Paul Torrens, Arizona State University

Unfortunately, I could not bring a female voice to this list. Hopefully it will come from the attendance.

As promised at last year’s Picnic, I have managed to have Adam Greenfield give an open lecture at MIT. There is no better moment to catch him before he completes his second book and he moves to Scandinavia for a long-term gig in the rubber business at Finnish Rubber Works. Adam kindly accepted to amtrak up to Boston and give an open lecture entitled “The City Is Here For You To Use“. It will take place on Monday, April 14, 5pm in Room 3-401.

In his presentation “The City Is Here For You To Use” Adam Greenfield takes everything explored in his book Everyware as a given, and a point of departure. He will assume that emergent technologies like RFID, mesh networking and shape-memory actuators will simply be part of how cities will be made from now on, and seeks to understand what impact they’re likely to have on metropolitan form and experience. Adam will make the case that these technologies can help us rediscover public space, and make suggestions how we might use them to reclaim that space as a common good and a resource for all. Anyone interested in understanding how the emergence of ubiquitous and ambient informatics will shape urban communities, physically and experientially, will find plenty to sink their teeth into.

Dan Catt’s talk at the upcoming Where 2.0: Going Places on Flickr: The Significance of Geographical Information in Photos

Every photo has a location—it was taken somewhere. For photo-sharing communities like Flickr, geotagging enriches the database with location metadata and makes digital photos more useful and relevant to users, allowing them to not only easily search and organize their own photos but better browse images from around the world. With nearly 50 million geotagged photos on Flickr, around 32 million of which are public, Flickr senior engineer Dan Catt was able to use Flickr’s open API to create a new feature called Places. Places is a zoomed-in view of a particular location and allows Flickr members and visitors to explore that location through iconic photos.

and at Web 2.0 A Flickr Approach to Making Sense of the World

What do you do when you have well over 50 million geotagged objects? How do you actually do anything constructive with that? With emphasis on the How and constructive parts.

To start with we’ll take a quick(ish) look at the current state of reverse geo-coding; mapping latitude and longitude to an actual place. And what to do when that place is the wrong place or technically the right place but not what anyone calls it. Why it seems as though it should be simple but in reality it’s all terribly hard and we’re still just at the very start of that one. Geocoding != Maps.

In the swiss popular daily free newspaper Le Matin Bleu, squeezed between an article on youth violence and another acknowledging the emergence of bear communities in London…

Grâce à Internet, des scientifiques peuvent établir les circuits des touristes dans les villes
Les monuments les plus visités de Barce­lone, de Rome ou de Florence? Les trajets pris pour les voir? Et à quelle heure? Tout cela n’a plus de secrets pour le Groupe de technologie de l’Université Pompeu Fabra, à Barcelone, qui a dressé un plan détaillé des chemins préférés des touristes. Comment? En analysant plus de 150 000 photos postées par environ 6000 personnes sur le site de Flickr. Des infos qui intéressent bien sûr déjà les institutions des villes et qui pourront suggérer d’autres trajets à ceux qui veu­lent éviter l’afflux de touristes!

Some of the work on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye, Bicing and at SENSEable has been mentioned these past days in the Spanish media. In the free daily newspaper ADN Juan Freire describes in very accurate terms the Huellas digitales en las ciudades.

El objetivo inicial de este proyecto es evaluar el potencial de la información georreferenciada generada por usuarios para el análisis y la comprensión de los procesos urbanos, lo que permitirá en el futuro convertir las herramientas de visualización y las bases de datos púiblicos procedentes de la web 2.0 en excelentes instrumentos para los responsables de la gestión urbana (desde los planificadores a las empresas de transporte) y para los propios ciudadanos.[…] Un simple vistazo a los videos que resumen este proyecto muestran claramente los patrones de extrema agregación de los turistas y sus movimientos diarios entre los diferentes hitos turísticos de la ciudad. […] Uno de los elementos más sofisticados de este proyecto es que tiene en cuenta la cobertura espacial de las imágenes, que estiman a partir del grado de zoom registrado como parte de los metadatos de las fotografías.

In Internet revela los movimientos de los turistas en las ciudades (catalan: Internet revela els moviments que fan els turistes a les ciutats), published in the catalan daily newspaper El Periódico de Catalunya, Michele Catanzaro focuses more on the potential implication on urban tourism.

Que el Camp Nou o la Sagrada Família están entre los monumentos más visitados de Barcelona no es ninguna novedad, pero los caminos que los turistas recorren para desplazarse entre las atracciones de la ciudad no son tan fáciles de prever. De hecho, oficinas y empresas de turismo gastan abultados presupuestos para predecir los caprichosos deseos de los viajeros. […] Los mapas de Blat y Girardin pueden ayudar a programar mejor los horarios de apertura al público de los espacios ciudadanos, sugerir dónde es mejor colocar las oficinas turísticas e incluso qué áreas urbanas requieren manutención. Pero también pueden ser útiles para los propios turistas.

To which, the daily Catalonia Today requests in “Barcelona tourists stick to well-beaten paths” that

The city needs to promote other worthy destinations, which would also relieve the congestion seen above.

Additonaly. El Periódico briefly reports in Visualizar el uso del Bicing (catalan: Visualitzar l’ús del Bicing) on the idea of implementing a stronger feeback loop in new urban systems supporting mobility, such as Barcelona’s Bicing.

“Si mapas de este tipo estuvieran a disposición de los ciudadanos, quizá se podrían autorregular en sus desplazamientos por la ciudad, optimizándolos en función de las condiciones”, comenta Girardin. Uno de los objetivos principales de la investigación, coinciden los dos investigadores de la UPF, es poner información compleja al alcance de los ciudadanos de la forma más clara posible.

Finally, the magazine on innovation “If… Revista de innovación” interviewed me on digital traces and Bicing: Conocer la ciudad siguiendo nuestras huellas digitales.

Un reportaje sobre las huellas digitales que dejamos inconscientemente en nuestro día a día por la ciudad, a través del Bicing en Barcelona. Un fenómeno estudiado por el ingeniero Fabien Girardin.

2 years after Mobilités, la Clé des Villes, JCDecaux released Les Audiences dans la Ville the second opus of their trendbook serie “cahier des tendances” that collects visions on the world of media, new technologies, urbanism and design from an eclectic crowd of practitioners and researchers. I contributed with a text on the digital traces we leave behind us from our daily frictions with urban infrastructures and services and some implications when they are processed and made public. The concept of traces Nicolas later analyzes as a support for social navigation. Other short essays include Maurice Levy predicting the emergence of the “urban media”, Adam Greenfield on Everyware, Daniel Kaplan on the city as a platform for innovation open to the co-creation between the actors of the city and the citizens, Peter Fleischer on the new opportunities the web and in the city offer people to handle their identities and topic also discussed by Frédéric Kaplan with a spin on traceability, Nathan Stern on hyperlocality, Bruno Marzloff on “ambient sociability” and the citizens appropriation of their time and space.

The content of Les Audences dans la Ville can be accessed online in its entirety.

In addition to a first list, here is list of events I won’t attend but should keep an eye upon.

First International Workshop on Trends in Pervasive and Ubiquitous Geotechnology and Geoinformation
Workshop @ the GIScience conference, September 2008, Park City, Utah, USA

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers from various fields to discuss trends in pervasive and ubiquitous geotechnology and geoinformation and their impact on the day-to-day application of geography by consumers and geo-friendly industries such as tourism and education. […] In this workshop, we will discuss the issues (both human factors and engineering challenges) surrounding these context-aware systems. While we will include any research topic that relates either to geotechnology or geoinformation, we will focus on the theory behind and application of systems that successfully and rigorously combine the two. Furthermore, we will particularly highlight research that is able to combine the two in a manner that creates a value to the end user that is greater than the sum of the parts. Finally, we will also discuss broader questions related to pervasive and ubiquitous geotechnology and geoinformation. For instance, how will these new capabilities transform the way we experience the world around us? More importantly, how will they alter our interaction with geography?

The First International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2008)
In Conjunction with the WWW 2008 Conference. April 22

This main objective of this workshop is to look into the fields of how to extract, index, mine, find, exploit, mashup, and visualize Web content with respect to its location semantics.

Space = Interaction = Discourse
Aalborg, Denmark from 12th - 14th November 2008

The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers who investigate space, mediated discourse and embodied interaction from different perspectives. The conference will highlight interdisciplinary research that explores how embodied and virtual social actors communicate, interact and coordinate their activities in complex multimodal environments, with a special focus on place, mobility and the body.

Summer Institute of the The Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science
With a 1-week session in Tuscany, Italy on the Geo-Sensor Web with the presence of YDream’s Antonio Camara and UCSB’ Michael F. Goodchild

Geospatial information increasingly is being produced not only by central mapping agencies but by diverse and dispersed collections of sensors. How does this new data collection and dissemination paradigm affect the geospatial community, and vice versa? Sensor Web and citizen participatioon: what happens when citizens are able to deploy and exploit their own sensors? If the Sensor Web becomes as ubiquitous and successful (within its realm of influence) as the WWW, in what ways might it change the way we do things? What areas of high-inertia might be reduced? What as-of-yet unforeseen applications might emerge?

In The Repast Simulation/Modelling System for. Geospatial Simulation, CASA’s Andrew Crooks (blog) introduces Repast and its ability to incorporate geospatial data to build an environment and to create agents to explore different types of phenomena. He shortly introduces some geosptatial simulation constructed from minimalist academic models based upon ideal assumptions, to large scale decision support systems based upon real-world data. These include:

• disaster management such as a Sarin attack in Manhattan, the spread of infectious diseases and a food poisoning outbreak
• pedestrian modelling both in retail and emergency evacuation
• urban dynamics (see Barros, J. (2004), Urban Growth in Latin American Cities: exploring urban dynamics through agent-based simulation), segregation, residential and business location
• models in which mobile agents travel and interact on rugged terrain or on network landscapes at any scale from rooms within buildings to urban neighbourhoods to large geographic networks of cities. (see GeoGraph)
• study land use change
• geographic conflict research(see GROWLab)

Relation to my thesis: Exploring the possible use of “census data” generated by digital footprints (user-generated data, cellphone data) to model urban tourism (some profiles of tourists) dynamism both in time and space. It would be one way to validate the data (compare the simulation with survey data) and test different scenarios over several cities, thus aiding planning tourism. Appetizer before reading Cities and Complexity: Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models, and Fractals.

In a talk at the Responsive City meeting, Manuel Castells discussed the practices of urban management and design in this current historic moment when 50% of the planet population now lives in cities (South America reaching 80%!). Unlike what futoroligsts predicted communication networks did not kill distances the cities have not disappeared. It lead to new form of urbanism - some call it megacities (Casstells has another word about that) or what Peter Hall and Kathryn Pain refer as Polycentric Metropolis, a cluster of cities and towns, physically separate but intensively networked in a complex spatial division of labor. These new places are represented by networks (like new england, southern california) and they do not have official names. In fact the name are defined by the news and media. For instance local news refer to the “Bay Area” in San Francisco (a region where San Jose is even bigger) and “South Land” in Los Angeles. In these cases, the television market (and how it attracts advertisement) actually defined the place.

Globalization is made of these networks. Each network has a different geographies (movie industry, knowledge production, finance). In some metropolitian areas these networks overlay (e.g. London) and synergies happen at the nodes where theses different networks connect. They form “micro-milieux” where decision making takes place. For instance, the city of Saragossa is currently being integrated to Madrid and Barceona in the same time. As Barcelona made less efforts in interconnecting, apparently Saragossa is becoming absorbed as a spatial node of Madrid.

There is not political authority over these new places (megacities). The expression of people on their major metropolitan areas (see Un point de vue unique sur la ville) reveals that they feel betrayed by their local governments because they favor the management of the flows over the management of the place. It means that the strategy to first get rich by privileging connections to the outside world (investiement in airport, optic networks, convention centers) and then we redistribute the wealth is not well perceived. Saragossa is an excellet example of these tensions between existing in the world and providing basic or good services to citizens.

Castells gives some key pointers that now must be considered in urban planning:

• connectivity is critical (multi-modal, local and global connectivity)
• speed and scale create huge environment problems. Technologies make cities grow and do not make them disappear (as also stated by Richard Florida, “the World is Spiky“. On some city maps the freeways are now drawn in green. Therefore, environmental planning should the at the foundation of planning.
• crisis of political legitimacy. citizen are more distrustful from local governament than the central authorities.
• the public physical space is really hard to maintain. Some of them, like La Rambla became a theme park where locals are not present anymore (even the mimes and entertainers are foreigners).

and a few implications in the management of these spaces:

• strengthen of the public space in each of the nucleus
• aim at congregating people with no specific purposes (serendipty) shopping centers are not public spaces. merchants streets are public spaces
• metropolitan cities are about building “stations”. For instance, the most innovative places are close to railway stations. We have to think that we must build cities around these nucleuses.
• density of population creates possibility for stores, business and life emerges (following here the Barcelona Ecologia’s concept of compact mediteranean city)
• maintain a vibrant immigrant life (letting them to be open the whole night). Like stores owned by Chinese immigrants in Spain.
• nurture the notion of distributed monumentality. Build spatial signs of recognition, otherwise people don’t know where they are. It can take the form of monumental architecture (whit the same usual suspects designing the monuments (Nouvel, Gehry, Foster, …- cities are divided by serveral architectural agencies). These monuments become signs of indifications are more important than their actual settings.

Relation to my thesis: Even though I do not focus on macro/global issues of the development of networks, I was curious to hear how a leading urban sociologist describes the hybridization of the physical and digital in the city and the type of signals he analysis and how they are transformed in implications for planning and management. From Castells’ talk, it seems that the interface with technologies and networks is still not taught in land use planning and urban design. It once again comforts my feeling that urban space will need researchers with mixed competences in engineering, HCI (call it user experience or interaction design) and urban planning, validating this year’s move to the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

In relation to the notion of “distributed monumentality” and their necessity as spatial signs of recognition, I believe that the analysis of pervasive user-generated content could reveal the monuments of the city that people use to anchor their data in the space.

“Who’s Your City?,” the world is spiky

In the book of the New York Talk Exchange project, William Mitchell addresses in “Mapping Urban Flux” the ethical issue of analyzing digital traces to reveal the urban dynamics:

There is little doubt that the capacity to track, analyze, and map urban activity in fine-grained, real time detail will open up powerful new ways of providing services to urban inhabitants, of managing urban systems efficiently, of enhancing safety and security, and of making well-informed planning decisions.
[…]
But the crucial questions that loom here are not ones of technological feasibility. They are questions of how we will want to make some difficult social tradeoffs, how we will debate these tradeoffs, and how much power we still may have to affect them anyway.
[…]
But if this explanation does not take place within a framework of vigilant, carefully debated, vigorously formulated and executed public policy - with careful attention to issues of data aggregation and individual privacy - we will soon find that have unwittingly allowed the stealthy, piecemeal emergence of an irreversible condition of electronic hyper-visiblity.

Relation to my thesis: In my thesis I will need to discuss the ethical issues and social tradeoffs in analyzing individual and aggregated digital traces.