Utopic city

Answering a question he was asked at LIFT Evening Seoul, Adam Greenfield wrote a long answer detailing what his perfect city would be like. Very inspiring thoughts, and an idea for a new book after Everyware?

My urban utopia would assemble these traits, kaleidoscopically:

- A setting as gemlike and as accessible to ocean, mountain, forest and desert as San Francisco’s, with winters no worse than that city’s, and summers like Helsinki;
- Lots of oxygenating green space;
- A zone or zones with the density, skyscraping verticality and walkability of Manhattan, or maybe central Hong Kong, for identity, legibility, and let’s face it, excitement;
- Boulevards with the leafy slope and generous broadness of Barcelona’s Ramblas or Tokyo’s Omotesando (at least as the latter existed up until 2003, i.e. prior to the destruction of the Dojunkai Apartments and their replacement with Ando’s jumped-up, pompous mall);
- Flabbergasting ethnolinguistic diversity, with all that implies for the eating experience;
- Lots of mixed-use close in to the core, and lower-density, more purely residential outlying districts with the easygoingness, human scale and hardy housing stock I remember from my adolescence in West Philadelphia;
- These connected to the downtown(s) and to each other by something like the vividly multimodal transitscape of central Amsterdam, where a road, a sidewalk and a bustling bikepath will all converge in crossing over a canal (and I’d thrown in Portland’s light-rail network);
- Enough cheap housing so that everyone who wants one has a room to call their own – and enough cheap warehouse/event space to support an arts community like Berlin’s;
- The 24-hour bustle and ad-hoc spirit of Seoul – where a vacant lot plus a grill plus a tent equals a nightspot, and in nice weather you don’t even need the tent;
- Something in the lay of the streets that recalls Daikanyama, or the winding backways between Shibuya and Ebisu;
- It’s undeniably haute-bourgeous, and titled perilously toward consumerism, but if you’re going to have commercial zones I’ve always felt that something works about Berkeley’s Fourth Street;
- Thousands of idiosyncratic small bookshops, cafés, bars and other service establishments;
- Moments of sudden, unexpected grace – a planted nook, a shaded arcade or courtyard, a humble bench;
- London cabs, Amsterdam bikes, old Saigon cyclos, Yamanote-sen trains – and while we’re at it, why not make it safe for motorcyclists so I can ride my SV once more;
- All of this undergirded by a thoughtfully-designed informatic infrastructure that sutures all these experiences together, that lets them speak themselves, that does what it needs to and then goes

Link

Could the Chinese – who seem to be building cities around utopias these days – start working on that?

Planet Internet

There isn’t one Web anymore. Many different webs are emerging around cultural boundaries. Welcome to a multipolar online world!

Back in 1994, Internet was a village. You could know all the streets names, all the habitants addresses and habits. English was the one and only language, and the whole ecosystem’s map could still be fitted on a homepage. Internet experts were people able to understand the intricacies of HTML and to remember unsexy URLs (yahoo.stanford.edu) gathered through random surfing.

Then the village became a country, organized around a few poles like Ebay or Amazon. The maps became obsolete with the birth of effective search engines like Webcrawler, Altavista or Hotbot. Internet was still very homogeneous, full of common rules and codes (the netiquette), hampered by various technical limitations (browser compatibility, 28k modems, 640*480 screens). English was still the ultra dominant language. Kings had mastered the secrets of clever searches, able to find the right way to navigate the 50 first results to find the best resources.

Then the city became a continent. Millions and millions of people, Google emerging out of the newly messy network, organizing pages in a way that was gaming the gamers who couldn’t simply repeat a word a million times to sit on top of the rankings. French started to emerge, Japanese and Spanish too. Cultural differences blossomed, and local players were gaining traction and respectable audiences. Technology was getting its acts together, finally providing ways to reach multiple languages, devices, and cultures. Leaders were those able to cope with an increasing amount of information, who managed to filter the relevant from the irrelevant and were able to repackage multiple sources in an easy to understand and adapted way.

Internet is now a planet with different continents, each having a different culture, a different structure, a different set of players. See this list of dominant communities per country gathered on a recent BBC article:

MySpace (United States, Australia, Mexico, and Italy), Bebo (Ireland and New Zealand) , Cyworld (South Korea), Friendster (Indonesia, Philippines, and Singapore) , Fotolog (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay), Hi5 (Colombia, Ecuador, and Thailand), Mixi (Japan), Orkut (Brazil, India, and Paraguay) , Skyblog (France, Belgium, Senegal), Studiverzeichnis (Germany, Austria) and Vkontakte (Russia).

Social networking sites are exposing a formerly hidden reality: the fact that the web now matured into a network of distinct ecosystems.

Does that mean the end of global sites? Probably not. But just like in politics, where the emergence of China and India will end the West’s unilateral dominance, multi polarity is brewing on the Internet. We expected it to happen because of technology, money and innovation (Yahoo and Microsoft to counter-balance Google). Instead it’s the world’s oldest frontiers – language and culture – showing up to balance things out.

PS: I thought about that when I read Bruno’s post about William Gibson, a famous science fiction novelist who has “given up on trying to imagine the future” because we have “hit a speed and complexity that make the future inscrutable”. Things grow and become more complex with time. Internet is a good example.

Links:
Lunch over IP: William “cyberspace” Gibson gives up on the future
BBC: Pull down the walled gardens

Are computers getting old?

It’s a stupid question but I always wondered if that was the case. Because even if you fully reinstall an old laptop with the original system after a crash, it feels much slower than when you took it out of the box.

Is it some kind of mental Moore’s law, where our brains become more demanding with each day passing? Or are computers really getting slower and less effective with time?

Something made of electricity and non-moving parts (mostly) getting old sounds a bit weird. That’s why the question came up.