When it comes to bike rental platforms, I am often intrigued by how digital technologies are employed and for what purposes. A description of how italian biking solution Bicincittà describes it in detail:

“Monitoring and organizational systems: Every movement of the bicycles is transmitted to a server that updates in real time their availability in the area. Upon receiving an electronic card, each cyclist is then registered in the server, having inserted his/her personal information and telephone number. This card is distributed for an indeterminate amount of time and can be deactivated remotely at any time at the director’s discretion. The system’s interface supplies us with the user’s personal information at the moment of the hire, giving us a general overview of who is exploiting the system. As a result we can analyze bike movements and study their statistics in order to increase or decrease the number of bicycles according to demand.

Tele-diagnostic system: Bicincittà is equipped with a remotely enhanced diagnostic system that allows us to know the conditions of the parking stations at any moment. Wherever there may be a damaged or malfunctioning unit, a remote mechanism allows us to reset the device, be it a single parking space or the entire parking station. The practicality of the tele-diagnostic system allows us to solve problems from a distance. This guarantees a completely efficient, indispensable organization in providing quality available alternative public transportation.“

Seems to be very close to Velib/Velov and co. The website interestingly gives some random stats which seems to be more descriptive than explicative:

Why do I blog this? I find interesting to see where digital technologies play a role in bike rental solutions; and the description above is quite transparent regarding how the digital traces of physical activities (movement, parking, diagnosis). In addition, I like the way they describe the whole process. There must be intriguing tools and visualizations to reflect that kind of traces for diverse “urban audiences”:

1. the company which needs to have indicators about his services (but the one above is maybe less informative since it’s regardless of any explanatory variable such as city, weather, etc.).
2. local institutions that what to get information about bike mobility in their city, how the platform is used, etc. in a sort of descriptive way. Further out, they might also need to access to a more explicative dimension so that they could see what works (re-fill of stations, time spent on bikes, etc) and what doesn’t. The point would hence be to modify the system (change the frequency of re-fill, add stations, etc.)
3. Customers who may want to get information about the service availability (number of bikes in real-time at what station) or more elaborated services (why not printing out special maps to depict the best areas to drop a bike, new routes to come past certain empty bike stations). This information could also be coupled with other one coming from other means of transport to help people to pick-up a more efficient succession of transport means (get a bike - use it to go to a metro station - get the metro and get out); in order - for instance - to avoid finding no spots for your bike (or a steep hill?).

Belle Dumé in the NewScientist addressed recently the idea that city road networks grow like biological systems. The article is basically a description of the academic work of Marc Barthélemy and Alessandro Flammini who analysed street pattern data from roughly 300 cities, including Brasilia, Cairo, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Venice.

Using these cases, the researchers found interesting patterns showing that the road networks in cities evolve driven by a simple universal mechanism that follows a biological metaphor:

“The main influence on the simulated network as it grows is the need to efficiently connect new areas to the existing road network – a process they call “local optimisation”. They say the road patterns in cities evolve thanks to similar local efforts, as people try to connect houses, businesses and other infrastructures to existing roads.
(…)
“Beyond the economic, demographic and geographic “forces” that shape a town, there are a myriad of small “accidents” that contribute” he says. “Although these are unpredictable, they can be understood in terms of statistics and simple modelling.”

The team’s model also reveals that roads often bend, even in the absence of geographical obstacles, and that road intersections are generally perpendicular.“

And, as the authors described in their paper, “in the absence of a global design strategy, the evolution of many different transportation networks indeed follows a simple universal mechanism.”
Why do I blog this? I am not really into urban pattern modeling but I find interesting this notion of “local optimisation” and how it works for instance for roads and not for rail (because of its different nature and scales).

This is somewhat related to the elephant path (desire line) I often blog about here and there as pointed out by Space and Culture. A desire line can be turned into a design opportunity and thus into a new road.

Why is that interesting? certainly because it shows the contingencies of the urban infrastructure. I am wondering this hold true for other sort of infra, such as internet connections.

Another synonym for elephant path: desire line. According to the Wikipedia:

“A desire line is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. Desire lines were used in early transportation planning, prior to the advent of computerized models.
They are manifested on the surface of the earth in certain cases, e.g., as dirt pathways created by people walking through a field, when the original movement by individuals helps clear a path, thereby encouraging more travel. Explorers may tred a path through foliage or grass, leaving a trail “of least resistance” for followers.“

In french people say “chemin de l’âne” which means “donkey trail”.

Related: How to kill an elephant path and here.

SK8 OBJECT 1.5 is a very interesting urban artifact designed by Melanie Iten and Gon Zifroni, commissioned by the city of Geneva. It’s actually a mix of a bench and a skateboard bank:

Why do I blog this? simply because I find that kind of project interesting and curious. Readers here know my interest in skateboarding practices and how I see skateboarders as an interesting target group to foresee the future of urban behavior. In this case, what I find relevant is the fact that it’s not the skaters who are innovative but urban designers. Beyond the shape and the affordance of the object that I like, the implications are very interesting here in the sense that the object can be used by different populations (BMX+rollers+skaters AND regular pedestrians). Of course, it can be employed by these different population at the same time, showing the urban tensions of urban furnitures.

I also find intriguing how it looks like a mix between a skatepark artefact and something more… urban, less artificial like the assumption that if you build a skatepark, people will go there.

This sort of device installed here used to be called “Journal Electronique de Rue” (Street Electronic Journal) in the 80s in France. What I find intriguing here is the assumption people had for this sort of urban screen: so much confidence in them led people to employ the word “journal” for a pretty basic display.

Seen in Amsterdam last fall, beyond tandems.
What I like here is that there is a potential to have this sort of device circling around a certain path, taking and letting people along the way, each of the participant giving a contribution to the movement. In the case above, it’s not really like that, it’s simply a “beer bike” A curious form of mobility anyway

Encountered yesterday on my way to a meeting, this nice street camera has been protected but some people have found a more interesting side-effect of the protection. The accumulation of bottles might, down the road, influence what the camera is watching.

Finally managed to read the oversized Paris ville invisible book by Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant (1998). The whole thing is an amazing photographic essay on the “social” and technical aspects of the city of Paris (”social” in Latour’s sense). It’s a bit like Susan Star’s article called The Ethnography of Infrastructure but definitely in Latour’s words (and yes it’s definitely french). There is also a web version, defined as “a sociological web opera”.

For this post, I am mostly concerned by the notion of traces, their visibility and their implications. An important part of the book is about various “channels of signifiers”: from collected data like temperature or time to their computation by intermediaries (sensors, computers) and the map and model outputs employed by institutions such as telecom operators or police departments

Some excerpts from an english translation by Liz Carey-Libbrecht:

“Megalomaniacs confuse the map and the territory and think they can dominate all of Paris just because they do, indeed, have all of Paris before their eyes. Paranoiacs confuse the territory and the map and think they are dominated, observed, watched, just because a blind person absent-mindedly looks at some obscure signs in a four-by-eight metre room in a secret place. Both take the cascade of transformations for information, and twice they miss that which is gained and that which is lost in the jump from trace to trace – the former on the way down, the latter on the way up. Rather imagine two triangles, one fitted into the other: the base of the first, very large, gets smaller as one moves up to the acute angle at the top: that’s the loss; the second one, upside down in the first, gets progressively bigger from the point to the base: that’s the gain. If we want to represent the social, we have to get used to replacing all the double-click information transfers by cascades of transformations. To be sure, we’ll lose the perverted thrill of the megalomaniacs and the paranoiacs, but the gain will be worth the loss.
(…)
The more information spreads and the more we can track our attachments to others, since everywhere cables, forms, plugs, sensors, exchangers, translators, bridges, packets, modems, platforms and compilers become visible and expensive – with the price tag still attached to them. the reader will perhaps forgive us for our myopic obsession with the trails of traces“

About how to reveal the invisible and the role of this book:

“the visible is never in an isolated image or in something outside of images, but in the montage of images, a transformation of images, a cross-cutting view, a progression, a formatting, a networking.
(…)
In photos and text we’ve attempted to highlight the role of the countless intermediaries who participate in the coexistence of millions of Parisians. In the series of transformations that we followed with myopic obsession, we would have liked to have kept each step, each notch, each stage, so that the final result could never abolish, absorb or replace the series of humble mediators that alone give it its meaning and scope. “

Why do I blog this? The book is a very intriguing read for anyone interested in contemporary cities and their underlying activities/infrastructures. If you liked Italo Calvino’s “invisible cities”, that book written by Latour (with pictures from Emilie Hermant) is a must read. The notion of traces described here is very Latour-ian to some extent and it’s interesting how he uses it to describe what happens in a contemporary city such as Paris. What I find relevant here is this idea of “intermediaries” and the observation of the transformation he discusses.

If you’ve read Dan Hill’s post “The Street as a Platform”, that book is a theoretical exploration of the issue of technologies in city space. There is of course much more to draw from this book, which I will explore in following blogposts.

Weird post-it encounter in Puebla, Mexico last summer. On the street, looks as if it was a secret code of some sort.

Seen last week in Geneva, next to temporary constructions for immigrants.
What can we see here in this interesting “point of contact”
- almost all have the same orientation (= same channels? same cultural group of viewer?)
- they are grounded, do not at their regular position on the roof (= left here in a a hurry? not possible to climb to the roof)
- they are very close to the sidewalk where people pass by (low number of people passing here anyway)

Encountered this morning in Geneva.

The splatters of paint are actually gorgeous, as a sign to reveal a digital-physical friction

When it comes to mobility, people are in general mesmerized by Velib or Zipcar lately but there are there sorts of devices that I find very intriguing: aluminium scooters or K-2 Kickboard Scooter. Some people would argue that this for start-up pricks (because real value is in pure P&P skateboarding gear) or that it is childish and useless but I don’t think so. I don’t have any scooters but what I find interesting here is the notion of “micro-mobility” and the balance of cost: the cost to use the device is low (lower than unfolding the A-bike Adam gave me for instance). And it’s way cheaper than a Sidekick. Another characteristic is that it can be used indoor/outdoor.

Invented around 2000 by dutch/swiss banker Wim Outboter, these scooters are still very popular. His point at that time was to solve this concrete problem:

“When Wim was 30 years old and living in Zurich, he came across a problem. His favourite sausage shop was too far away to walk, yet not far away enough to take the car out of the garage. ‘I called it a microdistance,’ he says. ‘I made a primitive scooter using the wheels of some inline skates and it worked. The only problem was that when I went down town on it, people laughed at me.’ With his characteristic mixture of a kid’s desire to be cool and a grown-up’s application of technology, Wim worked at the scooter until it was small enough to hide in his backpack. It still took another 10 years (and the constant encouragement of his wife) to get the invention on the road.“

Why do I blog this? interest in less common means of transport and their implications in terms of design (of the device itself as well as the infrastructure to support it). Micro-mobility devices also seems to be a bit dismissed in the discourse about the future of mobility in urban environment, although scooters, lifts, elevators, electric sidewalks, etc are prominent in our everyday life. And high-rise architects surely have to deal with that.

Pneumatic tubes and networks (as the one described in Boris Vian’s novels) have always fascinated me. The name itself is gorgeous and it really looks like a strange vehicle. Although there are sometimes still use to transport cash and documents (transparent supermarkets pneumatics are intriguing), their usage has often stop or led to new possibilities: using tubes to put optic fibers to serve as internet infrastructure OR use both technology and pneumatic to vehicle paper documents which still matters in the 21st century.

Also of interest is the mapping of pneumatic networks, see for instance the Paris network as shown in this article:

Why do I blog this? What is interesting here is not that you can get web-based remote control of an electro-pneumatic (nor the impact on net neutrality) but rather the existence and sometimes the resilience of this communication network. An old version of the “city of flow” sort-of.

The other day I mentioned this short article I wrote in JCDecaux trend report. It was about how skateboarders “read” space, make decision about where they do skateboard or to hang out with peers. In a sense, it’s about “social navigation” and what sort of “footprints in the snow” matter for skateboarders. I dug up some examples from my city ventures below.

Choosing a skateboard spot according to the physical aspect of the place

For instance, in Niteroi (Brasil), that curved sidewalk is definitely an invitation to skate it:

This bench in Zürich (Switzerland) is also an obvious point of interest (from the physical point of view) but the presence of wax also attests that OTHERS are using it as a spot. The place can also be more than a physical spot as the presence of wax indicates it marking by a community. It reveals the appropriation by a click of skateboarders (and the likelihood to find them here on saturday afternoon)

Skatespot approval or how places are validated for certain activities

This “thumb-up” stickers found in front the of the University of Geneva indicates the approval of the spot by a community of skater (in that case a local shop/community):

Skateboard map

The usual paper map, for example in Lyon (France) found in a shop called Wallstreet, that depicts interesting spots to do skateboarding:

And of course, there is an on-line/participatory version, named freeyourspot, see the example of London (which not really reveal about skateboarding potential there):

Why do I blog this? of course one could use lots of other examples but I find skateboarders a very interesting target group to study spatial behavior, and how they use various techniques (from wax to participatory websites or cell phones). In this post, I tried to update some examples of how skateboarders read/navigate in space.

I find them really interesting examples IMHO of what some would refer to as “situated technologies”.

Some tough but relevant issues presented in Backbone about how technology help solve the problems of city dwellers (”Or even just tell them when a bus is coming?). An excerpt that is particularly strong (about a Microsoft urban computing project)

“ So what impact does this sort of thing really have on a city?
Not much, according to Austin Williams, technical editor of the Architects’ Journal and director of Future Cities, a forum that critically explores city issues. Williams, who calls such technology-driven projects indulgent, points to more urgent urban problems awaiting solutions, such as the loss of social connections between city dwellers. “The people who are inventing these technologies are creations of this fragmented society. They don’t want to have a hard argument. You need a proper political analysis,” he said. “A lot of these things are public art projects. It relates to people on an individual emotional level rather than on a group political level.”
(…)
What irks Williams could be the sense of playfulness in many of these urban computing projects, which is at odds with the hardheaded policy building that is the mainstay of think tanks like Future Cities. But playfulness lies at the centre of Eric Paulos’ work. (…) A trash can that regurgitates its own garbage. Cute, but how useful is it? “You can look at some of the things you do as being efficient and productive and getting things done, while some things are about wondering and reflecting and daydreaming,” Paulos said. “I am fearful that ‘city’ plus ‘technology’ equates to Wi-Fi cafés. [It should be] more about letting us radically rethink what’s possible.” “

Why do I blog this? a very interesting and critical discussion of urban computing form different angles. Especially about the techno-driven argument. That said, I am not sure it’s efficient to oppose two tracks (politics/instrumentality versus art/emotional/playful) in such a caricatural way. There are big problems but instrumentality is always relevant, and some urban computing projects tackle them as well.

Also there is this interesting issue in the conclusion:

“ Pollution sensors bluejacked the Bluetooth radio interfaces of nearby cell-phones with unsolicited information and Web links on pollution levels in the surrounding area. (…) because people walk quickly through city streets, by the time the device set up a connection with a nearby phone, most people had already walked out of range, eager to reach their destination. And that is a reminder for urban technologists: the biggest challenge of all is to keep pace with a fast-moving and multitasking population.“