Rather than trying to continue the level of output we’d been keeping up, I’m going to be trying something a little unusual, which is putting the practice per se on pause for an indefinite period while I concentrate on finishing The City Is Here For You To Use. The book has gone through a lot of changes since I first announced my intention to publish it, way back at the beginning of 2008, and while I think it will unquestionably be better and more useful for having matured over this extended period, it really does demand my total attention now. Demands my attention, that is, in a way that’s inconsistent with the realities of running a client-service business honorably and with a focus on detail.

We’ve wrapped up work on all the projects we had in the shop, shipped our final outstanding deliverable, and will be putting things in hibernation until such time as I am once again free to pursue active design and development work. This is certainly a strategy with its share of risks, but ultimately I think it’s the best way of fulfilling my obligations to the book, to the people who have already invested in its appearance, and to the networked cities and citizens I care about so passionately. (I am continuing to take on a limited number of public-speaking engagements, so as ever you should feel free to get in touch if this is of interest to you.)

I want to thank Mayo, Jeff, Leah and J.D. for their talent and fervor; our collaborators Ryan Sullivan, Benedetta Piantella, Justin Downs and Todd Bailey for theirs; and everyone who’s responded to what we’ve been trying to do with such enthusiasm and love for that wonderful and truly affirmative energy. This includes each and every one of you who have followed our weeknotes, reposted our essays and videos, come to our FRIDAYS AT 7 events and, yes, sported our stickers.

For my own part, I would encourage you to think of this not as a departure, but as a shift into a different mode of investigation. The mission is a very long way from completion, there are many loads left to lift, and miles to go before we sleep. Take care and stay in touch.

» You may well have heard of the boneheaded stunt a marketing agency pulled at the South by Southwest Interactive festival last week, in which members of Austin’s homeless population were pressed into service (OK: “recruited”) as walking, talking wireless hotspots.

I’m going to go out on a limb and advance the opinion that this is not inherently an obscene idea. Once a society is prepared to tolerate the genuine obscenity — which is the human cost incurred whenever and wherever a market unimpeded by wisdom or mercy forces people to fend entirely for themselves — you’d pretty much better offer the worst-off a few ways to keep their nostrils above the waterline. In this light, the notion of furnishing homeless people with something of inherent value, network access, that they can both use themselves and exchange for cash money is not terrible.

Had this been executed properly, it would have been no more troubling, at its core, than the street-paper business model that was its direct inspiration. It would have some resonances with the Indian-inspired alternative model of service delivery Anab Jain discussed in her Urban Lenses session at PICNIC 2010, bringing the network-wallah to American streets. I can even see circumstances under which such a scheme would underwrite the dignity and autonomy of those choosing to participate in it — if, that is, I thought for even a bright moment that the creative sparks responsible for conceiving Homeless Hotspots had anything as un-buzz-generative as dignity or autonomy in mind.

We’re skeptical because so much of the program’s design-in-detail seems bound to dehumanize the people giving life to it. And even if this does not ultimately turn out to have resulted from a massive failure of empathy on the part of the designers, well, the purpose of a system is what it does.

For example, participants were required to wear t-shirts saying “I’m [e.g.] Clarence, a 4G Hotspot“; the inclusion of the first name here reads to me like a disrespectful diminution, rather than the personalizing touch it was most likely intended to be. Worse still was that the privileged conference-goers making use of the hotspots were asked to consider a “donation,” rather than making a fair exchange of money for value received. Finally, insult to injury: the program was launched during a week when much of Austin was mourning the death of local character Leslie Cochran, a street person flamboyant and ubiquitous enough to have become a fixture even among that cohort that only visits town for SxSW.

Let’s be clear, then, that we think the harsh reception Homeless Hotspots met with was entirely deserved. But it’s also kind of a shame. Within the limitations of the neoliberal city, it’s nothing if not a creative (“innovative”) application of the existing toolkit. Further, there’s a cleverness in the concept that is not incompatible with the notion of using networked information technology to forge new, surprising and mutually-valued human relations in the city. The yawning gap between that end and the hot mess the people of Austin were actually offered reinscribes the first and last lesson of urban-systems design, which is that details matter.

It’s the details that determine how actors can form links with one another, or fail to. It’s the little granular greebly surface bits of the things we design that condition what other frameworks they can plug into, what behavior they make possible, what potentials they actualize.

And that brings us to the other teapot tempest that’s been on our minds this week…

» It’s always interesting to see a more-or-less mainstream media outlet focus its attention on issues “in our wheelhouse,” to use the parlance of our times. The latest such that’s popped up on our radar is Talking Points Memo — a well-known American political site that I’d judge center-left by US standards, and center-right by any sane ones — which has recently been trying to extend its brand into the science and technology space.

As part of this push, TPM has shown a great deal of interest in the results of the somewhat notorious annual skyscraper-design competition run since 2006 by “architecture and design journal” eVolo. (In fact, TPM lavished rather a lot of attention on this competition — as far as I can tell, more than they did to any non-party-political matter unfolding over the same interval. Here’s a post in the site’s main column by site founder and lead editor Josh Marshall; here’s another six days later, by associate editor Paul Werdel, and here’s a separate, high-profile slideshow that was merchandised in modules on the bottom and side of the front page.) The troubling thing is that the site repeatedly characterized the subject of these renderings as “visions of our urban future.”

No. These are:

- Static pictures…
- …of fantasy buildings (i.e. precisely not cities)…
- …that are completely detached from contemporary (or any reasonably foreseeable near-future) materials engineering possibility…
- …that make no reference to any real-world economic, political, practical or moral constraints on land acquisition and development…
- …that at best wave a hand at the social relations they embody, extend, or make possible, and at worst appear to deny any necessity for or possibility of human inhabitation…
- …that were produced as part of eVolo’s cynical, pay-for-play promotion, something that has always struck me as more about revenue generation than the advancement of visionary architecture.

It straight-up mystifies me as to why a media outlet presumably interested in establishing its bona fides in a new field of coverage would want to lend its hard-won imprimatur to everything implied by the above description.

What’s our beef here? Mostly, it’s the act of dual normalization performed, doubtless inadvertently, by TPM’s framing of the competition and its winning entries. In labeling these posts “2012 Skyscraper Competition,” Talking Points Memo is implying that this is the annual such competition, and therefore worthy of your attention, not merely (with all due respect to the many talented entrants) a rather marginal and contested exercise that’s not taken seriously by any architect I know. And by characterizing these as “visions of our urban future,” Marshall and his writers are telling us — again, almost certainly without thinking very deeply about it — that urban progress has something to do with ever-more-ambitious conquests of the vertical. Hark unto the experts, they seem to be saying, whose visionary vision-y visions will show us the shape of tomorrow today. And boy howdy, that shape is up.

As it happens, any “urban future” I’d want to be a part of isn’t about experts and their visions at all, but would concern the creation and long-term sustenance of architectures of participation. With the exception of the justificatory apparatus around the (formally hackneyed and even played-out) Honorable Mention, it’s frankly hard for me to find gestures at anything resembling this among the eVolo competition winners. In this light, however unwitting it is, the ideological work performed by the TPM posts is precisely the kind of policing of the discourse that the site’s writers and editors would recognize in a heartbeat in the party-political sphere.

In the end, the question I lodge against Homeless Hotspots and eVolo’s skyscaper pr0n is the same — is, in fact, the same I ask of all provocations, prototypes and “design fictions”: what specific, historical spaces, relations and experiences are they foreseeably likely to bring into being, for people and nonhuman participants both? As designers, what I believe we all need to develop is the courage to rework or even refuse projects that seem likely to generate further squalor, no matter how seductively bold the idea, how soaring the conceptual arc. And what I would ask of those making representations of designed artifacts in the broader media is the perspicacity to unpack the images you encounter, and determine which agendas they might serve, before granting them the aura of your approval.

» Logistics: In Copenhagen and Aarhus all week, for meetings with Gehl Architects, BIG, and the Aarhus city government. Back in NYC next Monday!

Let’s start with Scott. He contends that there are two fundamental ways of thinking about urban structuration, organization and development: one built around a rigorously-applied and essentially optical order, consecrated to the needs of administration — we might call this “watchfulness from above” — and the other dedicated to far messier organic processes that, in the fullness of time, give rise to “spontaneous order from below.” (Scott identifies these modes with Le Corbusier and Jane Jacobs, respectively.)

In my talk, I argue that almost all widely-promulgated contemporary visions of the so-called smart city — archetypically, the “intelligent operations center” IBM’s Smarter Cities group built for the city of Rio de Janeiro — conform closely to the former paradigm, and that this not merely recapitulates all of the blunders of high-modernist 20th Century urban planning practice (blunders now widely recognized as such), but squanders by far the greater share of the actual value that inheres in the data we produce in the course of living the city.

Both because it’s, so far, the overwhelmingly dominant tendency in the domain, and because it is after all what I’m setting out to critique, I furnish plenty of concrete examples of this marked preference for centralized, top-down schemas, rhetorical, imagined and deployed.

This part of the talk feels a lot like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel, frankly. Like psychoanalyzing a subject who hasn’t learned to dissemble or sugarcoat his or her desires yet, let alone sublimate them, it’s all right there on the surface; a quick trawl through the promotional material generated by usual suspects IBM, Cisco and Siemens throws up dozens of passages in which enlightened administrators use “autonomous systems” to “anticipate problems and…manage growth and development,” where technology is used to “optimally regulate and control” “occupant support and convenience systems” (!) and “perfect knowledge” is invariably deployed for the benefit of “decision makers” rather than ordinary citizens.

This is rhetoric, but it’s an accurate reflection of a set of circumstances in which citizens generate data in the course of their everyday activities, the analysis of which is used to furnish administrators with improved situational oversight. I hope it’s obvious by now that Urbanscale’s entire raison d’être is returning the value bound up in that data to the people who, after all, produce it in the first place. And given that I’m asking people to imagine alternatives to the dominant paradigm, I think it’s entirely fair when they ask me for actual examples of the kind of thing I’d like to see more of: technical systems in which value is both produced from the bottom up and primarily returned to the parties responsible for its production.

I have a big, concrete, obvious answer, and it may surprise you. It’s Foursquare.

Yep: Foursquare, the popular location-based mobile social application. If you’re not familiar with it, Foursquare allows its users to register their presence at (“check into”) commercial venues and other real-world locations, and earn a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for doing so. Check into enough venues of a particular sort — airports, or bakeries, or Korean restaurants — and you earn a rather charmingly-designed “badge” recognizing your predilection. Check into a single venue more often than anyone else, and you’ll find yourself that place’s “mayor,” earning your profile a little crown icon in the process.

There’s plenty of stuff in the Foursquare interface — the point tallies and leader boards, primarily — that’s almost entirely irrelevant to me, that I tend to view as so much cruft (though I do acknowledge that these features may be of value to others). What Foursquare gets right, though, it gets very right. In particular, it manages to encourage two almost diametrically-opposite behaviors that, between them, open up a great deal of the experiential richness and depth any city has to offer: the badge mechanic drives exploration, while the mayor mechanic incentivizes repeated custom.

If, like me, you’re the kind of person for whom home and all its psychic and material comforts represents an all-but-inescapable gravity well, and for whom a nudge out the door is more than occasionally useful, the incentive mechanics built into Foursquare are a godsend. Engage them even slightly, and the odds are that you’ll wind up going out more often, to more different places, and spending more time at your favorite places, developing a broader spread of experiences and enriching your first-hand knowledge of what the place you live in has to offer. In my book, that’s a reasonable approach to living urban life to its fullest.

Let’s be crystal-clear that I don’t believe Foursquare in itself is or can be a panacea for shallow engagement with place. I’d never make what amounts to the vulgar-Marxist mistake of assuming that because someone’s earned the mayorship of this or that venue, he or she has necessarily made the most of their visits. But the strong likelihood is that, should you land the tiny golden crown, you’ve had a deeper encounter (or series of encounters) with that place than would otherwise have been the case. In most reasonably-scaled venues, you’re most likely well on your way to becoming a recognized regular, a local. (I also want to point out that “mayorship” is cannily named, respectful of an older conception of neighborhood-scale localism. It’s a nice touch that I appreciate.)

There’s also invariably a performative aspect to Foursquare check-ins. I’m just as guilty of this as anyone — rarely declaring when I’m somewhere banal like Starbucks, for example, yet somehow never forgetting to mention the fact should I happen to find myself at, say, The Wing, Cathay Pacific’s lounge at HKG.

These quibbles aside, of all the networked urban systems I’m personally familiar with, Foursquare almost certainly generates more value, for more parties, in more different registers, than any other. From the perspective of a business owner, it rewards loyalty, drives custom, and produces actionable intelligence about that custom; through its generous API, it clarifies patterns of activity in time and space; from the perspective of a lover of cities, it gives rise to a kind of declarative flânerie that at its best transcends the performance of consumption.

We think Foursquare is a shining demonstration of our principle that cities are always already smart, that this smartness inheres in the currents of daily practice, and that significant value is realized when these patterns are brought to light. And it’s already up, already running at scale, and costs a municipality precisely zero. Both the heroic, top-down systems being urged upon municipalities by the big vendors and the claims made on their behalf seem pretty impoverished next to it, don’t they? What we’d really like to see, in preference to these desiccated notions of networked potential, is one, two, many Foursquares.

» Logistics: We’ll be ducking out early Thursday evening to see geographer Don Mitchell and activist Amador Fernández-Savater consider new conceptions of public space, in conversation at Parsons, and are looking forward to next week’s get-together with the folks from Grimshaw Architects; in the studio otherwise, largely for meetings with our friends at BBVA.

Compared to its flashier sisters among the great Asian capitals, Taipei feels like something of a well-kept secret. It’s relatively compact, easy to navigate, and favored with that particular kind of safety that encourages wandering and risk-taking. Its Metro is a joy to use, taxis are cheap, and in general getting around simply isn’t a problem. What’s more, the city is positively blessed with close-in amenities like the Beitou hot-springs district.

Curiously, many of the things we ourselves loved best about Taipei — the night markets, the texture of the sidestreets and alleyways, its impressively profound lack of large-scale commercial advertising — are apparently among those aspects of the city least valued by officialdom, the representatives of which invariably seemed surprised and even faintly embarrassed when we singled these elements out for praise.

Their reaction made me wonder how well these particularities — the elements, after all, which fundamentally distinguish one place from another, and which do so much to support the experiences that resonate and that you take away with you — will fare under the generic sort of smart-city strategy that seems sure to be implemented here. Having sat through a presentation from a functionary of the semi-official Institute for Information Industry that emblematized just about everything that’s wrong with contemporary Internet-of-things discourse as applied to cities, I have my doubts.

What struck me as so troublesome about it? The national strategy, at least as enunciated in this particular presentation, deploys a very impressive-sounding stack of mediating technologies in its conception of networked objects in everyday life, but essentially waves its hands at the two most crucial aspects of any such schema: the data feeding the stack from the bottom (which were here, as so often, presented as natural and unconstructed) and the applications at its top (which “developers will come up with” at some unspecified point in the future). None of this effort, mind you, driven by anything but the perceived necessity of keeping pace with the EU and Taiwan’s Asian competitors, and laying claim to some of the “USD 200B” in annual revenues projected to be generated by the market for IoT products and services by mid-decade. (The one aspect of the presentation that was actually helpful, although surely inadvertently, was its point-by-point comparison of Taiwan’s initiative to the similarly grandiose Chinese, Korean and Japanese national-level IoT strategies.)

If you’ve been paying close attention to the documents and other artifacts thrown up by this discourse, you’ll have noticed that they generally collapse the distinct notions of a developed cloud-computing infrastructure, an “Internet of things” and the transformation of everyday, but specifically urban, experience by networked informatics. There may be certain circumstances under which this effacement of details is warranted, but it doesn’t bode particularly well for those of us who are interested in ensuring that networked urbanism works at least as well and as smoothly as the naive city did before.

A concrete example: Taipei does offer a blanket of free public WiFi, a service called TPE-Free. But a critical design decision — the requirement that visitors to Taiwan register for access to the service in person by bringing their passport to one of a very few physical service centers — means that access to TPE-Free is effectively denied to one of the populations that most obviously stands to benefit from it.

At the most basic, hygienic level, can Taipei claim to offer free municipal wireless access? Yes. Does that mean it’s very useful, or returns to the city very much on the investment that was surely made in deploying it? Not necessarily. And the same goes triply for more elaborate deployments of networked informatics, situations in which the technology of connection is more intimately interwoven with the circumstances of everyday experience. If nothing else, history teaches us that getting this stuff right is difficult; planners are displaying an almost contemptuous disregard for that difficulty, the innate complexity of the urban terrain in general and the specific quiddities of each city, when they sketch out generic technical “solutions” and call it a day.

We think Taipei deserves better. We’d like to see a strategy for networked Taipei at least as clever and idiosyncratic as the city’s new crossing-signal character — a loping fella who seems like he might just be on his way to Ampelmannian status in the hearts of his countrymen. Judging from the folks we met, there’s both the desire for such a thing, and (abundantly) the local insight, talent and energy necessary to carry it off. There does also seem to be a fair amount of entirely justified skepticism that the national and local bodies charged with setting policy in this domain will make wiser choices than they have in the past. You know what they say, though: where the people lead, the leaders must follow.

Our hearty thanks to Ilya Lee for inviting us to Taiwan in the first place, to Xiao-Ling Lin and Ruby Yang for keeping everything flowing smoothly, and to Denny Tsai for introducing us around. A double-extra helping, as ever, is due to Ching-Yao Chen, because he’s awesome.

» Logistics: In the studio until we go wheels up for Copenhagen and Aarhus in the third week of the month. At last, some time to focus on New York and NYC-based projects.

» Midweek we shipped off the final documentation of the January workshop we held for BBVA’s Centro de Innovación, with our good friends Fabien Girardin and Nicolas Nova of Near Future Laboratory and young Mr. Slavin.

It’s been wonderful working with BBVA. If you’re interested in tracing the flows of matter, energy and information through a given place, not many things will give you a better handle on them than studying the patterns of financial transaction that obtain in that place. And of course, very few parties will have better visibility on these patterns than a bank with both retail and commercial offerings.

This kind of access is a tonic, let me tell you. Over the last half-decade or so, I’ve more than a few times been confronted with a frustrating inability to build some useful model or visualization of a situation, because the data required was simply out of reach — either it was held close by some recalcitrant gatekeeper or, just as likely, it straight up didn’t exist. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said something along the lines of “Imagine what we could show if we could only get” X or Y or Z dataset. The amazing thing about the BBVA engagement is that no such imaginary exercises are required: the answer to such queries is generally either, “Yeah, we’ve got that,” or at worst, “We can get that.”

The generous space of possibility this opens up has implications for one of the longer-term (rhetorical and practical) points we’re trying to make in our work. We believe, bluntly, that as far as the dynamic visualization of information is concerned, the era of “pretty pictures” is over, and that the time has come for institutions to use these methods more instrumentally, in roles as varied as prediction, decision support, argumentation and advocacy.

Of course, it’s a lot easier to make this argument on a foundation of visualizations with meaningful probative value, and the odds of building any such thing are immeasurably improved by access to robust and complete data sets. So saying that I’m looking forward to seeing what we’re able to develop with BBVA and the Near Future folks is something of an understatement.

» On the logistics front: this upcoming week we’ll be in Taipei for a series of events happening around the TELDAP 2012 conference. On the 22nd, with Nurri Kim and under the Do projects banner, I’ll be leading a Taipei Systems/Layers walkshop, and on the very next day, giving a talk at the Academia Sinica. But for a half-hour layover at the airport on my virgin visit to Asia (Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, April 1994), this will be my very first time in Taiwan, so — again — I’m super-excited.

» A little further out, upcoming keynotes include the Digital Urban Living Konference in Aarhus, Denmark, on the 22nd of March, followed by Where 2.0 in San Francisco, and one I’ve tentatively agreed to do at Open Data Eindhoven. The latter two are both in April — the San Francisco talk on the 4th and the Eindhoven event on the 20th. (I’m planning to be in Amsterdam a day or two either side of Eindhoven, so get in touch if you’re interested in e.g. Wijnand Fockink.)

» Keep an eye peeled for a post here showcasing some of the outstanding work our friend and colleague Ryan Sullivan did on iconography for Transitflow. We think this work goes a long way toward solving some really vexing problems in representing complex transit options for the mobile touchscreen, and we’re happy to be able to share it with you even independently of the context in which it originated.

» Finally, and on a not-entirely-unrelated note, I’ve been energized lately by the conversations we’ve been having with “social transit” provider Weeels about our doing some NYC-based work with them. Given our love for the city and our pride in representing it globally, New York has always been kind of an upsetting lacuna in our portfolio of projects, so the prospect of working on something we might actually get to experience as part of our own everyday life is just too enticing. I’ll keep you posted as these discussions evolve; until then, we’ll come back at you next week with a report from Taipei and whatever else crops up.

From the outset, I positioned Urbanscale as a hybrid proposition: a chimera forged of equal parts “visionary” consultancy, boutique design practice, and resolutely pragmatic development shop. The logic behind this was that, ideally, each one of these activities would inform the others, generating that all-important synergy, and ensuring that the whole would give rise to more value than the sum of its parts would imply. In practice, though, it’s become obvious that the diverging requirements implied by these different ways of approaching the world (and, particularly, of trying to offer full-scale technical development and integration for municipal clients, without losing focus on our other activities) pulls a studio of five people in too many conflicting directions.

This tension is in itself interesting, and it’s probably productive in a bunch of ways. But one in which it’s clearly not productive is the single way that happens to matter for a business enterprise, and that is financially. I’ve always been conscious of the fact that the studio was undercapitalized for the sort of projects our ambitions dictated we should be taking on. Equally — municipal bureaucracies being known neither for the rapidity of their decision-making or the transparency of their procurement processes — we understood that anyone playing in these particular fields had better be prepared to tolerate drawn-out negotiations and lead times that are often measured in years. We made a bet that our relatively high-margin consultancy activities would generate sufficient short-term revenue to support the other facets of the practice while our more ambitious and capital-intensive projects gestated. This was a hedged bet, but a bet nonetheless.

Unfortunately, it’s now clear that we’ve lost this bet, and there are consequences for the practice and its projects that I need to share with you. The most obvious, immediate and frustrating consequence is that we’re suspending development work on our Urbanflow and Transitflow projects indefinitely. There are also some implications for the way we’ll structure the studio and its ongoing activities. The best way to describe these changes would be to say that we’re reformulating the studio as a rather looser network of associates, who will continue to work on some projects together under the Urbanscale banner, and take on other opportunities as they present themselves.

None of this will affect our ongoing consultancy work in any way. We’ll continue to serve our existing clients, and (we certainly hope) take on new ones. I should also make it clear that we’re not abandoning the work we did on Urbanflow/Transitflow — if nothing else, we’ve generated a significant amount of code, cartographic and other assets, and we’re currently exploring ways we might return the value locked up in these to the City of Chicago and the broader open-source development community.

There’s a much longer post to be written about what we’ve learned by trying to bootstrap our way into municipal-scale production immediately, but the time for that consideration is a little later on, after I have enough distance to put things in their proper perspective. For now I’ll confine myself to noting that, in retrospect, a wiser course of action might have been to concentrate on producing the design fictions I tend to dislike so heartily, in the hopes of securing the longer-term institutional buy-in that might have led to more successful outcomes. (This may in fact be what’s in the process of happening with Urbanflow, given the spate of recent and favorably-received coverage, but only time will tell.) But, y’know, sometimes it’s hard to see past one’s ideological blinders, to say nothing of one’s own ego and ambition.

I want to thank the whole extended family — Mayo, Jeff, Leah and J.D., Nurri, Benedetta and Justin at GROUNDlab, ace coil man Todd Bailey and our West Coast co-conspirator Ryan Sullivan — for all of their hard work on our slate of projects over the past year. (Actually, what I really want to say is otsukaresama deshita, which is the customary way of thanking Japanese colleagues for a collective effort; ironically enough, I hated having these compulsory and merely performative-feeling ritual greetings expected of me when I actually lived and worked in Japan, but have come to miss having a handy figure of speech to acknowledge consciousness of the debt one owes to one’s coworkers and their diligence.)

A heartfelt otsukaresama deshita, then, to them and to those of you who did so much to support us during this never-anything-less-than-engaging process. As you might expect of us by now, we’ll be ringing the changes at Temple Bar tonight. I think we may even have one or two Year One t-shirts left, so bring cash if you’re inclined to pick on up. And I’ll check back in next week with some more thoughts on where we go from here.

» We’re reflecting on what we learned last week in Madrid with our old friends Fabien Girardin and Nicolas Nova of Near Future Laboratory (plus Kevin Slavin) and our new friends from BBVA’s Centro de Innovación. We were thrilled to be able to bring a different perspective to the work they’re doing, help them see how we combine data analysis with on-the-ground observational research in our practice, and suggest some new opportunities for their current explorations.

It was a short trip for us, so one of my personal highlights was the afternoon we spent observing transactions around Madrid – it was crisp and clear, the streets were bustling, and I feel like a I got a real (if tiny) glimpse at the life of the city. I think our presence helped the Madrid natives take advantage of their local knowledge while consciously considering the familiar locations as though they weren’t.

The trip wrapped with an evening of talks from Adam, Nicolas and Kevin (whose answer to a question from the audience prompted this from Leah), a lovely reception, and a rather fantastic Spanish dinner. We certainly hope to make it back again, soon.

» Transitflow is coming off the back-burner, as Mayo and I review the user experience and interface design work we’ve done thus far, taking advantage of the little bit of distance we’ve been able to get from the project to attack it with fresh eyes. J.D.’s rolling some of the codebase he’s built for our Urbanflow on iPad proof-of-concept back into Transitflow, so he’ll be ready to start implementing the UX solutions as we lock them down.

» Speaking of Urbanflow, we’re sorry to say that conversations about a Chicago implementation have drawn to an unsuccessful close. Despite the best intentions of a lot of smart people, the parties involved just couldn’t create the environment necessary to make it happen, and everybody walked away disappointed. But then, nobody ever said that bringing something truly innovative into the world was easy, and we remain optimistic about Urbanflow’s future in Chicago and elsewhere.

» We were thrilled to see a great writeup of Do projects‘s Safety Maps on Fast Co Design this week. Congrats to Nurri, Bloom’s Tom Carden, Stamen’s Michal Migurski, and Adam for that.

» In the background of all of the above, we’ve naturally been engaging in the business of running a business — thinking about ways to formalize some of our service offerings, developing concepts to add to the pipeline, and having interesting conversations with people with interesting problems to solve. Think you’re one of them? Get in touch, or if you happen to be in New York this week, drop by FRIDAYS AT 7.

» For the first time this week, the clocks on our new about page each did something useful – indicating where each of us was. With Adam, Leah, and Jeff in Madrid for the previously alluded-to workshop with BBVA, the studio has been emptier than usual this week. Adam, joined by Kevin Slavin and Nicolas Nova, also gave a free and open-to-the-public talk titled “Beyond Smart Cities” at BBVA’s Innovation Center last night.

» That left J.D. and I holding the fort back in New York – hustling for new business, shipping a proposal, and cranking away on some of the thornier interaction questions remaining for Transitflow.

Although the Farevalue prototype arrived in the studio more than a month ago, it’s taken us a little while to push a short video demonstrating its existence, functionality, and performance out of the door. Nonetheless, it’s exciting to be able to show definitive proof that the technical concept behind Farevalue – pronounced impossible and against the laws of physics less than a year ago – very much works.

Although clearly there’s space for optimization on the size of the actual electronics and components, the prototype does everything we could want it to do at this stage: the update of the e-paper display on the card is powered purely through induction from the coil on the base station, and the value on the display is decremented by the appropriate amount ($2.25, the cost of a single ride on NYC’s subway) – and if there isn’t sufficient value remaining on the card, the base station responds approriately. Thanks again to Justin and Benedetta at Groundlab, and Todd Bailey’s expert wrangling of the magic of induction coils, for creating this prototype for us.

It’s also highlighted the power of the two-pronged approach we’ve taken with Farevalue. With the combination of the design fiction and the technical development, we’ve been able to do a kind of pincer movement, prototyping the idea, vision, and execution on the one hand, and prototyping the technology, feasibility, and constraints on the other. Whether in presentations, or, more viscerally, when somebody visits the studio and gets to play with the prototype, the two parts together tell a greater story than either element alone could ever communicate.

» Logistics: Next week Adam is speaking at Deloitte GovLab’s Future of Transportation event in DC, while the rest of us will be in the studio all week, working away. If you’re in town, why don’t you swing by for a visit? Failing that, there’s always Temple Bar – do join us for a drink, and perhaps a t-shirt?

» Aside from helping Jeff with the site, Mayo has been putting the finishing touches on a video demonstrating our Farevalue/PERRY prototype; look for that video soon. For my part, I’m spending the week polishing our Urbanflow iPad demo, and then I’m back into Transitflow.

» Leah, Jeff and Adam are headed to Madrid on Sunday to conduct a spatial data analysis workshop for Spanish bank BBVA, and they have been heads-down all this week preparing for that. (Every time I glance over Leah’s shoulder, I see some new work of cartographic beauty, so I trust those preparations are going smoothly.) While in Madrid, Adam will be joining Kevin Slavin and Nicolas Nova for a free, public discussion on the 18th of January, under the rubric “Beyond Smart Cities.” The team also hopes to be given a tour of Madrid RIO, a linear amenity that does the High Line one better by converting a several-kilometer stretch of the M-30 ring road into parkland.

» Coming up the following week, Adam will be catching an Acela down to DC to participate in a summit on the Future of Transportation sponsored by Deloitte’s GovLab. It’s a wonderful opportunity to share our vision of transmobility with some of the sector’s most thoughtful, experienced and influential people.

» A bit further out, Leah’s work will be featured in an upcoming show at MoMA entitled Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. You can read about the design process behind the show here. Foreclosed opens February 15th.

» Logistics: Mayo and I will be holding down the fort on Centre Street next week while Leah, Jeff and Adam are in Madrid. Do drop by the studio and say hi. As ever, you can find us at Temple Bar for FRIDAYS AT 7. We’ll have Urbanscale Year One t-shirts for purchase, so bring cash if you’d like one.

When I say the word city, what’s the first thing you think of?

For most of us, I’d wager, the word conjures up images of things that are for the most part just that: things, physical facts. Judging from the friends, students and total strangers of whom I ask this question, anyway, our initial impressions tend to be oddly static dioramas, mute arrays of buildings and streets and sidewalks; only after a moment, if at all, do we remember the unceasing flows of people that animate a place and make it what it is. And this is likely to be true whether our first thought happens to be of Grand Central Station, Shibuya crossing, the choked streets of Lagos or the markets of Bangkok.

Two lenses, then. Through one, the city is coextensive with its stones and monuments, more or less independent of the acts that take place among them; through the other, it’s nothing other than the sum of those acts. If you’re like me, you may be disposed to think that one of these two ways of describing a place has by far the deeper claim on truth — and it isn’t the former.

So what are we to make of the invisible electromagnetic sleet that attends any human place, this pulsing cloud of signal that threatens to exhaust my store of metaphors and which it’s already half a cliché to discuss? Doesn’t any consideration of this belong to the city of stones?

Well, maybe. Just maybe, if the inquiry is confined to the physics of signal absorption in densely built-up areas, the differentials of attenuation in concrete and brick. But even there, the all-too-human isn’t far beneath the surface. Because literally anything beyond the very simplest question in the domain — whether we’re concerned with the placement of relays to ensure line-of-sight propagation or the politics of spectrum allocation — is bound to invoke the presence of human actors and institutions, our values and our priorities. We’re always already present in the Hertzian city.

And inevitably, no matter how ghostly or immaterial it may be, the veil of electromagnetic traffic that suffuses a city is going to have implications for the visible behavior of the people in it — interestingly enough, in ways that diminish the relative significance of the built environment. Any close observer of human behavior in the contemporary city will have noticed that our decisions are no longer informed entirely, or even predominantly, by our physical surroundings. The quality which now conditions choice and action belongs primarily to the region of the electromagnetic spectrum that lies roughly between 3 MHz and 64 GHz: the domain of microwave transmissions, mobile telephony, and WiFi networks.

If you doubt the claim to determinism here, you need go no further than the nearest busy sidewalk to garner evidence in its favor. Note how many of the people you see are quite literally receiving instructions from the aether. How many of them are turning at this corner because that’s what Google’s walking directions specified? How many are following some gradient of ostensible hipness dictated by a social-location service? And how many are about to step heedlessly into traffic, because they’re more present in the nonplace of their phone conversation than they are in the onrushing here and now?

Watch what happens at any subway entrance, any time a train comes in, as passengers emerge from the signal-free purgatory of the underground and immediately reestablish their presence on the network. Observe the behavior of workers leaving an office building at the end of the day, as they say their goodbyes to their colleagues and don headsets for the journey home.

Now compare what you see to William H. Whyte’s classic time-and-motion studies of the Midtown Manhattan of the 1980s, collected in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Spend even a few minutes watching Whyte’s video — you can find it on Vimeo, if you’re so inclined, stream it to your phone as you walk down the street — and you cannot help but notice how differently people once lived the city, and not so very long ago.

Before pulling the dense shroud of connectivity over ourselves and our cities, people used to be co-present, at least in potential. They were available to one another, in ways we’ve largely ceased to be, and it shaped their microbehavior in ten thousand unconscious ways, from the things they carried to the way they held their bodies and moved through space. We’re very close here to William Gibson’s observation that “some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.”

If you still doubt the thesis, you can simply pay close attention to the people headed back into the subway. In my talks, I very often tell the story of something I saw in Hong Kong over ten years ago now: a series of young women moving briskly through the turnstiles of the MTR, swinging their handbags in the air with balletic grace as they did so.

What were they doing? They were using the system’s RFID-equipped Octopus farecards — using them brilliantly and intuitively, but in a way that system’s architects had never foreseen.

These architects most likely imagined that people would use their cards in the conventional manner, by tapping the card neatly against a turnstile-mounted reader. At some point soon after the system’s introduction, however, one or another canny passenger obviously figured out that they didn’t have to do this: because the reader was powerful enough to acquire and read an antenna tens of centimeters away, even through layers of fabric, they could leave the card wherever it was most convenient for them, and never have to fish it out at all.

The result wasn’t merely the elegant gesture I’d seen enacted time and again. Because the elaborate interaction between card and turnstile, turnstile and database, database and barrier had been compressed into the third of a second it might take someone to swing their handbag through a reader field, each one of the women I’d seen was able to move through the process of fare collection and into the subway without breaking her normal walking pace. And this, in turn, markedly improved the number of passengers the station could accommodate in a given period of time, what traffic-analysis engineers call “throughput.”

There turns out to be a surprisingly close coupling between parameters of a system’s technical operation and the kinds of behavior that arise in response to it, as I learned when I related this anecdote in the course of a talk I gave in Tokyo a year or so later. During the Q&A session, someone in the audience pointed out that one of that city’s major public transit systems, JR East, also offered its customers an RFID-based smartcard, called Suica…and yet he’d never seen women in Tokyo making the handbag gesture I’d described. And he asked the obvious question: Why not?

I had to confess that I didn’t know. As it turned out, though, someone in the audience that day did. As she explained it, the designers of the Suica system, acting out of concern over the long-term health implications of radio-frequency fields for human users, had deliberately lowered the power of their readers, and therefore abbreviated their system’s range. No range, no handbag ballet, and an entirely different rhythm at the turnstile.

And here we get to the crux of the issue: in both Hong Kong and Tokyo, the consequences of decisions made by engineers about the properties of a technical system operating in the electromagnetic spectrum cascaded upward not merely to the level at which they could afford or constrain individual behavior, but that at which they affected the macro-level performance of the entire subway system.

Similar things are true at the larger scale of social activity, as well. If “city people are constantly making and ‘unmaking’ places by talking about them,” as geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argues, and “[a] network of gossip can elevate one shop to prominence and consign another to oblivion,” how could it not matter that such communication now propagates across the urban fabric at the speed of light? The terms on which this “gossip” is conducted, its persistence and its domain of effect, have all been altered beyond recognition. What people are saying online, how they rate the businesses around them, which social networks the customers of those businesses happen to use — these are the things which now tell.

You don’t have to like what this all implies. Most days I myself do not. But if you care about cities and what people can do with them, you do need to understand what’s going on here:

The irritating guy with the popped collar standing next to you at the bar? He paid less for his G&T than you did, because he’s the Mayor of this place on Foursquare, and the management has cannily decreed Mayors get a 5% discount. Ten minutes from now, the place is going to fill up with his equally annoying buddies, absolutely ruining your hope of a quiet drink. And they’re going to show up not because he did so much as call them to tell them where he’d be, but because he’s got things set so his Foursquare account automatically posts to his Facebook page. Buddies of his that don’t even use Foursquare will come, to slouch at the bar, stab at their phones and try and figure out where the party’s going next.

You’ll settle up and leave, miffed, and ease on down the road a spell to a place you know where you can get a decent bowl of penne — nothing special, but good and hearty and cheap, and you’ll chase it with the big bouncy house red, and all will be well and right with the world. Except the Italian place is gone, gone because it racked up too many nasty reviews on Yelp, or somebody Googlebombed its listing, or its hundred healthcode violations made it positively radioactive on Everyblock.

Two years from now, these names will most likely be different. But the point will remain: if the technologies these services are built on are opaque to you, if you don’t know what they are and how they work, you’ll never have the foggiest clue why things shook out the way they did. Your evening will have a completely different shape and texture than what it would have prior to their advent. You’ll have been tossed this way and that by gusts and squalls blowing in a parallel dimension, whose sole physical trace is modulations of a signal imperceptible to the human sensorium.

Of course, you could just as easily argue that your evening out would have been inflected in all sorts of delightful ways by these prevailing winds. Either way, though: inflected it will be. The trouble is that these effects, which do so much to shape the experience of the contemporary urban environment, are produced by a series of institutional and individual actors with relatively little feel for the unique complications of that environment.

Put bluntly, engineers aren’t paid to care about high-quality urban experiences. They’re given a series of constraints — physical, technical and economic — and within these constraints they are responsible for devising an optimal solution. Requiring that the solution they arrive at be something that underwrites a congenial, humane environment is not generally among the criteria they are issued.

Worse, designers of informatic systems have tended to treat the ground on which their systems take effect as what Deleuze called “any-space-whatever”: an abstract, generic, unconditioned space at degree zero, containing infinite potentials for connection. But as more sensitive observers — I think of writers like Paul Dourish and Malcolm McCullough — take pains to point out, this can never be so. Space is always some particular space, technical systems are always given meaning by being situated in a specific locale and human community.

Meanwhile, the urbanists that might have supplied technologists with vital corrective insight have tended to be far from the cutting edge of technical development, in their turn unfamiliar with the impact of things like mobile phone use on cities and their users. As urbanist discourse has embraced ideas like transit-oriented development, traffic calming and urban wetlands, it has lacked any account of the ways in which the behavior of people in cities has changed over the past quarter-century, largely due to the influence of the technologies we’ve discussed. All of these things, to be sure, are entirely laudable ends to work toward…but none of them does a damn thing to respond to the novel circumstances we now find ourselves in, as residents and users of cities.

What we need now, acutely, is a generation of technologists who understand the texture and nuance of city life, and, in parallel, a generation of urbanists with some nous for the technologies that now do so much to shape that life. Perhaps together, they can offer us a third and unifying lens, a lens through which the city of stones and the city as lived can be seen to be one and the same place.