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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Thanks to Wi-Fi networks, cellphones and global positioning locators, there's a new sense of place in the city.
Nov 29, 2004 | In November 2003, New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger penned a diatribe in Metropolis magazine against the isolation and dissolution of place wrought by the pervasive use of cellphones on city streets. "The mobile phone renders a public place less public," he wrote. "It turns the boulevardier into a sequestered individual, the flâneur into a figure of privacy. And suddenly the meaning of the street as a public place has been hugely diminished."
Goldberger's critique of mobile communications technology capped over a decade of analysis revolving around the ability of global communications networks -- for better and for worse -- to release people from the constraints of time and place. "The post-information age will remove the limitations of geography," wrote Nicholas Negroponte in "Being Digital." "Digital living will depend less and less on being in a specific place at a specific time." In "Pandemonium," Lars Lerup, dean of the architecture school at Rice University, proclaimed: "The bandwidth has replaced the boulevard."
Actually, it didn't. Virtual reality as a substitute for reality? That kind of thinking is, well, so very yesterday. With a new generation of wireless devices, GPS (global positioning system) locators and ubiquitous networking, future gazers claim, digital space will simply add another dimension to physical space, especially as technology continues to penetrate what sociologist Ray Oldenberg has famously described as "third places": the communal public spaces where people interact with friends or strangers.
So-called "urban computing" means much more than bringing your Centrino laptop to Starbucks and logging on to Amazon.com. Instead, cutting-edge mobile and wireless services emphasize proximity over connectivity, the local over the global and the here and now rather than anytime, anywhere. Computer geeks suddenly turned urban theorists, many of today's technologists harbor even loftier goals for mobile research agendas: to enhance the image of the city itself -- the patterns, the complexities and, above all, the sheer serendipity of the urban landscape.
"People talk about mobile computing as now you'll be able to leave your home and go to a cafe or park and maybe go online and check e-mail," says Eric Paulos, lead researcher at Intel's Urban Atmospheres project in Berkeley, Calif., a program designed to explore technology's potential to augment and enhance the urban experience. "But we're interested in something much bigger than that. We're interested in the social cues that people already perform in urban spaces, in the artifacts that already exist, like trash cans, park benches, and how they will be mapped or reappropriated into a playful network of digital life on the streets."
Call it the "new new urbanism," a fusion of telecommunications technology and urban design that is at once a 21st century zeitgeist and a familiar riff on the age-old interface between cities and technology. "From an urban design perspective, a lot of technologists are just discovering public space," says Dennis Frenchman, chairman of the master of city planning program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's an old story that goes back hundreds of years." A consultant on Seoul's Digital Media City, Frenchman himself is part of a very new story. The DMC will incorporate all-digital signage, with programming capacity accessible to the public, personal positioning services, intelligent street lamps and transparent storefronts that will reveal a building's inner uses as well as real-time Web feeds from sister cities.
The overall purpose of the DMC design, Frenchman says, is to infuse life on the street with multiple layers of meaning. "We're in a transitional moment," he hastens to add. "Huge kinds of things are happening."
