 |
| Accessing the digital layers ... networked urbanism is ruining our posture! |
Recently, Sophia and I took a group of 25 urban geography students on a field trip in the Central Business District of Sydney, designed to examine various ways in which the digital and the urban are coming together.
We based the field trip on the 'Systems/Layers Walkshop' concept designed by Nurri Kim and Adam Greenfield for Do Projects. Nurri and Adam have produced a
fantastic booklet that can be used to help prepare for such an exercise, based on their experiences of running these 'walkshops' in a number of cities.
The purpose of the walkshop is to develop a better understanding of networked urbanism and its implications. To quote from their booklet:
We live in an age in which the form of cities, the ways in which we experience them, and the choices they present us with are all in the process of profound and rapid change, driven by the
presence of networked information-processing systems everywhere around us. Mobile phones, CCTV cameras, building-scale displays, embedded sensors, and remotely-operated barriers are all part of this
transformation. Between them, these systems superimpose a layer of information on top of the physical bricks and paths of the city, and this is increasingly a place where control over space and behavior can be
exerted.
We believe that understanding this layer, the systems that make it up, and its implications for the freedom to move and act is vital to full citizenship in the congested, contested urban spaces of
the twenty-first century.
And so, the walkshop is a tool to develop this understanding of layers and systems, and to generate discussion about their implications. This is what you do:
What you’re going to be looking for are appearances of the networked digital in the physical, and vice versa:
apertures through which the things that happen in the real world are gathered up by the global informational network, and contexts in which information originating on the network affects what people see, confront and are able to do.
Places where information is being collected.
Places where information is being displayed.
Places where networked information is being acted upon.
I also asked the participants to read Dan Hill's wonderful essay on '
The Street as Platform' in preparation for the day.
We focused our attention on a couple of relatively small areas in the Central Business District. For those who know Sydney, here's how we rolled...
We started at Central Station, where we had a talk from two people from the City of Sydney about their
Food Truck program and mobile app.
We then caught a train from Central Station to Circular Quay, for a walk around followed by a talk from the folks at
Skedgo, who are responsible for the real-time public transport app TripGo.
After a break for lunch, we then caught a train back to Town Hall Station, and broke up into small groups to explore the terrain between Town Hall and St James Station on foot. We reconvened as a large group to report back on our small group observations and reflect on the day.
Here's a quick report on what we saw and what we learnt, and some reflections on the experience.
