John’s vision 4
EXTRACT LOCALITY
[…]
Resource Ecologies
Most of us are potentially both users and suppliers of resources. With networked communications we can access and use everything from a car to a portable drill, only when we need it. The average power drill is used for ten minutes in its entire life. Most cars stand idle 90 percent of the time. The principle of “use, not own” can apply to all kinds of hardware: buildings, roads, vehicles, offices. For more or less anything heavy and fixed, we don’t have to own it—just know how and where to find it when we need it. Imagine there’s a kind of slider on your phone. You set it to “sandwich” and “within five minutes walk” and you use those search parameters (ideally including a real-time customer rating system) to grab a bite to eat. You don’t need to go far to get fed; you just need to know how to find what you want to eat.
If the postspectacular city is to be well endowed with social capital, then the most useful use of location-aware communication devices is probably to enable person-to-person encounters. Marko Athisaari, a future-gazer at Nokia, says that enabling proximity—getting people together in real space—is a strategic focus for his company. “Mobile telephony might seem very much to do with being apart, but proximity is one of the killer applications of wireless communications,” he says.
Infrastructure
Could mobile phones do for cities now what parks used to do? It looks as if the two could help each other. When a group called New York Wireless identified more than twelve thousand wireless access hot points in Manhattan alone and put their location on a website, the result was a new layer of infrastructure, says cofounder Anthony Townsend of New York University’s Taub Urban Research Center. “But no streets were torn up. No laws were passed. This network has been made possible by the proliferation of ever more affordable wireless routers and networking devices.” A “wireless park” soon followed. Bryant Park became the first park to install a dedicated system that provides coverage throughout its entire footprint.
This period in the history of infrastructure resembles the time, at the end of the nineteenth century, when electricity was the great new technology of the moment. Then, too, the private sector electrified major population centers—but left most of America, which was harder and more expensive to reach, in the dark. Recognizing that electrification was critical to their economic development, thousands of communities that were not large or profitable enough to attract private power companies created their own electric utilities. As Jim Baller, a U.S. expert on municipal wireless, has written: “Most of these communities found that they could provide for their own needs better and at far lower cost than the private sector could or was willing to do.” Today, approximately two thousand public power systems continue to exist and thrive in the United States, providing, says Baller, significantly better service at substantially lower prices than investor-owned utilities provide.
Many municipalities are considering providing free broadband communication access access in much the same way that they provide free roads and town squares. Brussels, for example, has deployed twenty of these so-called hotspots (zones in which one can access the Internet wirelessly from one’s computer) as part of a larger project to bring broadband access to the entire city. (Some policymakers in Belgium want to make train travel free, too.) New York City Council has also embarked on a sweeping change in the way the city buys and utilizes telecommunications services on the principle that high-quality wireless communications have become one of the ways people evaluate the technical quality of a city’s infrastructures. Even tiny Bhutan, a kingdom in the Himalayas, has completed a pilot project to use wireless and Internet-based voice telephony technologies to deliver communications services to rural areas.
According to the group Wireless Commons, “A global wireless network is within our grasp.” Wireless Commons has been founded to accelerate the spread of community-based, unlicensed wireless broadband initiatives. The group says that low-cost wireless networking equipment, which can operate in unlicensed bands of the spectrum, bridges one of the few remaining gaps in universal communication: “Suddenly, ordinary people have the means to create a network independent of any physical constraint except distance.” (Esme Vos, editor of MuniWireless.com, a website that provides “reports on municipal wireless and broadband projects,” says it can cost a town of four thousand people as little as twenty thousand dollars to deploy a wireless network.) “Technical problems are the least of our worries,” says Wireless Commons; “the business, political and social issues are the real challenges facing community networks.” Hardware and software vendors need to understand the business rationale for implementing open technical solutions. Politicians need to understand why universal access to open spectrum is important. Citizens need to understand that the network exists and how to get access.
Much of the world’s GDP is highly localized. Local conditions, local trading patterns, local networks, local skills, and local culture remain a critical success factor for the majority of economic activity in the world. Especially if we steer them in that direction, mediascapes can improve the resource efficiency of the places we live in.
Big business is already using mediascapes to shape the evolution of localities. Locational data and demographic models are used by Starbucks and McDonald’s to site new stories. Huge volumes of point-of-sale information are mined to help firms like WalMart tune the placement of wares, even inside stores. My proposition is this: The same software and data that enable WalMart to locate its huge stores can be repurposed to optimize local-area service ecologies. Flows of resources can be shaped that minimize the movement of people and goods. New parameters can be introduced into open planning systems—for example, that 50 percent of produce in a shop or railway station should be local or have traveled no more than fifty kilometers from where it was grown.
Local-area service ecologies can be further enhanced by referral and ratings systems. Position index databases, social navigation, quick messaging, local polling on hand-held or worn devices: All these have the capacity to add dynamism and lightness to economic life in a locality. A similar approach could optimize the siting of decentralized educational facilities, too.
As with networks and infrastructure, so too with localities: Too much of our world is just too designed. Too much control over public space is detrimental to the innovation upon which our future fortunes depend. It is welcome to note, therefore, that several European cities are contemplating the protection of design-free situations, or free zones, in which planning and other top-down, outside-in improvements will be kept at bay to make space for the kinds of experimentation that can emerge, unplanned and unexpected, from wild, design-free ground.
It’s tough for planners to embrace a phenomenon that flourishes because it is not planned, and free-zone promoters face tough opposition from health and safety officials, who hate the idea of places outside their well-meant control. (Tickets for the Burning Man Festival in Arizona include the disclaimer that the buyer may suffer injury or death.)
An even more free-form approach to urban design that has flourished in a situation in which the state was collapsing is taken in a project called Wild City: Urban Genetics. A group of designers called Stealth has undertaken street-level research in Belgrade over a number of years. The city experienced an abrupt change from centralized to atomized growth as the result of a decade of crisis and a United Nations embargo in 1992. As the state and its institutions collapsed, individual initiative led to innovation in literally every urban domain, from commerce to housing production and public services. The new, nonregulated structure that emerged flooded the public realm and, in the designers’ words, “superimposed a layer of mutants on the existing city.” Mapping the interactions between nonregulated processes (street traders moving into spaces vacated by defunct official businesses) and existing city fabrics (the green market or a department store), Stealth has developed tools to map actors and forces that previously did not figure in urban design notation.
This research into urban genetics focuses on the evolutionary, time-based character of nonregulated transformations. It is a practice of discovering the inherent logic of emergent processes, based on the assumption that the result is often more sophisticated than a conventionally designed one. Through this experiment, a set of tools and a specific methodology have been experimentally developed for visualizing, monitoring, and to a certain extent, predicting spatial and organizational changes over time. Stealth’s objective, in the longer term, is “to point out the undiscovered potentials of specific locations.” As the Wild City researchers put it, the city itself acts like a wild garden, as an “incubator of new urban forms. The paradigm of ‘wildness’ emerged through non-planned and scarcely regulated processes. In the urban domain, these processes feature a remarkable degree of innovation. They lead to possibilities for redefining institutional participation in the creation of urban space.” Wild City provides empirical evidence that an adapt-and-provide focus on the adaptation of existing infrastructures to serve new purposes can work.
Comprar Plano B na Livraria Cultura