In the research that I’ve done connecting the history of ideas with respect to modern economics, modern urban form, and modern urban youth cultural production and reproduction, I’ve had to bring together several disciplines to animate a single narrative. In academia however, there’s still something of a reticence to remix culture when dealing with disciplines, so it’s been tricky. That having been said, kudos to my local university library for ordering a book that I have been waiting for for quite some time: Urban Informatics.
From the foreword by Anthony Townsend, Director with the Institute for the Future:
Taking a long view of urban informatics, the simultaneous urbanization and global economic integration we are currently experiencing can best be seen as a refinement of the city as a system for information processing. In the pre-electronic era, face-to-face proximity and the clustering of functions was the most efficient means of replicating, transmitting and searching for information in social and economic networks. Over time, new tools augmented this function, but in a sense the city itself is our original and greatest information technology.
So it’s the idea that once the shape for the city emerged, bringing us into our current spatial relations, and technology advanced, that there was another layer of connectivity and expression that was also emerging. To understand the way that this new digital layer helps us express and improve our old analogue tendencies requires what is called a “transdisciplinary” approach.
It combines members of three broad academic communities: the social (media studies,
communication studies, cultural studies, etc.), the urban (urban studies, urban
planning, architecture, etc.), and the technical (computer science, software design,
human-computer interaction, etc.)
In a final, very evocative comparison from Townsend’s foreword:
To use a crude analogy, if aerial photography showed us the muscular and skeletal
structure of the city, the revolution in urban informatics is likely to reveal its
circulatory and nervous systems. I like to call this vision the “real-time city”, because
for the first time we’ll see cities as a whole the way biologists see a cell –
instantaneously and in excruciating detail, but also alive. This is in contrast to the way
astronomers see a heavenly body – as it was, some time ago, light-years in the past.
As I was taking all of this in, I began to think about articles like this about smartphone use in classrooms, and stats like this letting us know that over 50 percent of the world not only lives in cities, but that over 50 percent uses a cellular phone, the implications of this digital nervous system that has been emerging began to get more broad. I began to wonder how it would affect expression, particularly with respect to the urban arts.
This I saw this @ Wiispray.com:
Just a will, a Wiimote, flash technology and German ingenuity, and graffiti’s gone digital.
The implications are pretty clear: once we break down some disciplinary silos and get this circulation going, the future will certainly be an interesting place.
And now, as always, some music.