This show does nothing less than delineate a possible future trajectory for architecture, in which it remains relevant in the development of ’sentient cities’, put frankly. It also implicitly indicates how far architecture has to go to do so.

Curated by Mark Shepard and organised by the Architectural League of New York, who through their various events and podcasts are doing as much as any architecture organisation worldwide to grasp the possibilities of the internets, the exhibition runs at the Urban Center. For those who aren’t a subway ride from Madison Avenue, the League’s website smartly and straightforwardly organises more details on the commissions themselves in the context of other writers’ responses, of which this is one, curatorial statements, an open archive, public programs, tweets etc. Interviews are distributed via Urban Omnibus, another fine initiative from the League. Whilst a little more activity could’ve been nurtured on further outer rings of content like YouTube or architecture-oriented discussion sites, it really is a very impressive body of work around a theme, and a great example of how to use the internet to stimulate informed discussion.

Enough meta. The content of the show itself, including the various supporting statements, is also generally impressive, hinting at the new possibilities for architecture enabled by urban informatics, or the increasing impact of networked, real-time, data-driven and responsive/interactive systems on physical objects and spaces.

I hope what follows is a constructive critique, during which I’ll try to address the questions implicitly asked by this probing exhibition, such as what architecture is for. Bear with me.

Few commissions here are actually that radical, which makes one wonder about the role of such an exhibition – is it to display the currents running through urban development or to suggest the avant-garde, to convey where a field of practice might go next? To someone working directly in the field, the show contains ideas that are actually already in production, or at least very close to commission and development, on mainstream urban development projects. For instance, over the last 18 months, on urban development projects in Helsinki, Sydney, Masdar, and Brisbane, Arup Informatics has been producing designs for water-borne water quality sensors, co-working infrastructures, smart street furniture, tagged urban agriculture and so on, often using similar technologies.

What’s different of course is the critical nature of these ‘… Sentient City’ works, beyond mere technical similarities. Outside of the stunted rat race of property development, the contested terrains of urban renewal, or even the more benevolent ballet of urban design, these exhibits can explore themes that actual ‘stakeholders’ (in the crude language of the business) would find unpalatable, frivolous or uncomfortably close to a few home truths, perhaps.

In doing so, just as  with Dunne and Raby’s ‘critical design’ examples, they provoke important questions about the business, the nature of urban design, and the role of civic space and urban infrastructure in the 21st century. Certainly, as a practising designer in the field, the show has made me think more deeply about the work. Job done in that respect.

Yet I’m left wondering whether they exhibits go far enough, across a number of axes.

The first is a minor point: that technical axis. Again, there is little here that is genuinely pushing at a boundary. Though technical bravura is clearly far less important than meaning at this point, a show such as this might have had more of an imperative to prototype beyond the charted terrain a little. But perhaps one commission might have explored, say, an indication of how how a membrane of responsive systems over the city might drive shifts in physical fabric, via shape-memory alloys or the seductive surfaces implied by the BMW GINA prototype, for instance. (The Living have some previous here, with their Living Glass project.) Or perhaps another commission might have exploited the current explosion of interest in augmented reality applications concerning urban space and activity. (Having said that, for all AR’s promise, I have a hunch there’s more meaning in informational experiences that are more directly physical and embodied, and that this is where architecture may have real value.)

Another axis would be around the process of building in urban space, and how that may change through pervasive use of advanced digital technologies. The more iterative, responsive, data-driven, fabrication and prototyping methodologies of industrial design and interaction design are within reach of some elements of architecture and planning, just, yet there is little discussion of their implications here.

Finally, a further axis would be the positioning of architecture itself: do these exhibits outline ways in which architects can increase their sphere of influence in order to help shape more productive, sustainable, equitable or engaging cities? This might include strategically using advanced technologies and informed urbanism to increasingly understand the city, expanding the perspective of governance, planning and citizen engagement. Some have argued that architecture has a lot to offer to the practice of design thinking, or service design, and I reckon it might. But while the exhibition moves some way in that direction, it perhaps inadvertently describes the currently limited role of the architect as much as anything.

Urban form has largely been shaped by technologies of mobility – human, horse, streetcar, elevator, automobile etc. – rather than architecture, just as structural form has largely been shaped by the engineer, and infrastructural form by the spreadsheet. Too few buildings and spaces are actually directly shaped by architects. This is not a criticism of architecture, at least not directly. I would welcome a greater involvement in all these things by architects. The profession does have to look at itself, though.

The Melbourne-based educator Leon van Schaik suggests architecture took a wrong turn when professionalising in the mid-19th century, in thrall to the engineer of the emerging industrial economy. Van Schaik’s critique is profoundly important, as it describes the seeds that have led to architecture’s near-marginalisation but also of its potentially influential future:

“To complete with this practical glamour our forebears went to the heart of making in architecture – its technologies of carving, moulding, draping or assembling – when they staked their claim to be caretakers of a body of knowledge for society. The architectural capacity to think and design in three and four dimensions, our highly developed spatial intelligence, was overlooked, and for the profession space became, by default, something that resulted from what was construction … What if our forebears had professionalised architecture around spatial intelligence rather than the technologies of shelter? Might society find it easier to recognise what is unique about what our kind of thinking can offer?” [Leon van Schaik, “Spatial Intelligence: New Futures for Architecture”]

The articulation and exploration of spatial histories that van Schaik suggests would be a fascinating next step for exhibitions such as this, and the designers involved. How might exhibitions help develop this understanding of how spatial intelligence, and how it augments the other intelligences of kinetic, natural, linguistic, logical, mathematical, musical and personal? (In fact I’d hesitate before suggesting there is also an emerging ‘informational’ intelligence … but only just. Similarly, at other points a few of us have talked of understanding ‘information as a material’, and while this could conceivably lead to the digital equivalent of shelter-fixation, this too may be a theme worth developing.)

Developing a way of communicating such intelligences -  and possibly related sensory modes such as an urban or informational form of proprioception – may be key to where this work goes, at least in hovering around an avant-garde that can generate useful prompts for the emerging mainstream business of urban informatics.

An axis this exhibition does positively explore, however, is that of seeing architecture itself as communication. I’m reminded of something Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi said recently on the Melbourne radio show The Architects:

“Architecture is a form of communication … of knowledge. Architecture is a way to understand our world, and also possibly to have some effect on it. It doesn’t have to necessarily be through buildings – it has to do with ideas that involve our immediate environment, our physical space. Any way to use that physical environment, that architectural context, as a means to discuss issues I think is very appropriate”

That few of these projects concern a traditional understanding of the building, focusing instead on the implications of space and urban fabric ‘becoming sentient’, is thus hugely important. Tschumi’s directive enables the profession to freely explore issues, ideas and interventions, only some of which need be built, or appear to be buildings. The League could continue to productively plough this furrow, moving further beyond the traditional limits of building, articulating the implications of architects as conductors for spatial intelligence within a society and connecting ever deeper to an understanding of how people live in cities. These and others projects might then begin to match the leaps of imagination made by Peter Cook and Reyner Banham, as referred to by Shepard in his valuable curatorial statement.

So let’s look briefly at how these particular exhibits “use the physical environment as a means to discuss ideas”, in Tschumi’s words.

Amphibious Architecture is by The Living Architecture Lab at Columbia Uni (formerly The Living) and Natalie Jeremijenko of NYU and elsewhere. It’s a rather beautiful piece of work, comprising two interactive networks of floating tubes, connecting the Bronx River and the East River. The tubes are both sensors and actuators, the latter in the form of LEDs, the former measuring water quality, presence of fish and so on.

A development of an earlier project by The Living, the glowing, bobbing lights are immediately compelling, but more interesting is this exploration of the relationship between urban bodies of water and the city. As Jeremijenko points out, there is a vast amount of public information about water quality yet this generates only small pockets of engagement. Meanwhile, waterfronts in New York and elsewhere have become attractive again to urban development, though only at a superficial level of the view over the water. “Harbour glimpses”, as we say in Sydney. This project moves beyond that facile surface connection to engage with water as a body, rather than a mirror with a memory. In doing so, it helps us understand something of what’s going on in the opaque mass that created, nourished, supported and shaped New York.

The idea that you can “text-message the fish” is somewhat dubious, however. We’ve probably done enough to the poor buggers without now subjecting them to spam too. (Another Jeremijenko project has already suggested the fish in the Hudson River are on anti-depressants.) The project works perfectly well by remaining in the responsive, reflexive camp, without the need to suggest this faux-interactivity.

If SMS for fish is possibly a joke, David Jimison’s and JooYoun Paek’s  project Too Smart City certainly is. They deliberately use comedy to highlight the potentially absurd nature of placing too much hopes in so-called smart technology, or rather outsourcing responsibility for civic spaces to algorithms and actuators. By subtly engaging with the political undercurrents in urban design, they’ve created a set of smart-arse street furniture that is all too plausible, embedding a sort of grumpy, obstreperous character into benches and trashcans, as if years of neglect had finally caused the city’s street furniture to flip out.

The Smart Bench tips you up if you spend too long on it, disturbing potential vagrants. The Smart Sign berates you with legal codes. The Smart Trashcan spits your waste back atcha if it’s deposited in the wrong bin.

The artists describe the objects as “so smart that they’re functionally useless”, and it’s good to see humour being deployed here. If Tschumi’s directive to engage is taken seriously, then not being serious at all by going for laughs is entirely fair game, and probably essential, occasionally. Certainly these are close to the “funny because it’s true” category. William H. Whyte’s seminal 1970s photographs of New York are full of benches and ledges that are not supposed to be inhabited for any length of time – in fact you almost fear that this bench design may end up in the wrong hands and get actually commissioned. Similarly, the rhetoric around sorting one’s waste can verge on a slightly desperate hectoring that makes the Smart Trashcan seem like Oscar the Grouch in a rare good mood.

Though questioning what they describe as “the myth that technology is going to be a transformative force” is also fair game, it would be good to move beyond the question and at least hint at some answers, however. But as with many of the projects here, you can track ongoing progress on their entertaining blog and watch what develops, not least Jimison’s attempts to create an “ass algorithm”.

As if emerging from the rear end of the waste-bin in Too Smart City, the Trash Track is a continuation of the MIT SENSEable City Lab’s research into sensor-based interventions into existing urban and telecommunications systems. In this case, trash is tagged with sensors and then followed throughout its slow, inexorable and often depressing journey to landfill or recycling. As with many projects in this area, it concerns the now-ubiquitous idea of making the invisible visible. In this case, the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problem when it comes to dealing with waste. Some initial visualisations indicate an interesting product-centred view of how garbage interacts with the city, yet with this broader goal I’d be more interested in a sense of the aggregated footprint of the city itself, derived from all the coffee cups discarded over time.

The project suggests it’s almost a practical demonstration of a core idea in pervasive computing – that of ‘smart dust’. Though it isn’t there yet – the sensors are large, cumbersome and apparently placed by hand – it hints at its possibilities, if remaining a little uncritical. The connection to architecture and urbanism is not as obvious, despite positioning garbage as an urban system, perceived in terms of mobility. I suspect the implications are more broadly for industrial design and product design. Again, though, it’s worth reflecting on the sense of ambition, scale and connectivity that often comes with MIT’s work. Their ability to connect does place them in a sphere of influence, and at the highest levels.

Usman Haque, a designer who in the creation of the Pachube data-meets-place-meets-people platform  has grasped the promise of informatics as much as anyone, makes a typically fascinating contribution. Natural Fuse is simply more interactive – it’s not just an abstract signal that might raise awareness around energy consumption, and so possibly stimulate intervention, but actually and actively requires an intervention of the users. The possible outcome of the Natural Fuse system – that PLANTS WILL DIE! If energy consumption gets too high – may be the more visceral mode of engagement that is required around energy consumption, as compared to the quietly glowing LED screens of smart meters that have replaced the flashing ‘12:00’ of VCRs in homes around the land. (Though you half-wonder whether an ‘arms race’ of ever more gruesome natural deaths may be required if people become inured to wilting brown husks of Leopard Lily?!)

The project also describes an architecture around the exhibit – of websites, RSS and Twitter feeds, maps and of the platform of Pachube itself. Again, the team led by Haque appear to have the greatest facility with this networked aspect of informatics. And this is interactive, at least to some degree, where others are responsive. Whether there is a spatial intelligence being articulated here is another matter – this is perhaps more informational intelligence than spatial. And so is it architecture? Many of Haque’s other works certainly are, rather more obviously, but his sense of “the software of space” is certainly interesting and a genuine attempt to reconfigure architecture around an understanding of the shared and ongoing production of cities. Watch that (soft) space.

The most genuinely interactive contribution of all – in that it comprises an essentially open and accessible platform – is from the team led by Anthony Townsend and featuring several from workplace consultants DEGW. ‘Breakout’ is inspired by the co-working spaces (or “jellies” as some are known) that enable work to take place via shared resources. It’s a mobile infrastructure of power, connectivity and social interaction, supported by smart social software application to facilitate  transient workplaces. While the stated motive is to “liberate office workers from office buildings”, it could be argued that this is already happening – see all the ventures the Breakout team is inspired by, for a start. When it doesn’t happen, it’s not for lack of infrastructure in a city like New York, but rather social, cultural and economic issues around present-day business culture. However, the Breakout team can hardly change that overnight, and like the annual PARKing Days, we’re reminded of the value in creating a series of public focal points on such activity, and so of the powerful role of events in shaping the city. In terms of the environments the Breakout team can create, I’d like to see a more varied set emerging, with different kinds of workshop available, particularly those that involve physical ‘making’ via the return of light manufacturing to urban environments. But that can come later.

Almost all of these commissions do variously deal with the social rather than built form, with explorations of the civic realm rather than physical structure. Sure, there are a few shortcomings but taken as a whole they comprise an excellent set of examples of how a more sophisticated relationship between architecture and the sentient city might unfold over the next few years.

“Might” is a key word there, for it’s going to take a lot of effort to retrain and reorient architects in general for this particular form of spatial intelligence, and while programmes like this are part of that effort, they’re not enough in themselves.

Gregory Weissner’s introduction indicates that the show is “intended to bring architects and urban designers into a conversation that until now has been limited largely to technologists.” He continues:

“Don’t be confused by the technology (and the terminology), though. What we are talking about is nothing short of a complete reorientation of our relationship to the built environment and the unintended consequences are not going to be all positive. Either architects and urban designers insert themselves now into the discussion about how these technologies are conceptualized and deployed or they risk diminishing the unique contributions they bring to shaping our world.”

Architecture and urban design should be in this debate, no doubt, but its entire practice, sensibility and economic model may need redressing (as with many other fields, of course.) Given their previous predilections, the lack of technical and conceptual understanding – never mind an apparently congenital inability to design a decent website – the profession has a long way to go before it can demand a seat at the table. An admittedly fading tradition of thinking of itself as the ‘master builder’ needs to be entirely excoriated once and for all. Devising the architect’s new sensibility – what Paul Dourish would describe as “the designer’s stance” for the discipline – will also be fundamentally important. Either way, complex urban systems are well beyond the ken of the sole master builder; they have been for years, but increasingly so with this ever more multi-layered understanding of the city.

Other design disciplines – interaction design, industrial design, service design, to name three – are currently far better placed to lead on these ideas, within multidisciplinary design teams. So the architect may be best-placed as part of that team, leading on spatial intelligence just as others might lead on information and communication systems, materials, structures, embodied interaction, behavioural psychology, topography, acoustics, biodiversity and so on. In a recent conversation with the SENSEable City Lab’s Carlo Ratti, we ended up sketching out a loosely multidisciplinary team in which the architect was one of perhaps ten different disciplines, all of whom would lead at various points.

Yet there doesn’t seem to be much explicit recognition of that here. I’d like to have seen more of a debate of the craft, process and shifting nature of disciplines throughout – though I appreciate that’s harder to make a compelling public exhibit around.

And of course the smart, progressive and more inclusive designers represented here are far-removed from the Roark stars of architectural mythology. But whether many in the wider profession have moved far enough in their direction is another matter.

To put it another way, who would you actually rather designed some sentient street furniture? Naota Fukasawa or Frank Gehry? Jonathan Ive or Daniel Libeskind? Luigi Colani or Ken Yeang? (Actually, I suspect that the intentions of any sentient furniture designed by Colani may not be entirely honourable. Wipe-off plastic required. Be careful where you sit.)

But given that it’s actually the likes of large software and hardware corporations that are currently attempting to claim the ‘smarter cities’ mantra for their own, I’d like the profession to pull up a chair nonetheless. At least many architects and urban designers have an understanding of what makes good cities tick.

With that in mind, this exhibition – not least through its manifestation as a widely-communicable online exhibit – is fantastically useful and worthwhile. It weaves together several threads running through contemporary thinking around cities and information, and through the provision of context and discussion, it does indeed use architecture, of a sort, as a means to discuss ideas, as Tschumi suggests, or to more broadly exert a form of spatial intelligence, after van Schaik. In this, it suggests the new form of architecture that we’re all striving for, something beyond variations on shelter or indeed the gaudy showmanship of the last two decades, in which new ways of living can be articulated via a genuinely open and interactive framework.

Devising an urbanism that extends this last aspect – urban fabric suffused with rich forms of civic interactivity – is perhaps the biggest challenge. Funnily enough I’m reminded of the British architecture critic Ian Nairn’s line about the avenues of trees in Bushey Park, surrounding Hampton Court – and by extension England, and design:

“Man proposes, and a noble enough proposal. Nature takes over, but heeds man’s direction. All you see now are the glorious trees: but they would not have been so glorious without the initial design. As a symbol of Hampton Court, and of the whole of England, you could do worse: the tree allowed to grow freely, but to man’s pattern.”

Perhaps in this line from 1966, concerning a design from the 1530s, there are the seeds of a more responsive and sometimes interactive architecture, iterative in development, predicated with change in mind, a space described around both biological and social ecosystems, constructed around the organic, chaotic and complex, yet symbiotically shaped by clarity and intent.

Van Schaik implores us not to unthinkingly overlay inappropriate spatial histories and asks instead “What spatial constructs does this new place allow?” We should ask the same of such rare opportunities for addressing the promise of the sentient city.

This stimulating exhibition begins to tentatively trace out some lines describing this new place, and those of us who inhabit cities will benefit hugely from continuing to pick apart its implications.

I must start off this piece on Toward the Sentient City with an admission: as I write this, I am unsure as to what my own take on this excellent and thought-provoking exhibition should be. Which hat do I wear? Am I a technologist? Kinda. An architect? Definitely not (although I am affiliated with an architecture school). Urbanist? Unless someone can offer me a specific definition for this term, or circumscribe its putative scope, my only response is, who isn’t an urbanist? So let me spin this question around and redirect it somewhat: What object doesn’t have a significance at the urban scale? Such thoughts inevitably lead us to think of cities, of those dense agglomerations of natural and built objects that have—for lack of a better description—really, truly shaped all aspects of modern life. As the geographer Ed Soja would put it, such observations are proof that we are, indeed, “putting cities first.”

Such language, though deterministic, carries its own burden. And here is where I lay my cards on the table and ask this question from the point of view of architecture and urban history: how do we read a city though its many objects? It’s a very old, yet still relevant question. Let’s face it: when looking at the objects presented to us in Toward the Sentient City—tilting benches, smart(ass) street signs, plant thermostats, unassuming sensors, and burping trashcans—we are asked to look at our cities differently. This varied and unusual assortment of technical objects command our attention because they reacquaint us with streets, buildings, public spaces.

Reacquaint? How? For starters, consider the use of the term “sentient” in the exhibition title. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “sentient” as “having the power or function of sensation or of perception by the senses”; or, put more simply, “conscious or percipient of something.” Sentience is therefore a quality, ostensibly animal in origin, that is transferred onto the inanimate. If a “sentient city” is one imbued with its own sensorium, how, then, to qualify such feeling? The Italian architect Aldo Rossi gives us a clue in his A Scientific Autobiography. He writes:

Cities are in reality great camps of the living and the dead where many elements remain like signals, symbols, cautions. When the holiday is over, what remains of the architecture is scarred, and the sand consumes the street again. There is nothing left but to resume with a certain obstinancy the reconstruction of the elements and instruments in expectation of another holiday.^[1]

The above statement—though taken out of context and applied to a different set of parameters—is still useful when considered alongside the five commissions in Toward the Sentient City. Like the various visions of 21st century urbanism from the exhibit, Rossi’s elegaic vision of the city is wholly materialistic. Its various objects are skeleton keys through which we can decode a city’s spectral traces to reconstruct a reality. Rossi’s quote also provides us with a useful metaphor: his city is sentient in the sense that it has a communicative potential. If, as Rossi believes, a city wants to communicate, it is our task to close this loop. As communications theorist Colin Cherry would put it, the effect of such closing is to create a two-way symmetrical link. In short, the creation of dialogue.

To press this point, I want to shift my focus to those commissions that concern consumer objects. And here, I want to talk trash. Literally. Both JooYoun Paek’s and David Jimison’s Too Smart City and MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory’s Trash Track concern the “afterlives” of consumer objects. Whereas Too Smart City’s smart trashcans regurgitate trash when it is “thrown the wrong way” (I’m assuming here that they “return” non-biodegradable or non-recyclable items), Trash Track’s intelligent skeins track an item of trash and reveal “the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.” These two projects share similarities in that they both call into question that very moment when a consumer good becomes refuse. I would even say that Too Smart City’s trash cans go beyond sentience—they are clever. A denizen of Too Smart City really has little say in determining whether a cardboard coffee cup is trash is not. Similarly, Trash Track’s visualizations depict a secret life of sorts for trash: as soon as the same cardboard coffee cup enters a waste receptacle, it becomes part of a different, unseen system. These projects really ask us to rethink what it means to throw something away. And in doing so, they recalibrate our relationship to a city’s sanitation infrastructures.

Generally speaking, the above projects demonstrate how consumer objects mediate our understanding of cities. It is in this sense that Too Smart City and Trash Track share a lineage with architectural projects from the 1960s. The most extreme condition would be Archizoom’s consumption-centric No-Stop-City (1969). This enigmatic project, consisting of a infinite, isotropic field of objects is really a limit case—its assembly and display of consumer goods in mysterious, hermetically-sealed interior landscapes (intentionally) questions our ability to read the metropolitan condition. Yet other projects come close to mistaking a city for its constitutive consumer objects. And in some cases, architects have readily refused to distinguish between the city and its objects of throwaway culture.

Archigram, Living City Survival Kit (1963), Reproduced in Theo Crosby and John Bodley (eds), Living Arts, no. 2, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and Tillotsons, 1963. Archigram Archives, London (Source: Sadler, "The Living City Survival Kit: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man").

For instance, Archigram’s Living City Survival Kit (1963) is a carefully-arranged display of cigarette cartons, phonograph records, Playboy magazine, and other objects organized into categories of “air”, “drink”, “fags”, “make up”, “drugs”, “money”, “sex”, and “cars”. Historian Simon Sadler problematized the relationship between these objects and architecture, reminding us how, “Living CIty and its catalogue were not about form, but its opposite: the pre-architectural formlessness of space, behaviour, life.”^[2] When placed within the circumscribed spaces of the Living City exhibition, these objects described “an urban experience unaccounted for by maps, plan or function. It concentrated on space and experience at the micro-scale. The Survival Kit for these micro-spaces was predominantly made up of low-brow, everyday, pocket-sized, throwaway, illicit, mass-produced consumer goods.”^[3]

Urban objects, from 2 ou 3 chose que je sais de elle (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

The actual, physical arrangement of consumer objects in the Living City Survival Kit also recalls another similar configuration—the (famous) final shot from Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais de ellle (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her) (1967). Here, the equation of a city with its constitutive consumer objects reaches its fullest expression. Godard arranged containers of laundry detergent, cigarette boxes, pasta cartons as buildings. This decisive orthogonal arrangement almost reads as a branded version of Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Hochhausstadt project (1924). As critic and theorist Sarah Whiting put it in a recent issue of Log, Godard’s set pieces suggest “vast bundles of urban land that represent power and its lubricant, money.”^[4] Unlike Living City, then, Godard’s meticulous final shot is an act of cognitive dissonance that conceives of an architecture literally shaped by consumer behavior.

What does this all have to do with an exhibit devoted to situated technologies? The above projects were all contemporary visions and only looked to very immediate futures. Likewise, the idea of a “situated” technology also suggests contemporaneity, a literal and figurative rooting in the present. And yet the exhibition’s title deserves additional scrutiny—specifically, the calculated use of the word “toward.” In an architectural context, the word no doubt recalls the title to Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture (1923). Much critical ink has been spilled interpreting that particular book’s mysteries and trajectories. It almost goes without saying, but deploying the word “toward” in such a decidedly architectural context signals a move to the future.^[5] If the title Toward an Architecture describes a hope in architecture’s ability to counter a social threat, similarly, we would like to think that Toward the Sentient City looks to situated technologies as a formative part of our future urban experience.

Such talk about the future can veer towards the sentimental and the nostalgic. Literary critic Frederic Jameson even admonished popular visions of the future, such as science fiction, as a kind of wasted futureology. He declared how science fiction’s “deepest vocation is over and over again to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future.”^[6] Despite this seemingly hopeless assessment, Jameson even recognized that science fiction is rooted in the interminable now, or, as Sigfried Giedion would put it, the “eternal present.” And being rooted in the now is not a bad thing. Recall that some, if not all of the technologies in Toward the Sentient City are available in the here and now. Being rooted in the present at least gives us the hope of imagining our urban future.

Toward the Sentient City is curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the Architectural League of New York. The exhibition is on display at the Urban Center, 457 Madison Avenue, New York, NY from September 17 to November 7, 2009.

Notes
[1] Aldo Rossi, Autobiografia scientifica (1981), quoted in The Architecture of the City, Joan Ockman and Diane Ghirardo, trans. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1984), p. 3.
[2] Simon Sadler, “The Living City Survival Kit: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” Art History Vol. 26, No. 4 (Sep., 2003), p. 559.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Sarah M. Whiting, “Super!” in Log 16 (Spring/Summer, 2009), p. 23.
[5] For more on the meaning of the book’s title, see Jean-Louis Cohen’s introduction to Toward an Architecture, John Goodman, trans. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute Publications, 2007).
[6] Frederic Jameson, “Progress Versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?” in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 288-89.

At certain points in the history of architecture and urban planning, the internal debate on how to apply new technologies surpasses the boundaries of the discipline. At those times, the hopes and fears found in the disputes between architects, policy makers, engineers and planners are extended to a broader discussion about urban and societal change. Then, the central issue is not merely how to solve a specific spatial problem with the help of new technology. Rather, the debate starts to revolve around its possible impact on urban society at large. What does this new technology mean for urban culture, what impact does it have on how we shape our identities and live together in the city? When those questions emerge, Dutch philosopher René Boomkens argues, the professional debate has turned ‘philosophical’.

The exhibition ‘Toward the Sentient City” – running at the Architectural League NY – can be understood as such a philosophical enterprise. On display are five commissioned projects that make use of ‘sentient technologies’ or ‘ubiquitous computing’ – technologies that are currently ‘coming of age’ and promise to change the way we experience the city. Yet, this exhibit is no World Fair where we are to marvel at the new new things, born out of the brains of our smartest engineers, flaunted on shiny pedestals, stirring up our imagination, arousing our desire, promising us an ever better future. Nor is it a disciplinary affair where architects and media designers exchange ‘best practices’ of how to best make use of new sensing and actuating technologies. Curator Mark Shepard wants to ‘raise questions rather than pose answers’. The goal is not a peek into a future that is ‘just around the corner’. The exhibits should rather be understood as ‘conversation pieces’ that expose some of the hidden assumptions of a new engineering discipline and the way it is appropriated in social-technical situations. And rather than performing ivory tower criticism, the exhibition also lays bare alternative trajectories.

So if this indeed is a philosophical exhibition, let’s have a look at how some of the basic questions of that discipline are addressed. These being of course – to put it somewhat bluntly – : ‘who are we?’, ‘what can we know?’ and ‘what is the good life?’ – or in the context of urban culture ‘how are we to live together in the city’.

Before we start answering those questions, I will have a closer look at the technology that is the centre piece of the exhibition. Increasingly, Shepard states in his interesting curatorial statement, it is the ‘dataclouds of 21st century urban space’ that shape our experience of the city. All over the city, ‘intelligent’ applications have started sensing what is happening around them and reacting to it – be it smart traffic lights or cctv camera’s whose images are computer analyzed for suspicious behavior. Add to this the increase of tracking devices such as cell phones that most urbanites carry, and as a result the city has become ‘sentient’. Shepard explicitly refers to the Latin roots of this term to explain what he means with that term: ‘Sentience refers to the ability to feel or perceive subjectively, and does not necessarily include the faculty of self-awareness.’

Now of course it is not the city itself that perceives or even is sentient, but rather the combined apparatus of tracking and sensing devices – operated by different actors – that note what is going on in the city and output their impressions in all sorts of data streams. Neither is this emergence of the sentient city a singular movement driven by a centralized bureaucracy or company, established at a single address to which one could send a letter of complaint or e-mail a feature request. The field of what could be called ‘urban computing’ consists of plural research traditions, performed and commissioned by divergent actors all with their own motivation and implicit understanding of what a city is or should be.^[1]
They vary from government agencies that want to bring order to city space, politicians that would like to promote citizenship, companies that want to offer personalized services, community workers that hope to promote solidarity or mutual understanding, artists that want to criticize consumer culture and urbanites who may embrace, adapt or reject some or other of these offerings. The sentient city thus should be understood as an ‘assemblage’ of all those different actors that all employ their own logic.^[2]

What then should we make of Shepard’s notion of ‘subjective’ perception? It is my guess that he has chosen this term to foreground that the data streams generated by the Sentient City may seem like an example of objective fact gathering, whereas in reality it is far from it. For starters, the decision of which data to collect and which to ignore and how to classify it, is already a highly political choice. Next, the data generated by the Sentient City is interpreted by software algorithms and actuation devices, and there is nothing objective about that either. It is a highly normative process, where subjective values, legal codes and power relations are turned into software code on the base of which sentient technology decides, acts and discriminates.

This foregrounding of the normative side of the sentient city goes against the grain of the discourse of ‘ubiquitous computing’ that plays a dominant role in the debate on the sentient city. In ubicomp, an application is usually thought successful if it makes the computer disappear. While we carry on our daily routines, computation technology – calmly operating in the background – will make our live more easy, efficient or exciting – whatever way we would want it. Not only does it do away with the need to interact with those beige boxes on our desktops (which of course is not a bad thing per se), it also renders the subjective decisions at the heart of its social interventions invisible and presents them as natural.

Now, this brings up issues of agency, and thus leads to the first of our three philosophical questions: the ontological ‘who are we’. Does the way we employ new technologies alter the way we think of ourselves? Does it alter our relationship with the world around us and the objects in it? Does it create a shift in how we think about ‘agency’

On a side note, a lot of interesting things could be said about the relation between sentient technology and identity. Anecdotical accounts of for instance Esther Polak’s installation Amsterdam RealTime^[3]
(in which people are traced through the city with GPS-device) show that the collection of data could lead to a new type of reflexivity: the ostensible objective data about participants trajectories through the city at times clashes with their cultivated self-images (one might think of oneself as a urban flaneur, whereas the data now ‘proves’ that one has only travelled between the couch at home and the cubicle at the office). Or what to think of services that based on their analysis of your urban trajectories assign you to a lifestyle profile that from then on is used to recommend places to go, activities to undertake and people to meet. Would you eventually subscribe to such a continuous lifestyle address made to you by your mobile phone?

Interesting as those questions might be, they are beyond the scope of Toward the Sentient City. This exhibition mainly brings up issues of agency, as well as our relation to the (natural) world around us. For instance the exhibit Amphibious Architecture makes us aware of the invisible underwater world of the Bronx and East Rivers. When fish swim by, a floating collection of leds in the river emanates an undulating purple shine on the water surface. One can also inquire the fish by means of a text message about the quality of the water. Poetic and playful as it might be, as Shepard writes, this exhibit ‘encourages us to expand our view of what constitutes the city and its citizens.’ Not only does sentient technology may ask us to redefine our ontological categories, it also addresses the issue of agency within the category. Do sentient objects, like those in the project Too Smart City have an agency of their own? Are they truly ‘intelligent’ as is sometimes claimed in the ‘smart city’ rhetoric that is part of the ubicomp discourse? In this exhibit a moving city bench ruthlessly kicks off its users after its built in sensors and algorithms have determined the allotted quota of leisure time has expired. Now who exactly evicts the unsuspecting stroller from his lunch spot? The bench? Its programmer? The larger assemblages and discourses in which norms about appropriated city behavior are determined and encoded into the software? Is the bench – in the words of Bruno Latour – a mere intermediary that passes on rules and information that are shaped elsewhere? Or is it a mediator, an element that plays an active role in the constitution of those norms and values?

A second and related philosophical field that Toward the Sentient City addresses is that of epistemology. Does the information gathered by the sensors in the sentient city lead to new ways of gathering knowledge and new insights? The exhibit Trash Track by MIT’s Senseable City Lab actively addresses this question. For this exhibit, trash items such as paper cups are tagged with a gps-device and mobile phone chip. After it has been disposed of, the item sends text messages with its location, so we can follow its track from recipient to waste disposal site. The hope expressed through this project is that knowing will lead to a change in doing: the fact that we know where our trash ends up should make us more aware of the problem we create by throwing things away.

Now, what is at stake epistemologically is not just a newly gained knowledge on the whereabouts of our lost keys, runaway dog or thrown away coffee cup that will make life somewhat more (dis)comfortable and may lead us to behave differently. What indeed is new is the fact that data from many different sentient sources can be aggregated in real time and give us a grasp of what is happening in the city that we never have had before. Elsewhere Anthony Townsend (who has contributed to this exhibition with the project Breakout!) has argued that this shift in perception is comparable to the introduction of aerial photography. I quote at length:

‘if aerial photography showed us the muscular and skeletal structure of the city, the revolution in urban informatics is likely to reveal it’s 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. … and as these capabilities become more widespread, the real-time city could become a place where everyone is an amateur urban planner, using urban informatics to understand the larger impacts of their everyday decisions. That, so fundamental a shift in our perception of our civilization seems to be something worth working towards’ ^[4]

This new ways of gaining knowledge about the city may have huge consequences for the way we perceive and act in the city, and Townsend even sees opportunities for democratization.

Yet could it also lead – if you will allow me another detour, this time through the work of Jane Jacobs – to a new form of architectural hubris? In the early 1960s Jacobs pronounced the ideology of modernist architecture dead on the ground that they had reduced urban life to too simple a formula. From their Olympian vantage point modernist planners had thought that they could calculate the exact needs of a population based on a handful of variables. Take the population number, divide it by a health rate and you get the number of hospitals needed per square mile. The problem, Jacobs argues, is that modernists understood cities as problems in disorganized complexity, whereas they are problems in organized complexity – meaning that every change in a single variable doesn’t only change the outcome, but also directly influences the other variables at work. The ‘health rate’ in this example is not a static given but dependent on many other variables: the number of parks, the means of transport, diet, etc. And all those variables are intricately related tot the value of other variables. Ville Radieuse, Jacobs claimed, was the ‘triumph of mathematical average’. Instead she argued we should think of the city as a ‘process’, and to understand the processes at work urbanists should look for the catalysts that speed-up or slow down social processes in the city. Their tool being the microscope rather than the telescope.

Now, I wonder what would Jacobs make of the urban information systems that for instance have come out of the Senseable City Lab? Would she embrace them as illustrations of the organized complexity of the city? Can we now finally take in all the variables at work? And if so, can we base our planning practices on this new found knowledge – also by reacting in real time to changing conditions? Or would she still be suspicious of the data, finding it too abstract to act upon? After all the many data streams we now have may reveal quantitative aspects of urban conditions, but what do they teach us about the qualitative experience people have of them?

Let us now leave the d-tour and turn back to the main path: the third and last stage of our philosophical quest. If indeed the sentient city produces new ways of thinking about ourselves and a new type of knowledge, the question that remains is an ethical one: to what aim do we apply these new found insights? Again, Toward the Sentient City proposes alternative trajectories to some of the dominant developments in this domain. Many sentient city applications that are currently in development have an implicit idea of the city as a collection of services and infrastructures to be managed as efficiently as possible. Alternatively they offer personalized versions of the city through search and discovery devices. Other initiatives depart from control and security-issues: they use sentient technology to prevent potential unrest or allow or deny access to certain users. Combined, in a dystopian scenario, these appropriations of the technology might contribute to what Belgium Philosopher Lieven de Cauter has called a ‘capsular society’ – a city of privatized capsules with different functions – dwelling, shopping, consuming accessible only to those with the right rfid-chip in their wallet.

Are alternative trajectories thinkable? Yes, Toward the Sentient City states. The projects Breakout! and Natural Fuse propose alternative ways of thinking about urban culture.

Breakout! addresses the issue of the urban public sphere. The project problematizes the public sphere as a sphere that only comes into being if urbanites actively engage with the space and with each other. It is not just a space that is pronounced as such by a city government. So how can the urban public sphere be animated in an interesting way? And by whom? How can we as urbanites take responsibility for it? How can we turn public spaces in the city in an inspiring meeting place, by means of grassroots organizational tactics? Break Out provides urbanites a toolset that addresses this question from the perspective of organized work. The project wants to promote exchange and cooperation between workers in the city by claiming public spaces in the city as an office and by providing structures to organize meet-ups and brain storming sessions for urban creatives.

Natural Fuse addresses the idea of the city as a commons – a space and resource shared by and accessible to all its citizens. The idea of the commons is based on the old British custom of the communal pasture where all herdsmen in the community were allowed to graze their cattle. The drawback of such a system is that it is prone to self-destruction, a process that Garett Hardin has labeled The Tragedy of the Commons. As he writes …

the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited.

When every herdsman keeps on adding cattle, the commons soon will be overgrazed, and no one will be able to benefit from it any longer. Close personal social ties or traditions could perhaps keep the rational herdsman from prioritizing the appraisal of his individual benefit and from adding too many cattle. However in a modern society that has done away with traditional role-patterns and depends on more abstract interdependencies, such social restrictions seem much harder to enforce.^[5]

The concept of a commons thus assumes cooperation and mutual accommodation. Could Sentient Technology play a role in the allocation of limited resources between citizens? Could it lead to the emergence of some sort of peer-to-peer governance model, that could prevent overusage of scarce resources? This is the question that Natural Fuse addresses. This project consists of a city wide network of plants that are linked to electric devices. The central idea is that the CO2-digestion of the plants in the network offsets the CO2 emissions caused by the use of the electric appliances. Each individual chooses whether he wants to be selfless (conserve electricity) or greedy (use electricity). However, when the total consumption of electricity in the system surpasses its CO2-absorption capacity, the system will actively start to kill the plants.

Natural Fuse thus beautifully illustrates the problem of the tragedy of the commons and it challenges our thinking about the viability of a networked urban commons. Yet it does not provide any definite answers: Would creating awareness through direct feedback mechanisms about the impact of rational selfish behavior be able to prevent it? Or would we rather need complex reputation systems? Or perhaps bookkeeping systems in which our allotted ratios are kept or traded? Can we do this through peer-to-peer technologies, or do we need central institutions that act as trusted third parties?

Toward the Sentient City thus doesn’t give us any emphatic leads about which way the technology will take us. It succeeds in bringing up many important questions and diverting the discussion on the sentient city from a path of technological determinism to an open ended  affair, a concern not just for engineers, planners and architects but for all of us.

[1] Ann Galloways PhD thesis A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing and Locative Media is highly informative in giving insight in different discourses around urban computing

[2] See Manuel de Landa A new Philosophy of Society

[3] http://www.waag.org/project/realtime

[4] http://www.anthonymobile.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/townsend-urbaninformatics.pdf

[5] http://dieoff.org/page95.htm

It took awhile for my brain to formulate the words “science fair” as I walked through Toward the Sentient City, now on view at the Architectural League of New York, but once there I couldn’t shake them. The two words weren’t meant as derogatory or judgmental, quite the opposite. Curator Mark Shepard brought together five projects that embed the urban environment with the technologies of ubiquitous computing—sensors, RFID tags, and networks—and the result is a welcome familiarity.

Here, technology wants you to engage, not just with it, but also with the people and critters in the world around you. Amphibious Architecture, a collaboration between The Living and Natalie Jeremijenko, dunks an array of interactive tubes in the East River and the Bronx River. Equipped with sensors, the tubes collect water quality readings and monitor for fish. In the gallery, viewers are asked to text the fish a watery “What up?” and the fish report back on the state of their ecosystem. The architecture here is not just amphibious but anthropomorphic; I sent the fish a message and the fish wrote back “Underwater, it now loud,” signaling the presence of marine life, and urged me to text friends AhoyAnchovie and HeyHerring.

The National Science Fair, first founded in 1941, rose to popularity in the 1950s under the shadow of the cold war. Meanwhile suburban kitchens filled with appliances and ever more complex chemical solutions, science fairs served a double purpose. They trained American youth and offered the public a perceived transparency to the scientific and technological developments. If a high-schooler could build a crystal radio set, then the country’s future is in good hands. In many ways ubiquitous computing a similar model. The complex networks that provide the underpinnings of daily life are made visible; as seen in Trash Track that uses RFID tags to map garbage or Breakout! an experiment in co-working in the city’s café, parks, and public space.

There’s comfort in that.

Or discomfort, if we use the street furniture developed by JooYoun Paek and David Jimison as an example. Capable of making vagrancy judgments, their Smart Bench uses movement sensors and a hearty robotic system to boot sitters if they lounge too long. Wall text describes all three of the Too Smart City projects (bench, trashcan, and street sign) as “overly enthusiastic”—a phrase that captures and critiques the blind deployment of computational technology in the urban realm. Are Paek and Jimison suggesting that we shouldn’t get too comfortable with these technologies? As our actions in public space are tracked and monitored is the correct response acceptance, awareness, or action?

Just as mid-century science fairs’ optimism was colored by atomic fear, Toward a Sentient City has its own specter: the fate of the environment. Natural Fuse by Usman Haque, Dot Samsen, Ai Hasegawa, Cesar Harada, and Barbara Jasinowicz, comes across at first as a cheerful, hands-on learning station. Designed to call attention to carbon offsets, houseplants are hooked up to devices that tracks their CO2 output. That local system is then tied into a city-wide network of other houseplants which regulates energy usage and carbon absorption. Sounds friendly enough, the plants thrive when everyone in the network gets along. But, if not “then the network starts to kill plants, thus diminishing the network’s electricity capacity.” Users have the option of being “selfless” or “greedy.” Plants live or plants die on collective decision. It’s a grim opposition. But such darkness embedded in the brightly lit gallery is just as welcoming as any sanguine accessibility.

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Amphibious Architecture – “submerges ubiquitous computing into the water—that 90% of the Earth’s inhabitable volume that envelops New York City but remains under-explored and under-engaged.”

Toward the Sentient City, brought “architects and urban designers into a conversation that until now has been limited largely to technologists,” and created an extraordinary opportunity to investigate distributed architectures of participation of what we might call the “outernet.” This is a timely conversation as “web squared, “smart things,” the “internet of things,” or the “outernet,” and their popular “ambassador” augmented reality are rapidly becoming everyone’s “business.” From “evil” marketers, to global corporations, environmentalists, artists and community activists – everyone, it seems, is interested in the possibilities of this new frontier.

It is a challenging task to respond to, Toward the Sentient City, an exhibition whose backdrop includes a series of conversations on Situated Technologies – published by the Architectural League, from a circle of people who have been thinking, writing, and speaking on networked urbanism for many years now, including: Adam Greenfield, Mark Shepard, Matthew Fuller, Usman Haque, Benjamin H. Bratton, Natalie JeremiJenko, Laura Forlano, Dharma Dailey, Philip Beesley, Omar Khan, Julian Bleeker, Nicolas Nova. And the exhibition itself has a very thoughtful group of respondents, see posts from: Dan Hill, Martijn de Waal, Enrique Ramirez, and Mimi Zeiger.

But one of Toward the Sentient City’s key accomplishments was to go beyond the rhetorical, and to put practical examples out into the world to organize a discussion on some of the ideas and possibilities of ubiquitous computing that have barely begun to emerge from academic research, and entrepreneurial blue skying. As curator, Mark Shepard, explained:

“The aim is to provide concrete examples in the present around which to organize a discussion about just what kind of future we might want. Whether they’re prototypes or not, these commissions are concrete examples. They’re not abstract ideas. And we can go stand next to each other and look at and interact with something which is out there in the world behaving in the way it behaves, performing as it does, and we can then begin to have a discussion about it that is less dependent upon powers of rhetoric. So it’s not about me persuading you about an idea but it’s about us evaluating something that’s living and existing in this world. And that was really the intention of the show.”

The commissioned works – Amphibious Architecture, Breakout!, Natural Fuse, Too Smart City, and TrashTrack, that were the hub of Toward the Sentient City’s events, themes and texts, provided a unique glimpse at some of the possible dystopian and utopian futures of a “smart” city. But, most importantly, all the works questioned what might be new architectures of participation for a sentient city.

New Architectures of Participation: Hybrid Social Networks with Human and Non-human Participants .

Of the five works, Amphibious Architecture and Natural Fuse were particularly fascinating to me because they explored the possibilities of sensor networks to create new forms of distributed participation in networked ecosystems that connected the experience/trajectories of human and non human actors – fish, plants, and people.

Both Amphibious Architecture, and “Natural Fuse” – from Usman Haque and Haque Design + Research, gave exhibition attendees the chance to experience at a personal level our relationships with our non-human neighbors.

Amphibious Architecture from the The Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Directors David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang) and Natalie Jeremijenko, Environmental Health Clinic at New York University, used a sensor array to “pierce the reflective surface of the water” that separates us from the underwater ecosystem below. The sensor arrays just below the surface of the East River and floating light array (see picture on left opening this post) create a new interface between people and fish whose movements and water quality are transmitted in light.

One could also SMS the fish and the single beaver that lives in the rivers surrounding NYC to find the conditions they were experiencing. But turning the city’s “back stories,” like the movements of “Yo beaver,” and the oxygen levels and water quality of the rivers into “fore stories,” is only one of the many ways Natalie JeremiJenko explores how we can engender the empathy necessary for humans and non humans to live in harmony and mutual benefit.

Toward the Sentient City also held workshops/presentations in conjunction with Conflux 2009. After her Conflux presentation, Natalie Jeremijenko of Amphibious Architecture (which is also a collaborative project between xClinic, The Living, “and other intelligent creatures on the East River”) invited participants to enjoy a lunch of cross-species foods at the East River site.

The cross-species lunch takes an existing interaction pattern through which people and fish are already communicating, i.e., people going to the river – the waterfront, and feeding the fish Wonder Bread (which is bad for humans and fish); and transforms this desire to feed the fish into something which actually can remove the mercury content from the fish and our bodies by removing it from the food chain, so a previously inharmonious connection between people and fish, is redirected into a productive interaction benefitting both species. As it turns out, food that is good for Fish (see pictures above), and removes mercury from their bodies can also be nutritious and tasty for humans.

Natural Fuse, from team members, Usman Haque, creative director, Nitipak ‘Dot’ Samsen, designer, Ai Hasegawa, designer, Cesar Harada, designer, Barbara Jasinowicz, producer, used sensors to link humans and plants in network where we are accountable for how our behavior effects others in your ecosystem.

If you brought an ordinary plant to the exhibition, you could take home an electronically assisted plant and become part of a social network of humans and plants. This network of humans and electronically assisted plants is also a carbon sink and if more energy is consumed than the total number of plants in the social network can offset, plants begin to die giving immediate feedback and consequences to being greedy about energy consumption. For more about joining the Natural Fuse network see here.

We are in the pre-dawn of sensor networks like those Natural Fuse and Amphibious Architecture created – social networks that link human and non human participants in entirely new ways are largely an uncharted territory. (Note: The upcoming Situated Technologies Pamphlet 6 – “Micro Public Places,” Marc Bohlen and Hans Frei, indicates it will continue the journey with an investigation of “transparent and distributed participation.”)

Where Does the Social Negotiation of Technology Happen?

Frequent questions that came up at the presentations given by the teams that produced the commissioned works were: Does this idea scale? Does it close the loop in that you get answers to the questions asked? How does the conversation gain agency? And where does the social negotiation of technology happen? (These last two questions were asked by Mike Kuniavsky at Mark Shepard’s presentation at Conflux: “Sentient City Survival Kit.” – see picture above) I think it is fair to say that these questions for the most part remain unanswered. But Toward the Sentient city was alive with ideas and practical examples about ways we can explore these questions more deeply.

Usman Haque in response to the question, “Does this experiment scale?,” replied:

“it would, but at an individual level because it has to remain at the individual level because it is about the individual in relationship to the wider social context as opposed to building a forest to offset a city it is about each individual making choices of their own about what they do and having some kind of knowledge about the effect they are having on other people because most of the time we are quite complacent – we are able to do whatever we want because we are not necessarily aware how our intrusions effect both human and non-human neighbors….’

So how does this close the loop? Usman explains that one of the key aspects for him is that if you do take home a plant you become part of a system in which you are no longer anonymous and if a plant is threatened (plants get three lives) you have the opportunity to email the person in the system who has threatened your plant. Usman noted that one of the interesting things that happened in the context of the exhibition, where there was a single unit, was that 90% of the time people switched it on to selfish mode – presumably because they were anonymous. Another aspect of Natural Fuse that raises interesting questions is that as more people decide to join the network the risk of a plant being harmed by any particular individual’s selfishness lessens. As Martijn de Waal, in his response that unpacks some of the deeper philosophical, epistemological, and ethical questions that Natural Fuse addresses, observes:

“The concept of a commons thus assumes cooperation and mutual accommodation. Could Sentient Technology play a role in the allocation of limited resources between citizens? Could it lead to the emergence of some sort of peer-to-peer governance model, that could prevent overusage of scarce resources?”

New Aesthetics of Distributed Participation

The works of, Toward the Sentient City point to possibilities for a new aesthetics of distributed participation in which users and system are no longer separated but instead “develop joint forms of observing and knowing that neither [...] is capable on its own.” (quote from upcoming, Situated Technologies Pamphlets 6: Micro Public Places, Marc Bohlen and Hans Frei). Natural Fuse and Amphibious Architecture examine the new transactional realities of the Sentient City.

But there are many questions left unanswered. We know a lot about the power of generativity from the internet (see Zittrain)- the ur “architecture of participation.” As Zittrain points out, the “generativity” of the internet is “the engine that has catapaulted the internet from backwater to ubiquity.” Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase, “architecture of participation,” to “describe the nature of systems that are designed for user contribution,” such that “participants extend the reach/increase the value of the system.” But as Tim O’Reilly put it in his recent talk, “State of the Internet Operating System:”

“Web 2.0 is about finding meaning in user-generated data, and turning that meaning into real-time user facing services. “Web Squared” takes that same concept to real-time sensor data.”

We know little yet about what constitutes generativity for the “outernet,” particularly for the kind of hybrid social networks that Natural Fuse and Amphibious Architecture present. Social Networks that connect people and place, humans and non humans, challenge dichotomies of man and nature, and machine and user in new and unexpected ways.

At the moment, the internet is going through a metamorphosis with the emergence of real time technologies like XMPP, PubHubSubBub and Google Wave and the coming of age of mobile computing. While these shifts were not investigated specifically in any of the commissioned works I think all the works begged the question, What is a common platform for social interaction in the “outernet,” or sentient city? I was not entirely satisfied, from this point of view, with a web interface for Natural Fuse or SMS as a mobile interface for Amphibious Architecture.

David P. Reed points to the relationship between social mobility what he describes as the 3rd cloud and the need for a common platform (see David Reed – Social Mobility and the 3rd Cloud. Hat tip to @srenan for pointing me to David’s presentation)

What is an architecture of participation for mobile, social interaction? This is something I am very interested in. Recently I began a project with a small group of augmented reality developers and enthusiasts to use Google Wave Federation Protocol as a transport system for open distributed, social augmented experiences (lots more to come on this soon – you can see the back story in my posts here and here). Wave has introduced an open federated architecture of participation that combines asynchronous & synchronous data, bringing together the advantages of real-time communication with the persistent hosting of collaborative data (like wikis).

Augmented Reality puts who you are, where you are, and what you are doing center stage, and is an interface for “communications embedded in context” and “enabled by identity” – two key qualities of what David P. Reed calls the 3rd cloud. An open, distributed framework for augmented reality could create an interconnected sense of AR, one that fuses augmentation, data overlays, and varied media with location/time/place and crucially, social networking. Such an interface would open up many possibilities for the new transactional realities that could integrate real-time cloud based data with a human perspective and social networking. I am using the term, transactional realities to suggest an extension into social augmented experiences of what, Di-Ann Eisnor, Platial, describes as, “transactional cartography” – “the movement from map providing entertainment/information to map as enabling action” (see Human as Sensors).

We have only just got a glimpse of how real time technologies and “communications embedded in context” will transform social interaction and our cities. This post on Writing as Real-Time Performance that looks at the Google Wave playback feature is a brilliant example of how real time technology turns familiar practices like writing inside out, and catapaults us into new time trajectories. And, if you haven’t already seen Matt Jones of BERG’s, brilliant look at, “All the time in the world” – from the “soft time” and “squishy time” of cell phone culture, to their anticedents in real-time computing, go now! Also see Dan Hill’s work on “time based notation,” and Tom Carden’s work for mysociety.org

Transactional Realities Between the “Asynchronous City” and the “Synchronous Internet of Things”

Out of Toward the Sentient City’s five commissioned works, only Trash Track focused on the “synchronized Internet of Things.” Trash Track asks what can we learn from the aggregated data streams of “smart” trash about the infamous path of trash from cities of privilege to rivers of want, rather than exploring the the particular transactional realities of a social network that linked people with their trash.

The goals of Trash Track were, Assaf Biderman explained during his presentation:

“to learn about the removal chain, to see if knowing more could promote behavioral change, and investigate if smart tagging could one day lead to 100% recycling.”

The team from SENSEable City Laboratory, MIT included – Carlo Ratti: Director, Assaf Biderman: Associate Director, Rex Britter: Advisor, Stephen Miles: Advisor, Kristian Kloeckl Project Leader, Musstanser Tinauli, E Roon Kang, Alan Anderson, Avid Boustani, Natalia Duque Ciceri, Lorenzo Davolli, Samantha Earl, Lewis Girod, Sarabjit Kaur, Armin Linke, Eugenio Morello, Sarah Neilson, Giovanni de Niederhausern, Jill Passano, Renato Rinaldi, Francisca Rojas, Louis Sirota, Malima Wolf.

However, Assaf, in his presentation, presented another project from SENSEable City Laboratory in partnership with the City of Copenhagen, The Copenhagen Wheel. This project seems to work brilliantly at the intersection of the “asynchronous city” (Bleeker and Nova) and the “synchronized internet of things” The “smart” wheel – a low cost, open source, human electric hybrid is:

“an electric bicycle wheel that can be easily retrofitted into any regular bicycle and location and environmental sensors which are powered by the bike wheel and in turn provide data for a variety of applications.”

This project, that aims to promote urban sustainability through smart biking, opens up many possibilities for a bottom up architecture of participation for the sentient city (see video here).

Mark Shepard describes something he calls “propagative urbanism:”

“a way of thinking about shaping the experience of urban space in terms of a bottom-up, participatory approach to the evolution of cities.”

And, in the most recent pamphlet in the Situated Technologies pamphlets series, #5 “Asynchonicity Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing,” Julian Bleeker and Nicolas Nova invert an emphasis in the so-called “real-time database enabled city” with its synchronized Internet of Things…. and speculate on the existence of an “asynchronous city.” They “forecast situated technologies based on weak signals that show the importance of time on human perspectives.” They ask:

“why, besides ‘operational efficiency,’ would we want a ubiquitously computed environment? What are the measures of ‘better’ that we want to count as meaningful?”

They explain:

..we are trying to think through what “urbanwares might be – urban operating systems – if they were less about synchronization, top-down construction and connected channels of information and databases and so forth, and more about asynchronized, decentralized things. Software, data, time out of alignment, incongruities, tiles and imbrications of the geographic, spatial parameters into a delicious kind of lively peasant’s stew.”

One takeaway, perhaps, from Toward the Sentient City is that it’s at the intersection of the “asynchronous city” and the “real-time database enabled city” where many new transactional realities of the sentient city will arise.