Information Technology & the Urban

What is the role of urban planning in this highly dynamic unpredictable environment?

What could replace the failing instrument of prognosis?

What will the tools for processing possible urban transformations be?

Could hybrid (urban and media) environments function as generators (of trust) transforming planning to an event-communication (space) and entertainment zone?

Lecture Science Friction, Discussion @ de Orderverstoorders, de Balie, Amsterdam, 25 Januari 1999

Hybrid
Urban
Interface

2000
Interfaces are at a primitive stage

Physical encounter (bodily intuition) is still the basis for trust essential for communication.
Traditional urban tissues are strengthened and overlayered by trans-local spaces (media, mobility).
The “modernistic” functional categories of urban planning (living, working, etc.) blend and fuse.

2000+
Interfaces develop

Tactility and bodily intuition expand in the ephemeral hyper-materiality of the new fused analog/digital spaces.
Does this strengthen urbanity or does it make it obsolete?
What are the planning instruments of “multi-locality”?

2000++
Fusions of IT, biotechnology, nanotechnology…..

Soft
Urbanism

In architecture’s role of defining and materialising the spaces for social interaction, designing the relationship between the physical and digital public domain is becoming more and more of a challenge: investigating the relation and interconnection between the “soft” city with its finite material counterpart, the living environment, speculating about interfaces between the “virtual” and the material (urban) world and designing hybrid (analog-digital) communicational spaces.

Soft Urbanism deals with information/communication processes in public space, the soft aspects overlying and modifying the urban sprawl: the invisible networks acting as attractors, transforming the traditional urban structure, interweaving, ripping open and cutting through the urban tissue, demanding interfaces.

Soft Urbanism not only intervenes in the realm of infrastructures, but also adopts their concept and follows their paradigm. It brings an inherently flexible approach by expanding the field of social interaction and opening new paths of urban development. Soft Urbanism conceives the city as an organic entity, as “proteinic chains of networks”. Soft Urbanism is therefore not about shaping, inscribing or determining places, but about creating frameworks which allow and enhance a variety of unpredictable developments.

Urbanism today is caught up in the dilemma of either trying to realise the dream of the omnipotence of planning or accepting powerlessness in the face of the forces of the property market: on the one hand, the modernist belief in scientific methods of determination and control of the urban phenomena violating entire cities, on the other hand, the neoliberal positions giving in to the interests of privatisation and declaring the dynamics of the market to be the only legitimate determinants of urban developments. Facing up to the consequences of both positions today, Soft Urbanism develops an alternative strategy of intervention to reintroduce programmatic speculations about the public domain in urbanism.

The interventions will not be about control and determination, but about expanding infrastructures, frameworks for processes of self-organisation. Exploring the possibilities of digital technology will contribute to developing tools to process urban design and to generate architectural and urban programmatic process-spaces: dynamic, rhizomatic spaces, externalised brains with fluctuating synapses. To develop design environments “arranged or disposed [so] as to permit the greatest power for unforeseen relations”. To develop the tools to process the Virtual.

“Soft” strategies will be “bottom-up” strategies: rather than first defining the global result of the interaction and then determining the necessary relation between the elements in order to produce that interaction (which would be a “top-down” approach), simple rules for a set of independent elements will be developed and that which emerges from the interaction of these elements is aleatory. According to biological models, these fields of interaction of plural forces will serve as a reservoir for the selection processes needed for urban transformations.

A method for extrapolating existing reality to unfold its possibilities and force creative accelerations will release spores and create paths as yet unknown. (Speed, acceleration, but not control of direction.) The spores will infect different environments by adapting, mutating and transforming them.

Under the pavement (piercing the beaches) run fiberglass cables.

Program

BALIE_002_ORDERVERSTOORDER_SCREEN_1440x2040_WEBP_070823

Disruptors

Asphalt or Fibre Optics

A series of debates on the design of the Netherlands
The spatial history of a country, like that of a household, can be summarised in two gestures: bringing order and disrupting order. Those who furnish a house bring order. Whoever subsequently lives in it, reads and folds newspapers, eats and washes dishes, buys a chair, tears down a wall, disrupts and restores order in constant alternation.
Similarly, the spatial planning of our country is characterised by the dynamic of disrupting-establishing-disrupting order. These days, however, government attempts to establish and preserve spatial order seem more difficult, and the disruptions manifest themselves more powerfully than ever.

Participants
With the participation of, among others: Jaap van Till (Stratix Consulting Group and Delft University of Technology), Toon van der Hoorn (Advisory Service Traffic and Transport, Ministry of Transport and Public Works), Marcel Bullinga (Senior Advisor Digital Strategy Directorate Information Management Organisation, Ministry of VROM), Oetsge Atzema (Department of Spatial Economics, Utrecht University), Frans Vogelaar (Academy of Media Arts, Cologne)

Asphalt or Fibre Optics On new technology and spatial planning
The new information technology may well emerge as the biggest disruptor of national spatial planning in the coming years. Within five years, the spatial effects of the internet as a socio-economic network will be felt in all their intensity. Some things are already visible now: cities are proving to be a fertile knowledge network, incubators for start-ups developing applications for the new technology. Large companies are establishing facade-defining divisions in prestigious locations in the cities, moving support functions to low-cost locations (abroad). For the residential consumer, modern information technology seems to enhance the appeal of both rural and highly urban environments. How to deal with this highly dynamic technology? We talk about that with builders, planners, residents, technicians and the drafters of the Fifth Memorandum on Spatial Planning.

“Information and communication technology (ICT) fascinates. It is a story of unprecedented advances in technology, having a far-reaching impact on . society. ICT has made its entry into our daily living, working, and living environment over the past 30 years. Radio, CD, TV, PC, Internet, mobile phone, they are the icons of this century. At the same time, ICT is a very elusive phenomenon. Virtually none of the users are able to fathom how the equipment used works, and the creators of the technology are themselves unable to tell how the technology will evolve. In short: a high-dynamic unpredictable technology with far-reaching social consequences.”
From: ICT spatial planning: A source of turmoil, discussion paper commissioned by the RPD.

As with the advent of the steam engine, the automobile, the telephone and television, several myths have emerged about the impact of the latest information and communication technologies. For instance, the completion of the digital highway would finally solve the traffic jam problem. We could log in at home, be connected to a central network and, without moving, carry out orders from the boss or give instructions to subordinates. We could order virtually attractive groceries from our living rooms, which would then be delivered throughout the country in large delivery vans. This would reduce commuting and eliminate the need to actually go to furniture malls and department stores. The reality turns out to be different. “Rather, ICT will generate mobility growth because, thanks to ICT, time can be spent usefully, for example via mobile phone or by working with a laptop. Perhaps ICT can somewhat-somehow lead to rush-hour smoothing, especially through greater freedom of choice of travel time.

The overcapacity of the road network outside peak hours is very high and thus offers ample opportunities for very extensive mobility growth. In the most extreme case, two-hour traffic jams per day will be replaced by twenty-four-hour ‘just no traffic jams’ per day.”
From: ICT spatial planning: A source of turmoil, discussion paper on behalf of the RPD.

“Unfortunately, one inescapable law applies to technology: when the most revolutionary inventions become accessible to all, they cease to be accessible. Technology is potentially democratic because it promises the same services to everyone, but only functions if only the rich use it. When a train took two hours to get from A to B, the car appeared on the scene and you were there in an hour. That is why it was prohibitively expensive. But it did not yet become accessible to the masses or the roads were closed and the train was faster again. If you accept that you are not privileged, public transport gets you there before the privileged.” me on a journey with a salmon by Umberto Eco.

Schier eindeloze netwerken van glasvezelkabels onder de grond en permanent rondom onze planeet cirkelende satellieten bepalen in de toekomst het gebruik van de ruimte. Wij zijn niet langer gebonden aan landgrenzen en ook werelddelen vormen geen afgesloten eenheden meer. Het woord globalisering is niet meer weg te denken uit het hedendaags vocabulaire.

“De toegenomen snelheid van wereldwijde informatienetwerken en transportsystemen (digitale netwerken, luchttransport) creëert een onderscheid tussen ruimtes die lokaal zijn en ruimtes die globaal zijn.
We ervaren vandaag niet alleen een privatisering maar ook een atomisering van elektronische media op lokale schaal, met bijvoorbeeld de vermenigvuldiging van lokale tv-kanalen of radiostations. Aan de andere kant vermengen globale en lokale ruimtelijke hiërarchieën zich in stedelijke agglomeraties. Sommige stedelijke fragmenten (bank- en beurswijken, omgeving van luchthavens etc.) krijgen kwaliteiten van mondiale prestaties en kunnen worden gezien als onderdeel van de stedelijke conditie.”
Elizabeth Sikiaridi & Frans Vogelaar: Soft Urbanism Public Media Urban Interfaces, in LAB, Jahrbuch der KHM.

In world cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo, one work tower after another is rising, brimming with modern techno-logy. High-rise buildings are also springing up on the edges of Amsterdam, housing companies for telecommunications and high-end information technologies.

“ICT allows knowledge acquisition, marketing and management to be physically separated from production units. This is contrary to the development until the early 1990s, where many companies felt compelled to move their entire organisation with them due to the scaling-up of their production processes. In the early 1960s and 1970s, for instance, newspapers moved their editorial offices along with the printing presses to the outskirts of cities. The recent move of Philips’ headquarters to a metropolitan Amsterdam location shows the counter-movement. An underestimated location factor for the knowledge-intensive and strategic parts of companies is the importance of fertile net-works. Innovation often arises in places where knowledge domains overlap, where knowledge can be exchanged smoothly in networks. Dense urban environments are therefore an attractive location for knowledge-intensive parts of companies due to their great diversity of networks.”
From: ICT spatial planning: A source of turmoil, discussion paper commissioned by the RPD.