PD Smith

Icon, #99 (Sep­tem­ber 2011), p 93

Sen­tient City: Ubiq­ui­tous Com­put­ing, Archi­tec­ture, and the Future of Urban Space, edit­ed by Mark Shep­ard (MIT / Archi­tec­tur­al League of New York, 2011), £18.95, 229 pp. ISBN: 978–0‑262–51586‑3

By P. D. Smith

Who­ev­er holds this book leaves a ghost­ly shad­ow of their hand on its grey cov­er. Made of heat-sen­si­tive mate­r­i­al, the cov­er tem­porar­i­ly records the imprint of the reader’s hand. It is a strik­ing visu­al­iza­tion of Sen­tient City’s sub­ject, for as sen­sors and data pro­cess­ing capa­bil­i­ty are increas­ing­ly embed­ded in the phys­i­cal fab­ric of urban envi­ron­ments, so we now leave a data trail as we move through the city, a dig­i­tal shad­ow stretch­ing across the urban topog­ra­phy.

New dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies, from elec­tron­ic iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tags to CCTV cam­eras linked to car num­ber plate and even face recog­ni­tion soft­ware, are log­ging the life of the twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry city. A tru­ly “sen­tient” city may still be sci­ence fic­tion, but build­ings and streets are being equipped with the abil­i­ty to sense, process and record infor­ma­tion about our behav­iour. New Song­do, in South Korea, is the pro­to­type of this “smart city” of the future. Due to open in 2015, it will be the first city to boast an elec­tron­ic cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem: a net­work of sen­sors and micro­proces­sors spread through­out the urban fab­ric and jacked into city-wide com­put­er sys­tems. In the future, every­thing will be con­nect­ed.

Accord­ing to Mark Shep­ard, the “data clouds” of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry are now more impor­tant than the “for­mal orga­ni­za­tion of space and mate­r­i­al in shap­ing our expe­ri­ence of the city”. Smart phones, loca­tive media and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty apps are trans­form­ing how we see and inter­act with the city: “The city becomes a net­work of nodes and path­ways through which we cir­cu­late like data pack­ets.” Inspired by Archi­gram’s sem­i­nal 1963 exhi­bi­tion “Liv­ing City”, he argues that these new tech­nolo­gies not only demand “a recon­sid­er­a­tion of the role of archi­tects and the pro­fes­sion of archi­tec­ture”, but also a rad­i­cal rethink of cities and indeed cit­i­zens.

This book has grown out of a 2009 exhi­bi­tion, “Toward the Sen­tient City”, com­mis­sioned by the Archi­tec­tur­al League of New York, for which five teams of archi­tects, artists and tech­nol­o­gists were asked to imag­ine the impact of ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing on cities and urban life. They range from wor­thy exer­cis­es in rais­ing pub­lic aware­ness about waste dis­pos­al by attach­ing smart tags to rub­bish (“Trash Track”) and an attempt to trans­form the pub­lic spaces of an entire city into a vast open-plan office (“Break­out!”), to the won­der­ful­ly sub­ver­sive “Too Smart City”, in which three pieces of street fur­ni­ture are ren­dered utter­ly use­less by advanced tech­nol­o­gy: a “Too Smart Trash­can” that vio­lent­ly ejects unwant­ed rub­bish after it has been dis­card­ed; an elec­tron­ic sign that turns to face passers­by and bom­bards them with rules and reg­u­la­tions; and a bench that only per­mits a per­son to remain seat­ed for a lim­it­ed time before dump­ing the sus­pect­ed vagrant onto the ground.

As “Too Smart City” (designed by David Jimi­son and Joo Youn Paek) shows, new tech­nol­o­gy needs to be imple­ment­ed judi­cious­ly. Sen­tient City con­tains a dozen essays explor­ing the impact of the new tech­nolo­gies, includ­ing a piece by Sask­ia Sassen who finds that under­ly­ing today’s frag­ment­ed topogra­phies, new “invis­i­ble cir­cuits” are being cre­at­ed by infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies, mak­ing pos­si­ble “a new type of cross-bor­der polit­i­cal activism” that is both local and glob­al.

But sev­er­al con­trib­u­tors raise con­cerns about this brave new wired world. Mar­ti­jn de Waal observes that the implic­it promise of social and loca­tive media is “that urban­ites nev­er have to leave the com­fort of being sur­round­ed by like mind­ed peo­ple”. This under­mines the whole idea of the city as a com­mu­ni­ty of strangers that gains its unique­ly cre­ative dynamism from the need to nego­ti­ate dif­fer­ence, prin­ci­pal­ly in pub­lic spaces. Tre­bor Scholz right­ly rais­es con­cerns about the mon­e­ti­za­tion of infor­ma­tion. The “glob­al data field” we gen­er­ate will be mined by gov­ern­ments and big busi­ness, he says: “in the Sweat­shop City our data body nev­er sleeps”.

In this fast-mov­ing field, real­i­ty is rapid­ly over­tak­ing imag­i­na­tion and while some of the case stud­ies in Shepard’s book already seem dat­ed, the essays rep­re­sent a time­ly attempt to stim­u­late debate about the shape of tomorrow’s sen­tient city.

[N.B. This ver­sion may dif­fer slight­ly from the one print­ed in Icon mag­a­zine. Image by David Jimi­son and Joo Youn Paek]