- open source urbanism seems to be a big idea here that allows normal citizen has an access for building up his part of the city. it provides the basic requirement for the bottom to top structure of the smart city. In the reading, it introduces some open source device such as Arduino. A single building is the basic component of the city, thus Puts the open source into a building scale. what makes a house an open source house?
- Should the open source of a building start from design phase? what will be an open source designed building? a design that uploads to the internet and users can download and combine the design by themselves?
- Nowadays, in the countryside of China, with the increasing of the income of the people, people start to build their own house, however, without an architect. The purpose of the absence of the architect is budget control. However, for lots of cases, the budget is wasted due to lack of design. it seems that an open source house design will be a good solution. How does an open source house in the town become the start point of the open source town or small city?
Tag: W10 – Open Source Urbanism
Crashing and Hacking the Smart City — Yumeng Chen
Urban Versioning System 1.0
–The purpose of architecture design is not only to satisfy the functions we need, but also chasing the aesthetics. So that if it is the same purpose of open source coding? At least in the designing process, we need more then the open source benefits.
–In the IBM case, architects work together to finish a project at the same time , does it requires the architects are in the same level or can understand each others work even during the design processing?
Open Source Metropolis
–Though the open source data brings us a lot of benefits, it broke the wall that forbid a lot of cankered people or the people who don’t have enough ability out of this zone. However, now everyone enjoyed the free cakes and who will surveill this field and keep the citizens safety with their private and property?
W10. Open Source Urbanism – pinelopi
on Townsend, “Open Source Metropolis,” Smart Cities (pp. 115-141)
– In the seventies, Burns acted as a mediator between cable, the ground-breaking technology of the day, and people that wished to appropriate it (pp.117). The community video centers she launched in numerous cities could not have been made possible without the support of local governments and the industry. Townsend uses the term “perfect storm” to describe the synced point in time where technologies and people’s understanding of them become ripe together. Later in the chapter, it is implied that a similar condition is taking place today. How will the contemporary “perfect storm”, supposedly comprised of open source commons, ‘wirelessness’ and democratized electronics affect ‘the ways the city plays itself’ in the words of Gabrys? Are local governments and industry still fit to support the creative process “through which people harness technology to create a system” (pp.118) in the smart city?
– The format and standards of technology emerge as enablers of unplanned ‘idiotic’ applications from the users themselves (such as the microcassete recorder or the beeper of the 70’s, pp.119), yet on the other hand, they also pose important challenges along the way. An example of the latter is the obstacle of ‘walled gardens’ for the mobile web and how Crowley identified e-mail, a technology that was already in place as a workaround (pp.123). In a similar manner, Wi-Fi’s limited scale range was initially tackled with an ingenuous use of simple, already existing tools brought together in unexpected ways (arrays of DIY antennas linked to wireless networks, pp.129). But as technologies become more sophisticated, innovation tends to be in the hands of the ones that have the know-how – the hackers, as the last two examples show. Yet, as the “steep learning curve” of physical computing (pp.136) is being evened out, how are non-engineers empowered to meaningfully disrupt and appropriate the existing smart infrastructure of the city?
on Haque and Fuller, “Urban Versioning System 1.0,” Situated Technologies Pamphlets #2
– To approach the building as an in-progress model of itself opens the floor to the participation of non-designers and directs the discussion towards real-world constraints – two features that are apparently suspended by the representational practices and media through which spatial design is usually communicated (pp.23-24). However, it is probable that if the non-linear space-making processes described here were to be entirely carried out in meatspace, then the financial and spatial challenges that would consequently arise would threaten the feasibility of the project or force to unpleasant compromises. It seems that Haque and Fuller identify a resolution in BIM systems’ ability for digitally merging design and construction in an object-oriented manner (pp27). How are BIM systems suggestive of a shift from representation (a linear structure of communication) to simulation (a digital version of the real, constantly subject to change)? BIM systems have been accused of isolating the designed artifact from its context by situating it in an oversimplified approximation of its original environment. How to resolve this contradiction? For instance, in which ways could BIM systems take social parameters as an input?
– Where non-plan ideas meet Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), Haque and Fuller advocate for an Urban Versioning System that runs on granular parameters. There may include participation [from the non-designer to the virtuoso (p.30, 36)], modularity [ dependent on scale, expertise and time (p.37)] property [from its existing neoliberal redundancy to its mitigation (p.49)] and many others. Is there also a need to granularize persistence (from permanence to ephemerality)? The non-planners proposed permanent hyper-structures on which ephemeral envelopes would allow for ever-changing situations to happen. How would such a condition translate in the contemporary setting? How will the joints between the parts of the system change when the base structure itself is contingent?
Open source Urbanism
Open source metropolis – Anthony Townsend
In describing the evolution of social media from the platform of the internet Townsend states Burns and her team (in addition to other DIY research communities) began to experiment with new ways to deliver social services through the platform of the internet. Burns described the event forty years later stating that the convergence of amateur video and cable in the 1970s was “the perfect storm”. “In just a few short years, a growing network of public access activists had torn down barriers to community broadcasting that existed for nearly fifty years” – Could we recreate the perfect storm today? Ignoring our dispositions and fears of the hypothetical, allowing for complete smart city infrastructural implementation, assuming a revolutionary stance, infiltrating or gaining rights to the “smart city domain” of data and innovative technological platforms that supersede those of smart cities in complexity and potential? Could this not, coupled with exacting agency over the infrastructure to manipulate data results, allow us to contribute to our city in a much more proactive way?
“The technology giants building smart cities are mostly paying attention to technology not people, mostly focused on cost effectiveness and efficiency, mostly ignoring the creative process of harnessing technology at the grass roots, but the breach of public access cable in the 1970s is a reminder that truly disruptive applications of new information technologies have always come from the bottom up” – Notice here that the disruptive applications, while bottom up in their approach, required a top down infrastructural implementation to traverse and exploit. “The urge to repurpose technologies designed for one way communication like cable and turn them into interactive conduits for social interaction pops up again and again. Today, civic hackers, artists and entrepreneurs have begun to find their own uses and their own designs for smart-city technology.”
“But once you had an idea of the social network, it’s like ‘Dodgeball is Friendster for cell phones’. People understood it” – Crawley signifies the importance of concurrent technological applications not only as exploitable tools but as essential precursors or “molders” of the socio-cultural collective’s psychological scaffolding i.e. their ability to perceive, understand and accept new technological applications.
“Today, we take for granted the rich ecosystem of software available for our phones”, but “In 2003..Wireless carriers exacted tolls for content providers to enter their walled garden. Setting back the build-out of the mobile web for years.” – What kind of access is permitted to the smart city’s bed of sensored data? Do our dispositions with regards to privacy stand in the way of access to “walled gardens” if we persist to demand our information be “secure”? It appears that not only is top down infrastructural implementation crucial along with concurrently emergent technological applications, but the open access to both in promising to set the table for bottom up disruptive applications of sociability, serendipity and delight.
The “frequency hopping technique called spread spectrum, originally devised for torpedo guidance during World War II” extended the functionality of WiFi, in addition to it’s open source potential in that they could now “shove as much data across public airwaves as they could over wire with no subscription fees”. It seems that regardless of the original purpose of the technological invention, each “piece of the puzzle” lends itself to a complete picture in the form of bottom up exploitation and consequent disruptive applications combining and extending preceding technologies functionalities. Strategic, technological engineering must come before the creative utilization of the consequent structure/data. Does that not in some way support the smart city’s advocacy of big data harvesting? (although contingent on granted/forced access to the domain)
What form does interaction manifest if it was contingent on the spread and access to WiFi? If people are being attracted to a certain location for the promise of a portal to transport them elsewhere? In this respect does a non-sensored, digitally disconnected part of the city constitute a smart city ghetto much like Bryant park did in the 80s?
“Municipalities began to take over the deployment of public Wifi-access on a larger scale”, It seems like bottom up innovation (although contingent on preceding top down infrastructural implementation) inspires or catalyzes large scale technological implementations which in turn provide yet another traversable platform for further innovation/exploitation. Does that not shift our perception of power from a top down vs bottom up to a symbiotic relationship or dialogue between technology giants, dumb citizens (unconscious exactors of agency) smart citizens (educated DIY communities non-intimidated by the interworks of the technology) and the respective socio-cultural/political context?
Urban Versioning System 1.0 – Haque & Fuller
Architecture as one of Humanity’s oldest practices constitutes a fixed mean of channeling behaviors, a physical common that serves as a high resolution low pace environment of internal, intuitively and tacitly collected information resulting in a respective embodied predisposition in the space. As our cognitive pool becomes layers with increasing amounts of media and interfaces (sent vs internalized information) – architecture assumes the role of the background. Does code become (as a result of cycles of technological evolution and respective embodied predispositions of a new common) this generation’s tool of designing urban performances?
“The difference should be that we consciously recognize our interdependence (architecture, citizens and technologies) and thus must consciously act upon it.” We have repeatedly morphed spaces through exacting agency and populating them with socio-culturally conceived devices (such as a news paper stand) that result in consequent urban performances that challenge/extend the original functionalities of spaces and respective embodied predispositions. Is the fine line between a conscious participant and an unconscious consumer simply the recognition of where agency lies in crafting our surroundings within the seemingly restrictive smart city grid?
The design of the future built environment “appears to be split between large developers and ubiquitous computing technologists with architects finding themselves irrelevant” It can be argued that architecture, as an expansive discipline, trains us (or should) to carefully consider concurrent social, cultural & political contexts and respective implications on our designs. Are other disciplines as inclusive? Should architects now be charged with addition ubiquitous computing design to their vocabulary?
“Most important is to develop a method through which architecture the physical conduit for knowledge and memory can itself be open”, it’s signified here that architecture has thus far mainly been a top down process of attempting to create performances at different locations and scales i.e dictating vs accommodating interactivity and special use. “We want to see what happens if we work otherwise” – Is the answer quite literally delegating parts of the design process to an array of disciplines and the respective citizens (subjects) of the site of implementation? Fixity allows architecture to serve as a scaffolding populated by contingent or unplanned uses, but buildings are rarely designed for that express purpose. Can we start thinking of the concurrent socio-cultural collective as a performance that architecture must accommodate vs create/resist?