1. “The urban vernacular, Living City claimed, made fussing with the detailing of urban facades or interior lobbies irrelevant, as the experience of the street was more influenced by ambient, immaterial, and kinetic forces than by the detailed formal articulation of space and material.”

   Comparing the Living City to the idea of the Sentient City, he suggests that both have the same impact on Architecture in that the formal details become less important, instead it is the relationships between the moving or living parts that governs the “feel” of the city. But do you agree with Koolhaas claim that “People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that Architecture has nothing to do with it?”

2. “Regardless of the formal geometries and material arrangements of a space as defined by Architecture, and irrespective of the normative activities or uses encoded (or elicited) by its program, these devices and the ways in which we use them have perhaps become as important as – if not more important than – architecture in shaping our experience of urban space.”

   To what extent do you agree that we are more influenced by the devices we use as to how we experience the space around us, than by the actual Architecture that encompasses that space?

3. “As we have grown accustomed to navigating the city with our smartphones and our print-outs from Google maps, we have come to know it from above, as a two-dimensional, planimetric experience. Instead of seeing ourselves as part of the city fabric, inhabiting a three-dimensional urban condition, we dwell in a permanent out-of-body experience, displaced from our own locations, seeing ourselves as moving dots or pins on a map.”

   I thought this perspective was very interesting as I had never really realized that this is how I experience the world around me most of the time, especially in new places that I have never visited before. It’s interesting to note how an increasingly data-driven city geared towards efficiently collecting, storing, and using more precise data about ourselves, is actually leading us toward a more out-of-body experience like the quote says, because of how we interact with the system. We are increasingly zooming out to understand the whole, rather than zooming in to understand the parts. Is this at all related to the process of globalization?

01_Shepard_pg23_Continuing from the conversation last week about responsive architecture, and who determines how a space is used, does Koolhaas’s theory of generic space allow the designer to make whatever they want, without consequences to program? or is it the opposite, that the designer needs to be careful not to get in the way of generic programing, else they hinder the potential uses of a space? should all spaces take on an aspect of generic-ness?

For instance, people use coffee shops as secondary offices, bringing laptops and supplies to work into the space and use it for a purpose other than eating or drinking. Whether you’re in a Starbucks, Spot, or Tim Hortons, the experience is largely the same. However, if you go to an Ice Rink, attempting the same use will yield a very different, and probably hindering, experience. While this may be a case of extremes, I still consider the question whether all spaces can be truly generic.

02_Shepard_pg37_In the final paragraph discussing investment in materiality, the development of social networks and online exchanges in the years since publication of the book have built a virtual environment, not grounded in materiality per se. Economic forces have taken hold of this virtual environment, creating Facebook, Google, and to some extend Apple, some of the largest companies in the world. As we approach the day where the virtual merges with the material and really starts to upend the architecture profession, I think we can count on the industry changing rather rapidly if it means a better economic return.

The point on Vespasian’s Colosseum and Power is interesting, in this regard. Power is now demonstrated through virtual and social means more often than not, rather than physical manifestations. Will the architectural profession transition from designing powerful buildings and monuments to designing powerful virtual or hybrid structures, and testaments to technology instead?

03_Ambient Commons_pg223_The point of overexposure to many media sources I feel is indicative of this past year, catalyzed by the 2016 presidential elections. Discourse over the role of media, its bias, and who it is beholden to is a hot debate topic. All of this happens though, as citizens loose more and more interest in listening to news media outlets at all.

Can overexposure be cured? or is it something that we all must simply adjust to? Is there a role in forming physical or virtual space to limit exposure and thereby increase engagement? Should space design take a generic programing approach, or a much more targeted method?

The idea of sentient city is discussing a city which has ability to hear and feel things happening within it. Article also mention the term “Pathetic Fallacy” to re-emphasis the concept of understanding. “…the pathetic fallacy allows one to glimpse the passions within the consciousness of another human being. (George P. Landow)” I can see this sentient city has similar context as smart city. At the beginning of article, “… the flotsam and jetsam of every day urban life were to become the new materials of architecture.”
1. Since the Living city exhibition was happened at 1950s-1060s, I understand the flotsam and jetsam was the negative impact of industrialization and mobilization. Under the concept of sentient city, what are the flotsam and jetsam?
2. What happen to sentient city, especially the idea of feeling? As the development of smart city, it can function pretty well of hearing, but the idea of feeling seems not there yet. What will a city be if it can feel its people?

Under “urban resource partnership” he mention the urban computing as collecting data to make a more effective(common) model. “… more fundamental aspects of urban computing as psychogeography deserves emphasis here. After all, media do not simply annotate a preexisting city but also help create new understandings, uses and tacit geographies of the city.” What does psychogeography mean? The function of media could be  programing the user’s movement. Can we see media as a “unprecedented material benefits”?

From “Toward the Sentient City” by Mark Shepard:

Q1:

Shepard discusses (pgs 20-21) the difference in how the “informational ballet” of the city street is described, showing the contrast between the very much visual, haptic, contextualized and ‘eventful’ description by Jane Jacobs, with the more ethereal, ‘behind-the-scenes’ look of Dan Hill’s description of street interaction driven by non-visible data. Will this ‘invisible layer’ of data invalidate the typical perceptual way of understanding the streetscape? Currently, it seems as though ‘data’ and networks simply stand as a new layer of urban fabric; if ‘formal geometries’ and ‘material articulations’ are becoming less relevant, is it possible that these will become almost completely irrelevant to the street? Where will architecture lie within the hierarchy of importance to the urban environment in the future?

Q2:

At the end of the chapter, Shepard mentions that for architects to address new and emerging kinds of space, they (and their clients) will need to see these new spaces as valuable, predicting a future need for (and encouraging the use of) more ‘program-agnostic’ spaces that embrace emerging technologies ( being “open to architectural imagination”). Are they not be perceived as ‘valuable’ to clients because they are currently seen as risky and niche luxuries, rather than things that meet their current spatial need?

Q3:

I am not sure I completely understand the correlation Shepard makes between the architectural program of a house, and planning and zoning laws of a city (pgs. 22-23). Homes typically function the way that they are used based on the desires of the inhabitant, in addition to the formality of the generic function. Zoning and land use policy restrict this (for better or worse) at the city scale. Is the loosening of programmatic specificity (in terms of zoning regulation) within the city the point Shepard is trying to make?

Megacity resources:

‘The influence of technology on urban experience might depend on your attitude toward environment, information as material or perceptions of overload.’

Q) How will the concept of access alter in this new urban dynamics. Will it give rise to a more open ‘Image of the city’ with information readily available on surface or will it create more segregation for marginalized communities by controlling access?

‘With citizen science, new genres of urban data curation such as urban computing become a significant cultural domain.’

Q) Who are considered as smart citizens here? What would be the learning curve for a citizen to be able to participate and how does it affect the hierarchy of decision making?

“The Metropolis and Mental Life,” the fatigue that dulls and blunts comes from ‘the intensification of nervous simulation, resulting from the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences in what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli.”

Although distraction and overload could occur in any culture, modernity offered more means to become comfortably numb.

Q) How does this affect the concept of active citizen participation in networked cities. A top down approach that views citizens as data generating input nodes under surveillance may have an advantage here but how does the grassroots bottom up approach that require active citizens survive with this idea of comfortably numb audience.

Shepard, M. “Toward the Sentient City”

Internet of  things kind like a evolution of living city, because network are all connected but also flexible to move.
The city was made by people’s emotion called “ballet” and the data that we can’t see in the city. Ambient is important, so we can know the truth.

1.Delirious New York, Plug-in city V.S Metabolism, how can AI and information influence the city scale ? what is the relationship between city scale and social activities?

The article mentions Jane Jacobs book. I think the Asian city such as Tokoy,
Taipei and Hong Kong(the city scale L,M,S) is a good example of life city, one area can have multiple use, and always full of energy and activities.

2.When AI (artificial and Ambient) corporate with human city, it could be a sentience city? or lack of flavor in human city?

3. Media, information and Smart-phone control people’s life. How can we distinguish the true or fake information?(P24,25,26)

Toward the Sentient City – Mark Shepard

1 – The idea of sentience not as intelligence but as an ability to sense is a very important point in this text. The idea that a city is sentient but not “intelligent” through the means of an A.I. seems to already be the case of the existing built environment. The large amounts of sensors, cameras, and lights in our everyday street environment can be helpful, but problematic when it starts to make decisions. How can this large amount of data be useful for the city, without causing all the problems described in the reading associated with false positives or negatives? Is there some human component necessary, or is an A.I. the direction a sentient city is heading?

2 – As the city becomes less about the materiality of the streetscape and the buildings which we inhabit, and more about the technology interfaces which people use and carry around, how does the architecture profession adapt? How do we incorporate the idea of personal participation through the technologies, as some apps attempted to do? (geocaching, as an example)

Ambient Commons – Malcolm McCullough

3 – There is a discussion on page 202 of how technology may be distorting our mental models of space, and allowing us to rely more on external sources for navigation rather than internal maps. How does increased externalization help us, or does it only hurt us? Does a city start to embed these technologies so that we don’t even need to look at a device at all?

1
Identifying strategies against programmatic fixity, Shepard discusses the concept of ‘generic’ program (pp.23), which seems to express the architectural irrelevance of both form and function in face of immaterial parameters, or situations. Notably, the circumstances of the mass conversion of industrial spaces to lofts were arguably market forces, such as housing shortage and gentrification.

Is it possible to design for a ‘generic’ program that is open to social and cultural dynamics? Where does its indeterminacy lie, if not neither in form or function?

2
We have previously discussed in class    that one of the rifts between architecture and technology is that of scale – architecture, in Walter Benjamin’s words, is perceived by the collective, whereas technology tends to operate on a personal level. However, in Sentient City Shepard analyses case studies that use mobile and Internet technologies to shape a “collective representation of urban life” (pp.28).

What is the role of locative media in changing the focus of digital technologies from the individual to the collective? Could they allow urban life not only to be collectively represented in virtual space, but rather collectively produced in real space?

3
McCullough seems to argue for a symbiosis of top-down and bottom-up urban dynamics (pp.198). However, the challenge of integrating the two still remains. IBM’s white paper is eager to provide an easy solution: to parse a vast amount of user-generated data and give them back to the citizens. However, raw data is not information. Meaning relies in interpreting the data through emergent patterns.

Who will have the right to the data? Assuming that raw data is arguably of little use, who will be interpreting this data and why? Is there room for non-corporate or institutional data interpretations in the smart city?
Also, how would the data processing filters be defined? What is put at stake anytime algorithms reach false assumptions, such as those drawn out of proportion in the blog Spurious Correlation (link) ?

The logical fallacies of algorithms

1) In Shepard’s Sentient City, I was struck by the passage in page 23 about the “program for a house”, as if building a city was an exercise in object oriented programming. A house has characteristics that may vary from one to the other, but they all descend from a common class of “House.” To find hybrid, or unexpected spaces like the laundromat/bar, this object oriented way of thinking won’t get you very far. If each node in the network of a city is an opportunity to find and explore a ludic space not just through the architecture, how can digital technology help break down these seemingly arbitrary barriers that define spaces? How can a single space hold multitudes?

3) On p20 of Sentient City, Mark write about various ways in which locative technology can be of use (traffic patterns), where it may be an irritant (targeted advertising), and where it’s intrusive (profiling). What are the differences in the applications here? It would seem that a level of anonymity is required before it becomes something that is welcome and useful on a city wide scale. What about edge cases though? If you aren’t in the center of the dataset, what are you missing out on in this scenario? Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction has a good series of examples of “outsiders” or people who are statistically separate in large sets of data. When thinking about locative media, it’s something to keep in mind, who is implementing these tools, and for whom?

3) McCullough writes about attempts at making smart cities, and the failure of top-down implementations. Masdar City, which I’ve visited and can attest to the totality of a flop, is a great example. In fact, the UAE as a whole may eventually be seen as a story of missed opportunity, in large part because of this top-down planning of everything in the country. Even as technology enables cybernetic systems to help regulate these environments, there is still a failure in realizing the overall goals that are laid out. Can this be attributed to a failure of vision, implementation, will, or some combination of all of the above? Is it possible to build a city with a non-hierarchical system? What would that look like?

REQUIRED:

McCullough, M. “Megacity Resources,” in M. McCullough, Ambient Commons- Attention in the Age of Embodied Information, MIT Press, 2013.

Shepard, M. “Toward the Sentient City,” in Shepard, M. Sentient City- Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture and the Future of Urban Space, MIT Press, 2011.