Meandering around something idea-shaped but not quite touching it
Cities, then. The November issue of WIRED, on subscribers doorsteps today and in the shops tomorrow, is all about The City, and I’ve been thinking a lot about them. I suppose much of this is an excuse for flaneurism, but much of it has really been engaged with my more personal suspicions that the design and technology direction I’ve been going on is the wrong one. Bear with me on this.
I’m writing in Soho’s MilkBar, enveloped by soft layers. Just looking directly ahead, I can see references to French cinema, to the Swiss Railway, to 21st century pastiches of 1950s American diners, to Australian coffee-nomenclature, to the Florentine lily. Each one of these branching off into layers of semantics, all meaning something that directly affects my day and my behaviour, and that’s just the clothing and the stuff on the wall: the symbols go on and on, soft and made for love. You don’t need to be Umberto Eco to riff off it for hours: it’s turtlenecks all the way down.
If anything, it’s these layers that make The City our protection. The cushioning effect of history upon reference upon metaphor upon inter-mixed system is the thing that makes it the most human place to live in. It’s why Soho is nicer than L’Opera, and why Marylebone feels more human than Milton Keynes, and it’s why a good conversation, or a sunny day watching the world go by, are more meaningfully human than microclimate data or real-time search. As technologists, designers, futurists, whatever, we would do well to remember that. It’s just that we rarely do.
Matt Jones’ “The City is a Battle Suit for Surviving the Future.” is busy spawning thought all over the web at the moment. And so it is here too.
The overwhelming majority of these are not old post-industrial world cities such as London or New York, but large chaotic sprawls of the industrialising world such as the “maximum cities” of Mumbai or Guangzhou. Here the infrastructures are layered, ad-hoc, adaptive and personal – people there really are walking architecture, as Archigram said.
Walking architecture? A battlesuit?
God, how tiring.
I lived for a year in Dongguan, the even-more-hyper neighbour to Guangzhou – and since then have spent enough time in maximum cities, failed cities, edge states and post-nation state localities to know that what’s entertaining in fiction positively sucks in reality. The whole tooled-up to buy some groceries, hope I don’t get typhoid thing is romantic, for sure, but we used to do it in London too and the finest minds of the 19th century dedicated themselves to stopping it. The Victorian Mega City One wasn’t any fun at all after a while.
Of course, I don’t think that Matt is advocating a lifestyle: he’s tapping into a tradition of British speculation to give vectors for thinking about pervasive computing. Nothing more. Still, that doesn’t stop the undercurrent of yearning for the future of our pasts that seems to be returning. Nevertheless we dance with the future that brought us, and as much as we might debate Thunderbirds.v.Jetsons we’re rather stuck with a world that is much more layered than fiction ever could be.
The critique isn’t restricted to the feel of the thing. It’s historically dubious too. It’s not like the world stopped thinking in 1969, as Kazys Varnelis, the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, also points out:
Thus, when Jones invokes Warren Ellis’s comic series The Authority to conclude that cities are the best battle suits we have, I wonder if his rhetoric hasn’t revealed this fundamental problem with networked urbanism. Critique is a thing of the past for most of us, as antiquated as Archigram and its earnest modernity might have seemed in the early 1990s. When I began teaching at SCI-Arc, fifteen years ago, slides of Walking City raised chuckles among my students and I would have to explain its historical importance. How times have changed. But the research being done into networked urbanism is tied very closely to industry and even to military operations (how distinct are these under network culture anyway?). As we cheer on the latest (literal) battle suit, do we ask how these technologies will be deployed in the Iraqs and Afghanistans of the future? Or how the devices with which we activate the city control us and allow us to be tracked? Projects that critically interrogate the sentient city, as for example Mark Shepard’s Hertzian Rain does, are precious few.
True enough, but again, I think missing a point. It’s not a battlesuit, because this isn’t a battle. Much as one might want to be Bourne or Batman or the dude from Mission: Impossible, at the end of the day, none of us are. The layers of modern life aren’t grand missions to vanquish evil, or the preparation for the time that we’ll be called to action, activated by the Global Frequency. Instead our cities are made of, and our lives build up, layers and layers of soft actions. We’re already massively networked. We can already read the city’s data, it’s just that it’s encoded in patina, in fashion, in accents, in flirting. Why is this important to remember? Because if we want to predict the future by inventing it, we’d (i.e. us 30-something white male post-digital types) might want to remember everyone else – the people who don’t have a theme tune running in their head when they run out of the tube station. As Alex Deschamps-Sonsino wrote, it’s about the…
…things about this, that makes me feel like I’m not included in the city experience in the same way as my more testosterone-driven peers
All of this is a long and sprawlingly bloggy way of saying that I’m in the middle of something in my head. It’s not tech-shaped, but I can’t see it yet. Hmmm.