Cities as Programmable Operating Systems
Instead of idling in frustration about the delayed bus or subway, the potholes in the street, hazardous traffic signals on a particular corner, or the never-ending lines at Whole Foods, cities are capable of moving towards a read/write urbanism, where they will operate like programmable software.
Bruce Sterling imagines how the future interface of the metropolis might operate:
An issue-tracking board for cities? Something visual and Web-friendly, that’s simultaneously citizen-facing and bureaucracy-facing? Heck, that begins to sound like a pretty neat way to address the problems with systems like 311 and FixMyStreet .
You provide citizens with a variety of congenial ways to initiate trouble tickets, whether they’re most comfortable using the phone, a mobile application or website, or a text message. You display currently open cases, and gather resolved tickets in a permanent archive or resource. You use an algorithm to assign priority to open issues on a three-axis metric:Scale, Severity, Urgency.
Cities will start to implement better frameworks for citizen responsiveness. In order to do so, there needs to be a better way for people to interact with public objects. Greenfield, via Speedbird defines a public object as “any discrete object in the common spatial domain, intended for the use and enjoyment of the general public.” Greenfield envisions a geopositioning interactive augmented reality tool, such as “Tap here to report a problem with this bus shelter”
Greenfield says that, “In order for anything like this scheme to work, public objects would need to have a few core qualities, qualities I’ve often described as making them addressable, queryable, and even potentially scriptable.”
This means that each public object can have an assigned address to identify it, an API related to it to allow for real-time information and public interaction, and the ability to inform appropriate resources of the issue. The general public must also be able to receive and use the information.
The Internet is already the platform for urbanism and technological innovations in cities, and it is already turning into a ubiquitous tool to connect public objects (check out Pachube, an internet platform where you can store and share real-time data about objects, devices, and buildings worldwide). It is an innovative idea that Greenfield advocates, that all public and municipal objects will have API’s.
As futuristic as it that seems – that objects will participate in urban living and communicate with each other just as people do – enabling things like throwaway umbrellas to soon have a personality and a history – it is an unwarranted fear that humanity will be overthrown by human intelligence : ubiquitous computing and networked public objects are enhancing urbanism by allowing people be much more efficient at identifying an issue, communicating with one another and with bureaucratic systems, and then fixing the problem.
