Although the jobs are very different, in some ways, planners that work on economic development are a lot like HR managers. Both are trying to attract and keep talent in their respective city or company.
I read an article a while back about how difficult it is for companies to keep the best employees on board – it was particularly in reference to managers in China – but this is the same sentiment expressed by corporations explaining why they need to give CEOs outrageous salaries. The article, written by an HR manager, offered a different perspective; “money is easy to top”, she said, “if all you’re offering is lots of money, anyone can come in and offer a little bit more. If you want to keep your best people, you need to offer them things other companies can’t replicate.” She offered suggestions like great health plans that their spouses and kids will really love, flexible schedules, etc. In short the idea was, connect not just through money, but through many channels, and connect not just with your best employees, but with their families. Build an attractive web that will draw people in and make it hard for them to leave…
City planners have been doing similar things for a long time. Working to build good infrastructure and schools, inviting neighborhoods with affordable housing, good hospitals and employment opportunities… more recently building “third places for the creative class”.
What then, is the next step for planners as HR managers? As you might expect, as I see it, part of it will come down to building infrastructures that support productive use of the cyberscape. Cities in which denizens are empowered, even encouraged, to live out their dreams in ways that no other place can offer will have an advantage in attracting and keeping the best talent. I think that cities with advanced and multiple cyberscapes will prove able to be more things to more people – to be in accord with more peoples’ dreams – and therefore have a leg up in the competition for the best.
Hellicar & Lewis are a London-based duo – Pete Hellicar and Joel Gethin Lewis. They have embraced the open source revolution which creates art that is accessible and interactive.
Wasted Spaces commissioned the artists to develop the The Hello Wall. This installation uses Twitter to let the public interact with the huge wall projection on Wembley High Road.
The artists explain the artwork in more detail as follows:
“In visual terms, The Hello Wall will be a simple single colour background, with a foreground of simple shapes, in a physically realistic two dimensional simulation. Imagine a series of red circles on an orange background, bouncing off each other in zero gravity. The installation is designed to empower people, to allow them to have a creative input into the architectural space that they find themselves in – often without any sense of control or ownership.”
The US State Department has launched Opinion Space 2.0 (I’m not sure what the 2.0 is for, but I’m in no position to criticize others for adding numbers to the end of words in hope of getting attention). Here’s what they say:
The U.S. Department of State and UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media are working together to explore new technologies that can solicit insightful ideas on U.S. foreign policy. Opinion Space is a new tool that uses data visualization and statistical analysis to give all participants an equal opportunity to have their opinions heard and to vote on the ideas of others.
Participatory culture thrives on the sharing of diverse opinions among large populations over the network, however:
1) The amount of data can be overwhelming. News and blog sites often generate hundreds or thousands of comments.
2) Websites often attract people with like-minded viewpoints, which can reinforce biases and produce “cyberpolarization.” ( http://bit.ly/4A5lAn )
3) Thoughtful moderates are often shouted down by extremists.
Opinion Space uses new data visualization models and statistical analysis to address these problems. Every participant represents a “point of view” on a visual opinion map. This map is not based on geography or predetermined categories, but on similarity of opinion; those who agree on basic issues are neighbors, and those who are far apart have agreed to disagree. The map is designed to ‘depolarize’ discussions by including all participants on a level playing field.
You can instantly see where you stand in relation to other participants, and by reviewing their comments, you help the community highlight the most insightful ideas.
Opinion Space is a general tool that could potentially be used to collect and visualize user opinions on topics ranging from politics to parenting, from art to zoology.
Or city planning and governance, naturally. The need for visualization formats that display the wide range, rather than the extreme poles, of opinion is necessary – and I really like how this platform allows you to change your opinions as you evaluate and rate the arguments of others. All-in-all I think the platform is an important development, and pretty well done.
But what about the questions the site poses to gauge peoples’ opinions? They are as follows:
1. The most urgent security threat to the United States is a terrorist armed with a nuclear weapon. (sliding scale, agree/disagree)
2. Continuous diplomatic efforts are required to produce lasting, sustainable peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan. (sliding scale, agree/disagree)
3. Climate change poses a threat to political stability around the world. (sliding scale, agree/disagree)
4. Investing to increase food production in other countries will ultimately benefit me and my family in the future. (sliding scale, agree/disagree)
5. The best way to advance a country’s economic development is to empower its women. (sliding scale, agree/disagree)
If you met U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, what issue would you tell her about, why is it important to you, and what specific suggestions do you have for addressing it? (short answer, open ended)
My thought is: How am I supposed to know if empowering women is the best way to advance a country’s economic development? Which country? How is their infrastructure? Race relations? Education system? If I’m not an expert in this field (and maybe even if I am) I just don’t know, and it’s most likely that there isn’t just one answer. What’s more, if I don’t agree, how is the State Department going to know why I don’t agree?
The same goes for all the other questions. Is a terrorist armed with a nuclear weapon the greatest threat to the US? Well… what does the intelligence say about the probability of terrorists having nuclear weapons? If intelligence says that they might, where are they? Do they have a way to deliver it to US soil? What about other threats that could be significant. Biological weapons maybe? I don’t really know how to answer them, and even if I did think I knew the answer, that doesn’t really mean much. It is probably more of a reflection of the information that comes to me through the social networks and news sources I ‘belong’ to, of my personal experience. Perhaps people that lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis would agree more strongly with this statement then others, but that doesn’t have any bearing on the real threat level from nuclear weapons today. The State Department must understand that people around the world thinking that the most urgent security threat to the United States is a terrorist armed with a nuclear weapon does not make it so. Reality is not decided by plebiscite. What is the point of collecting and presenting this data, then?
There are a couple of answers I can think of.
First: the State Department hopes that by “viewpoints” out in this non-polar way (which I actually find somewhat hard to interpret) they will make a point about the complexity of the issues we face, encouraging an outlook on the world that is less black-and-while or “us v. them”. If this is the case, then one might think that the questions you ask barely matter at all, and kind of “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey”. I think the questions do matter, however, and I’ll return to this point later.
Second: The State Department doesn’t plan on using this data to make decisions, but to design the narrative around the decisions that it makes. For example, if people believe that nuclear weapons are a the greatest threat, then emphasize the threat of nuclear weapons when talking about our foreign policy. In this case, contributing information to the platform is akin to telling an advertising agency about your preferences as a consumer. It might help them find the ads that most relevant to you (ie, address the issues that are most important to you) but it also may help them manipulate you into buying products (or policies) that you don’t really want, because they are appropriately packaged and marketed.
So, I think the questions that are being asked are pretty poor ones. They ask about very general things in very specific ways, they require expert knowledge to answer correctly, and it’s hard to see how the results of the survey could be usefully employed without taking a pretty cynical view of the word useful.
But, better questions could be asked. General questions should be asked about general things, and questions about specific scenarios should be used to gauge whether the way people perceive their own values matches up with the likely results of the actions they support.
Here are the kind of general questions for I would consider soliciting quantitative responses, with a few little twists on the “agreement slider”:
How many foreign civilian lives should be subjected to potentially life threatening preemptive attack in order to protect one of your civilian countrymen from a similar threat of preemptive attack? From zero to infinity.
Should countries spend more money on military spending or on education, infrastructure, and other aid to foreign nations? (continuum between all money at either extreme)
Should countries promote their core values abroad? (agree/disagree slider)
And some specific ones to follow up, such as:
Intelligence reports indicate that a terrorist cell of about 10 members is at location X with 70% probability, but will likely move to an unknown location soon. The military could use a drone bomber to attack the location, which would likely cause 10 to 20 civilian causalities, should the location be bombed?
I realize that these kinds of questions make for some really sensitive answers, and that they too force people into answering in a somewhat unclear way (because they are open to people from all countries, they do not differentiate between what “we should do to others” and “what others should do to us” – I think this type of distinction is actually one of the biggest problems in foreign relations, and it would be great if there were questions that could get at this issue as well).
What does this have to do with cities? Well, although the issues a city deals with are very different than those dealt with by the state department, the core question of the issue is the same. Citizens can be asked questions about their perceptions of reality and the decisions they would make thereby, or questions about their values and the decisions they would make thereby. I think the questions about values offer more potential, and hope that as more and more platforms are developed for soliciting and visualizing responses, we will not lose sight of the importance of the questions we’re asking.
In my view, the reason for representative democracy is that it’s impossible for everyone to be an expert on every issue. Leaders shouldn’t be asking citizens to interpret the facts for them, but should be working to understand citizens’ values so they can be good representatives, and make decisions accordingly.
One of the potential, perhaps even inevitable, consequences of rapidly developing cyberscapes is that we may increasingly find ourselves occupying parallel cities. People walking on the same street but interacting through different channels, seeing different AR layers, pumped full of wildly different information and interpretations of society. Not to mention those who don’t exist in the cyber-realm at all. What would this mean for civic life? Is there precedent in the physical world or the internet ‘pre-internet-of-things’? I think so.
In the physical world there have been degrees of parallelism for a long time – from facades that hide reality, to restricted spaces, language barriers and social strata. So, when Engels talked about how the wealthy could take their carriages from the nice suburbs of Manchester to the downtown, traveling on the one road through the slums that was well maintained – so they didn’t have to see the squalor – they were living in a parallel world. Ditto for modern day commuters who travel from suburbs to CBDs on highways that pass through getthos. Perhaps even more relevant to the cyberscape analogy is the difference in the way people experience a Chinatown – as defined by their ability to read and speak Chinese. Some signs provide English and Chinese – but they don’t always say the same thing – and some signs aren’t in English at all (for example, ones that advertise “immigration services”). Point being: there is definitely precedent for parallel cities in the physical realm.
The online world is, of course, even more so. The social networks you belong to dictate what memes you are exposed to, and there has been lots of research showing that users of facebook, twitter, MySpace, etc, to a certain degree, self segregate into like-minded mobs. The same goes for the blogs people read (evidently most people read and listen almost exclusively to opinions that support their own). So, despite the potential to connect people of all backgrounds, languages, etc – it seems that the internet has also had a segregating effect. Allowing us to form tribes of like-minded people from around the world.
What will happen as the urban and the online merge? As virtual ’signs’ are added to the landscape by many different providers that all say different things, as the narratives of those we have chosen to listen to infiltrate every space, drowning out the disparate noise…
San Francisco is naturally one of the leaders in merging the city with technology, and using technology to improve the city. Here are a few things that have caught my eyes in the past couple days.
The City of San Francisco has launched PolicySF, a Website to ‘help communities share good ideas with one another.’ The site provides ‘policy toolkits’ with FAQs, processes, sample policy documents and ordinances on SF-specific initiatives. Other governments can also share their ideas.
BART, in partnership with San Francisco-based developer Junaio, released its first official augmented reality app–or, more accurately, its first official augmented reality layer.
The Mobile City has done an excellent summary of Design Approaches for the 21st Century City – which gives distinct ideas to many of the ideas I’ve been toying with here – I feel like I go to far in lumping things together: ie “these are all really just one big interconnected movement” – so, while I think there is some overlap in the categories below, I really appreciate the way they’ve been articulated.
· The Wiki-City - Designing with new media – How can the design process itself be restructured through the use of (social) digital media? How can one allow for more participation, bottom-up input, and engagement in a productive way? How does this change the relation between client, architects and other performers, and the audience?
· The Real Time City – Data-aggregation in the Design Process With the rise of digital and mobile media and gps receivers, urbanites have started leaving numerous digital traces behind that when aggregated reveal their usage patterns of the city. What exactly do we learn from these datasets, and how can they be incorporated in the design process?
· The Living City –Urban experience, narratives and design Digital media can be used to annotate urban spaces with people’s everyday stories and lived experiences. How does this temporal inscription of place change they way we see and interact with the urban environment?
· The Multimedia City – The design of urban screens and mediafacades Architecture is increasingly using multimedia components as part of their elementary set of building blocks. How can you incorporate these into urban design?
· The Augmented City – The design of informational services in a physical context In augmented reality, additional layers of information are projected on or over physical environments. Thus the domain of digital information is embedded in the physical domain. What is the potential for urban design?
· The Sentient City – Designing Responsive Architecture Various sensors can register real-time information about the environment, and movements, (social) processes and identities of people and objects. Technical systems may also respond to changing conditions. How can this be employed to adapt the shape, function, usage of or access to buildings and infrastructures?
· The Smart City – Using artificial intelligence to design urban systems that respond or anticipate what is happening Can AI be integrated in urban design to anticipate and respond to urban patterns?
· The Hybrid City –Designing for hybrid practices. Digital and mobile media have led to changing urban behaviors and the rise of new cultural practices. For instance, the advent of WiFi has increased ‘mobile work’ from (semi-)public spaces. How can these changes in cultural practices be translated back into design, either by physically accommodating them or by design interventions that discourage them?
· The Layered City –Integrated design of the parallel experiences of physical places and mediascapes If the experience of the city is shaped by both the shape of the physical city as well as through exchanges in the media landscape, can we design both layers (or ‘channels’) of an urban project in concordance with each other?
· The Plugin City – using digital media to optimize, personalize or extend the experience of the city Can digital media be designed as ‘plug ins’ to the existing city, make the usage of existing urban structures more efficient and personalized or extend and deepen their experience?
· The Tactical City – using digital media to design alternative usage of the city Can digital media be designed to open up the design of physical spaces to other users or practices than initially intended?
· The Critical City – using design to foreground and discuss the dominant discours on urban culture Can design be employed as a means to a debate on urban culture, rather than shaping urban culture itself?
· The Interface City – designing urban ‘interfaces’. Some urban theories understand the city itself as an information platform where goods, opinions and ideas are constantly exchanged. Can new services be designed that optimize or extend this function of the city as a platform of exchange into the digital domain?
· The Informational City – The design of information spaces In our understanding of the media world spatial metaphors play an important role. Some architects have made the leap from designing physical structures to using their spatial expertise in ‘information architecture’.
On whom does the responsibility for easing participation in the city planning process lie?
First, what is a city?
Obviously this is too broad a question to address in a blog post, but stick with me, there’s a point here. The typical textbook answer as I understand it goes something like this: the western concept of urbanism is rooted in Greek history, where, when they spoke of the polis they were referring not only to the place, but also to the people. So city = physical places + the people who inhabit them. Yes?
Well… maybe not. When someone says they love New York, they might mean the architecture or the weather (to each hser own) i.e. the place; they might also mean the culture or the music i.e. the people – or both… or something else. Something that isn’t contained in the people + places paradigm.
The city has always been more than the sum of its parts, it has always consisted of more than just the places and the people. A city also consists of memories and dreams, of the image of the city created in movies and other media, of a host of ‘intangible extras’. My first instinct was to try to wrap these intangibles into ‘the conceptual city’ – which led me to Montreal Haecceities: The Underground City. The author(Alan Bourassa?) uses haecceity in a slightly unconventional way, but one that lends itself well to my further appropriation. Let’s define haecceity in a city context as the sum of the extras that make a city what it is. So when someone says they love New York, they are most likely saying they love the experience of New York’s myriad haecceities.
But, haecceity is difficult to understand and even more difficult to convey. I think it has traditionally been ignored in planning literature not because planners failed to realize it existed, but because the idea of doing something about it/with it/to it was so near impossible. Which leads me back to the cyberscape.
The cyberscape, and the many forms of augmented reality that will emerge from it open up a new world of possibility, and while a city’s cyberscape isn’t equivalent to its haecceity (and it never will be), I do think the technology offers exciting new possibilities for the recording, conveyance, recollection and analysis of haecceitical data.
This brings us to question two: how does one participate in a City 3.0?
If we accept that geo-referenced tweets, chalks, buzzes, etc are part of a city – perhaps even a foggy window into those elusive intangibles that make a city what it is – then we must study them too. It is taken as given that in order to do their jobs effectively, city planners must understand their city’s layout, traffic, economy, people and institutions. They do this by “getting out there” to do “reconnaissance” and also by asking questions – by inviting participation.
But what does where is “out there” when parts of the city live online, and what does it mean to encourage participation in the planning process when geo-referenced data is everywhere? While I’m sure we’ll see many more planning departments rolling out online surveys and other apps, I can’t help but feel that they will also begin to bear the onus of responsibility for exploration of their cities’ cyberscapes, searching for the heacceities that has been so elusive for so long.
If everyone is always “participating” then planners need to find new ways to listen, interpret, present and decide.
Ideas for Austin: another site for crowdsourcing urban planning. The site is powered by UserVoice with some interesting results. (UserVoice, as the name implies, is really designed for businesses to use with their clients/customers). I say interesting because it seems that Ideas for Austin has enjoyed greater use than most of the other “crowdsourcing planning” sites I’ve seen, but it doesn’t really allow users to do much. You can submit ideas in a text only form, and vote for ideas submitted by others that you like. The data is not geo-referenced, and is only broken down into five categories (21st Century Economy, Clean Energy, Community, Our Neighborhoods, Supporting Austin’s Creative Class).
While I still feel that an ideal system would include a lot more meta-data than this one does, and will note that greater participation may also be the result of better publicity, Ideas for Austin reminds me of the need for participation to be simple – makes me think about getting meta-data in ‘unconventional’ ways (ie, without human-user submission) – and finally, begs the question – how will technological tools for participation in planning be different from tools for participation in other aspects of work/society/etc. Is there an optimal level of abstraction?
