Replacing Industry with Green Housing in Stockholm

by Peter Sigrist and Rebecka Gordan

“Sustainable architecture and urban development can never be solely technical issues or be reduced to a matter of points on a certification scale, but need to begin with fundamental social issues: How are we to live together and how can architecture and the city create best possible conditions?”

– Henrietta Palmer in “Art and Institution: A Contradiction?” 2010

Online in Public Space

by Anja Wolf

Studying at a cafe recently, I noticed that most of the people around me were sitting alone in front of computers. Others had come to meet and talk, but the majority were focused on their screens. It seems that computers, phones and other devices have not only influenced our concentration capacity but also our behavior in public. We often appreciate sitting in active places but remain absorbed in our digital worlds.

San Francisco's New Favorite Bridge

by Emily Marsh

Although the Bay Bridge opened six months before the Golden Gate Bridge, it is widely considered the lesser of the two. The Golden Gate's Art Deco design in striking international orange has made it a global icon, while its silver counterpart is a heavily used expressway connecting San Francisco with its industrial neighbor, Oakland. After 75 years of living in the shadows, yesterday the Bay Bridge came into the spotlight.

Assorted Links #72

by Ali Madad

• Smart Parking and the Robert Moses Mistake
• Dissatisfaction City
• New Old Town
• Smart City, or Smart Citizens?
• Starry, Starry, Starry Night

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Peter Kropotkin on Invention

Source: Nadar

“The cities, bound together by railroads and waterways, are organisms which have lived through centuries. Dig beneath them and you find, one above another, the foundations of streets, of houses, of theatres, of public buildings. Search into their history and you will see how the civilization of the town, its industry, its special characteristics, have slowly grown and ripened through the co-operation of generations of its inhabitants before it could become what it is to-day. And even to-day; the value of each dwelling, factory, and warehouse, which has been created by the accumulated labour of the millions of workers, now dead and buried, is only maintained by the very presence and labour of legions of the men who now inhabit that special corner of the globe. Each of the atoms composing what we call the Wealth of Nations owes its value to the fact that it is a part of the great whole. What would a London dockyard or a great Paris warehouse be if they were not situated in these great centres of international commerce? What would become of our mines, our factories, our workshops, and our railways, without the immense quantities of merchandise transported every day by sea and land?

“Millions of human beings have laboured to create this civilization on which we pride ourselves to-day. Other millions, scattered through the globe, labour to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in fifty years but ruins.

“There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man.

“Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have laboured to increase knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century could never have appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all sorts. They have drawn their motive force from the environment.

“The genius of a Séguin, a Mayer, a Grove, has certainly done more to launch industry in new directions than all the capitalists in the world. But men of genius are themselves the children of industry as well as of science. Not until thousands of steam-engines had been working for years before all eyes, constantly transforming heat into dynamic force, and this force into sound, light, and electricity, could the insight of genius proclaim the mechanical origin and the unity of the physical forces. And if we, children of the nineteenth century, have at last grasped this idea, if we know now how to apply it, it is again because daily experience has prepared the way. The thinkers of the eighteenth century saw and declared it, but the idea remained undeveloped, because the eighteenth century had not grown up like ours, side by side with the steam-engine. Imagine the decades that might have passed while we remained in ignorance of this law, which has revolutionized modern industry, had Watt not found at Soho skilled workmen to embody his ideas in metal, bringing all the parts of his engine to perfection, so that steam, pent in a complete mechanism, and rendered more docile than a horse, more manageable than water, became at last the very soul of modern industry.

“Every machine has had the same history — a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.

“Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle — all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.

“By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say — This is mine, not yours? ... Thought being incapable of being patented, patents are a crying injustice in theory, and in practice they result in one of the great obstacles to the rapid development of invention.”

— Peter Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread, 1906

This is part of the Polis collection of quotes related to cities.

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Learning to Get Lost in Cities

by Anja Wolf


AWOL helps users lose their way. Source: Local Travel Movement

When I was younger, I spent many hours browsing through my grandparents' encyclopedia to discover things I didn't know existed. Today I turn to search engines to find information as quickly as possible. This is more efficient, but it doesn't offer the same sense of wonder in spontaneous discoveries. If you don't type something you hope to find, the page will remain blank. We tend to start out knowing what we're looking for.

If we need to know the direction from point A to point B, we can easily find it on Google Maps or on GPS-equipped phones. This is very practical, but perhaps a bit boring. Should we always know what we're looking for, or where we want to go?

Easy access to vast quantities of information has increased the value of the unknown, and technology is emerging to meet this need. AWOL, for example, is a package of algorithmically generated routes that help people get lost in cities. It even includes a nonworking compass. There is also the web service GetLostBot, which tracks the places you visit over time and offers alternatives when they become too repetitive. As for apps, Drift facilitates getting lost in familiar places, and Serendipitor helps with finding things by looking for something else.


Serendipitor helps you find what you weren't looking for. Source: Inventing Interactive

These kinds of tools can help us find unexpected information and unknown places that we might not even think we would appreciate. They can even influence the ways we access and use urban space. At the same time, isn't it a bit sad that we should need our phones to show us how to be spontaneous?

Perhaps we're beginning to see our cities with new eyes, as full of potential for aimless treasure hunting with or without the help of technology. There remains so much we don't know about the places where we live, so much to discover. Moving outside our comfort zones and forgetting what we're looking for may help us find new pleasure in city living.

Anja Wolf, originally from Sweden, studies landscape architecture at the College of Art in Edinburgh, Scotland.

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Colleen Morgan on (Digital) Archaeology

Source: Colleen Morgan

“The tradition of craft in archaeology has been brutally squandered; as the de-skilling and devaluation of archaeologists continues through the culture of academic underrepresentation, lack of training, and a world-wide paucity of funding for cultural heritage, recognition for the origin of archaeological data and its relative reliability has dwindled. Even as complex network analyses of migratory patterns, massive relational databases, and vast 3-D reconstructions of Roman cities are created, the underlying data relies on the skilled labor of craftsmen and craftswomen in archaeology. A better archaeology is a participatory, multivocal, craft-based archaeology that recognizes the value of both dirt and digital archaeologists. Using digital media to highlight inequity, to bring the voices of stakeholders into relief, to de-center interpretations, and to make things and share them is a gift to archaeology, and a threat, and a promise.”

— Colleen Morgan in “The Conclusions of the Conclusions,” 2012

This is part of the Polis collection of quotes related to cities.

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Interview with Ben Berkowitz of SeeClickFix

by Melanie Friedrichs


SeeClickFix co-founders (left to right) Jeff Blasius, Ben Berkowitz, Miles Lasater and Kam Lasater. Source: SeeClickFix

Ben Berkowitz is co-founder of SeeClickFix, a website and software application that allows users to upload pictures of infrastructure problems — like potholes or downed trees — and report them directly to local government. SeeClickFix offers its software and data to users for free. It also does paid work for municipalities, developing solutions to infrastructure problems from start to finish. SeeClickFix recently teamed up with The Huffington Post to assist with recovery from Hurricane Sandy. Ben sat down with Polis to talk about how users have reacted to SeeClickFix, and share his views on governance and entrepreneurship.

What inspired you and your co-founders to start SeeClickFix?

There were a number of problems in my neighborhood that were supposedly being documented and dealt with through city channels. During an attempt to get graffiti off of a neighbor's building, I had the idea that publicly documenting the problem would help hold the government accountable. I think my co-founders were feeling some similar frustrations. I was also motivated by a general interest in getting involved with a social venture that could have a long-term impact on our community.

New Haven is an unusual place for a tech start-up. Why did you choose to stick around instead of moving to New York or Silicon Valley?

Miles [a co-founder] always jokes that the food kept him here longer than he expected. New Haven really has an amazing restaurant scene. Also, my family is here, and with food and family you tend to stay. Then, as if by local karma, you find that there are all these other awesome reasons. Access to talent is really high because of the universities, and demand is not as high for technical people here as in Boston, NYC, the Valley or even Boulder. And, of course, the city itself is a fun place; there are lots of livable, walkable, cyclable places — the same things I enjoy in some of my favorite big cites like Boston, New York and Vancouver.

When you first brought the idea of using SeeClickFix to local government, what kind of response did you receive?

I was not expecting it to go as smoothly as it did. I didn't expect issues to get fixed when we made them public. I suspected that local government wouldn't like us right away. But it works, and it turns out most local government officials actually do want to do their jobs. More and more governments are partnering with us and not trying to look the other way. Also, I was surprised that so many governments started using our software for managing internal data. I have lots of faith in the engineers on our team and we're building really good software, but I thought that "legacy software" was more entrenched in local government than it was.

When I started, I had a very "us vs them, citizens vs government" mentality, and now I have more of a "we" mentality. There are people on both sides who can be disruptive to the community, and people on both sides that can really make the community a positive place.


SeeClickFix workflow. Source: Alliance for Youth Movements

Do you think SeeClickFix has succeeded in helping residents and local government connect?

Definitely. People have gotten together to resolve things, people have gotten together to discuss things, people have gotten together to lobby things, people have helped each other. Here's my anecdote of the week: Users reported a desire for a dog park in a previously unused public space, and we helped fundraise for the dog park and got it put up. I just saw a report that a woman's purse had been found in front of the dog park and was posted to SeeClickFix. I'm not sure if she's gotten her purse back yet, but it's amazing to think that the incident might not have been reported if that park hadn't been there.

What do you think is the biggest problem in local government today?

Inefficiencies. General inefficiencies, communication, allocation of resources, failing infrastructure. I think that a great strategy is including more people in the act of governance. That's not a statement about big or small government; it's just a statement about more inclusive government. It's remarkable how many people from local government are willing to invite people in to help make communities better, and also what local citizens are willing to do in their neighborhoods that they wouldn't normally think of as governance. It would be great if the federal government could have as much success, but all the lobbying and politics get in the way of the things that really matter to people.

How would you characterize the role of entrepreneurship in cities?

Entrepreneurship is invaluable to cities. Any kind of culture that says, “Get it Started” and “Do it Yourself” is good if you're working at a nonprofit, if you're a kid in 4th grade selling lemonade, if you're the director of public works or if you’re the C.E.O. of a local tech start-up. That willingness to try something with minimal resources is what sparks innovation and keeps the country going. I’ve seen local government wake up to that, from New York City to much smaller cities like New Haven.

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A Better World by Design and Technology

by Melanie Friedrichs

If you had the power to rebuild the world from scratch, how would you design it? The question seems hypothetical, but the more I think about design and technology, the more realistic and important it becomes.

Every October for the past five years I've attended a conference called A Better World by Design. Founded in 2008 by two engineering students at Brown University and two industrial design students at the Rhode Island School of Design, the conference attracts social entrepreneurs, urbanists, artists and students of all stripes for a weekend of ideation, iteration and, most importantly, inspiration.


"The Grand Anything" workshop at A Better World by Design 2010. Source: A Better World by Design

Many of the speakers touch on cities. Here are some of my favorites over the years:

• Cameron Sinclair (2008), founder of Architecture for Humanity
• Jaime Lerner (2009), urban planner and former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil
• Ben Hamilton-Baillie (2010), expert on traffic management and street design
• Steven Bingler (2011), founder of the architectural design firm Concordia
• Timothy Beatley (2012), author of "Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning"

But the conference covers a wider range of themes than even the catch-all of "cities" can encompass. This year there were workshops on "Persuasive Communication," "Hip Hop for Social Change," "The Nature of Wood," "Eating Insects" and "Throwing Paper Airplanes at the Moon."

When I first attended as a wide-eyed freshman, I would have defined design as "the aesthetic arrangement of words and images on paper," or perhaps, as an afterthought, "the aesthetic arrangement of objects in space." Through the conference, I've gradually expanded my definition of design to something closer to the one offered by this year's closing speaker, Cheryl Heller: "Design is a process for seeing unconnected things in relationship to each other."

For the past five years I've watched the iPhone conquer the mobile market and entrepreneurs apply tablets and touch-screens to finance, retail, education and healthcare. Rapid innovation produces what economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction," a process by which new technology renders existing products or systems obsolete. The cell phone has nearly replaced the landline, which replaced the telegraph. The camera phone is substituting for the scanner, which has almost killed the fax. Ruby on Rails is growing more popular than Java, which dethroned C++ as the most popular programming language. Creatively destructive technologies are by definition better: faster, easier, cheaper.

Technology is constantly replacing existing products and systems with new ones. In a sense, each new round of creative destruction wipes the slate clean and rebuilds that particular part of the world from scratch. We get a chance not only to make things faster, easier or cheaper with technology, but also to entirely rethink how we go about doing things in the first place.


Memorable bus stops built during Jaime Lerner's tenure in Curitiba, Brazil. Source: EMBARQ

Enter design. After five years of adjusting and expanding my definition, design to me now means "consciously building with a better world in mind." There is a fine line between design and technology. Design alone can provoke a process of creative destruction (take, for example, the entire fashion industry) but, more often, hard mechanics start the cycle and design adds layers on top. If we let pure mechanics push the system forward, we'll end up with a world that is faster, easier and cheaper, but to only a fraction of the degree it would be with the addition of design. For example, I'd put the difference between the Blackberry and iPhone at about 20 percent technology and 80 percent design.

The relationship between technology and design applies to cities as well. Putting in the mechanics, whether a subway system or LEED-certified building, is only part of the opportunity. Hannah Bebbington, a member of the A Better World by Design planning committee, explains:

A city can be designed as more than just a system of roads, fast food joints, and department stores. A city can be more than just a hub for the masses. The way the buildings are built, the way nature is incorporated, the way art can become part of daily life, can transform a city into something intimate and community-oriented, creating a platform for relationships, creativity, exploration, and more for the people living there. When cities are built with an eye for environmental sustainability and community-oriented infrastructure, a better world will emerge that is long lasting and strong.

Design is key in applying technology toward these kinds of cities and this kind of world.

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Three Questions: Annette Kim of M.I.T. Sidewalk Lab

by Peter Sigrist

As part of the Polis Three Questions series, in which we present the same three questions to a range of people doing impressive work related to cities, we bring you an interview with Annette Kim, professor of international urban development at the M.I.T. Department of Urban Studies and Planning.


Source: SLAB / Narrative Maps

Annette is founding director of SLAB, or Sidewalk Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that uses cartography to generate knowledge about the public space between streets and buildings. Her research and teaching encompass property rights, critical cartography, market transition, urban housing, entrepreneurship, public space and municipal finance. Recent publications include "Real Rights to the City: Cases of Property Rights Changes Towards Equity in Eastern Asia," "Takings in the Twenty-First Century: Comparisons of Urban Land Development Controversies in the US, China and Vietnam" and the forthcoming "Sidewalk City: Re-Mapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City." Annette has worked as a consultant to the U.N. Centre for Human Settlements, a designer of low-income housing and a manager for construction projects in cities around the world. In this interview, we discuss her current work, future plans and sources of inspiration.


Source: SLAB / Physical Survey Research

What is your most exciting project at the moment?

The last two years have been exciting with the formation of SLAB — a completely different mode of scholarship for me that reconciles a number of issues: collaborative yet directed inquiry, social science and art, academic scholarship and public engagement, etc. We have mostly been focused on one output for our research — the book "Sidewalk City: Re-mapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City," which is being published by the University of Chicago Press. We are just now sending it off to go into press production.


Source: SLAB / Street Vendor Interviews

So now we are turning to constructing a traveling exhibit of our critical cartography to engage with a slightly broader public, with the high point being an exhibit in Ho Chi Minh City itself, where the role of sidewalks and street vendors is a big social debate. The show is really exciting to me because moving from print into installation unleashes all kinds of possibilities. We are now working on animated maps, tactile maps, interactive maps, all of which are very large. One of the things I learned from writing the book was that the most promising direction forward is to develop a narrative, almost cinematic, map in order to integrate analysis of space-time and the material-social, as well as to communicate better. With the accessibility and development of technology and the continued experimental melding of the disciplines, the possibilities are quite in reach. There is a heck of a lot of visualization out there in the sciences, humanities, design, etc. But, core to SLAB is the pursuit of a humane ethos and aesthetic, so we are careful to not get too slick or complex for our own good, although we can appreciate the wizardry of others.


Source: SLAB / Public Space Maps

What do you plan to take on next?

In keeping with SLAB’s vein of mapping overlooked spaces and overlooked peoples, I see the next stage of SLAB moving to a different geography. There are an estimated 2 million people living underground in Beijing, in old bomb shelters and basements, because that's the best space that they could afford in the city. I suppose you could think of it as excavating the subterranean dimensions of rapid urbanization. The situation is somewhat remniscent of Jacob Riis's New York, but different as well.

In any case, I look forward to an in-depth period of fieldwork again. I think one thing I contribute to scholarship is to not rely solely on either remote technology or remote theorizing, but to engage in a spatial ethnography. I’m taking Mandarin classes!


Source: SLAB / Photography

What do you find inspiring?

I have found many sources of inspiration: people, nature, places, growth, grace, etc. Rather, it seems the question is whether I’m in a state sensitive enough to notice inspiration. Its so easy to become deaf and blind — it’s truly amazing! That is what critical cartography is about: to help us notice, to navigate ourselves to greater awareness. And like receiving inspiration, it paradoxically takes discipline.

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Ecology of Images

by Min Li Chan


Seoul at night. Source: Min Li Chan

In describing the triumphs and travails of cities and urban culture, we often turn to photography. This is even more so with the democratization of technology, replete with smartphone snapshots, Internet-uploaded timelapse photography and easily accessible satellite imagery. Film critic A.O. Scott, in "Around the World in 99 Minutes and Zero Words," writes:

Susan Sontag concluded her book 'On Photography' with a plea for 'an ecology of images,' an approach to making and reproducing photographs that would protect both the meaning of particular pictures and the integrity of the reality they depict. Since the 1970s, when the essays in Sontag’s book were written, the global glut of images has grown almost beyond measure. In the age of Instagram and Google Earth it is easy to believe — it is sometimes hard not to believe — that every inch of the planet, every human face and patch of wilderness, has been snapped up and uploaded. We have seen it all.

In the constant change of hypergrowth cities on a planet of six billion inhabitants and growing, we clearly haven't seen it all just yet.

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Too Many Startups in Cities?

by Melanie Friedrichs

Source: 123RF

Urban imagination in the Americas revolves around two paradigms: the growing city and the declining city. The growing city symbolizes the dream of expansion — full of bustle, construction and recent arrivals eager to succeed. The declining city is the disappointed dream, with vacant buildings, rusting industrial kingdoms and, in Detroit, an endless grid of empty streets.

Statistically, growing and declining cities fall into well-defined patterns. Growing cities have rising populations, rising rents and falling unemployment, while declining cities have the opposite. One other statistic stands out, harder to measure but probably more important: the number of new businesses. The list of cities with exciting entrepreneurship scenes fits neatly into the paradigm of the growing city.

New business means new employment, which means new income, and new income means a wealthier, healthier (although not always happier) city. If businesses leave or fail, the opposite occurs. A movement in entrepreneurship can spark a cycle in either direction.

Can you have too many startups, and what does a bubble in entrepreneurship mean for cities? A bubble has minimal impact if only investors get hurt, but where new business is concerned, a bust could push cities from growth into decline.

Too Many Startups?

When my father graduated from college in the era of Watergate, journalism drew the young and ambitious. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Wall Street ballooned into a giant vacuum tube, sucking smart students straight from graduation to New York to work long hours as junior analysts. Management consulting got popular in the mid 2000s, but today it is startups that are hot.

Entrepreneurship is hot because it means opportunity. Just as my father’s generation was informed by the story of Bob Woodward, mine is informed by the story of Mark Zuckerberg. Technology is the product of our time — the medium through which we can make change and do better than our parents. Entrepreneurship is also hot by default. Corporatism as a whole was stained by the bailouts and by Occupy Wall Street, and new graduates shy away from traditional management positions.


The story of my generation. Source: The Economist

Graduates flocking to start companies are met by an equally large surge in investment. Hundreds of incubators, accelerators and networks of "angel investors" who fund ventures at very early stages have sprouted in the last five years. According to David Tisch, the managing director of the Boston branch of Techstars, a popular accelerator, if you’re a startup and you can’t get seed funding, “there is something wrong.”

The Obama administration has also passed a number of measures to help startups, most notably the JOBS act (Jumpstart Our Business Startups), which considerably relaxes regulation of early-stage ventures, making it easier for entrepreneurs to raise funds.

Too Few Startups?

I am a part of the the swell in startups, a fellow in the first class of Venture for America, a program that matches recent graduates with startups in low-income cities, with a mission to revitalize American cities through entrepreneurship. I am inclined to believe that we have too few startups, not too many.

Startups should be bubble-proof. If a startup bubble is the Dot-Com Bubble 2.0, my statement does not hold, but "startup" itself is not a sector. It is a stage of development, the first and most important for growth. How can we overvalue growth?

According to President Obama, "These small businesses are the mom and pop stores and restaurants, beauty shops and construction companies that support families and sustain communities. They’re the small startups with big ideas, hoping to be the next Google, or Apple or HP. Altogether, they create roughly half of all new jobs."

Andrew Yang, founder of Venture for America, with U.S.
President Barack Obama. Source: Venture for America

The entrepreneur seeking funding does not see a bubble. Raising money is no walk in the park, requiring months if not years of hard work. We are still in a slump, and it’s hard to tell if the recent ramp-up in angel investing is unusually high or simply a return to pre-2008 levels. And angel investors still largely ignore garden-variety startups, the restaurants and beauty shops and construction companies that look little like the next Apple.

I’m also inclined to believe that corporatism is on its way out. Not only will the dinosaurs alive today fall, but the entire race of dinosaurs will go extinct. All of our structures will have to be remade in smaller, more flexible, start-uppity form. Creative destruction in the way Joseph Schumpeter meant it.

Consequences for Cities

Our cities are defined both in imagination and reality by economic cycles. But cycles, and startups, are necessary to build a better world. Cities should be wary of the effect a bursting bubble could have on their local economies and do what they can to discourage the obvious inflation in the social, the mobile, and the app-licable. But for declining cities, entrepreneurship could be a way to start the spiral up.

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A Tale of Two Technology Cities

by Tim Clark

Ron Huldai, Mayor of Tel Aviv, and Jack Bennett, deputy manager of Skolkovo City, represent different strategies aimed at emulating the success of Silicon Valley in becoming a global innovation center.

With the medieval streets of Jaffa less than a mile away, Tel Aviv doesn’t immediately come across as the next technology hub. However, it has been building successfully on Israel's status as the "start-up nation" to attract scores of innovative entrepreneurs over the past few years.


Tel Aviv is building on Israel's status as a tech-entrepreneurship hub. Source: Skyscraper Life

According to Ron Huldai, the key is flexibility.

Speaking before his talk at the New Cities Summit in Paris this week, Huldai explained: “Start-ups are extremely high-risk and fast-paced. They're not always keen to enter a long-term lease on offices or to invest in office furniture.”

Tel Aviv has come up with a spatial strategy. According to Huldai, “Tel Aviv has developed co-working space as a solution to providing start-ups with shared office facilities they can rent from one month to a year until they are ready to take on their own space. Furthermore, the co-working space provides a synergetic community that is crucial at this stage.”


The Skolkovo masterplan envisions a city split into clusters. Source: Skolkovo

Developers of Skolkovo — an unbuilt prototype for a new city just outside Moscow — have taken a more radical approach. They envision a full-fledged "innocity" that could become an open source blueprint for future urban development. The city is expected to house more than 30,000 workers when completed later this decade. The multi-billion dollar project has been heralded as a sea change for Russian urban planning.

“We strongly believe, based on our research over the past several years, that to innovate effectively you need to be living where you are working,” said Skolkovo deputy city manager Jack Bennett. “So we've worked closely with CISCO to integrate housing with a technology park based on their Smart+Connected Communities initiative, which will help provide the services needed for comfortable urban living."

While the government of Tel Aviv has been helping individual start-ups take root in Israel's established technology industry, Russia is attempting to build such an industry from the ground up. This has prompted a new openness to working with partners from around the world.

“What the Russians understand is that to innovate in today’s world you need to collaborate," Bennett added. "If you look at the 1950s to 1980s, up until the fall of the Iron Curtain, things were based on closed systems. The Russians understand that we need to collaborate on a global scale to make Skolkovo work.”



French architecture firm AREP, along with SETEC engineers and landscape architect Michel Devigne, were commissioned to design the master plan for Skolkovo, which revolves around a series of clusters for different tech industries.

The aim was to create opportunities for fruitful interaction between people, bodies of knowledge, research projects and businesses, and to adhere to sustainable development principles.

Bennett sees the "smart city" cluster environment as the key to cultivating innovation. “You are in the environment where all the amenities are at the touch of a finger. If a city is to be competitive and smart it needs to have a strong information-technology infrastructure. It needs the social infrastructure, the commercial infrastructure, the logical infrastructure for people to be successful.”

Russia's approach is an expensive and risky one, but it offers the advantages of a fresh start. Although entrepreneurial culture in Russia is not as established as it is in Israel, the government can still foster initiatives that are taking place in existing cities. It remains to be seen whether beginning with a blank slate is more effective than focusing on processes that are already happening independently.

Tim Clark is a freelance journalist based in the U.K. He splits his time between writing about comedy for his website Such Small Portions and writing about travel, architecture and education.

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Assorted Links #57

by Ali Madad

• Music Inspired by Mega-City One
• The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan
• Witness to War in Lebanon
• Comparison of Imprisonment Rates
• The Invention of the Ship was Also the Invention of the Shipwreck
• China Ranks First in the World's Top 10 Hottest Real Estate Markets

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King’s Cross Redevelops with Buildings and Apps

by Andrew Wade


Main space of the new Western Concourse.

After a £500-million redevelopment, the new Western Concourse of London's King's Cross Station is now in use. The project, which opened less than five months before the 2012 Olympic Games, is a high-profile success and a needed reconsideration of urban infrastructure in the area. Led by Hiro Aso, architects John McAslan + Partners have articulated a beautiful and complex design with re-used, restored and newly built components. Designed in collaboration with engineering expertise from Arup, the structure and lighting collectively lend a dynamic yet graceful quality to the space.


The new entrance, adjacent to the original station.


The flowing roof structure extends outside to form a canopy over the new entrance.

A Grade I listed façade of the original Western Range building has been restored and unveiled as a backdrop to a white, diagrid shell structure, which emerges from 50 meters within the earth to envelop the new concourse. The building triples the size of the station and is part of a larger vision for the regeneration of King's Cross, which is set to receive its own post code.


Diagrid shell structure over two levels of retail units.


The structure touches down only along the perimeter, leaving a column-free central space.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has seized this moment to document the design of the Western Concourse. For five months this year, it will host a display on the design process of the architects and engineers involved. In addition, Guardian News and Media Limited have created an app that allows you to listen to stories about the previous lives of various sites in King's Cross. These “streetstories” can narrate based on your location using a smartphone with GPS, so the historical strata of the site can be experienced in-situ.


Integrated structure and lighting above the mezzanine level.


The mezzanine level of retail units stands as an independent, sculptural form.

How might this newly accessible urban history affect perceptions of the King's Cross Redevelopment? Now we are able to see new buildings assuming their functions while listening to stories about what they have replaced. As this urban feedback takes place, will we become more sensitive to the stepped evolution of our cities and respond to that in a critical way? Can apps alter expectations of design?


Restored façade of the Western Range behind the structurally independent addition.


The electronic train departure board in the distance, beyond the restored façade.

Credits: Photos by Andrew Wade.

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Projecting Memory and Possibility on a Building Facade

by Rebecka Gordan



Being a city dweller is often conditioned by memories. Walking through a familiar city, we see things that newcomers don’t. Remembering scenarios from our past, we picture ourselves in squares and alleys, younger versions in the memorable dramas of our lives.



If we know our city better, we even imagine the history that is not our own. Collective memory makes us visualize events like political speeches, demonstrations or perhaps hostage dramas, like the one at Norrmalmstorg in Stockholm. This was the origin of the so-called Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages express empathy towards their captors. Similarly, in cities that capture us, we do what we can to feel at home. We crave history and collective memory for a sense of belonging.



Last weekend, the City Museum of Stockholm hosted a large-scale video installation called I.R.I.S. A 3-D projection took viewers on a journey through the architectural history of the museum and transformed its facade into the ornamented version originally intended in 1683, with balconies and stately statues.



Filmmaker and multimedia artist Jesper Wachtmeister also wanted to play with history and challenge our imagination. What would happen if the ornamentation was extruded and pushed out in the air? What if you could see through the wall? Or send text messages to speech bubbles that appeared from the windows? What if the facade was made of plate glass?



The result was a mind-blowing experience. A crystallized surface turned into a mirror-glass facade, reflecting the site and suggesting faraway places. The facade was reversed and cracked, changing color and shape. Adding these kinds of projections in our cities might help us see our surroundings with fresh eyes and even reduce some fears or prejudices. Instead of clinging to history, we would dare to accept new visions side by side with the familiar.

Wachtmeister has become renowned for his documentary films and art projects, often with architecture as a theme. Among his most famous works are "Test Site: North American Desert Culture"(2010), "Great Expectations: A Journey Through the History of Visionary Architecture" (2007) and "Kochuu: Japanese Architecture, Influence & Origin" (2003).

Credits: Photos from Solaris Filmproduktion.

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Interactive Urban Research

by Peter Sigrist

The Internet is being used in exciting ways toward participatory research on cities. Beyond facilitating collaboration between academics, it is widely expanding the range of participants. Approaches include decentralized fieldwork, interactive microstudies and map-based data feeds. They are developing so quickly that the best way to understand them is, most likely, to participate.


Training youth mappers in Nairobi's Mukuru settlement. Source: Map Kibera

Decentralized fieldwork includes as many people as possible, filling in data that contributes to sound policy, design, technology and other potential improvements to the quality of life in cities. Participants play an active role in expanding the research base, often taking responsibility for quadrants near their homes. These studies are similar to collective knowledge bases like Wikipedia or Wikimapia, but they address specific research questions. They are continuously updated and freely accessible online. Related initiatives include Community-Based Participatory Research (not necessarily web-based, but an important precursor), Open Humanities Press, Map Kibera and Sparrow Hills Ecocenter youth phenological studies.


Ciudad Camilo Cienfuegos, from a study on Cuban architecture at Places. Source: Studio Basel [PDF]

Interactive microstudies address research questions via blogs and other websites. Writers draw upon accelerated versions of methods such as discourse analysis, review of published data, archival study, direct observation, surveys and interviews. The articles are timely, shareable and interactive in the sense that they allow for quick feedback via comments. At times many authors post on a common theme. Interactive microstudies can be used to get acquainted with a topic, fine-tune scope, gauge interest, develop proposals, generate funding or prepare drafts for publication. Some examples include essays at Places, historical studies at a456, articles at Urban Omnibus and series at mammoth. Many academics keep blogs related to their research — Clive Barnett, Matthew Gandy and Mark Purcell, for example — but the posts are rarely as developed as those at a456. Most of their work remains prohibitively expensive to access.


Transportation and noise level data visualization from the SENSEable City Lab. Source: Xiaoji Chen

Map-based data feeds display information for public access in real time. They may show housing prices, maintenance budgets, development projects, air-quality statistics and other useful data on cities. Applications filter and customize information for different needs. They are not really focused on specific questions, but they are very useful for research. In "Lifeworld Inc — And What to Do About It," Nigel Thrift discusses the implications of massive quantities of data for social science, as well as the potential in data visualization. Shared repositories such as Google Public Data and the Dataverse Network are expanding access but have yet to reach their full potential. It would be useful to build upon these efforts and add as much information as possible to a common map. The SENSEable City Lab, Toward the Sentient City, Data Haven, Civic Commons, Urbanscale and Smarter Cities initiatives envision the use of real-time spatial data to solve problems and improve living conditions in cities.

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Andrei Goncharov on ‘Crowdsourced Moscow’

by Peter Sigrist


Andrei Goncharov presenting at the Strelka Institute last July. Source: Strelka

In a post on modeling open source cities, Polis featured a video about "Crowdsourced Moscow 2012: A Public Space Game" by Andrei Goncharov. However, we didn't include much detail on the project and its creator. A recent article in Planning and Technology Today looks at Crowdsourced Moscow more closely, and we've conducted a brief interview with Andrei on his work, related initiatives, Vladimir Putin's plan to build a park in the center of Moscow, and ideas for implementing technology-enabled approaches to participatory urban development.


Video introduction to Crowdsourced Moscow.


Former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov. Source: Urban Christian

Andrei, how did you come up with the idea for Crowdsourced Moscow?

I was interested in participatory planning after growing up during the era of former mayor Yury Luzhkov, who majorly transformed the city through top-down and nontransparent measures. The idea crystallized through the collective work of a research team at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design last year. We intended to find a way to spread information about possible mechanisms for governing public space, using data on existing practices in Moscow and abroad.


Based on this experience, what initiatives have you found most inspiring?

Many new developments in urban planning and citizen engagement have appeared here in the last year [including the reconstruction of Gorky Park and the Moscow Urban Forum]. The fact that they're not only private enterprises, but also government initiatives, makes me think that we're at a turning point. However, enticing visions of the future are still rare. Projects like NYC's Road Map for the Digital City and Urbanflow Helsinki, for example, allow people outside professional circles to participate in the discussion and develop new ideas.


News report on the history, removal and projected future of the Rossiya Hotel.

In light of Putin's recent decision to turn the site of the demolished Rossiya Hotel into a park, do you have any recommendations for approaching this project?

For me the most interesting question is not what the park should look like, but how to build something in the center of the city that is accepted by local citizens — how to set up a dialogue with the city. The park could be an opportunity to find a format for this dialogue. It might be easier to do this if the dialogue is not about a master plan that is defined once and forever, but rather a flexible set of rules that allow for continuous update of the territory based on citizens' feedback.


Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin. Source: БГ

What are some of the most important steps that municipal governments can take to approach the kind of civic engagement that you envision in Crowdsourced Moscow?

First they can facilitate input from local communities in planning decisions via online and offline platforms. Social media can be used to make activity transparent and create opportunities for public participation. I would also like to see high-quality data shared openly so that citizens can make informed decisions on the establishment and improvement of public amenities. People are calling for more democratic governance, and this is a good starting point.


Pro-democracy demonstration in Moscow on Dec. 24, 2011. Source: The Australian

For more information, you can visit Crowdsourced Moscow on Facebook or contact Andrei directly at goncharov at strelkainstitute dot com.

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Oscar Moment: A City in Dance

by Min Li Chan



In riveting scenes from Wim Wenders's 2012 Oscar-nominated 3-D dance film, "Pina," dancers for the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch move to the themes of love, humor and longing. They are transported from the stage and into the midst of city life in the German city of Wuppertal. On the street median, underneath the tracks, in the park, or in the industrial outskirts of the city, the drama of life is expressed in the language of dance. These city scenes provide a stunning, often unlikely backdrop for dance theatrics, perhaps paying homage to the city that this illustrious dance company and its iconic choreographer call home.



"Pina" highlights Wuppertal's unconventional mix of land use. Many scenes are set in lush greenery — no surprise, given that green space occupies two-thirds of the municipal area. The city is known for its woods, parks and slopes, which are within a 10-minute trek from any part of the city. At the same time, the audience catches glimpses of Wuppertal's industrial lineage and bustling downtown, connected by the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, a suspension railway. The 3-D effects in the film bring a certain physicality to the space, but also provide an unprecedented view "inside" the dance — you can see within the choreography rather than watching a faraway stage.

Credits: Photos from the "Pina" website.

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‘Avoid Ghetto App’ Takes Us the Wrong Way

by Alex Schafran


Source: EURweb.com

The American Internet is atwitter after Microsoft announced last week that it had patented a mobile application technology giving pedestrians directions that avoid high-crime areas. An early story from a Seattle TV station dubbed it the "avoid ghetto app," and the avalanche began. Twitter is exploding with links to tech blogs, witty 140-character opinions and links to online debates: Is it racist? Does it protect women?

MSNBC, which is owned by Microsoft, attempted to weigh in on the budding controversy by mentioning that they never used the term "ghetto." An AOL reporter actually did some reporting, talking to experts who compared the tool to redlining and found it "appalling" and others who said it was "creepy" but useful.

What makes this issue so complex is that Microsoft is using highly fallible technology to replicate an existing practice that is itself both problematic and practical. People are writing about the app not only because Microsoft is using crime data to mark communities "to be avoided," but also because this mimics something most city residents do already.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we avoid certain parts of the city — especially on foot, especially at night and especially if we are carrying something valuable. When friends visit, particularly women, we advise them on safer routes or offer to pick them up in a car if an area is dangerous. We keep an eye out when we move about the city, looking for signs of trouble. This is called "street smarts," and it is practiced not just by middle-class white folks but also by low-income residents, people of color and tough guys. Staying in one piece in many communities involves knowing which blocks to avoid.

Is Microsoft's app a problem even if it replicates a common practice? Yes. Here are a few of the many reasons why:

• Codifying something matters. Banks always discriminated against people of color and poor neighborhoods, but it got much worse when redlining became official policy. Since the advent of the Internet, technologies that are widely used by major corporations have a form of codifying power. This app will further mark some communities as places to avoid, exacerbating abandonment and creating a self-fulfilling prophesy.
  
• Folk knowledge is absent. "Street smarts" is often about relationships with people you know, specific incidents and particular places, not about raw data in GIS. As author Sarah Chinn wisely points out in the AOL article, most violent crime occurs between people who know each other. There is simply no way to create an exclusively "data-driven" application for street smarts in a way that actually makes people smarter. Note to IBM: The pathway to "smarter cities" involves smarter citizens, which goes beyond access to "data." This app would not teach us how to read, live in or navigate a city — it would simply chop the city up into "safe" and "unsafe" areas.
  
• This is a practice we want to undo, not replicate. All of us, especially if we are white and not poor, have avoided places based on some "sign" or reputation. Sometimes this is probably quite wise — I've been mugged, and I now know why I should have avoided that place. But we have all likely avoided places based on unfounded fear, one that permeates our society and constantly helps reproduce spatial inequality. We should be looking for ways to reduce the "automatic avoidance" instinct, not build it into our cell phones.

Perhaps we should be thankful to Microsoft for raising a much-needed debate. Chinn made the not-quite-tongue-in-cheek suggestion that a better app would help young men of color identify areas to avoid getting profiled. Instead, how about an app that points out areas that you may avoid because you imagine them to be dangerous, but that are in fact relatively safe to explore?

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