The urban nexus

In keeping with the urban theme that’s occupied me of late, I’ve been considering just how the city exists as a fertile ground for a deeper consideration of place.  It seems to me it is indeed such a thing, no matter from which angle I approach that reflection.

A key concept emerging for me with sense of place is its inherent ability as it were, employing geographic scale, to support an individual in their unique identity while simultaneously facilitating membership within a larger landscape and broader community.  That ability to not only conjure but operate two seemingly distinct and potentially conflicting roles at the same time, and in conjunction with one another in fact, distinguishes place awareness as something genuinely worthy.

The triggers that increase awareness of place and generate meaning are variable and can themselves be associated with either highly personal, individualised experience or with the particulars of a community perspective on a given location.  What’s more and in terms of the contributions arising from the physical locations, these triggers can be distributed along the full breadth of the geographic scale put to use.

On a practical level these location-based triggers are likely to be different in an urban context than those found in a rural setting.  But at their core, and in terms of the role they play in stimulating a consideration beyond physical space to place, I think they can be considered the same.  At the most elemental level, place = location + meaning, and it is in keeping with that simple formula, no matter what the situation, that place experience will run its course.

So what then is the value of considering a particular situation?  What is it about urban environments in particular that might make them important in the fuller consideration of place awareness?  It seems to me the city is special in this regard, if for no other reason than it is fast becoming the dominant context for place experience for a majority of the world’s population.  But my sense is that there is more to it than that.

In my previous blog, I touched on the idea of the urban environment as a nexus, in particular as a location where various cultural perspectives, conditions, ideas, all come together and interact within a constrained area.  And it seems to me this quality, this facilitation of a highly heterogeneous mix of things within a particular physical not just location, but situation, lies at the heart of the city’s contribution to a meaningful comprehension of place.

With that in mind I’d like to explore the proposition of urban as nexus in a particular way, incorporating a few analytical themes with which I’ve been involved or are otherwise familiar.  To me they are relevant threads, if not those that a typical city-dweller might list if asked, within the intricate tapestry that is an urban sense of place.

And turning that around, when viewed through the urban place lens, these approaches are exposed in a new way for further scrutiny and a deeper understanding of their purpose both individually and in conjunction.  The value of geography as common platform is in this way exposed as well and can be further acknowledged as a means of helping us understand the places we live.

One such list of urban-relevant ideas therefore might include:

• Digital Earth
• The Senseable City
• Resilience

There is certainly a data-centric flavour to this list, clearly acknowledged in the first two and recognised as valuable to the last one, and that’s relevant.  Gone I think are the days when our interactions with data – its collection, discovery, management, utility – are considered as distinct in and of themselves.  Data engagement is no longer a technical “other,” the exclusive purview of the highly trained and specialised practitioner, as it was when I began my career.  Ironically technology itself, and its ability to capture, manage, analyse and present voluminous amounts of data in a timely manner has relegated the once unapproachable to the status of intuitive.

This is a profound development in many ways as it reduces or otherwise eliminates barriers to our interaction with data.  Suddenly as a result the playing field is opened up to a scope we could hardly imagine as practical not so long ago.  That creates seemingly endless possibilities of investigation, of knowledge, of understanding.  But of course therein lies a novel and maybe even more daunting challenge: How to manage and what to do with that newfound freedom?  Such are the questions addressed as part of the discussions around big data.

The three place-relevant themes listed above are all affected by this shift in how we interact with data.  Some of course are no less than defined by it or exist because of it.  Whilst they each might insert themselves at different spots along that data-interaction spectrum, they are all leveraging the new approach to data in some way.  And they are doing so, in most cases, within an urban context.

Digital Earth: With a goal of creating a global-scale digital model of the earth, incorporating all of its natural and constructed systems, this initiative is clearly ambitious.  But it has effectively leveraged developments in technology to make real strides of late.

In terms of generating actual working models, initial focus has been on the urban areas of our planet, with efforts on several fronts to develop fully virtual cities.  The idea is that these then could be linked to effectively generate a networked virtual representation of the whole planet.  Sitting behind these developments is the increasing awareness that we simply need this modelling capability to properly manage, in those locations that affect most of us, the big problems like climate change.

I believe a key point for acceptance and the success of the Digital Earth (DE) approach involves a re-alignment of our thinking about what it truly offers.  To date the focus has been on the highly technical aspects of this proposal.  That’s understandable as the early-stage requirements of developing and maintaining a full virtual model on the scale of a single city even are daunting.  But such an emphasis masks the true value of DE, which is demonstrating how a computer-generated representation of our environment, even one operating at a global scale, can in fact support a more personal and nuanced interaction for each of us with our local environment.

Once effectively modeled as part of DE, a virtual city is available as an intuitive resource to help us to explore a myriad of ways to engage with our urban contexts, our neighbourhoods, our street.  These might be improved or otherwise altered ways of looking at common levels of engagement, or they might be new ways of engaging altogether.  The potential at least exists for this virtual representation to engender a more holistic and therefore more potentially genuine view of our city, which can only help colour and enrich our sense of urban place.

The Senseable City: Based at the MIT SENSEable City Lab and led by visionaries like its Director, Carlo Ratti, this initiative draws from both practical advances in sensor and data collection technologies and conceptual foundations including the city as a living organism, to propose an important contribution to the broader goals of DE.

Acknowledging that both the natural and built environments in which we all operate every day are profoundly complex, Senseable City proponents suggest an approach to understanding that incorporates continuous and live streams of data from a host of strategic sensors throughout the urban environment.  These collectors might be stationary or mobile, the latter including the well-publicised Copenhagen Wheel, which leverages bicycle commuters to collect real-time data on a host of urban variables such as traffic, air quality or road conditions.

As the streams of data from many sensors are received and processed, we are able to generate a true picture of the urban environment around us.  And importantly we can watch it evolve in real time, in response to various stimuli or agents of change.  Our contextual awareness is heightened as a result and we find ourselves interacting in new and more personal ways with what might previously have been considered a lifeless infrastructure and built environment.  In this way the Senseable City approach contributes to the DE value proposition of technology as an enhancer of environmental engagement.  And it too then provides a positive level of complexity that might very well evoke or amplify our sense of urban place.

Resilience: Along with sustainability and liveability, resilience is a fundamental driver for many applications of urban design and as such it is a significant consideration for much of the world’s population.  I noted in a previous post that it can be understood as something of a coping capacity, a measure of how a city – both its built infrastructure and population – responds to and recovers from future uncertainties.  Whilst not limited to natural disasters, that’s often the context in which resilience is discussed and it’s one that has interesting ramifications in regards to consideration of place.

In simple terms, a disaster can be characterised as disruption.  It is a disruptive force in many ways, from physical breaks to utility and communication services, the loss of transportation networks, the profound shift from familiar and comfortable routines to a focus on survival and subsistence, and the forfeiture of an expected level of personal safety and security.  Not only is what was once there and taken for granted gone or irreparably damaged, there exists for the survivor of such a disaster no guarantee that it will persist into the future.

And it is the nature of that return path to a sense of normalcy, either in the immediate aftermath once response efforts are initiated or well into the lengthy timeframes of recovery, that is itself a measure of resilience.  Following a destructive event, particularly in an urban setting where significant populations and dense implementations of the built environment are the norm, the ability to rebound, to put things right again, and to limit that which must be sacrificed to loss, is paramount to the continued life of a city. And if the time is taken to do so, the thinking about what persists, albeit sometimes in an altered form, and what is expendable, influences the level of resilience that is built into mitigation efforts.

To return disrupted lives to something of their condition prior to a disaster requires awareness, not only of what that desired state looks like, but of the current state and where it falls in relation to the desired outcome.  It is in this regard that data generated from technology can be of particular value, historically characterising the city in the past, providing an accurate assessment of current conditions and thereby facilitating meaningful comparisons, pre and post disaster.  It is also at this stage of course where access to such data can be severely constrained.

As those in a city recovering from a disaster make their way in their disrupted lives, it is memory ultimately that steers them towards the familiar and to an urban existence exhibiting a high level of liveability.  Place awareness has a vital role to play in this regard and can exist as an important aid in recovery and therefore an invaluable component of resilience.  A strong sense of place, shaping awareness of the urban environment prior to a disaster, is available as a well-needed guide for the individual struggling to return their lives to some level of normalcy and for the community rebuilding its damaged infrastructure and amenities.

A strong sense of place can indeed persist through the events of a natural disaster and help speed the journey of recovery.  But it can be disrupted itself, perhaps in the case where physical location triggers are so irreparably damaged or lost such that they can no longer facilitate the meaningful awareness they once did.  In that case place awareness may be lost altogether, with profound consequences on the future individual or community.  Or it may re-emerge as something altered, a new awareness of a place changed by disaster, exhibiting new influences and playing a new role in resilience.

All three of these themes – Digital Earth, the Senseable City, resilience – associated with the urban context, reliant on large volumes of data, are more than just analytical approaches.  They are ultimately attempts to better understand exactly what a city is, how it functions, how it affects and is affected by those who reside or work within its boundaries.  And behind all of those considerations, I would suggest, lies awareness.  Awareness as city-dwellers of our immediate contexts, of the locations on the urban platform where we spend time or which are otherwise important to us.

I’m not suggesting that something as esoteric as sense of place can be fully realised from a stream of technology-derived inputs of environmental data.  I’m suggesting simply that we need to be open to such inputs and consider how they can help fill out and enrich our otherwise experiential awareness of place.  To relegate technology in this way to the realm of the impersonal or negate it as operating, as with DE, at a scale too broad to be of relevance to an individual engaging with their immediate surroundings, is in the end to do ourselves a great disservice.

And it is in the urban context, at least currently, where these technology-driven data inputs are most fully realised.  It is that context too, the constrained and complex mix of conditions and outputs and circumstances, where they have the potential to provide the most value.  It is where the technologies themselves, or the initiatives like senseable cities or a fully digital earth that they support, likewise come together to interact and generate potentially new ways of considering the city around us.

It is for me an awareness of place, mapped onto the urban environment, that is ultimately at play here.  And with its myriad of elements, each influencing our place awareness in different ways, some in conjunction, some in contradiction, the city helps tease out just what place means to each of us, both as individuals and as members of a community.  As a nexus for these influences, the urban context therefore serves as a particularly valuable landscape for defining sense of place.