Urban Choreography » Personal Insights & Feelings

Charles Birnbaum on the Future of Landscape Architecture

Urban Choreography — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:21:36 +0000

Charles Birnbaum, founder and president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, makes the case that historical preservationists are finally waking up to the glories of modernist landscape architecture.

Donovan Gillman‘s insight:

Is this making Landscape Architecture more important or increasing the percieved value of urban public space – both more notable than creating more “Star-(Landscape Ar) chitects

See on www.dwell.com

Two Views of Woodstock:Cape Town – “Upscaling” vs “Gentrification”

Urban Choreography — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 09:22:33 +0000

Here are two opposed views of the regeneration of an old area of Cape Town, Woodstock, it seems inevitable that any upgrading or regeneration effort runs the risk being labeled ‘gentrification’ with its negative connotations of poor locals being forced out by profit hungry developers. It seems ironic that in many of these cases the developers are out-of-work young professionals who seeing the opportunity, make the best of their creativity, contacts and by hard work get the thing going in the face of enormous odds. Only once they have made the area acceptably safe and more economically viable, does the area become the target for developers to enter the market and the price of rents, land etc become a problem as the “poor” landowning residents decide to cash in and sell their properties.

The first post by Ravi Naidoo is the positive and development oriented “neo-liberal” view of things, from Dezeen and Mini World Tour

“South Africa has always had an Upscaling Culture”

In the second part of our tour around Cape Town, Design Indaba founder Ravi Naidoo shows us the former industrial suburb of Woodstock, which the city’s design community has recently made its home, and explains the importance of upcycling in South African design.“If you have 36 hours in Cape Town and time is at a premium, you have to head down to Woodstock,” says Naidoo. It is an area of Cape Town three kilometres from the city centre that has undergone an “extreme makeover” in recent years and is now home to an array of arts, craft, fashion and design studios and shops, as well as cafés and restaurants.

Naidoo takes us to The Old Biscuit Mill, a 19th-century biscuit factory in the heart of Woodstock, which was redeveloped in 2005 by Kristof Basson Architects, and where many of the designers that present their work at theDesign Indaba Expo are now based. It also hosts a weekly food market that draws crowds from across the city every Saturday.

The Old Biscuit Mill recently underwent its second phase of redevelopment, converting the old flour silo into six storeys of mixed-use space, which now houses the Cape Town Creative Academy as well as a new penthouse restaurant called The Pot Luck Club by leading South African chef Luke Dale-Roberts.

Laura Wenz’s post, while more “gentrification” orientated, examines some of the problems and attempts to mitigate the negative effects from Daily Maverick

Woodstock’s urban renewal: Much more at stake than the loss of parking

In South Africa, the phenomenon of gentrification is commonly associated with the resurrection of downtown Johannesburg and the rebirth of Woodstock in Cape Town. Both areas share a common denominator for gentrification: a growing middle class with disposable incomes and a taste for all things designer. And both fail to support government’s claim that it is creating inclusive cities for all, writes LAURA A WENZ.

“When I first moved to New York, it was dingy, disgusting, dirty, ugly, flea-ridden, stinky and altogether terrifying – but then sadly the whole city started to go uphill,” laments Ted Mosby, the naïve and inveterately romantic protagonist of the popular American TV-comedy series How I met your Mother. His sentimental statement captures the glum irony of urban regeneration: Neighbourhoods with the right mix of historical flair, cosmopolitan ambience and urban decay perpetually attract students, young professionals and artists in search of cheap rent and inspiration.

Armed with the best intentions and an undaunted can-do attitude, these pioneers set out to make their newly adopted working-class neighbourhood an even better one, praising its “gritty charm” and “original character” while they open coffee shops and organic eateries. Only too late do they realise that property developers have been watching them closely and once the word on the potential value of the once hidden gem is out, land prices shoot through the roof, artists exit through the gift shop and long-time residents end up on their stoep, door locked firmly behind them.

Photo: Bromwell Boutique Mall, with close-up of doorman.

Rising property values are often too readily assumed to benefit local home-owners, while in fact they have put severe strain on old-established residents, who have had to cope with rising municipal rates due to property re-evaluation. According to the Anti-Eviction Campaign, some families have not been able to afford the escalating rates, leading to their eviction and removal to‘Blikkiesdorp’. This infamous Temporary Relocation Area (TRA) – a not-so-glamorous World Cup legacy – has been repeatedly slammed by human rights groups for its inhumane living conditions.

Though the market effects of higher land value are at first glance supporting the city council’s densification strategy as space needs to be used more efficiently, it simultaneously prohibits the development of affordable housing and rental units. This however is an essential prerequisite for making the inner city more accessible to people in the low-income bracket and cracking open the encrusted patterns of urban inequality.

Can we please stop drawing trees on top of skyscrapers?

Urban Choreography — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:57:13 +0000

From Per Square Mile by Tim De Chant some sense on where trees are needed and not needed!

Just a couple of years ago, if you wanted to make something look trendier, you put a bird on it. Birds were everywhere. I’m not sure if Twitter was what started all the flutter, but it got so bad that Portlandia performed a skit named, you guessed it, “Put a Bird On It“.¹

It turns out architects have been doing the same thing, just with trees. Want to make a skyscraper look trendy and sustainable? Put a tree on it. Or better yet, dozens. Many high-concept skyscraper proposals are festooned with trees. On the rooftop, on terraces, in nooks and crannies, on absurdly large balconies. Basically anywhere horizontal and high off the ground. Now, I should be saying architects are drawing dozens, because I have yet to see one of these “green” skyscrapers in real life. (There’s one notable exception—BioMilano, which isn’t quite done yet.) If—and it’s a big if—any of these buildings ever get built, odds are they’ll be stripped of their foliage quicker than a developer can say “return on investment”. It’s just not realistic. I get it why architects draw them on their buildings. Really, I do. But can we please stop?

There are plenty of scientific reasons why skyscrapers don’t—and probably won’t—have trees, at least not to the heights which many architects propose. Life sucks up there. For you, for me, for trees, and just about everything else except peregrine falcons. It’s hot, cold, windy, the rain lashes at you, and the snow and sleet pelt you at high velocity. Life for city trees is hard enough on the ground. I can’t imagine what it’s like at 500 feet, where nearly every climate variable is more extreme than at street level.

Trevor Manuel – Minister of Planning: South Africa

Urban Choreography — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 11:57:22 +0000

From Daily Maverick – an interview with Trevor Manuel Minister of Planning – South Africa – on what the planning commission means and what it intends for working on South Africa’s extremely unequal demographics and poverty.

Interviewing politicians can be difficult, because they hardly ever give a straight answer, and Minister for Planning in the Presidency Trevor Manuel, is a consummate politician. But in a wide-ranging interview, he spoke as openly as possible, among others, about how he has won over sceptics over the years, first as minister of finance and now as planning minister, about his displeasure at ministers whose utterances go against the Constitution, his anger at the policemen who killed a Mozambican man in Daveyton last week, his resignation in support of Thabo Mbeki and how his current job is very different from his previous one as minister of finance. He remained hesitant to speak about his future, however. By RYLAND FISHER.

We interviewed Manuel in his office at Parliament on Friday morning, a few hours after he had hosted a report-back meeting in the Rocklands Civic Centre in Mitchells Plain where he spoke about the need to rekindle the activism that was prevalent in the 1980s.

Below is an edited extract of the interview:

RF: When you were appointed minister in charge of planning in President Zuma’s Cabinet, there were obviously some sceptics who did not quite understand what it is that you had to do. Now that the National Development Plan has taken centre stage in our political life and, indeed, our economy, do you feel vindicated?

TM: I don’t actually set out with that objective. I think that too frequently we start out not being given the benefit of the doubt. What it entails is just working hard to get things right and if, in the process, you disprove the sceptics, that’s okay, but you start out to get things right.

In the last few years of Madiba, in spite of the fact that many people told him he was crazy to appoint me minister of finance, I did not set out to prove the sceptics wrong, but I hoped that through my efforts I would be able to win the trust of Madiba and the organisation that gave me the opportunity to do so. What is important is that one is able to take decisions and learn in the process.

I understand very clearly that if the only thing you want to do in a position of leadership is to please people, the quality of your leadership is going to be severely compromised. If you try and do things that go against the grain of your belief system, then you will be unhappy and feel compromised.

If you want to deal with these issues, you have to ask questions constantly about what your reference points are, about what is your value system. Some people use the term “compass”: so where are you heading and why?

The ability to think past ideological rigidity is also important.

If I take these points and try and use them to answer the question about the National Development Plan, it makes for an interesting read.

The commission [National Planning Commission] itself is an interesting construct. I’ll be bold enough to say that my initial thought was to have the commission structured more along the lines of the Indian Planning Commission which has about half a dozen ministers on it. It is chaired by the prime minister and often the president or the deputy president could chair it and I would do the spade work inside. I lost that battle, and it was not about wanting to be a prime minister. It was about wanting to follow a construct whose relationship to implementation would be understood.

The second thing about the plan and the commission is that its composition actually lives out “!ke e: ǀxarra ǁke (Khoisan for “diverse people unite”). It is quite a diverse group of people and that’s a real strength.

When we approached people to participate, on the recommendation of the president, some of them said: “Why are you approaching me? I’m not even an active member of the ANC.” However, everyone accepted. There were some people who felt rejected by the ANC. In putting this together, a lot of these people got a new lease on life and have given the commission a new lease on life. It has been very important for that reason.

The third issue is that, in many ways, when, 13 months into the process, the diagnostic report was released, it was a coming out for the commission. If people thought it was a lapdog, then the release of the diagnostic report – which deals with issues such as the unevenness of the public service, the breakdown of unity, the need to tackle corruption, etc. – spoke volumes about the way so many South Africans feel.

But it also spoke to the fact that the president, in inviting the commission to take a long-term, independent view, was actually not curtailing that. There was no censorship about the views of the commission. He allowed it to happen and has built on the momentum created by the National Planning Commission. It is going to be quite important because it was a commission started on his watch and it has been allowed to generate the unity and momentum. It is something that he wants to see through and that is very positive.

“We can’t draft a new world and print it out”

Urban Choreography — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 07:49:36 +0000

The endless fascination with techno solutions subjected scrutiny from Dezeen

Opinion: in this week’s column, Sam Jacob argues that instead of liberating us, 3D printing will merely “bind us even more closely to fewer and fewer corporations”.

If this is the year of anything, it’s the year of 3D-printing boosterism (even more than last year was). The overarching narrative surrounding 3D printing presents it as a liberating technology. It argues that the technology will free us from organised, centralised production of the industrial era. And it suggests that this radical break will in turn transform the political, economic and social structures that industrialisation precipitated.

There is a latent dream somewhere in this rhetoric, something like an electrified version of William Morris’ strange rural-futurist novel News From Nowhere. Morris’ protagonist goes to bed in the industrial 1890’s but mysteriously wakes into a post-revolutionary, proto-socialist nu-medievalist London.

It’s a London whose citizens craft themselves beautiful things in fulfilling equality. We imagine now, perhaps, our own sci-fi version of this utopia. A future where digital production technologies set us free. Where we are surrounded by sequentially layered self expression and customisation. Where we return, thanks to electronics and robotics, to an idealised folk-art state.

Yet of course, we’ve been on the cusp of techno-liberation before. Remember those wild, free years when the internet was young? Limitless fields of freedoms seemed to open up through the window of a squawking dialup modem. The information enclosures of Facebook, Google, Apple et al have long put paid to that sensation.

Let’s face it: 3D printing might give us a million new ways to make objects, but it is unlikely to undo our late capitalist relationship with objects. If the history of the internet is a lesson, then technology only accelerates us further towards the horizon of consumerism, deeper into the depths of digital modernity.

Think, for example, of the labour politics of 3D printing. There is something undeniably appealing (to designers) in the removal of the production process between the designer and their artifact, a shortening of the distance between their imagination and its physical product. But part of this appeal is that it shifts the value of the object toward the designer rather than the labour of production. It’s the total realisation of Ruskin’s critique of industrial capital’s division of labour, where ‘thought’ and ‘work’ are entirely estranged, where personality and invention are ringfenced by design rather than shared with production.

Inevitably it won’t be a democratic, distributed version of the technology that takes hold. It’ll be an iTuned, DRMified ecology that will bind us even more closely to fewer and fewer corporations. If we’re lucky enough to escape that fate, it will only be into the arms of a Pirate Bay of objects where we’ll find the 3D equivalents of screener films, dodgy 3D scans and partially ripped bootlegs.

Here’s another scenario, another possible version of a 3D-printed world. This one is a world that physically resembles the contents of your hard drive (if you are anything like me, that is). A world of half-completed files, a thousand drafts, weird duplicates, super high-res and hyper-compressed versions of the same file and lost aliases. A world made in the image of the detritus around the outlet of a photocopier. A world of copies with no originals. A world of undifferentiated, undetailed substance, endless landscapes of half-finished Sketchup models as though Google’s 3D warehouse had dumped itself back into the physical world. In other words, a super-proliferated Junkspace that would make even Junkspace blush.

Technology itself will not rescue us from our circumstance. We can’t draft a new world and print it out. In fact, the focus that digital design places on the object itself as an autonomous object, floating in its electronic amniotic sac, is itself a mirage of technology; a non-verbal argument about the nature of objects and society as much as a Fordist production line ever was.

If there is any hope of resurrecting Morris-esque resistance or Ruskinian ideology in a digital age, it is to recognise, as they did, that objects are not simply form but intrinsically politicised artifacts. And so are the technologies we use to produce them.

But 3D printing propels the idea of design-as-form to an extreme conclusion. It makes a persuasive argument for design as the production of autonomous techno-formalist objects. 3D printing might change how we make the world, but it won’t change the world itself.

Gates, Buffett, can you hear me? Patrice Motsepe gives away half of family fortune

Urban Choreography — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 07:30:10 +0000

African Rainbow Minerals chairman Patrice Motsepe announced on Wednesday that his family would give away half its fortune to charity, as a part of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s The Giving Pledge. He becomes the first African to do so. How many will follow? By SIPHO HLONGWANE. from Daily Maverick

: Patrice Motsepe at Davos

When ARM chairman Patrice Motsepe announced that he would be making an important announcement, the speculation was that he would be buying himself some newspapers. He was in Davos, and at the same time, Independent News and Media’s biggest shareholder Denis O’Brien met with President Jacob Zuma. The Irish group owns several papers, including The Star, Cape Times and Pretoria News, and has been seeking to unbundle its South African assets.

As it turns out, Motsepe’s announcement was of a different sort. The beneficiary will be the Motsepe Foundation, which was founded in 1999 by the ARM chairman and his wife Precious. It oversees the philanthropic work done by the family, which includes education and health; the development and upliftment of women, youth, workers and the disabled; churches; the development of entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs; rural and urban upliftment; soccer including youth soccer development and music.

“I decided quite some time ago to give at least half of the funds generated by our family assets to uplift poor and other disadvantaged and marginalised South Africans, but was also duty-bound and committed to ensuring that it would be done in a way that protects the interests and retains the confidence of our shareholders and investors,” Motsepe said.

The give-away is a part of the Giving Pledge, which encourages wealthy people to donate their fortune to charity. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett (formerly the world’s wealthiest man) founded the campaign in 2010 and have both committed large chunks of their sizable wealth to charitable organisations around the world. As of November 2012, 91 billionaires – mostly Americans – have committed to the pledge.

Motsepe said, “I was also a beneficiary of various people, black and white, in South Africa and in the US who educated, trained, mentored and inspired me and whose faith and belief in me contributed to my success in my profession, business and elsewhere. The same can be said about my wife, Precious, and we are deeply indebted to them and many more.

“Most of our donations have been private, but the need and challenges are great, and we hope that our Giving Pledge will encourage others in South Africa, Africa and other emerging economies to give and make the world a better place.”

Motsepe met with Buffett in the USA in August 2012, and with the Gates family in Cape Town later last year. The foundation will appoint an advisory council which will consist of “church and religious leaders, traditional, disabled, women, youth and labour leaders and other respected NGO and community upliftment leaders”.

According to Forbes, Motsepe’s net worth stood at $2.65 billion (R23.94 billion) in November 2012. ARM, the company he founded and chairs had a market capof R43.47 billion at the time of the give-away announcement. It isn’t clear when the donation will happen, but it is understood that it will happen in perpetuity.

Stephen Muecke on Bruno Latour’s Modes of Existence

Urban Choreography — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:15:56 +0000

I have enjoyed what pieces of the book are available in English so far – here is a review

I am what I am attached to’: On Bruno Latour’s ‘Inquiry into the Modes of Existence’

RIGHT NOW IN PARIS, Bruno Latour is being fêted. “One of the great intellectual adventures of our epoch […] the Hegel of our times,” enthuses Patrice Maniglier in Le Monde, who finds him a much more entertaining read than the dour German.

Curious, the way the French worry about their intellectual standing, for which they use the English word, taking their philosophers to be the barometers of the national reputation. “Is France still thinking?” worries Le Magazine Littéraire, as it too comes up with Latour as a rare savior. His new book, Enquête sur les modes d’existence (An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence), sold out of the first print run of 4,000 in 10 days. But it is not just a book; it is also a project in interactive metaphysics. In other words, a book, plus website. (Unheard of! A French philosopher using the Internet!) Intrigued readers of Latour’s text can go online and find themselves drawn into a collaborative project (so far only in French, but the English web pages will be up soon, and Catherine Porter’s translation of the book will be out from Harvard University Press in the spring). Simply register on the site, and you are free to offer commentary, counter-examples, snippets of movies, images, whatever. You may possibly graduate to the status of co-researcher, and even be invited to a workshop in Paris down the line, to thrash out the thornier problems.

Collective collaboration — some would call it “crowdsourcing” — is rare in philosophy, but Latour, a sociologist and anthropologist by training, is used to collaboration with scientists. (He was one of the founders of the new field of science studies and a veteran of the “science wars” of the 1990s.) And An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence is not really philosophy as understood by the dustier denizens of the Sorbonne, where nearly everyone and his other is a phenomenologist. Latour’s subtitle is An Anthropology of the Moderns, and it continues the project he began with 1993’s We Have Never Been Modern, an anthropological account of western European culture, with serious metaphysical implications, that attempts to answer the question: who do we think we are? “We” — however vague that occidentalist umbrella term may be — are the ones whose style of modernization was destined to take over the rest of the world. But the project has hit a dead end: the planet itself is protesting, and we are going to have to think again about our technological, economic, philosophical “universals.” We will have to choose between modernizing and ecologizing, says Latour, a theme he has been sounding at least since 2004’s The Politics of Nature.

Digital Maps – Is what is mapped what is “really there”?

Urban Choreography — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:32:22 +0000

A flush of blog posts on on the rise of digital maps and apps for location based services via smartphones and GPS devices lead via my readings of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and beyond to wanderings in the realms of ontology and epistemology to my backyard and garage where loads of junk left over from past ‘lives’ as sporting wannabee etc. and children’s-clearings-of-their-rooms-once-they-have-left-home-combine in strange ways to trying to picture what it means if the construction of these maps is actually responsible for the creation of “my” reality?

What is going on here:

When we are informed by The Economist that we can have The world in your pocket are we being delicately suckered into believing that this is really in our interests – in the past when we have ventured out into the unknown local and not so local world in order to get the things we need to sustain our lives, we have consulted directories and maps to tell us where to get it. This is nothing new – but in terms of ANT we might have brought these things into being by wanting them – our instruments i.e. directories and maps, by virtue of our consulting them, start to constitute the world ”in -here” before becoming reified (made real) by our acting on the information and “finding” them “out-there” !

These ideas explored from early beginnings in Science and Technology

Studies by among others Bruno Latour, John Law and Michel Callon are developed into challenges to the structure of our conceptions of reality ~(After method – mess in social science research Law 2004) and what it means to me and my perception of myself in relation to this “reality” – or more simply who am I really? – am I anything more than the sum of my “programs” which have been embedded into me from birth by the social world and culture I am embedded in? Is it even possible for me to discover “myself “, let alone break out from this “matrix” and lead a life apart from it?

Or, is my reality “made” by my interaction with the connections/relations that I have with people and things “out-there” and that I talk to myself about “in-here” – as such the memories and stuff that I identify with as important or I use to construct this version of myself and as my interests move – some become redundant and are left behind – but still exist in a materiality that includes the junk in my back yard and the “stuff “of children which is left in my garage while they, the children, are “out-there” in London and I communicate with them “in- here” on Skype. Or what is it like to be my mother who is 93 and gradually loses touch with the sequence of the days and the “reality” of her relationships with me as a son and is more present in her “in-here” memories of her college years in Cape Town before she was married than my presence in the “out-here” nowness?

Which brings me back to the descriptions of “out-there” of maps and digital devices that are trying to guide me to the fulfillment of my desires or help me make sense of the bewildering density of data that floods my now disassociated “in-here” world and aims to fulfill my every desire ? Open-air computers;Cities are turning into vast data factories

This works if “I” live in part of the digitally engrossed world and I have been culturally modified to accept these programs. The ongoing project of this thinking seems to relate to a pre-existing structure that can manipulate me into doing what it wants – or at least provide so much stuff that I might want while I am searching for what I need that I will buy it- but does such a structure in fact exist? - or is it too the result of the program we are wielding/writing as we scribe and leave our traces in this “ether” or plasma”? Can I choose what I want or am I a helpless “ant” biochemically programmed to follow traces across the perilous ground of the “out-there” world? Your friendly neighborhood app: The internet is going local

Fynbos at Cape Peninsula

So, as I was walking with few friends and family across the top of our local mountain at Silvermine Nature Reserve, I was in my usual reverie caught between what it means to “be-here-now-in-the-moment”- “out-here” and wondering “in-here” what it must have been like to be the first person to wander onto this mountain top and have no staked-out and stabilized paths to follow, let alone know from memory the names of countless fynbos plants that are endemic to this place alone and that are dependent on the local ecology and interaction between the climate of mountain mists and the geology of Table Mountain Sandstone. To have wandered around without any of the trappings of an “advanced civilization” and its technologies which seem to have been instrumental in both the “discovery “, mapping and then permanent modification of these very mountains and their occupants. Actually, unimaginable, to be a “stone-age” inhabitant like one of the “San” or “bushmen” that lived or passed through and over these places “before” colonization by Western Europeans – what did a “Sans” maps look like – what was he/she thinking when they ….

“Suddenly I am jerked back ”into -being-here-in-this-very-very-

Not the baboon who took our bag -also having fun with technology

nowness” by becoming aware of troop of baboons on the side of the path- one of them – a very large male- has red tags on his neck and a radio receiver collar – not a good sign here where these baboon troops have become habituated to walkers as easy targets for food and sweets ! Very alert now – internal reverie recounting “don’t be afraid – they can smell if you are afraid” – flood of thoughts – reassure the rest of the party behind that they should just walk past – nonchalantly! Not so easy -shouts – our guest walker has had his bag grabbed off his back by the dominate male baboon who has proved his trouble maker status as indicated by his red tags and is busy ripping the bag to shreds in search of delicacies! Stand back – “wait till he has finished – careful!!”

Anyway we made it back – he lost interest – important keys to cars and expensive rain gear are unharmed – opportunity too buy nice new hiking gear in mind ( use for smartphone app) – and we are on our way!

Whose reality now?

More of more later.

Communities Aren’t Just Places, They’re Social Networks

Urban Choreography — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:13:43 +0000

From Richard Florida on Atlantic Cities - a book revue and author interview that is reminds us of Christopher Alexander’ seminal paper “A city is not a tree” – “its’ a semi-lattice” that makes the idea that proximity creates communities obviously misinformed – even in places that have dense communities – these are invariable distributed and connected in many different ways – not only by physical location – all sorts of network associations are in play and being enacted – where these associations are not being reenacted or performed – the networks decay and communities disintegrate or never form, as repeatedly elaborated by Bruno Latour, in “Reassembling the Social” and other of his papers, these Actor-Networks consist of both human and non-human actors and their relationships are coterminous in more than one type of network and more than one type of space.

Cities are obviously more than just the sum of their physical assets — roads and bridges, offices, factories, shopping centers, and homes — working more like living organisms than jumbles of concrete. Their inner workings even transcend their ability to cluster and concentrate people and economic activity. As sociologist Zachary Neal of Michigan State University argues in his new book, The Connected City, cities are made up of human social networks. Neal took time to discuss his book and research with Atlantic Cities, explaining how cities work as living organisms and why what happens in Las Vegas cannot stay in Las Vegas.

RF: In the book, you write that “communities are networks, not places.” Tell us about why and how networks matter to cities?

ZN: We often think of communities in place–based terms, like Jane Jacobs’ beloved Greenwich Village. But, whether or not a place like Greenwich Village is really a community has more to do with the residents’ relationships with one another — their social networks – than with where they happen to live or work. The danger of thinking about communities as places is that it can lead us to find communities where they don’t exist. A neighborhood where the residents never interact is merely a place, but hardly a community. This can lead us to overlook communities that are not rooted in particular places, like a book club with a constantly changing venue.

Communities aren’t disappearing, but to find them we need to stop looking in places, and start looking in social networks.

What are the key factors that shape the networks of a connected city?

Despite claims of the death of distance, especially in a networked society, the most critical factor is still distance. But, when it comes to the connected city, at least three different kinds of distance — network, spatial, and social — are important. Network distance refers to the number of links between two people: I am close to my friends, a bit further away from friends–of–friends, and so on.

Understanding how the connected city is organized is really a matter of understanding network distance: Why are some people close to one another in a network, while others are further apart?

Spatial distance plays an important role because when two people live or work near one another, they are more likely to have chance encounters and interact. Social distance matters because when two people share political attitudes, or educational backgrounds, or even musical tastes, they are more likely to interact. This nearly universal tendency is known in the social network world as homophily. Thus, when two people are separated by short spatial distances (they live near each other) and/or short social distances (they like the same things), they are likely to be separated by short network distances (they interact with each other or have mutual friends).

Location Based Services are to People as Sheep Dogs are to Herding

Urban Choreography — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 09:55:20 +0000

Back after a recent laptop crash and insurance replacement with accompaning stress of problems with installing backup to iMac – bad experience for a otherwise perfect Mac – lots of time for trying to browse my mail on my iPhone ( not good fro updating blogs) and lots of time for guitar practice -but anyway…two weeks later …. So this article on how we are shaping ourselves via allowing our instruments to tell us where to go, from URBAN TIMES by KATY CULVER

We’re experiencing a culture where people carry around powerful computing devices on a standard basis, typically in the guise of a mobile device. These objects make it seem normal to share everything from the song we just liked on Spotify and the restaurant we’re visiting for dinner to updates that we’re on vacation away from our homes. This mobile technology is reconfiguring our social and urban spaces, creating a geotagged city space, and redefining our meaning of location-based services. More specifically, we not only use location-based services to update our friends of our whereabouts, but also to decide where we should visit based on the opinions of people we care about. In this way, we are transforming location-based services into a type of “social norm” we count on for reinforcing our behaviors and decisions. Thus, we end up herding ourselves by relying onlocation-based services to tell us where to go.

Photo Credit: teamstickergiant/flickr

Once connected, we become addicted to informing our community about almost every facet of our lives and depend on this online community for advice. If you’re not part of the map, you don’t exist. With the persistence of platforms including, but not limited to, Twitter, Instagram and the influx of new technologies, the geotagging trend doesn’t appear to be going away anytime in the near future. The amount of enabling technologies and trends that provide more opportunities for us to update behaviors online continues to grow.

(Personal photograph from SantaCon 2011 in Central Park, New York)

One way in which people leverage location-based services is to coordinate social movement. For example, cities across the United States partake in SantaCon, a gathering of thousands of people dressed up like Santa Clause who convene in one meeting place. The first meeting place is announced the morning of the event and from there, the thousands of Santa Clauses travel to various pre-determined locations throughout the city. Participants must rely on social media updates and location based services to learn about the next organized meeting location. In this way, location-based services are quite literally herding people in packs.

As seen with SantaCon, companies and brands are experimenting with these types of tools that influence behavior. B2C businesses must find the right balance leveraging the tools to increase consumer engagement and enhance loyalty. Mobile communication increasingly raises the bar in terms of influential significance, and in this instance, location-based services enrich the meaning of a physical location. Locations are now made meaningful through the ability to connect with others and share information. Store openings, art gallery exhibits, product launches, restaurants and so much more can gain from the ‘herding’ result produced by location-based services. In a nutshell, people continue to move together in groups, and our advanced technologies and capabilities are not changing our very basic human nature, but only enhancing it.

Photo credit: efactormedia/ flickr