![I guest reviewed chapter in Marcus Foth’s forthcoming book, Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City. It will be released later this fall.I’ve just been reading Anthony Townsend’s forward in which he hones in on the clear signs that scholars are developing transdisciplinary approaches to their research in this area:“In 2005, the Institute for the Future conducted a 50-year scan of future trends in science and technology for the UK government’s Department of Trade and Industry (now the Department of Trade and Innovation). One of the eight high-level forecasts to emerge from this year-long effort, the idea of trandisciplinarity essentially meant that rather than putting together teams of specialists from established fields, we would see ever more young scholars seek training in multiple disciplines to develop new approaches to particularly messy or difficult problems. As author Howard Rheingold described it, “transdisciplinarity goes beyond bringing together researchers from different disciplines to work in multidisciplinary teams. It means educating researchers who can speak languages of multiple disciplines – biologists who have an understanding of mathematics, mathematicians who understand biology” (IFTF, 2006, p. 31).Advances in the tools we have for “seeing” cities, from the first maps to the latest in satellite imagery, have always had major impacts on how we define problems, opportunities and aspirations. Sherman Fairchild, the father of aerial photography, described the impact of his invention (1924): [It] shows the city with the minutest detail. It shows every structure from contractor’s temporary tool-shed to skyscraper; back-yards, gardens and parks with every tree and bush visible; avenues and alleys, streets and unrecorded foot-paths; big league ball parks; water-front clubs, with their yachts and motor boats; the boardwalk of Coney Island, and crowds of people appearing like small black dots. In essence, this new perspective granted by aerial photography rendered cities as abstract expressions of steel and concrete – malleable designs to be reworked from above by technocratic deities. The legacies of that fantasy are the planning disasters of the post-War period, costly lessons browbeaten into the minds of young urban planners today. To use a crude analogy, if aerial photography showed us the muscular and skeletal structure of the city, the revolution in urban informatics is likely to reveal its circulatory and nervous systems. I like to call this vision the “real-time city”, because for the first time we’ll see cities as a whole the way biologists see a cell – instantaneously and in excruciating detail, but also alive. This is in contrast to the way astronomers see a heavenly body – as it was, some time ago, light-years in the past. And as these capabilities become more widespread, the real-time city could become a place where everyone is an amateur urban planner, using urban informatics to understand the larger impacts of their everyday decisions. That, so fundamental a shift in our perception of our own civilization, seems to be something worth working towards.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/uRgTgmVne8ob8iepbekYtYkd_500.jpg)
I guest reviewed chapter in Marcus Foth’s forthcoming book, Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City. It will be released later this fall.
I’ve just been reading Anthony Townsend’s forward in which he hones in on the clear signs that scholars are developing transdisciplinary approaches to their research in this area:
“In 2005, the Institute for the Future conducted a 50-year scan of future trends in science and technology for the UK government’s Department of Trade and Industry (now the Department of Trade and Innovation). One of the eight high-level forecasts to emerge from this year-long effort, the idea of trandisciplinarity essentially meant that rather than putting together teams of specialists from established fields, we would see ever more young scholars seek training in multiple disciplines to develop new approaches to particularly messy or difficult problems. As author Howard Rheingold described it, “transdisciplinarity goes beyond bringing together researchers from different disciplines to work in multidisciplinary teams. It means educating researchers who can speak languages of multiple disciplines – biologists who have an understanding of mathematics, mathematicians who understand biology” (IFTF, 2006, p. 31).
Advances in the tools we have for “seeing” cities, from the first maps to the latest in satellite imagery, have always had major impacts on how we define problems, opportunities and aspirations. Sherman Fairchild, the father of aerial photography, described the impact of his invention (1924):
[It] shows the city with the minutest detail. It shows every structure from contractor’s temporary tool-shed to skyscraper; back-yards, gardens and parks with every tree and bush visible; avenues and alleys, streets and unrecorded foot-paths; big league ball parks; water-front clubs, with their yachts and motor boats; the boardwalk of Coney Island, and crowds of people appearing like small black dots.
In essence, this new perspective granted by aerial photography rendered cities as abstract expressions of steel and concrete – malleable designs to be reworked from above by technocratic deities. The legacies of that fantasy are the planning disasters of the post-War period, costly lessons browbeaten into the minds of young urban planners today.
To use a crude analogy, if aerial photography showed us the muscular and skeletal structure of the city, the revolution in urban informatics is likely to reveal its circulatory and nervous systems. I like to call this vision the “real-time city”, because for the first time we’ll see cities as a whole the way biologists see a cell – instantaneously and in excruciating detail, but also alive. This is in contrast to the way astronomers see a heavenly body – as it was, some time ago, light-years in the past. And as these capabilities become more widespread, the real-time city could become a place where everyone is an amateur urban planner, using urban informatics to understand the larger impacts of their everyday decisions. That, so fundamental a shift in our perception of our own civilization, seems to be something worth working towards.”
