Considering cities as "dense meshes of active, communicating public objects"

Here's ubiquitous computing dude and smart guy Adam Greenfield talking about treating cities as "software under development." It's a provocative and exciting essay:

Provided that, we can treat the things we encounter in urban environments as system resources, rather than a mute collection of disarticulated buildings, vehicles, sewers and sidewalks. One prospect that seems fairly straightforward is letting these resources report on their own status. Information about failures would propagate not merely to other objects on the network but reach you and me as well, in terms we can relate to, via the provisions we've made for issue-tracking.

And because our own human senses are still so much better at spotting emergent situations than their machinic counterparts, and will probably be for quite some time yet to come, there's no reason to leave this all up to automation. The interface would have to be thoughtfully and carefully designed to account for the inevitable bored teenagers, drunks, and randomly questing fingers of four-year-olds, but what I have in mind is something like, "Tap here to report a problem with this bus shelter."

In order for anything like this scheme to work, public objects would need to have a few core qualities, qualities I've often described as making them "addressable, queryable, and even potentially scriptable." What does this mean?

Frameworks for citizen responsiveness, enhanced: Toward a read/write urbanism (via Beyond the Beyond)

• [Anony Mouse]

  Why bother with a ‘tap here’ interface? Combine it with the ubiquity of CCTV and increasingly discriminating computer overwatch of these systems – “Do the YMCA to report an issue with this bus stop*”

  *Not recommended at 2am in New Cross

• [Symbiote]

  Is he aware of FixMyStreet — a British site for reporting problems with roads, lights, public equipment etc? There’s an iPhone app (which gets the location by GPS), and there’s common sense (if there’s a number on the broken light put that in your report), which pretty much covers it.

  (Use B1 1AA if you don’t know a UK postcode)

  • [Anonymous]

    Did you happen to read the very first link in the article?

• [jasoneppink]

  See also: Blogjects

• [adamnvillani]

  Is this guy aware of GIS? There’s been progress made toward databases at least somewhat resembling this over the past decade or so.

  Last year I got to tour the City of L.A.’s ATSAC center, which is control center where they monitor traffic around the city, tweak lights, collect data, etc., like in the Italian Job remake. It was basically what this guy’s describing, only with the inputs limited to traffic sensors and cameras.

• [voidmstr]

  Smart spimes!

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spime

• [humanresource]

  There might be something in this guy’s idea, but my first thought was “How long before that button gets destroyed someone bored waiting at the bust stop?”

• [Beanolini]

  what I have in mind is something like, “Tap here to report a problem with this bus shelter.”

  Not quite as advanced as this… but our local lampposts all have a phone number and reference number printed on them, and an encouragement to phone in if they’re not working.

• [Anony Mouse]

  Does this mean that as an active communicating public object I can go down to the park where I was ambushed at knifepoint and self-organise an appropriate evolution of the local environment in order to resolve design elements which were not aligned with the area’s primary envisaged function but were rather de-facto supporting socially damaging behaviour and re-enforcing an un-regulated and un-taxed economy? One which involves fire?

• [shadowfirebird]

  “Dense meshes of active, communicating public objects”

  Pardon me if I seem cynical, but I suspect that “dense meshes of active, poorly communicating corporation-owned objects” is more likely to be how it turns out.

  “Tap here to listen to a long string of adverts and then a series of badly designed, pointless options, one of which is to report a problem with this bus shelter. Which we will ignore.”