AN EXPERIMENT
"one half of all architects and urbanists in the entire world should, as of now, stop designing new buildings and new developments altogether. Instead they should invest the historical depth and intellectual nuance of their architectural imaginations into the design and programming of new software that provides for the better use of structures and systems we already have. It is a simple matter of good content management. The other half, the control group, may continue as before."
POSSIBILITIES
"The range of services and opportunities for savvy urbanists is vast: location-aware augmented reality viewfinders, macrosensing and reality-mining of composite crowd-sourced behavioral data, citizen activists using GIS and mass market Geobrowsers and plugging open map layers into their Ruby and MySQL applications, realtime disease outbreak visualization and real-time microgovernance of biopolitical swarms, traffic control sensor and tollbooth hacks, individually reconfigurable interior partitions collapsing rooms and even floors, proprietary parking apps, post-Twitter apps keeping one always at the tent-pole center of his or her concentric and now minutely reflexive social networks, bus bench RSS feeds, pigeons that blog, lifelong syncing of car-phone-home-cloud, in-pocket web servers, realtime traffic, congestion and crime data patterns informing personal routeware, point-and-scan barcode readers, 4.5 inch Bloomberg terminals, instant carbon footprint visualization, real-time voice-to-voice language translations, location based serial cinema, Google Habitat, realtime cab-spotting, personal arphid managers, data privacy consulting services, gray market concierges, etc. all posted with at least partially open API's enabling other apps to further build on the existing stacks."
WARNING 1: SPEED
"The co-evolution of urban behavior and urban software: the iPhone City is embryonic, but it's evolution will happen quickly. Furthermore, the devices themselves and their capacities will appear to be evolving more in relation to each other than to us. This Darwinism of the device will make it seem that we are their media and not the other way around. Appearances can be factual."
WARNING 2: COMPLEXITY
"The co-mingling of the hypersocial & the post-social: the explosion of hyperlocal and hypervisual information will both amplify and multiply the intensities of social interaction, but will also reveal the complexity of communication between non-humans (animals, ecologies, infrastructures). Just as collective urban cognition comes online it will be exposed as a hopelessly outflanked minority discourse."
WARNING 3: INSTABILITY
"The diegesis of the cinematic interface: the computational intensification of the interface will make it more and more cinematic, and more affectively factual. This will exacerbate everything we already know about the instability of cinematic memory, action, projection, repetition and pixelation, and will bring these deeper into everyday life."
http://www.bratton.info/projects/texts/iphone-city/
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