'Urban form and experience in the age of ambient informatics' was the title of Adam Greenfield's talk at Cooper yesterday. "We killed the street," he started off; the public sphere is not a place to stay in anymore but a zone to move through where non-places (Marc Auge) and junk spaces (Rem Koolhaas) dominate. Anything organic, produced by people is killed in the interest of commerce (Jane Jacobs). Urban space has become conditional: you can sit here if.... These pseudo-public spaces are stealthy (unfindable/invisible), slippery, crusty, prickly, or jittery. Adam showed how public benches in Tokyo are build to allow only sitting (and even that for a short rest only). The goal is to make  public spaces useable only for the specific intended purpose. It's ugly.

Mobile devices like cell phones allow people to withdraw from these inhospitable surroundings. They can disengage us from 'public spaces' by leading us into virtuality. Adam linked the hope to reconnect with the rich, fulfilling urban life through mobile computing. He situated this techno-social solace in today's 'post-pc and heads-up computing,' a time that he characterized as being shaped by technologies that become embedded, wireless, imperceptible, post-graphic user interface (gui). Equally important, information processing shows up in new places. Adam emphasized that he wants to be on the right side of history, which for him suggested embracing this technology.

Information processing dissolves into behavior and pervasive technology leads to social sorting and surveillance. Without credit cards it's hard to print out your boarding pass at the airport. Entire zones of buildings become inaccessible for those without credit cards: techno-social sorting. People who are of a certain class or socio-economic background are excluded.

Cities also get visualized through these ambient technologies. In San Francisco, for example, taxis can be visualized live through GPS on a city map (Cabspotting). Data outputs regulate the circulation of people (in buildings and cities). In high traffic buildings, cell phone-activated elevators may make you wait for two more people before they open their doors.

Screens become addressable and objects queryable. Information may be triggered from an ad on your cell phone via Bluetooth and Semapedia affords you access to Wikipedia in front of a building or at a site.

In such participatory (or read/write) urbanism data about the city are contributed by those inhabiting that space -or- at least that's the potential. A participatory panopticon, I'd say, is surely another. Adam ended with a call to support open standards and underspecified technologies.

A few links that I'd add:

Architecture & Situated Technologies Conference last October

Bibliography
 

SF WiFi Google/Earthlink contract a done deal

"The true object of police is man."

http://ctheory.net//articles.aspx?id=567 
 

http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why_some_social.html

Ambient Devices
http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/products.html#Umbrella 

Teaching in this Area

Networked Objects Syllabus (2005)

http://www.tigoe.net/pcomp/netobj-syllabus-sp05.shtml 

and

http://www.digilutionary.com/index.php?cat=22

http://www.uni-weimar.de/mediaarchitecture/ 

http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/information/department.html

Locative Media & The City 

http://cva.ap.buffalo.edu/courses/f06/dms557/