shaping habitat -...

Shaping Habitat: The Interrelatedness of Technology, City Development and Human Ecology.


Raune [email protected]

MKD_Externe Projekte Fachbereich Architektur

Hochschule Trier Supervising lecturer: Prof. Marion Goerdt

Raune Frankjaer || MKD_Externe Projekte Fachbereich Architektur || Prof. Marion Goerdt


Abstract

Humanity is urbanized. As of the year 2008 the majority of its population lives in towns and cities and here approximately 80% of the worlds economic production takes place. The level of urbanization is expected to rise to about 70% by 2030, amounting to a total of more than 5 billion people. In ad-dition to this immense demographic challenge humanity is faced with other equally profound and daunting concerns such as a changing climate, growing pollution, sociopolitical problems and economic crisis. To face these challenges the worlds urban centers need to become much more resilient to the impending radical changes and so urban design must redefine itself into an agent of transformation, guided by standards to develop efficient, cohesive, innovative and sustainable cities.

Precondition to perceiving and conceptualizing new ideas and design solutions addressing these issues is a thorough understand-ing of the city and it’s dynamics, namely the economic, ecologic, demographic, political, and sociological forces which are at play. How they interrelate. Where they stem from. How they are developing. Due to its diversity the city has since its origin been a cradle for innovation and a vital driving force to society. A function it can-not fulfill without a thriving public sphere where people of different backgrounds can meet and exchange ideas. Particularly in times of crisis, developing new solutions are crucial, consequently the focal point of this paper is on public and shared space. Throughout history the emergence of new technologies have changed the space we live in, and how we live in it. A space which over the course of time has become increasingly denser populated and simultaneously also increasingly individualized and pri-vate. Currently, digital and mobile technologies in many ways collapse the existing boundaries between what is considered public and what is private. As these technologies become more and more ubiquitous and progressively embedded, smart objects, buildings and spaces autonomously act on and interact with their surroundings, consequently altering our understanding of the spaces we

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inhabit and of ourselves. The information gathered may not necessarily be used for the common good, however it does carry the potential of reconnect-ing people and, unprecedented in history, to the surrounding environment, evoking a drastically new kind of shared space that could prove essential to developing and maintaining a healthy and involved society capable of withstanding the manifold chal-lenges of the near future. This paper will look at the evolvement from the first human settlements to the cities we know today, as driven by technological advances and the consequences on interpersonal and communal relations and examine current development towards a hybrid reality and the possible outcome of a digitally connected humanity with its main habitat, the city.

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Table of Contents

Abstract .............................................................................................................................................................................................................Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................................................................................1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................................................................2 The Modern City .........................................................................................................................................................................................3 Post-modern Space ......................................................................................................................................................................................4 Mobile .............................................................................................................................................................................................................5 Hybrid Space .................................................................................................................................................................................................6 The Connected City ...................................................................................................................................................................................7 Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................................................................................Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Humanity is urbanized. As of the year 2008 the majority of its population lives in towns and cities and here approxi-mately 80% of the worlds economic production take place. Furthermore the urban areas consume 75% of the global resources, and account for 50% of global waste as well as 60-80% of green house gas emissions [1].

The urban areas of the world absorb the entire growth in population, whilst simultaneously drawing in rural population, and the level of urbanization is by 2030 projected by the UN to rise to 67 per cent. The urban population will by then amount to more than 5 billion people. Today the figure is 3.3 billion. In the light of these figures it is safe to say that when address-ing the issues humanity is facing one is in fact addressing the issue of the city.Yet urban development across the world is anything but homogenous. The more developed parts of the world have been urbanized since 1950, while in the developing parts of the world it will still be another decade before more than half of the population will be living in cities (Fig. 1.0).

1 Introduction

Fig. 1.0: Urban and rural populaion be development group, 1950 - 2050. Source: World Urbanization Prospects 2011, UN.

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1. United Nations. Environment Program. Division of Technology, Industry and Economics, Global Initiative for Resource Efficient Cities, Engine to Sustainability (UNEP, 2012), 1.



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Furthermore the urban population is not distributed evenly, in 2011 half of the urban population was living in towns with less than 500.000 citizens. This number is expected to de-cline over the next decades as the major growth rate occurs amongst the megacities of more than 10 Million citizens. In 1970 the world only had two such megacities, Tokyo and New York, 40 years later, by 2011 that number had risen to 23 megacities worldwide. 13 in Asia, four in Latin America. Africa, Europe and Northern America have two respectively. These megacities house a total of 359.4 million citizens and account for 9.9 per cent of the world populace. By 2025 the number of megacities is projected to increase to 37, with 630 million people living in a megacity, by then accounting for 13.6 per cent of the worlds urban population (Fig. 1.1).

The urban growth rate is in fact slowing down. Between 1950 and 2011, the world urban population grew at a rate of 2.6 per cent per year and increased almost fivefold, from 0.75 billion to 3.6 billion. During 2011-2030, the world urban population is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 1.7 per cent, leading to a doubling of the urban population Fig. 1.1: Total population by city size class, 1970, 1990, 2011 and 2025. Source: World Urbanization Prospects 2011, UN.

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in 41 years. During 2030-2050, the urban growth rate is expected to decline further to 1.1 per cent per year, implying a doubling time of 63 years. The increases in the world urban population are concentrated in a few countries, with China and India together projected to account for about a third of the increase in the urban population between 2011 and 2030. In some of the developed regions the urban population is even reclining, due to the overall population decline taking place in these countries [2].

Fig. 1.2: Population of urban agglomorations with 10 mollion inhabitants or more 1970, 1990 and 2011. Source: World Urbanization Prospects 2011, UN.

2. United Nations. Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision (UN, 2012), 1 - 15.



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It is important to note that the majority of growth is happening in the developing world and will take place among the poorest. The informal settlements, or slums which today houses one-sixth of the world population is projected to triple by 2050, amount-ing to a total of one billion people. This huge socio-economic problem will not be dealt with in this paper, as it would exceed its scope. However at this point it should be noted that the UN on its website in an article from 21 March 2013 describes how today more people in the world Fig. 1.3: Population of urban agglomorations with 10 mollion inhabitants or more, 2025. Source: World Urbanization Prospects 2011, UN.



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Fig. 2.0: Examples of scaling relationships. Total wages per MSA in 2004 for the U.S. (blue points) vs. metro-politan population. Best-fit scaling relations are shown as solid lines. Source: Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities, Bettencourt et al.

Fig. 2.1: Supercreative employment per MSA in 2003, for the U.S. (blue points) vs. metropolitan population. Best-fit scaling relations are shown as solid lines. Source: Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities, Bettencourt et al.

Fig. 2.2 The pace of urban life increases with city size.Scaling of walking speed vs. population for cities around the world. Best-fit scaling relations are shown as solid lines. Source: Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities, Bettencourt et al.

have access to mobile phones than to sanitary facilities, such is the extend of these technologies. Also, due to the author’s back-ground it is inevitably written from a certain eurocentric viewpoint, however the processes and dynamics described can, when allowing for certain local characteristics and divergences, be observed and applied universally. In fact research conducted by renowned physicist professor Jeffrey B. West and his team at the Santa Fé Institute, has shown cit-ies to follow simple mathematical equations in their growth, indicating a tight and predictable relationship between the different factors making up a city. Their study demonstrated many diverse properties of cities to be power law functions of population

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size with scaling exponents. It is surprisingly simple: The function of the “output”, that is quantities reflecting things like wealth creation, innovation, crime rates, cas-es of HIV, etc is 1.2 >1, and the function of the “input”, that is the infrastructure and resource demands of the city, is 0.8<1. These laws were further shown to be applicable to any urban system regardless of time or place [3].

3. Luís MA Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey B. West, “Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities.”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 17 (2007): 7301-7305.



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The development towards an urbanized humanity commenced about 12.000 years ago with the neolithic demographic transi-tion, or agricultural revolution, where the invention of agriculture and animal husbandry led to the establishment of the very first human settlements. Some of these ancient settlements, namely those with a lucrative position on transport infrastructure, typically rivers and seaways, grew first to be trading points and later into real cities, predecessors to our modern cities today. These ancient cities were highly compact and diverse, walking distance cities characterized by mixed patterns of land use 1). Narrow, winding streets mostly lead towards a central square. Here the citizens would come to trade their goods or gather for festivities and other special occasions. Official and religious buildings would be situated here along with the residences of the élite. Housing, commerce and workplace was combined, sometimes including small scale animal husbandry.

From the very beginning the city was a hotbed of innovation and wealth creation. Here a diversity of minds could meet and exchange ideas [4], and the surplus food and resulting leisure time that agriculture created, freed up the necessary resources for the development of the crafts and sciences [5]. Although a few of these cities grew very large with Rome as well known and prime example with an estimated one million citizens at its peak, generally the ancient cities did not exceed a population of a few hundred thousand, limited in their growth by the ability to supply them with food. It was not until industrialization and its technological capabilities enabling much higher food-miles and prolonged storage, that cities were able to expand beyond these numbers [6].Up until then the city had mainly functioned as a converging point and place of commerce for the surrounding area. With the new factories production moved to the city and the relationship and power-balance between the city and the land changed pro-foundly, a shift further exasperated through the migration to the city of farm workers made superfluous through the mechaniza-tion of agricultural production. Agrarian economy was replaced by capitalism and religion lost its totalitarian authority as society moved towards rational thought and secularized institutions.

2 The Modern City

1) The basic land use patterns in cities are residential, industrial, and commercial.

4. Helle Juul and John Ploeger, PUBLIC SPACE 2 - The familiar into the strange (c JUUL | FROST Architects, 2011/2009), 7.5. Sanjida O’Connell, “Is farming the root of all evil?.” The Telegraph, June 23, 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/5604296/Is-farming-the-root- of-all-evil.html (accessed July 27, 2013).6. Carolyn Steel, “TED - Ideas worth spreading. Carolyn Steel: How food shapes our cities” TED Talks, Last modified 10 01, 2009. Accessed July 25, 2013. http://www. ted.com/talks/carolyn_steel_how_food_shapes_our_cities.html.



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The main characteristic of modernity and industrialization were separation, segregation and rationalization, which came to per-meate almost every layer of human existence. The city was segregated into an inner city business, trade and entertainment area, with housing for the poor situated around the industrial workplaces. Motorized transportation, predominantly the cable car, made commuting possible for those who could afford it and so the upper and middle classes relocated to the periphery.Production which had up until then been tied to the household and entailing manufacture of a complete product by a skilled ar-tisan was split off, not just to take place in factories but with the emergence of mass production broken down into singular tasks performed by specialist workers operating sophisticated machinery on the assembly line. This division of labor, whilst economi-cally beneficial, resulted not just in a stupefying and numbingly boring work day for the laborer but caused a complete discon-nection from the product and assigned tasks as the worker does not have any control over the outcome of his efforts [7]. This kind of structuring, where the global task is only visible to the top of the hierarchy and subsequently divided and sub-divided down through a chain of commands directed by a set of codified reason of rules is known as procedural rationality. It is a prominent feature of bureaucracy and relies on the people involved to strictly follow the rules, that is to adhere to the specified procedure and not be guided by personal feelings or judgements.In order to assure this impersonal behavior, loyalty and a sense of duty is promoted as the only acceptable feelings. Loyalty to the organization ensures that tasks are carried out regardless of their content, provided the command is legitimate, that is com-ing from the right place and following the correct procedure. Loyalty to fellow members, adds a personal morale, refusing to carry out one’s part would be to let ones colleagues and buddies down. Any other emotion, especially conscience which may state that a given action is morally wrong even though it is procedurally correct and thus threatens loyalty must be eliminated or at least sufficiently subdued. To achieve this organizations use two different strategies. One is flotation of responsibility the other moral neutralization.

7. Richard Sennett, The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism (WW Norton & Company, 2011), 33-42



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Flotation of responsibility occurs when a member of an organization carries out an order applying the correct procedure, it is not he who carries the responsibility of his actions. But as everyone else in the organization is equally just following the instructions of their superiors, ultimately no-one has any responsibility. Furthermore the singular tasks constitutes such minute parts of the whole, individual actions are rendered impossible to be pointed out and would have no impact without the work of the col-lective. Often the results are not even known to the individual members, which in extreme scenarios can thus help commit the most horrific crimes still perceiving of themselves to be of impeccable morals.In addition actions are morally exempted from any value when carried out as part as ones duty, that is the action itself is morally neutral, the only wrong or right which is to be applied is that of procedural correctness. In consequence, any member of modern organization is trained not to exercise or even trust his own judgment and is so de-prived of moral autonomy. Moral responsibility of individual actions and the consequences hereof ceases to exist when acting procedurally correct within the organization, which in institutionalized modern society encompasses almost everything to be found outside the sphere of the private [8].

On a material level mass production brought great progress. The price of industrially manufactured goods dropped significantly and along with the electrical and automated household, the car became available as a commodity to the middle classes. As the automobile became the prominent technology, the population dispersed into the suburbs a development aided by com-plimentary technological developments, primarily in telecommunications. Business was subsequently deconcentrated and the city core as the focal point of social and cultural life weakened. In rationalized society, dominated by economics of big corpora-tions, government bureaucracy and mass-produced goods the car became the symbol of individual freedom. It was private and allowed independent time scheduling and choice of residential location. Hitherto population movements had been controllable and communal by virtue of the existing transportation technology. With exception of the upper classes able to afford personal



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motorized transport already at an early stage, the peripheral housing development had been tied to the lines of the cable cars [9].The requirements of motorized traffic, soon eliminated the usage of the city streets as a social and recreational gathering space and modernist city planners, obsessed with the creation of order, divided the city into functional zones for housing, traffic, recreation and commerce [10]. This approach for one resulted in a lot more traffic by increasing the distance between the different functions, which subse-quently had to be covered several times a week and some even daily, thus creating a societal structure reliant on the car to function. Furthermore, the space in-between the buildings, i.e. the public space, was reduced to a structure made for move-ment requiring unrestricted open space. This concept of movement and open space was seen not just in the planning of city infrastructure at that time but pervaded almost any architectural idea. Open-plan floors, fully glassed outer walls and vast plazas, were the modern and post-modern ideals, that albeit aesthetically very appealing, especially on a 1:50 scale, completely fails to cater for the very basic human need for protection deeply rooted in our psychological makeup across any cultural barrier. The human senses as they are today developed long before humans became settled within permanent structures. As a consequence they are adapted to a hunter - gatherer lifestyle and according environments. For example spaces bigger than 100 meters are perceived as threatening as that is how far we can see, that is able to scan for dangers. Likewise we tend to look more down-wards than upwards, as there typically were enemies to be weary of living on the ground, but seldom from above. These funda-mental characteristics, on which we to a large extend base our psychological well-being is identical across demographics.The high visibility of modernist architecture creates a sense of constant exposure, a very stressful and exhausting state of being for humans. The result was an increased withdrawal into the shelter of intimate and private space, further exacerbating the deterioration of the public realm [11][12].The emergence of new media devices, such as radio and television enforced this retreat into private seclusion and further ac-

8. Zygmunt Bauman, Alone again: Ethics after certainty (No. 9. Demos, 1994), 5-9. 9. Martin V. Melosi, “The automobile shapes the city.” Automobile in American Life and Society (University of Michigan, 2004), 1.10. Ibid.11. Richard Sennett, The fall of public man (WW Norton & Company, 1992),14-15.12. Jan Gehl, Cities for people (Island Press, 2010), 3-6.



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centuated the emphasis on private life. Like a membrane these technologies permits a limited amount of publicness to enter the private space in a controlled and regulated manner. What was previously a large part of direct human participation and interac-tion, became a mediated public reality consumed in private seclusion. Combined with the notion of the public being a morally inferior space and ultimately leading to a de-socializing of pleasure [13][14][15].As the emphasis on the private increases, the ability of public interaction declines, with severe consequences for both the per-ception of the common but also to the more intimate closer relationships. Superfluous contacts and modest low-intensity inter-action is of utmost importance in relation to all other social activities. This kind of encounters for one serve as both an oppor-tunity for new relationships to evolve and deepen and, secondly as a healthy base for the more complex interactions. Without a public life, intimate relationships are strained as they become increasingly demanding in order to compensate for missing low intensity contacts [16][17].

3 Post-modern Space

The onset of the information or digital age and predominantly the emergence of its most prominent feature, the internet, saw a breakdown of the firm, pyramid-like corporate structures, into flatter, more flexible organizations. Network-based and project-oriented structures, the philosophical trademark of New Capitalism, are much more adaptable and responsive to the emerging rapidly changing market fueled by instant electronic communication technologies. To the employee the new flexible workplace meant liberation from the restrictive work schedules, monotonous tasks and rigid hierarchy which characterized Fordist modernism.

Fig. 3.0: Relationships of varying intemsity. Passive and low intensity contacts are a vital prerequisite to healthy personal interactions on all levels. Without a shared, public space the lower intensity contacts suffer. Source: Life betwwen buildings: Using public space, Jan Gehl.

13. Stephen Groening, “From ‘a box in the theater of the world’ to ‘the world as your living room’: cellular phones, television and mobile privatization,” New Media & Society, 12, no. 08 (2010): 1331 - 1333, 10.1177/1461444810362094 (accessed July 25, 2013).14. Richard Sennett, The fall of public man, 201.15. Tony Fry, Design futuring: Sustainability, ethics and new practice (Berg, 2009), 114.16. Jan Gehl, Life between buildings: Using Public Space (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987/2011), 17 - 19.17. Richard Sennett, The fall of public man, 16.



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Yet the new freedom came at a price, as flexibility goes hand in hand with unpredictability and discontinuity. Short term work replaced secure employment, and demands of mobility turned lifelong colleagues and friends into momentary co-workers [18].

According to Zygmund Bauman the consequences are manifold and pervasive: blurring of borders between work and leisure times, often manifesting itself as an invasion of the sanctity of the home by instant digital access, effectively eliminating any excuse of inability to carry out a certain task from home when asked to so by co-workers or employers outside normal work-ing hours. Remote working often welcomed as a convenient way of balancing personal needs, for instance in caring for kids or eliminating long travel distances, while remaining in the workforce often results in social exclusion and resulting feelings of isola-tion and loneliness as well as incapability to structure daily life. Accompanied by the increased job-insecurity the results are high levels of personal anxiety, with a resulting negative effect on the perception of the common, as the individual is constantly occupied with securing the next job and safeguarding him or her-self against the next disruption. Competition is fierce and everywhere and each must rely onto his own.Traditional virtues like providence, prudence and loyalty, highly sought after assets in bureaucratic structure, that, when applied with diligence allowed the individual to plan and secure his or hers future with foresight are in the new economy more of a hin-drance. With nothing long-term, whether the workplace as such, nor the individual function which is to be fulfilled, the focus is on changeability, mobility and versatility. Jobs and places have become temporary stays, without the possibility of forming roots or attachments. Skills and technologies that are valued today, will with all probability be worthless tomorrow. Digital media delivers a continuous excess amount of short lived information, innovation cycles are generated at constantly accelerating rates and as a result attention has become the scarcest of resources. This world of fragments requires swift adaptability and being provident now takes the shape of avoiding commitments and attachments to places and people, expectations of a certain future or even a specific image of oneself.

18. Richard Sennett, The corrosion of character, 46 - 64.



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Highly aware of our singular existence and devoid of any perception of a common fate, even personal relationships are exempt-ed from moral evaluation as people have become free-floating agents held accountable only for their own private existence. Life itself has been privatized. Even the most traditional core of community, the family unit, has become subordinated to the inter-ests of the individual and the home a place where the members lead their separate lives, side by side.The focus has shifted onto the individual, who, emancipated from the moral constraints of group and kin is on a solitary journey through life. This process has brought many liberations, most foremost the possibility of leading a life not dictated by the expec-tations of others on the grounds of a specific social class, culture, life stage or gender, but as a consequence our ability to think in terms of the common has equally deteriorated. The certainty and security which accompanied last century’s rigid order has been replaced with a great deal of confusion and uncertainty, and a sense of being lone and lost to unpredictable and undefin-able forces has become a prominent feature of contemporary life [19].

4 Mobile

Current emerging mobile technologies seem to further aggravate the development towards a privatized and atomized society, as each individual retreats into a personal bubble powered by some handheld electronic device. In contrast to or maybe more correctly as an extension of the modern era, where privatization implied a retreat in space, into the compact privacy of the nuclear family home, with broadcast media presenting an image of the public in the safe enclosure of the living room, mobile privatization, signifies a retreat of space. Experience of reality is mediated through a device and any sociability which has not been filtered by the set parameters of a

19. Zygmunt Bauman, Alone again, 13 - 23.



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social media services is rejected. Each individual spins a personal cocoon, a digital comfort zone, its boundaries defined by online groups of contacts or friends, selected entertainment and news feed subscriptions, all whilst being “out and about”, moving through the public realm, physically present yet mentally absent. Private space invades and displaces the public [20].At the same time living a private life in public space leads to being hyperpublic. Partly voluntarily, carrying out personal conver-sations in public, a habit which in the early years of mobile telephony was heavily frowned upon, has now become common-

20. Stephen Groening, “From ‘a box in the theater of the world’ to ‘the world as your living room’: cellular phones, television and mobile privatization,” New Media & Society, 12, no. 08 (2010): 1332, 10.1177/1461444810362094.

2) PRISM is a data mining program applied by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) in collaboration with major online service providers such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, AOL, Skype and Apple. The program was initiated in 2007 but only came to the attention of the public in june 2013 when revealed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Source: Barton Gellmann, and Laura Poitras, “U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program.” The Washington Post, Last modified june 08, 2013. Accessed July 25, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-

place and only too keen to post highly private content on services like Facebook, twitter, insta-gram and the like. Yet often also inadvertedly or without approving thereof, through the ever increasing public surveillance and recording, as well as the extensive amount of data collected and stored by internet providers, browsers, search engines and mobile carriers. The extend of the unwanted publicness of the individual has become painfully clear in the PRISM scandal cur-rently shaking governments all over the world 2). The new mobile services has changed the way the internet is used and understood. Entering desktop bound virtual reality is perceived as an immersion into a sort of non-place, and early theories predominantly believed that the concept of cyberspace would eventually absorb in-terpersonal physical interaction. This development clearly has not happened. Instead the trend is towards an integration of the digital information services as a constant and ubiquitous part of our being in the physical world, through devices which are always on and always accessible. In that way the internet ceases to exist as some other space, tied to stationary entry points, and the boundaries between digital and physical as well as private and public collapse, as these enfold each other creating a new spatial hybrid [21].Other boundaries, namely between the developing and developed world, literate and illiter-

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5 Hybrid Space

Fig. 4.0:Hybrid reality. Source: From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces, Adriana de Souza e Silva.

companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html.21. Adriana de Souza e Silva, “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces,” Space and Culture, 09, no. 03 (2006): 263 - 264, 1 0.1177/1206331206289022 .22. J.D. Lasica, The Mobile Generation: Global Transformations on the Cellular Level. A Report of the Fifteenth Annual Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology (The Aspen Institute. Communications and Society Program, 2007), 12.

ate, rich and poor seems to equally diminish with mobile technologies. Although the way the devices are used differ, for example in developing countries one device will often be shared amongst many users, the digital divide observed with the desktop pc, to a large extend breaks down due to lower initial costs and flexible payment plans, independence from existing in-frastructure as well as the relative ease of use. In most poorer countries, mobile use by far outnumber pc-penetration [22].

As technology is becoming more and more ubiquitous, partly embedded in objects and build-ings and partly carried as a constant companion on or in close proximity to the body, differen-tiating between digital and physical ceases to make much sense. Instead the concept of spatial-ity must be redefined in order to encompass connected, social and mobile space. The relationship between the digital and the real environment is known as the reality-virtuality continuum and defined in three distinct ways. On either end of the pole is reality and virtual-ity and in-between augmented reality where virtual information overlays reality, augmented virtuality where real world objects are brought into a virtual environment and mixed reality as a space where it is no longer clearly distinguishable which environment can be established as



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23. Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Félix Guattari, A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, (Vol. 2. U of Minnesota Press, 1987), 7 - 20.24. J.D. Lasica, The Mobile Generation, 9.

primary.The cities emerging today, with buildings objects and spaces that independently gather, process and take action on information belong within that mixed reality of the reality-virtuality continuum. When adding the components of interactivity and com-munication as part of that space a hybrid reality comes into existence, a conceptual space constructed by the networked social environment of mobile users within their immediate physical surrounding of embedded technology.Within hybrid space, the individual can no longer be seen as an isolated entity within a cocoon, but must be viewed as a node, a vital part of a greater network, comparable to the root structure of a rhizome. In the philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari space consists of a multiplicity of separate parts, each retrieving its identity from its surroundings, to which it stays connected whilst at the same time connecting to any other part within a rhizomatic structure. This structure exchanges movements, conditions, contexts, reflections, history and cultures and when an entity runs through the rhizome, it creates local ramifications and forms new connections. The individual acting in rhizomatic space, has a multiple, mutable identity, and is part of and interacting with its surrounding environment whilst rooted in the rhizome. Identity thus be-comes the result of genesis rather than history, and of geography rather than geo-history [23]. User behavior to a great extend seem to affirm this theory in that, opposing to the predictions and hopes of marketeers, the new ubiquitous technologies in conjunction with social networks primarily increase personal communication as opposed to multimedia consumption, thereby adding to the volume and flow of communication and not as often claimed replacing more meaningful real world interaction [24]. Similarly social networks do not replace real relationships, but first and foremost expands social space to encompass acquaintances like old school friends, distant family members and like-minded online friends. In that way users of online networks and services, are increasingly attached to their families and their pasts whilst living independently and often separated in terms of physical space [25]. A 2011 study relating to new mothers’ blogging and use of social networking sites, found these activities to create a feeling of



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6 The Connected City

25. Ibid, 42.26. Brandon T. McDaniel, Sarah M. Coyne, and Erin K. Holmes. “New mothers and media use: associations between blogging, social networking, and maternal well-being.” Maternal and child health journal 16, no. 7 (2012): 1509.

connectedness to friends, extended family and parenting communities, which in turn created a sense of moral support, thus enhancing the mothers wellbeing and significantly decreasing parental stress and depression [26]. The experience of a first time mother alone at home with her infant is by all means unique, however many of its components such as the novelty of the situ-ation, combined with being alone in the situation, as the partner, when existing will often her out of the house at work during care taking times, and often accompanied by some level of anxiety are in many ways comparable to that insecure feeling of being “out-there alone” on unchartered and ever changing territory, that to a large degree characterizes contemporary genera-tions experience of life.

The severe issues humanity is facing today converge in the worlds cities. Air and water pollution, climatic changes, the massive migration of people around the world, homeless economic migrants, asylum seekers, refugees and so on are all global problems and a product of the chaotic nature of the globalizing process characterizing the new economy, coupled with ruthless exploita-tion of resources. However it is the cities and municipalities that have to deal with the unwanted outcomes of these processes, they are the ones who have to come up with solutions to provide clean water and air and provide adequate living conditions for their rapidly growing populations. Therefore it is exclusively in the city that local solutions to these global problems can be developed and tested, while the city at the same time provides an environment conducive to the acquisition of skills, abilities and habits prerequisite to tackling those



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27. Zygmunt Bauman, “New Frontiers and Universal Values.” Lecture, Borders from the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, March 22, 2004. Accessed July 25, 2013. http://urban.cccb.org/urbanLibrary/htmlDbDocs/A025-C.html28. Tad Fettig, “bogotá: building a sustainable city .” e2 series, season 2, episode 3. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Web. Accessed July 25, 2013. http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/d571c914-9130-4fd0-a123-1aeed8abee1d/d571c914-9130-4fd0-a123-1aeed8abee1d/

issues. Preconditioned, that the fear, insecurity and aloofness which signifies and separates contemporary humanity, and render-ing it unable to think in terms of the common is reduced, if not eliminated altogether [27].In The Fall of Public Man Richard Sennett describes how the enormous complexity which characterizes the 18th century city is balanced by what he calls “urban tone” or “urban civility”. He exemplifies how in the Parisian coffeehouses, a public sociability developed that allowed very different people with highly contrasting opinions to gather and exchange opinions within an atmos-phere of mutual respect. This public behavior, which for the contemporary citizen with all probability would be experienced as extremely stifling became a form of potential anonymity or mask, making it possible to be strangers with respect to each other without the condition of strangeness being threatening. The city must be able to offer both anonymity, so as not to be experi-enced as oppressing to the individual and a sense of community in order to not foster complete indifference.Contemporary danish architect and urban designer Jan Gehl, who for many years has worked towards creating friendlier, more diverse and livable cities, notes that the ability to develop low intensity contacts must be re-cultivated for our cities to work. A great example of this can be found in the Columbian city Bogotá, where the controversial mayor Enrique Peñalosa trans-formed one of the worlds most chaotic and crime ridden cities into a model of civic mindedness through means of sustainable urban planning. By focusing on pedestrians and bicycles, whilst providing a functional public transport system Peñalosa drasti-cally improved the city not just environmentally but also socially as the citizens reclaimed the streets as useable public space and thereby drastically reduced the city’s crime rate [28].On an altogether different note finnish architect Marco Casagrande speaks of the Third Generation City. In Casagrande’s phi-losophy the future sustainable urban development grows out of the ruins of industrialized space into an organic machine, ruined by nature, which includes human nature. This theory views the city as a multi-dimensional sensitive energy-organism, a living sentient environment, which can be manipulated by applying urban acupuncture to the energy flows of the collective energy (chi) present beneath the tangible city. Architecture acts as a needle onto the hotspots/nodes of this chi and, according to Casa-



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29. Casagrande Laboratory, “Marco Casagrande.” Last modified 2012. Accessed July 25, 2013. http://www.clab.fi/information/architect/.30. Geoffrey B. West, “Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster.”Lecture, Seminars About Long-term Thinking from The Long Now Foundation, San Francisco, USA. July 25, 2011. Accessed July 25, 2013. http://fora.tv/2011/07/25/Why_Cities_Grow_Corporations_Die_and_Life_Gets_Faster

grande the impact can be total. As a result human nature is connected back to nature, that is man-made becomes part of nature itself, opening up to a city of uncontrolled creativity and freedom [29]. Interestingly this theory of the city as a complex sensu-ous energy organism born out of a crossover between eastern philosophy with western urban design theory, in a certain way overlaps Geoffrey Wests’ strict scientific and empirical research on how the different factors making up a city interrelate.Based on his findings West calls for “a grand unified theory of sustainability--- a coarse-grained quantitative, predictive theory of cities”, capable of predicting the impact created by manipulating any one factor, onto the whole, and states it all comes down to how we as humans relate and interact [30]. However named or perceived, the new space which is growing out of the currently developing physical-digital hybrid can pos-sibly provide tools for formulating new kinds of communities, capable of warding of the increasing dissolution of humanity and become more rooted in a socio-spatial connectedness, build on the grid of currently emerging information and communication technologies (ICT).

One example of reintegrating and recreating the urbanite as a responsible citizen within a community without sacrificing ano-nymity by means of digital mobile technologies can be seen in the Boston project on participatory urbanism Citizen Connect where citizens can report issues such as potholes, graffiti or broken traffic lights with a simple mobile app in conjunction with free wi-fi spots spread out over the city. The report is then logged to the service center and a notification send to the reporter when the issue has been solved. The log is at all times visible to any one logged on so that the work crews responsible for fixing the problem have autonomously taken to just watching the traffic on the app instead of waiting for the service center to instruct them where to go. As Nigel Jacobs, Co-Chair Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, City of Boston, explains in the docu-mentary Thinking Cities the project it is not so much about efficiency, although the system does create that - most issues are fixed within a day - it is about rebuilding trust with the public as a lot of the challenges society is facing are issues of disengage-



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31. Ericson, “Thinking Cities.” Networked Society. Feb 16, 2012. Web. Accessed July 25, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ctxP6Dp8Bk32. Ericson, “Stockholm Royal Seaport.” Smart Cities. July 02, 2012. Web. Accessed July 26, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIiKev8vz-M33. Stockholm Stad, “Stockholm Royal Seaport Innovation.” Accessed July 26, 2013. http://stockholmroyalseaport.com/en/

ment, as Nigel puts it the app acts as a “gateway drug” to civic care and engagement [31].Another example well worth mentioning is the development of Stockholm Royal Seaport (Norra Djurgårdsstaden), a new smart housing project in the capital of Sweden. The Scandinavian city has always been a forerunner in sustainable city planning and this latest project, a brownfield redevelopment which is planned be completed by 2030 and will hold 10.000 apartments and 30.000 work places, constitutes one of the largest city planning projects in Europe. The main aim of the development is to accommodate Stockholm’s growing population in a sustainably developed district, combining environmental quality with eco-nomic and social vibrancy. The Royal Seaport incorporates the latest climate-smart technology, such as a smart power grid in order to minimize energy use and optimize waste management.The combination of a smart grid with smart devices and a high level of automatisation was developed to optimize and reduce energy use by enabling consumers to make informed choices as when to use energy. The system also distributes the energy cre-ated by the individual households to other households and nearby industry and workspaces as needed. The underlying concept of this very extensive project is that is should be easy to do the right thing, and ICT provide the underlying structure to achieve that. By empowering people with the ability to make informed and better choices, sustainable behavior is stimulated and new more beneficial habits can develop, environmentally as well as socially [32][33].



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The origin of modern day urbanized society dates back to the neolithic demographic transition often referred to as the agricul-tural revolution some 12.000 years ago. The development of food-production techniques laid the necessary foundation for the development of arts, sciences and technology. Just as the borders and structures of the ancient city was defined by available technologies to transport and store food, and those of the industrial city by the infrastructure of the new production methods, so contemporary urban structure, on the verge of modernist separation and segregation to the hybrid reality of a networked society is defined by digital technologies and so can no longer be confined to a fixed, physical reality. Space has become many-leveled, and the traditional borders between public and private, physical and virtual blur as these spaces increasingly envelop each other. Similarly the many different components that make out a city are deeply intertwined and responsive to each other and can as such not be separated but must be understood as an organic whole. Affecting one aspect will inevitably have effects on the other, effects which to a large degree are measurable and therefore, once understood, predictable.The worlds urban centers are convergence points for the severe issues humanity is faced with today: an explosive population growth, increasing migration, pollution, climatic changes, financial crisis, etc. These issues are global. Yet it is the mayors and the city councils which have to come up with solutions to these problems, along with supplying adequate living quarters and access to commodities such as clean air and water, all whilst diminishing their resource usage and polluting factors.At the same time though, the city, which has always been the cradle of innovation due to its diversity and consequent potential for exchange of abilities and knowledge also harbors within the very potential necessary for developing and experimenting with novel approaches. This potential constitutes the very cornerstone of a growing, innovative, creative society, but is threatened by the ongoing seclusion, separation and segregational processes initiated by the advent of modernism and further advanced by contemporary digital technologies.

If humanity is to tackle these issues, it has to be able to perceive of itself as an entity with a shared fate. Yet the sense of com-

Conclusion



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munity was the prize paid for the liberation from the stifling communal structures of pre-industrial agrarian economy and mod-ernist bureaucratic institutions.Today’s life is much more transient, changeable and solitary than ever before and each member of society lives in secluded space increasingly incapable of relating to the others outside the personal bubble.This is not to suggest a utopia of return to an overly romanticized ideal of the “good old days” where the world was still in good working order. Both pre-industrial and industrial societies were extremely rigid and life back then to the contemporary almost unimaginably limited and restricted.Still, it is possible to isolate certain beneficial factors which were present before and attempt to transform and translate them into today and tomorrows reality. Low level contacts as shown by Jan Gehl or using Sennet’s definition, urban tone laid the foundation on which public interaction was made possible whilst at the same time maintaining the private. Reinterpreting and translating these skills into a contemporary context could prove expedient in establishing a new way of publicness, powered by social media with mobile and embedded technologies providing the structural substrate.

From todays perspective it is not difficult to envision that the digital revolution in its further iterations will foster as profound a shift to the structural fabric of society and general level of consciousness as Gutenbergs invention of the printing press. In a future hybrid reality, smart buildings and spaces are aware of their function and autonomously gather, transmit and take action on information, enabling them to appropriately provide their occupants with any given function whilst considering envi-ronmental needs and resources. As has been shown in the first chapters of this paper, the extent to which technologies impact and shape society are immense, hence it is fundamental to apply them with conscious thought to their effect. In the words of Tony Fry, it is imperative to con-sider the designing of the designed, how the things we create continue to shape and create us.



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Information and communication technologies, if designed to be tools for behavioral change towards making better environ-mental and social choices, can provide the technological infrastructure capable of making otherwise non-perceivable metadata accessible and processable to the individual, allowing decisions to be based on otherwise ineffable relations.

Like in the reality of the ancients the world becomes alive, each object, building or place animate, interacting both with its users and with each other. The supernatural guides of the spirit-world now personified by the all-knowing, continuously expand-ing fluid grid of information. Each member a vital node, living in a symbiotic relationship between the artificial and the natural, rooted in a rhizomatic structure that allows for constant exchange between physical and digital space. In other, less poetic words, the new emerging digital information and communication technologies, mobile and embedded, have the potential through virtual networks of people and things to assist in creating conditions in many ways similar to those of the pre-industrial city, where citizens are highly connected to each other and the space they inhabit, thus rekindling the sense of social responsibility and participation prerequisite to handling the incredible daunting isues humanity is increasingly facing.



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