This evening I attended the 27th Annual Toronto Planning Dinner. It’s an annual dinner for people in planning and development, put on by the University of Waterloo Planning Alumni of Toronto. Thank you Wood Bull LLP for the invite.
The keynote speaker was Dr. Anthony Townsend. He is the author of SMART CITIES: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. I haven’t read it (yet), but his talk offered a preview of it and I think it would be of interest to all of you.
It deals with many of the topics that we discuss on this blog, one of which is the interrelationship between our physical environment and the networks and software layers that we are now building on top of it.
These layers have the potential to augment and enhance our cities (maybe make them smarter), but they also have the potential to do us harm. One important issue that Townsend brought up is that of privacy.
Cities used to enable anonymity.
When essayist and art critic Charles Baudelaire wrote about “modernity” in 19th century industrializing Paris, it referred to an ephemeral and fleeting kind of urban environment. Pass someone on the street and you may never see them again. That must have felt sad at the time.
Today we live in a fish bowl.
Networks connect us, check us in, ping us when we are nearby people we know, and help us find people to meet and date. And we already have devices, like Alexa, that spy on us in our homes so that companies can serve us targeted ads. (This is deplorable by the way.)
Will the city of the future endeavour to do the same as we equip it with more “smarts”?
I guess that’s why Townsend believes that privacy will define a big part of 21st century urbanism. There’s no doubt that it will be very important.
Marc Goodwin – who is part of a photography studio called Archmospheres – has an ongoing project where he photographs the studios of architects.
He has photographed well known practices such as MAD, Renzo Piano, and David Chipperfield, as well as a number of geographic niches such as Paris architecture studios, Nordic architecture studios, and London architecture studios.
He also varies the size of the firm. Some of them only have a few people working out of a small streetfront retail space.
As an architect, you are pretty much required to have a cool studio space. So this is certainly an interesting photography project to take on. The photo at the top of this post is 3xn in Copenhagen.
Image: Marc Goodwin via Designboom
This is a terrific set of maps published by The Washington Post (2015) using data originally collected and published by Peter Kerpedjiev:
What they show is how far you can travel in a 24 hour period using only trains and brisk walking from a collection of 28 European cities. In a few cases, such as from London to Dublin, a ferry ride is also included.
Here’s a zoom in on London:
The obvious takeaway is that Western Europe is very well connected, whereas many parts of Eastern Europe are not. Some cities, such as Tallinn (Estonia) and Podgorica (Montenegro) are almost completely disconnected.
Of course today there’s stiff competition from air travel.