“The secret, I think, of the future is not doing too much”
— Frei Otto
I’ve started posting a selection of pieces from cityofsound.com here on Medium, particularly those focusing on design, cities and technology, which I’ve collected into a publication—But what was the question?
The most recently posted all pivot around an idea of network urbanism, sketched out a year ago in a set of articles for three architecture-oriented publications — a magazine, a journal and a book — all concerning the dynamics of contemporary technologies and how they may affect architecture and urbanism, and more importantly, cities.
The book was ‘SQM: The Quantified Home’, Space Caviar (ed.), Lars Müller Publishers (2014) and it concerned some of our shifting understandings of domestic space, taking Airbnb as a pivot for that. The articles were for Architecture + Urbanism (aka A+U) magazine and Architectural Design (aka AD) journal, and they covered a broader urban perspective.
An off-cut of all that was the germ of subsequent Dezeen columns on transport startups and predictive analytics, with longer edit dubbed ‘Clockwork City, Responsive City, Predictive City and Adjacent Incumbents’. That discusses the early impact of Uber in particular — though also the potential impact of autonomous vehicles and predictive…
