Continuing to sketch out this thought, and this one, and this one on the implications of networked urbanism.
A further wave of urban technology is beginning to roll through our towns and cities and, as with preceding waves of irrigation, language, currency, double-entry book-keeping, clocks, looms, trains, sewage, power plants, horses, elevators, cars, containers and so on, it suggests new urban forms, new patterns of development, of business, activity and community. And in this case, perhaps most interestingly, digitally-enabled technology could enable different approaches to the heavy, cumbersome and inert urban infrastructures of the last century: an emerging ability to build iteratively, adapting as needs and desires dictate.
Often, these digitally-enabled patterns could be decentralised or distributed, adaptive and malleable, comprising both physical and digital layers, each driven by rich data counterpointed by scalable forms of participation i.e. genuinely meaningful involvement, well over-and-above citizens as data-points, but proposing new forms of ownership as well as participation. In contrast to earlier models of centralised, capital-intensive, largely inert systems, characterised by grids of infrastructure or buildings enabled by top-down decision-making and high up-front costs, these new developments can be thought of as post-grid, or non-grid. Digital is not always the outcome…
