The Street as Platform 2050
How Digital Dynamics Shape the Physical City
The way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye.
So began an essay I wrote in 2007 called ‘The Street As Platform’, concerning the then-emerging ideas of urban informatics, Internet of Things, and the smart city. It used a depiction of a near-future city street as a platform for a wider discussion around the possibilities and pitfalls of urban data.
In 2014, I was asked to write an update of the essay by my colleague Chris Luebkeman, who was guest-editing an issue of Architectural Design journal, wherein each contribution would be framed around the idea of 2050. What you read below is the original edit.
Writing about 2050 seemed near-impossible. My then-six year-old son would be my age now in 2050, more or less. That single fact viscerally conveyed to me the difficulty of the task.
Nonetheless, cities are slow. Scrolling back the other way, we would recognise much of the physical city my father lived in when he was 44.
What has changed is the layer I described in the note on ‘Network Urbanism’: the enabling urban elements smaller than a building, bigger than a phone, sometimes immaterial. For my father and his generation, that might mean internet and mobile…
