rethinking our urban heart-ware
Design, maintenance and placement of urban infrastructure are issues that cities all over the world face. There is an additional dimension that is often forgotten. How does the placement of infrastructure affect the public’s utilization of urban spaces; how are our perceptions of spaces affected by the availability or lack thereof certain types of facilities? Sensors installed in our urban infrastructure today are highly effective at charting and capturing non-human phenomena, such as sewage flow and traffic congestion rates. They are less adept at modeling human needs and interactions which are crucial to the maintenance of our urban social fabric.
Engineers and urban planners should not just be occupied by whether infrastructure “work” as they are intended to. Their interaction with communities matter because they can sustain or break community ties. For example, the system of highways and interstates that crisscross Los Angeles was instrumental in enhancing mobility for the masses, but in so doing, it destroyed and walled in poorer neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights.
In order to generate these understandings, the University of New South Wales, Sydney has partnered with companies such as Street Furniture Australia, and the Georges River Council to record the use of public spaces to inform policy makers how people are using these spaces. The second part of the project involves embedding sensors in response to human behavior such that spaces can be utilized and maintained more effectively. Data collected from these studies can be used to effect design changes that improve the efficiency of these spaces, while enhancing user experience.
To scale up this project, more densely populated urban centers should be studied. Cities in the developing world should also be given priority as it is easier to enhance urban planning from the outset than to engage in a large-scale overhaul decades later when systems are more entrenched. given the overlapping responsibilities of various agencies for different types of infrastructure, coordination might be an issue without some sort of special task force designed to oversee such efforts or a rethink about the way each agency thinks about urban infrastructure.
