Disclaimer : In writing these reflections, I will try to relate the ideas to the physical world as that, I believe, is fundamental in understanding the reality of the built environment, and has been a crucial element in the curriculum of my degree thus far. Often times I find myself lost in the idealism of DUSP, through observing my peers or listening to instructors, that I find has less relevance to the reality beyond our idealist bubble. I admire much of the ideas that are discussed, and I try to keep my sanity in navigating to the real world to see how they are realized. I guess inherent in my upbringing as an architect, or maybe as an agnostic who believes in the tangibility of things, I only understand ideas that have the potential of being translated into our material world.
On a cold Friday evening, I was having coffee with someone I just met and we were talking about the science (or lack thereof) of urban studies. We spent the night discussing the dangers Big Data has up its sleeve when coupled with neo-liberal capitalism and cyber insecurity — that the privatization of our lives is diminishing by the day, that as Eric Schmidt explains every two days humans produce more data than they did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003 (Ratti, p.44, City of Tomorrow). Toward the end of the night, I found out this person was Hatch Sterret, who was part of MIT for 8 years and was laid off for holding a demonstration against Shell Oil in 2001 (see here).
Does Big Data have the power to really achieve a more democratic form of our cities? To answer this question, I think it is important to think not solely as an academic stuck in the bubble of theory nor as exclusively a practitioner. We can talk about building a neighborhood, for example, all we want, but our arguments would have different outlook if we also knew how to ‘build’ it, i.e. where the constraints of the structural grid and sewage infrastructure have their limitations, where concrete would collapse on its own weight, and mind you, how much all of this would cost materially and socially, etc.
I really liked the question Ratti asked at the beginning of his class on Future Cities about the difference between Bottom Up and Top Down urbanisms. I concluded by the end of that discussion that bottom-up urbanism would really lead to chaos because of our capitalist nature, and because informal markets do not strive alone without some form of governance we have reverted back to a top-down model. Everyone is optimizing for themselves ending up in the destruction of other ecosystems. The complexity of a bottom-up urbanism, in essence, is a top-down phenomenon when grounded in reality. Regulations and policies establish the ‘platform’ for this informality to occur.
I argue in my Urban Seminar course that Big Data is highly biased and vague, its translation to the built environment is unclear especially as it scales. We refer to computational design as a case study that uses mathematical formulas and tangible, undebatable, results as the backbone of its structure. However, even with something seemingly so credible (in comparison to the subjective basis of Big Data), we still have not been able to accomplish its effect to the built environment in such a big scale, using Zaha’s d’Leedon as an example. Computation and Big Data are, in my mind, very different when it comes to our built form. Big Data is privatized by large corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, how do we see its implications on the urban form? From my experience as an urban designer it is unlikely to see its influence because the sector of urban design is a highly private one, and when building is constrained by time and budget, there is little chronological and financial room left for acquiring a set of big data (that probably won’t be big enough) to accurately design for it.
As an architect my profession has taught me that, as Jan Gehl states, “Life between building is both more relevant and more interesting to look at in the long run than are any combination of colored concrete and staggered building forms” because these spaces provide the platform for social dynamics to occur far beyond what a Gehry building façade or a Zumthor thermal bath would. But to play the devil’s advocate, I think the buildings provide the datum for these spaces to occur. For example, if one goes to the millennium park in Chicago, they would want to see the bean, or the stadium structure (ironically by Gehry), with many other people sharing that outdoor space, so there is definitely a value to having ‘architecture’ in our open spaces. Big Data and computation definitely have the potential to improve our daily lives with respect to our outdoor spaces. But they are highly capitalized by big corporations, and because of the inherent value that it has for capitalists, it is unlikely to use Big Data in a democratic fashion. In the “Social Life of Small Urban Spaces”, William Whyte spoke about the importance of the plazas and how it could be achieved by studying open spaces, and Big Data can definitely have a strong impact to what kinds of successful open spaces we make.
