Federation Square, Melbourne 2008

The Street as Platform

The tech of the near-future city, or the culture of today’s city, via a narrative written from the perspective of the city itself.

Ed. This piece was written in late 2007 and first published at cityofsound.com on 11 February 2008. It has since been republished many times, including in Yale University Press’s ‘Best Technology Writing 2009’ edited by Steven Johnson, and continues to be used as a foundation text on numerous degree courses. Upon its publication, William Gibson described it as “extraordinary” while Bruce Sterling described it as: “an uncontrollable beat-poet gush about urban computing. It just rolls on and on and on and on like an endless spool of Kerouac butcher-paper”. I’d have written it more carefully had I known it was going to stick around.

Introduction

Back in late 2007, I was asked to comment on the idea of ‘the street of the future’; a response for a quango responsible for the built environment and a government department responsible for transport, roads and so forth. Which means it’s really the street of the near-future. I didn’t have enough time to write something short, so I dashed off the following, and I’m really posting here as a note to self, rather than an attempt to deeply discuss the everyday informational street circa 2008.