City of Sound is one of my favourite blogs on Urban Culture. This week blog-author Dan Hilll ponders about the future of the street. In fact, this article comes very close to addressing the main theme of our conference: what happens to urban culture when physical and digital spaces merge? It’s recommended reading for anyone who is thinking about coming out to Rotterdam to attend The Mobile City.

As Dan Hill puts it himself quite poetically:

The way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye. … Forty years ago, the British architects Archigram suggested that “When it’s raining on Oxford Street, the buildings are no more important than the rain”. The group’s David Greene subsequently asked “So why draw the buildings and not the rain?”. Why indeed? [this article] tries to describe data rather than rain, but they’re similarly ephemeral.

In the post Dan Hill describes a series of scenes in which digital communication impacts the way we experience or interact in the street. Just a handful of examples, in different categories (the categorizations are mine):

• Personalization of the urban experience

three friends, grimly jogging past, whose Nike+ shoes track the frequency and duration of every step, comparing against pre-set targets for each individual runner. This is cross-referenced with playlist data emerging from their three iPods.

• Gaming

Three kids are playing an online game on their mobile phones, in which the physical street pattern around them is overlaid with renderings of the 19th century city.

• Access

A small LED winks to indicate this, alongside a standardised explanatory icon drawn up by the department also responsible for the highways’ signage systems. The power running to the bench is carried via flexible cables that can twist and stretch around the growing roots of the nearest trees. The bench also carries a WIMAX transmitter as part of a research project led by the local university. As such, this bench appears as a key node on several GIS.

• Tracking

Through the use of loyalty cards, credit card and other electronic transaction systems, data can be collected by both commercial and public institutions, using it to optimize their logistics, marketing efforts or service

As the bus departs, the new passengers on-board swipe their RFID-based integrated transport system ID cards, updating mass transit databases with every possible aspect that can be gleaned from this simple activity (time of day, location, frequency of use, favourite entry points etc.)

• Monitoring

Sensors (from CCTV cameras to chip implants) collect data about the environment and can prompt for action. Again, these can be used both in a commercial or public way. They can be used to grant or deny access, or in quite different ways:

A wireless sensor network, carefully and discreetly embedded in the trunks of trees lining one side of the street, silently monitors the overall health of the limes and planes, collating data and waiting patiently for the council’s tree surgeon to inspect the arboreal vital signs.

Data gathered through monitoring or tracking can be used for all kinds of purposes:

• Targeting

he depiction of the highly-privatised data environments which constantly reach out to potential consumers is familiar from numerous hackneyed science fiction plot-lines. For example, the now infamous and faintly ludicrous scene in Minority Report where the protagonist is assailed by highly targeted ads as he walks through a shopping street.

Systems that are focused around a user’s private data, then played back to them with little or no chance of opt-out, are likely to emerge nonetheless.

• Aggregating data

A series of small high-resolution displays, hanging under each traffic light and angled towards stationary drivers, alternately communicates the number of accidents that have occurred around these lights in the last year, and then the current speed limit, which can be calibrated to an optimum level for the current traffic conditions in the borough.

• Visualizing

Aggregated data can be used as input to visualize collective behavior, thoughts, emotions etc. in an interesting way:

The large external LED display hoisted over the door at huge expense conveys the volume of ISBNs of books being swiped by librarians inside the building, in real-time. Part of an installation by students at the local art college, the most popular genres of books taken out, inferred from the aggregate of ISBNs and cross-referenced with Amazon, are displayed every five minutes via a collage of randomly-selected movie clips from YouTube that match broadly that same genre and keywords (filtered for decency and sensitivity by bespoke software which is itself receiving updates, detailing what is considered obscene at this point). Currently, a 2-second sequence of a close-up of David Niven’s nose and moustache from The Bridge Over The River Kwai morphs into the bulging right arm of Sylvester Stallone in Rambo, cradling a stolen Soviet rocket launcher. The patterns of clip consumption at YouTube twitch accordingly.

• (wiki-style collaborative) geo-annotation

Maps or other interfaces can be used to (collaboratively) annotate the street for varying purposes:

Registering the presence of a pothole at this point on the local problems database, Fix My Street.

‘a writer denotes the ghostly presence of a 12th century market using psychogeographical markup language’

And although this list is by no means complete, to conclude this reminder that just building or setting up a technological system is not enough:

Although Fix My Street smartly forwards on all issues to the corresponding council, a beleaguered under-trained temp in the also underfunded ‘pavements team’ is unaware of fixmystreet.com and unable to cope with the levels of complaint, and so the pothole claims five more victims over the next two weeks until someone rings up about it.