Urban Planning & Technology

Upon analysing Market Square I've found that Urban Design is becoming more and more influenced by technology. As stated in the report on the new design of Market Square 78% of people avoided the central area of the square and preferred to use their own desire lines. The new square has been designed to eliminate this. From my analysis of the square this new design does seem to work and now works much more like your traditional agora of grecian times.

I've found that redesigning urban areas to accomodate art & culture seems to be the way of imaging the city, open areas of clean design to give the perception of a modern metropolis where people can socialise and communicate.

It seems mobile technology is affecting the way we move throughout the city and hotspots occured in this area largely as a meeting place within the city, perhaps it's an area where people can meet and decide what they want to do. Mobile phones were used predominately and with the innovation of mobile technologies particularly in the iPhone people can quickly look up cinema times, or places to eat or where to go for a night out.

It seems the renaming of deprived areas is occuring more now in urban areas, I know this is of particular truth purely from studying where I grew up in the North East. My town Seaham is traditionally a Mining Town with a strong Labour backing, however areas where the pits have closed are now been redeveloped into housing areas and agoras and essentially trying to remove itself from Seaham and become its own node. Areas like East Shore Village & Rose Park are new development areas that are essentially their own small Tinsel Towns within a Town.

Redevelopment of transport has been implemented & the original town square has been redesigned much in the same degree as Market Square in Nottingham, an open plan area that would benefit from Arts & Cultural shows and a place for people to meet on the move, rather than to simply go for your grocery shopping.

Imaging The City

"The metro-media nexus occurs not only within the realms of film and television (not to mention older media forms); increasingly, urban images are conveyed through newer digital media. Popular computer-based games such as Simcity 2000 provide participants to direct the development of a metropolis, and encode a myriad of assumptions about how cities can be structured. Other alternative cyberworlds, also use physical cities as metaphors for creating new interactive social realms that allow those with computers to experience urbanism-at-a-distance.

Even as new communications technologies mediate the experience of the city through the creation of parallel fictional worlds, city imaging efforts also continue to thrive in the built world of urban real estate development. Here, too, the old values of "location, location, location" that drive urban redevelopment initiatives have gained new media partners. Increasingly, flagship development projects take on the trappings of staged ventures, in which image-building is at the head of the agenda.

In the effort to shift and lift public (or investor) confidence, places get named or re-named to convey future hopes-- as with Detroit's Renaissance Center-- or to convey a more upscale or pastoral image. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that seems to be diversifying and accelerating. At mid-century, tenements and slums were replaced by public housing projects with names like "Orchard Park" and "Elm Haven;" in the late 1990s, many failed housing projects are themselves being torn-down and rebuilt as New Urbanist mixed-income communities, again with new identities and new names, not to mention new glossy brochures and promotional videos. Baltimore's notorious Lafayette Courts project is reimaged as Pleasant View Gardens; Atlanta replaces Techwood Homes with Centennial Place; Chicago tries to bury the infamy of Cabrini-Green in a billion dollar new neighborhood.[6] Similar re-imaging occurs in other parts of American cities: now-seedy areas get recast as Arts Districts, and abandoned 19th century industrial landscapes become resuscitated as centers of Heritage Interpretation, Historic Preservation, and (it is hoped) Economic Development."

(Sam Bass Warner and Larry Vale, 1998)

The Power of Now: How the iPhone generation devices are changing society

Interesting talk on the iPhone generation and the effects its having, especially with the growing number of apps available now!

Roberto Monge:

"This new generation of phones, particularly the iPhone would make Gene proud. It's now possible for anyone who is on location to take a picture as a plane crash on their mobile phone to upload the picture to the internet and to have that picture on the front page of major news websites and on-air programming in less than 3 minutes. That has amazing ramifications on society. Everyone is now a portable broadcasting station. Web 2.0 gave us to tools to participate but it was tedious and required that you be in front of a computer. This wave of smart connected phones brings the power of participation and makes it real-time. Participating in a Social Network while in the basement of your house isn't really very social. If you take that power of connectedness and bring it with you you can be hyper social.

Remember when you had to make plans ahead of time to go see a movie? With just a few taps you can look up a movie that is playing in a 10 mile radius of my location, pick a show time and send and invite to your friends. You could purchase tickets for my group if they reply they are coming. During the movie you can rate the sections of the movie you like and when you get home you can have a personal trailer made tailored especially for you.

Roberto Monge spoke at Softec about his not so futuristic vision of how the iPhone generation phones are changing the media, games and social networks. Roberto is President of DropIn Development, Inc. He's currently acting as Chief Architect for LoveCinema. He's also building and designing iPhone application for the LoveCinema social network. His previous clients include CNN where he help build out iReport.com and Turner Broadcasting where he helped build GameTap.com."

(Roberto Monge, 2009)

The Power of Now: How the iPhone generation devices are changing society from Roberto Monge on Vimeo.

Electronic Agoras

I've recently been looking at the book, City of Bits: Space, Place, and Infobahn. I particularly like the term "Electronic Agoras" he talk's about in this book. This is something I feel has massive relevenance to my research as it touches on the social effects of wireless technologies and how traditionally your social peers depended upon where you go in a physical place, however wireless technologies I feel is erasing this need and information is available from everywhere you go, from the cafe to the shopping mall and even the plane.

Taken from William J. Mitchells Introduction to the book City of Bits:

"Traditonally you needed to go someplace to do this sort of thing - to the agora, the forum, the piazza, the cafe, the bar, the pub, Main Street, the mall, the beach, the gym, the bathhouse, the college dining hall, the common room, the office, or the club - and where you went pegged your peer group, your social position, and your role. It also framed expectations about how your should represent yourself by your clothing, body language, speech, and behaviour and about the interactions that were to take place. Each familiar species of public place had its actors, costumes, and scripts. But the worldwide computer network - electronic agora - subverts, displaces, and radically redefines our notions of gathering place, community and urban life. The Net has a fundamentally different physical structure , and it operates under quite different rules from those that organize the action in the public places of traditional cities. It will play as crucial a role in twenty-first-century urbanity as the centrally located, spatially bounded, architecturally celebrated agora did (according to Aristotle's Politics) in the life of the Greek polis and in prototypical urban diagrams like that so lucidly traced out by the Milesians on their Ionian rock.

(William. J. Mitchell, 2000)