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Playing with the Built City

“Architecture and urban planning play a huge role in our lives, to a degree not always obvious. The city, however, can be seen as just another system—like any other, it can be hacked, illuminating and subverting existing power structures and creating spaces that allow us to be more human and to live richer lives. In this talk, we’ll see a bunch of the challenges of the modern city and look at possible responses.”


“ We supposed that the user of a basic interactive map (with panning and zooming) suffers navigational trauma: simply put, getting lost due to jumping from place to place and only viewing a portion of the map at any given time. The user of a static map, in contrast, is able—and sometimes forced—to see the entire map with a constant level of detail and see the context of any particular point of interest. We were interested in seeing how well people knew the geographic context of places on the map, that is, the surroundings of specific places or the overall characteristics of the mapped area. You are here, but do you know where “here” is?
“ We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future