urban

Alain Renk describes "Unlimited Cities", a participatory platform used by architect to enable citizens to change their neighborhood. A rapid prototyping tool, this service aims at allowing people to bring their ideas and react to architectural or urbanistic proposals in a situated way.

This talk explores some of the issues that emerge around networked information-collecting objects in our public spaces, and to frame a taxonomy of such objects from the unobjectionable (due to local effect and a clear public good associated with them) to those that ought to be causing us significant concern (no public benefit, global impact, pernicious second-order effects).

Adam is a long-time friend of Lift, he shared his work with us on several occasions in Geneva, Marseille and Korea. Watch his previous Lift talks:
"Everyware: Further down the Rabbit Hole" Lift07
"The read/write City" Lift Asia 07
"The Long Here, the Big Now" Lift Asia 08

Dan Hill, from urban engineering firm Arup, revisits the past vision of the city of the future and shows they turned out differently. He discusses the important interplay between urban soft infrastructure (people, networks, culture, society, civic relationships) and hard infrastructure. Which leads him to the role of design thinking in developing this new layer information/services based on personal informatics.

Urban Mobs : how to visualize the cell phone activity in cities ?

Stéphane Distinguin, CEO of Faber Novel, describes the results from "Urban Mobs". This project, conducted with Orange aimed at studying crowd communication activities and paint a “ popular emotion cartography through mobile phone tracking.

Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, shows various projects he and his lab conducted around the theme of sensed data (mobile phone, flickr pictures) and how they allow to reveal new information layer on top of urban space and or lead to new experience for citizens.

Dan Hill, from urban engineering firm Arup, revisits the past vision of the city of the future and shows they turned out differently. He discusses the important interplay between urban soft infrastructure (people, networks, culture, society, civic relationships) and hard infrastructure. Which leads him to the role of design thinking in developing this new layer information/services based on personal informatics.

How to visualize the cell phone activity in cities?
Stéphane Distinguin, CEO of Faber Novel, describes the results from "Urban Mobs". This project, conducted with Orange aimed at studying crowd communication activities and paint a “ popular emotion cartography through mobile phone tracking.

We had this workshop yesterday; about designing future hybrid cities, we all split into groups on different topics such as, “endless energy city”, “ ambient city”, etc.

I ended up in the nomadic city group, and so right now I guess you must be asking yourself but what is a nomadic city ??...well, actually defining this was kind of the point of this workshop...And so we had this long brainstorming with so many interesting but very abstract question, it started by understanding whether we were talking about people nomadism through the cities or the city being nomad itself.

But even once you’ve chosen one of those path, it’s absolutely not an answer, it’s more like a hundred more question and so the brainstorming went on and on and on and on and I‘ve got to tell that I haven’t been focused from the beginning to the end.

What I know is that people had different conception of what makes a city, for some people it was about infrastructure moving through space and / or time, without border, this can basically be shop or other stuff with very short temporality ( imagine that every single shops , restaurants, institutions changed every month, continuously, how could you feel the belonging to a city, wouldn’t that be some kind of nomadism? The extreme example of that are some huge festival like The Burning Man, where a city emerge in a few days and disappears few days later.