*It's architecture fiction AND design fiction AND urban informatics AND ubiquitous vaporware, salted with augmented reality! Urbanscale's "Beyond the Smart City!"
http://urbanscale.org/2011/02/17/beyond-the-smart-city/
(...)
"We would compelled to recognize an entirely new class of nonhuman urban actors. Of course, there’s nothing new about the idea that things might act, and instigate the acts of others. But it will be far harder to deny things agency when they speak: drawbridges and railroad crossings, storage lockers and bike racks, each able to say when they’re open and when they’re closed, when they’re available and when they aren’t. When widely deployed, such signalling would transform our places into on-demand cities that make the maximum use of otherwise underutilized facilities, and otherwise wrest the most from existing capacity.
"For amenities no less than utilities, such reporting would mean a tighter and more useful coupling between demand and available supply: incredibly finely-grained, near-realtime reads on the state of a city and the events unfolding there. Not merely, in other words, to report on restaurants are open right now within walking distance, but whether or not each currently has tables available; not merely where a vehicle-charging station is, but how long the current waits are.
"More urgently, we could bind together existing transportation networks, vehicles and infrastructures in a vastly more flexible meta-network of transmobility services, extending more regular coverage to more of the surface area (and volume) of a city, extending access to the many now underserved by existing transit provisions, and transforming notions of the “right to the city” from rhetoric to reality.
"Drawing the torrential volumes of data provided by networked resources into appropriately designed visualizations will endow each of us with new powers of visibility — an endowment that amounts to nothing less than an extension of the human sensorium, rendering much of the world around us effectively transparent to inquiry. (((That's the awesome, isn't it? Yeah, that's the end game! Before you graft that app into your retinas, though, I hope you're not sweet on some corn-shucking girlfriend who's a rural country mouse. Because she'll likely become invisible.)))
"We will come to such a vastly improved understanding of the places we live and the processes unfolding all around us that we will wonder how we ever managed to get by before. Such improved situational awareness will, among other benefits, act to sharply reduce or mitigate the fear that keeps so many from fully embracing the life available to them, allowing the broader community in turn to benefit from the energy and talent they have heretofore been unable to bring to the table.
"The great ambition inscribed in all of these projects is to make cities more perfectly responsive to the needs of all their users, temporary as well as permanent, visitors as well as residents. It means leveraging the power of networked information processing to enable a lighter, more supple and responsive, even a playful way of interacting with the metropolitan manifold.
"2. Developing for city-as-platform
"Before any significant progress toward these aims is possible, it will be necessary to account for details of a highly technical, even an arcane nature...."
((("Team Urbanscale:")))
