The full, profusely illustrated transcript of my talk at Cognitive Cities in Berlin is now online. It's called The Living City, and includes a range of urban visualisations I've produced over the last year. One of the most welcome aspects of research life has been the time afforded to work on such speculative projects.
It was a diverse conference, opening with a thought-provoking and measured keynote from Adam Greenfield of Urbanscale on the politics of public networked objects, and ending with a gothic account of ghost hunters, RFID orbs and urban electro-magnetic fields from Warren Ellis.
Neukölln was good to me. Visits to Brunnenstraße 9, which was showing Barbara Hammer works, and DAM, which has a superb collection of early computer art (viewable by appointment), topped it off.
Thanks to Third Wave et al for putting the event together.
Visualisation of 566,638 checkins at 7,048 venues in New York City. Data from the Foursquare network.
I've been analysing Foursquare data for Paris, London and New York. In case you don't know, Foursquare is a location-based social network which users interact with on their 3G mobile phones.
Visit the project page for a number of visualisations and remarks on the data. What follows here is a discussion of the data and analytical techniques that form the basis of the content on the project page, so have a look at that page first before reading below.
Data
I've used Foursquare data relating social venues to checkins (activity) at those venues. The data has been collected by a systematic crawl of the Foursquare Search API, which returns upto 50 nearby venues when supplied with a geolocation. The radius of this search is not explicitly documented by Foursquare. For each city, I constructed a lattice of search locations 2km apart and performed a search on each point of the grid. 2km was chosen as it produces some overlap in results, implying good coverage of the intervening space between search locations. This resulted in 200-400 searches per city, the exact number varying based on the size of the surface area covered for each city.
The search API additionally takes keyword searches, and further passes of the grid were carried out using a number of keywords (bar, club, restaurant, cafe, museum, hall, food). The resulting venues list was then de-duplicated. As such, the data does not represent a comprehensive data dump, but sufficient venue data has been collected (in excess of 6,000 venues for each city) to assume a representative sample of Foursquare data for each city.
It should be noted that Foursquare produces data skewed towards the network demographic, which is a 3G mobile phone owning portion of the population engaged in online social networking (typically skewed towards under 35s).
Venues are classified into parks, arts, shops, food and nightlife according to Foursquare's own classification scheme.
Analytics
The claim that Paris has a more contiguously walkable structure is based on a scan-based clustering of the venue data, using the DBSCAN algorithm. With a threshold distance of 400m (chosen as a comfortable walking distance) and a minimum cluster size of 3 venues, Paris breaks down to far fewer, larger clusters than the other two cities (PAR,NYC,LDN = 254,394,439 clusters), generating under a quarter of the noise (PAR,NYC,LDN = 401,1795,1599). Noise in this case represents isolated venues that cannot be assigned to a cluster.
The claim that activity is less spatially dispersed in Paris is based on dispersion calculated for the 100 highest activity walkable cells using a weighted standard distance measure [more] where venue popularity (total number of checkins) is used as a weighting factor and euclidean distance is used as the distance measure. This gives us a measure of standard deviation in space of all the points taken into consideration, measured in meters (PAR,NYC,LDN = 4965,6473,8657).
Walkable links per venue are calculated by constructing a network representation in which venues are nodes and edges are produced when any two nodes are within a walkable distance of 400m. This creates undirected graphs with K edges (PAR,NYC,LDN = 55478,39277,44977). Edges per venue gives a rudimentary expression of global connectivity (PAR,NYC,LDN = 9.64,5.64,6.30). The degree distributions of these networks and further network characteristics are outside the scope of this article, but can follow from these representations.
Power law remarks relate to a regression analysis of venue popularity rank distributions for each city. Zipf's Law is only a fit for part of the distribution.
Tools
Processing and Flash were used for visualisation, Proj4 and Proj4js for coordinate conversion, Tom Taylor's Boundaries for neighbourhood names, the iGraph Ruby extension for network representations, R for statistical analysis, Google Maps Geocoding API and lastly, the Foursquare API, for all the venue and checkins data. Everything else was done by hijacking a language designed for Hypertext Preprocessing.
Download
The data used to create the images is made available in full under the Foursquare API terms. The data consists of csv files with aggregate checkin figures and geo-location data for each venue crawled. These files are broken down by city. Additionally, csv files are included with venue location converted to the so called WebMercator/GoogleMercator (EPSG:900913) projection, to facilitate visualisation using metric coordinates.
This data represents a snapshot collected in mid July 2010. In all there are over 800,000 checkins at over 20,000 venues. Checkins are expressed in summarised form for each venue as this is what is available via the public API. No raw checkins appear in the data.
I spent Spring in 17 & 18, was mostly to be found in 15, 31 & 34 during the Summer months and am now moving my activities over to 10 & 13 in time for Autumn. [GMap]
Control Space: Assembled images on urban cybernetics. Title: Norbert Wiener.
We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is a dwelling.
The Old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell. This signifies: to remain, to stay in place. The real meaning of the verb bauen, namely, to dwell, has been lost to us. But a covert trace of it has been preserved in the German word Nachbar, neighbour. The neighbour is in Old English the neahgebur; neah, near, and gebur, dweller.
Building and thinking are, each in their own way, inescapable for dwelling.
Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.
- Martin Heidegger
Sennett's Corrosion of Character and Heidegger's Building, Dwelling, Thinking interacting on the site of SANAA's Moriyama House, Tokyo, which is arranged as a set of distinct housing components forming a network of compact structures[1][2]. Aside from its modularity (and flexibility) and play on house/garden public/private polarities, I'm drawn in particular to the proportions of the site. How the dimensions of both street and house are strictly related to the human body, despite it being a suburban location, how this kind of scale makes it seem all the more dwellable.
Photographs by Takashi Homma & Iwan Baan, from the books Tokyo and Single Story Urbanism.
The full transcript of my first academic seminar is now online: Microplexes. It's housed at urbagram.net, which will be the home of my research into urban systems.
Abraham Cruzvillegas was brought up in the self-built district of Mexico City, Colonia Ajusco. His parents built their own house (here), as did the rest of their community. Infrastructure and resources were all produced or sourced informally. Here's the DIY scene Cruzvillegas sets in his book,
Every weekend there was a festive air around the dusty activities of moving chalk, cement and sand; the women would cook and help to carry water, haul stones, bricks, bags of cement, buckets of sand or fizzy drinks, under a burning sun, in a challenging atmosphere moved by a spirit of busy and efficient collectivity. On what years later would become known as streets, the men and women of the community would stir the huge bowl of cement to the rhythm of cumbias, songs by José José, ranchera ballads, and there would be no shortage of beer, pulque or fruit juices to keep it all going.
Cruzvillegas has documented the evolution of his self-built barrio, producing photographs and a range of testimonies from the residents, recounting the relationship between the population & building materials — they often built from the natural volcanic rock on the site — as well as discussing the social, political & cultural formations that arose, imparting a great sense of what it must have been like to participate in the construction of what Mexicans call the ciudades perdidas (lost cities). His personal story is a kind of entry point for grappling with the roots, mechanics & repercussions of spontaneous organization in informal urban areas.
Between Friday and Sunday, while we were growing up, fragments of homes were built with a dynamic that some more than others joined in with. Water was brought in tins, buckets or tin cans originally used for vegetable fat, hung from a strong pole that bent in the middle - it was balanced across someone’s back so that it wouldn’t spill and he wouldn’t fall on the uneven ground. It was also brought on request in bins from Primera Parada (First Stop), so-called because at that time it was the only place where you could pick up public transport.
There were sometimes real conflicts over the monopolising of some specific service. Accidentally, the drinking water tap was in front of someone’s shabby little home; absurdly, they then became the ‘owners’ of the water. There was an owner of light, an owner of a telegraph pole, an owner of the street and even someone who owned the rubbish-always a source of excellent building materials.
Cruzvillegas has gone on to explore the aesthetics of this kind of construction, basing his art practice on notions of auto-construcción,
Windowless constructions, wooden shutters, tile and linoleum floors, walls with a plasterboard finish, plastic mouldings and aluminium windows, can be chosen on the spot, at a moment when the visual intention, the urgent need for comfort, functional ingenuity and lack of resources combine. That is why the lack of planning or the apparent stylistic incongruity of many self-built structures are also ideological, with a social and economic basis, even when apparently at their most frivolous. The formal configuration of the houses is first rooted in intuition, in the instinct for survival and the distant reference to what a decent life means, that is satisfying all vital needs, including the visual character of the day to day environment, its objects, its ornaments, and the physical relationship with things – ergonomics straight from the heart.
Here's the complete Auto-Construcción booklet (pdf, 4.2MB). Thanks to Marcela for pointing me in this direction.
I've posted some background on the research I'm just embarking on, to provide a little more detail for all those of you who have been asking and as an embellishment to the many conversations I've had with friends on the subject. You can read it here.
In short the research involves using computational methods to help increase the energy efficiency of transport networks in cities. The research draws on complexity science and network theory, and the output is a set of tools & techniques that allow policy makers to design more efficient transport systems.
X-Plantations, Hubert Blanz
Last month I left Last.fm after a little over three unforgettable years. We did some good work. I got to hang out with a group of people with immense talent and grew in all kind of ways that can't be quantified, charted or spreadshot. So much remarkable stuff took place in such little time I wouldn't even know where to begin telling. So I'll spare you.
A week after my voluntary unemployment kicked in I walked into an interview at the multi-disciplinary research unit, CASA, for a funded PhD in the application of complex systems & network theory to matters of urbanism. These matters interest me.
My presentation contained three quotations that served to illustrate why I was sitting in front of the project leads. They clinched me the PhD,
I have confirmed Pascal’s observation that
imagination tires before Nature.
- Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature
The fact is, that the creation of a town... is fundamentally a genetic process. This conclusion, simple though it is, calls for a shattering revision of our attitude to architecture and planning.
- Christopher Alexander, The Timeless way of Building
The key systemic property of a city is nodality rather than centrality... Since network cities easily exercise control at a distance, the influence of a town has little to do with propinquity...
- Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Non-linear History
- Ebenezer Howard, The Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902)
First City: 2000-ton City
Even and perfect, the city lies amid green lawns, sunny hills and wooded mountains; slim, tall sheets of continuous buildings intersect in a rigorous, square mesh, one league apart. The buildings, or rather the single, uninterrupted building consists of cubic cells 5 cubits each way; these cells are placed one on top of another in a single vertical stack, reaching a height of a third of a league above sea-level, so that the relative height of the building varies in relation to the level of the ground on which it rises. Each cell has two external walls. Cell walls are of opaque material, porous to air, rigid but light. The wall facing north is capable of emitting 3D images, sounds and smells. Against the opposite wall is a seat capable of moulding perfectly to the human body, even of enclosing it completely. Incorporated in this seat is an apparatus for satisfying all physiological needs. When not in use, this membrane and all apparatus withdraw and the wall reforms. The floor is a simulator, and can evoke all sensations of living things. The ceiling is a brain-impulse-receiver.
In each cell is an individual whose brain impulses are continually transmitted to an electronic analyser set at the top of the building, beneath a continuous semi-cylindrical vault. The analyser selects, compares and interprets the desires of each individual, programming the life of the entire city moment by moment. All citizens are in a state of perfect equality.
Death no longer exists. Sometimes someone indulges in absurd thoughts of rebellion against the perfect and eternal life granted to him. At first the analyser ignores the crime; but if it is repeated, the man who has shown himself unworthy is rejected. The ceiling panel descends with a force of two thousand tons until it reaches the floor.
At this point, in this marvelous economy, another life is initiated. The panel returns to its original height, and all the individuals living in cells within a disance of a quarter of a league from the empty cell donate an ovum or a group of spermatozoa, which are transported in channels created for this purpose in a mad race to the now-empty seat. Here, an ovum is fertilized and the seat is transformed into a uterus, protecting the new son of the city for nine months, until his happy dawn.
Second City: Temporal Cochlea City
...
- Life Without Objects, Superstudio
Our towns and buildings are all made of patterns. The patterns of our time, like all other patterns in the built environment, come from the pattern languages which people use.
For instance, freeways are built from handbooks, which contain, more or less exactly in the form of patterns, rules which prescribe the optimum spacing of exits at different densities, the best configurations for the exits under different conditions, the proper curvature and inclination of the petals of a cloverleaf...
Consider, for example, the language which generated my office at school. It is an ugly place, terrible, dark and dead. It is one of many similar offices, and these are generated by the following language:
* LONG AND NARROW
* DAYLIGHT AT ONE END ONLY
* WINDOW THE FULL WIDTH OF THE WALL
* CONCRETE WAFFLE CEILING, 5' GRID
* FLOURESCENT LIGHTS AT 10' CENTERS
* FLAT CONCRETE WALL
* UNPAINTED CONCRETE CEILING SURFACE
* STEEL WINDOW
* PLYWOOD WALL SURFACE
This terrible language has generated hundreds of offices.
Patterns always come from languages. Of course, patterns do not come only from the work of architects or planners. Architects are responsible for no more than perhaps 5% of all the buildings in the world.
Every person has a pattern language in his mind.
The fact is, that the creation of a town, and the creation of the individual buildings of a town, is fundamentally a genetic process. This conclusion, simple though it is, calls for a shattering revision of our attitude to architecture and planning. We may conclude that the central task of "architecture" is the creation of a single, shared, evolving, pattern language, which everyone contributes to, and everyone can use.
The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander
- Oasis No. 7, by Haus-Rucker
Foursquare.zip (856 kB)
