Sejong Smart City Design Competition

Urban Design Studio for postgraduate students at ERICA Campus, Hanyang University, led by Networking City, is invited for the student design competition of ‘Sejong Smart City’ by Korea Land & Housing Corporation (LH).

Last January, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport of South Korea designated ‘5-1 Liveable Area of Sejong City’, a part of the new Korean administrative city, as a national testbed for Smart City and LH took responsibility to create the smart city from an initial plan and design to delivery for 2.74 km2 area.

To promote the interest from academics, industries and citizens and to share various ideas, LH invites six urban design studios from Korean universities and supports them to do good projects. The urban design studios will suggest inter-disciplinary ideas and have a joint exhibition in December.

Networking City’s studio accepts the LH’s kind invitation and makes efforts to create a better urban environment.
More news about the competition will be followed. 

‘Songdo: the hype and decline of world’s first smart city’ in ‘Sustainable Cities in Asia’

Routledge published ‘Sustainable Cities in Asia’ last September.
The book was edited by Federico Caprotti, Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Exeter, and Li Yu, Reader in Planning at Cardiff University.
It contains 23 chapters that show recent urban policies and practical challenges to build up sustainable cities in Asian cities.

I contributed Chapter 12: ‘Songdo: the hype and decline of world’s first smart city’ for the book. It looks at the history of Korean smart city policy, traces the twenty-five-year history of Songdo and critically reviews the reality of Songdo.

You can find more details of the book from Routledge’s webpage.

A sense of new academic term

 

New academic term of UCL officially started on 22nd September 2014. Thousands of new students walk around the campus, and they fill Bloomsbury area with vibrant energy. Dr. Adam Dennett begun his GI Systems and Science class for new post-graduate students of CASA with welcoming slide on 1st October. In this year, CASA opened two new post-graduate courses: MSc SmartCities and Urban Analytics and MRes Smart Cities. Therefore, he has developed a lot of the course materials and structure for the students during last summer days.

 

On the same day, when CASA held SHOW AND TELL, which is a traditional CASA event to introduce each other, I apparently realised that the new term is just started! Most members of the lab came up and introduced themselves at this inaugural meeting.  

 

Emer Coleman’s seminar was followed on 7^th October under the title of “Open Data and the City: Looking back and Looking Forward”. She explained open data as a way of engagement and empowerment and how citizen can be benefited and can participate in making better urban environment. Several good cases, such as Hello Bristol, were mentioned.

After the presentation, many questions were emerging from the audience. Transparency, security, effectiveness and so on. However, I was uncomfortable when she criticised, with some sentences from Adam Greenfield’s “Against the smart city”, big corporations that IBM and Cisco have been pushing smart city idea for money rather than people or better society. I could not catch the difference between the big brands, which get profit by providing new city systems and solutions, and her company, which get profit as well by providing efficient transport solution and application. There might be a matter of size.

These adventures would be enough to feel a sense of the new term. However, UCL email was unusually hacked on 9^th October. All UCL students got 3000 emails (including me) with bello. It was a big issues not only in the campus but also in the UK as The Independentannounced. Steven Gray, a specialist of large datasets at CASA, analysed what has happened with his Big Data Toolkit and posted it on his blog.
 

From Rhythmanalyst to Rhythmconductor- Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life

 

 

 

 

Image 1. The book cover of ‘Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life’

 

In the book, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, French sociologist Henri Lefebvre suggests ‘Rhythm’ as an alternative tool to understand and analyse everyday urban life beyond visual recognition. He argues that we can examine the true nature of cities from the human body, the basic unit of urban life, to substantial urban structures through rhythms.

 

Invisible rhythms are generating, repeating and transforming in cities. Lefebvre categorizes types of rhythm, which deeply intervene the life and make a foundation of law, institution and culture, based on its characteristics. Among them, the author particularly insists to pay attention to two aspects of rhythms that Arrhythmia which is creating discordance between or among two or more rhythms, and Eurhythmia which is staying in the state of harmony and balance. He asserts that it is important to convert Arrhythmia in the city that causes inequality and injustice to Eurhythmia which sustains healthy urban condition.

 

‘Rhythmanlysist’ is a fresh idea from the book published in 1992. Rhythmanlysist hears sounds of the city and reveals hidden systems behind visual images with sensing and analysing the change of spatial aspects in timing. As a rhythmanlysist, Lefebvre investigates Mediterranean cities. He presents some insights that the rhythms of Mediterranean cities are derived from specific geographical and climate environments, and the rhythms have created different political system and exceptional cultural diversity in contrast to Atlantic cities. Physically, it leads the development of plazas and the importance of stairways which link sloping lands.

 

Rhythmanlysist could still be a valuable concept to understand complex urban situations. However, we are living in the digital era. As Mitchell (Mitchell, 1999) denoted, the rhythms of our ordinary life are changing by digital communication. Every day tremendous data, which are invisible and inaudible, are generating, and its flows push us into the massive ocean of heterogeneous rhythms. Therefore, new Rhythmanlysist in the digital age needs other capacities. Capturing the digital data in real time and synthesizing it should be essential requirements to create or maintain Eurhythmia. While the cities of the 20^th century needed Rhythmanlysist, now it is the time of ‘Rhythmconductor’ who collects digital rhythms, reorganises its tempos-meters-articulations and resonates new contexts. We can easily find good examples of Rhythmconductor like below.

 

Image 2. London Public Bike share map by Oliver O’Brien. http://bikes.oobrien.com/london/

Image 3. Analysis of Happiness on Twitter during 9^th September 2008 to 31^st August 2011.

Dodds PS,  Harris KD,  Kloumann IM,  Bliss CA,  Danforth CM  (2011) Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter. PLoS ONE 6(12)

 

This radical change of the rhythm gives an opportunity to redefine the scopes of each social group. Citizens collect and utilize the data by their mobile devices; furthermore, they solve complex urban problems by themselves. (Desouza and Bhagwatwar, 2012) The role of planners is challenging to make new rhythms by spreading effective information and stimulating civic participation using social media instead traditional managers’ role within mainstream planning structures. (Tayebi, 2013) Also, Scientists’ role is shifting. According to Wright (Wright, 2013), scientific researchers had focused to find reasons of urban problems until the last decade, however; their voices are getting stronger to solve problems and provide alternatives in the decision making process with geospatial data and geographical analysis.

 

You can find the detail of Lefebvre’s book from Google and Amazon.

 

Desouza, K C and Bhagwatwar, A, 2012, “Citizen Apps to Solve Complex Urban Problems” Journal of Urban Technology 19(3) 107–136.

Mitchell, W J, 1999 E-topia: “Urban life, Jim--but not as we know it” (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA).

Tayebi, A, 2013, “Planning activism: Using Social Media to claim marginalized citizens’ right to the city” Cities 32 88–93.

Wright, D, 2013, “Bridging the Gap Between Scientists and Policy Makers: Whither Geospatial? | Esri Insider” Esri Insider, http://blogs.esri.com/esri/esri-insider/2013/02/11/bridging-the-gap-between-scientists-and-policy-makers-whither-geospatial/.

 

 

Review: Designing for the situated and public visualisation of urban data

Journal of Urban Technology, Volume 19, Issue 2, 2012
Designing for the situated and public visualisation of urban data
by Andrew Vande Moere & Dan Hill

THE authors point out recent urban data visualisation still remains on the stage of simply providing statistical data, and it is ineffective to make better understanding about the interaction of the massive and complex urban data. They argue public policy should be changed to open more public data, which are including local characteristics, to raise public awareness and encourage actionable public participation.

Through five main parts; theoretical part (data and public visualisation) – Recent projects – Student projects – characteristics of urban visualisation – conclusion, this article draws the question and tries to answer against how we can visualise the complex and continuously changing condition of cities, where have different problems by particular factors in different parts within a city, and how we can expect the unpredictable condition in the information age.

The authors premise that the character of place has been formulated by economic and cultural patterns based on the rock of physical and geographical aspects, and these patterns adversely facilitate the physical change.  In the past, the production of the place represented the specific character of the place, and it had coupled with the regional change. However, since cities have transformed their industry from material based to knowledge based, they have been showing the movement of hominization. This paper argues that the character of the city in this era can be revealed by the data, which are endlessly producing in the city, and we can find the difference between cities by the analysis of the data.  Therefore, the urban data is not an indicator of urban activities but also the driving force leading qualitative changing of the urban environment.

Particularly, previous data unilaterally delivered statistical data of urban areas, but recent the urban data stimulate active participation of citizen by well-developed mobile devices and illustrate what feedbacks are creating by the citizen. And the authors emphasize the following elements are essential to visualise the urban data.  

1) Situated : contextual, local, social
2) Informative: feedback, insightful, consistent
3) Functional: medium, participate, opportunistic, aesthetic, trustworthy, persuasive

Despite a lot of attractive contents, the most impressive point in the article is the well-organised logical flow of what they use; Neo-industrial city (production of data) - open data (role of public data) - social visualisation (impact of data) – urban computing (technological integration) - urban scene (combination of data & urban environment), to explain the meaning of data in this period, its social role and the combination with the physical environment. When we consider the vague use and weak logical connection of the concepts surrounding the data and urban areas, it is a profound approach. This article reminds us to make a coherent structure and clear correlation is an critical issue to set up the base of opinion and to insist it by writing.

To cite this article: Andrew Vande Moere & Dan Hill (2012) Designing for the Situated and Public Visualization of Urban Data, Journal of Urban Technology, 19:2, 25-46

 

 

Lauréat Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud

The founder and chair of CASA, Prof. Michael Batty has been awarded the prestigious Lauréat Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud, the highest award that can be gained in the field of geography. This prize is widely known as the “Nobel prize of geography”. From 1991, only 22 remarkable researchers were awarded this prize such as David Harvey, Yi-Fu Tuan and Sir Peter Hall.

He has been running his own blog, A Science of Cities, which provides valuable theories, papers and presentation files. Also, he launched a special online class to introduce his complexity theory and methods within Santa Fe Complexity Explorer teaching site. This site is systematically organised with good materials and should be helpful to those who want to learn more about complexity theory and application methods.