Networked Urbanism

design thinking initiatives for a better urban life

Design critics: Belinda Tato and Jose Luis Vallejo, principals of Ecosistema Urbano

Focusing on the relationships between people in a given context. Our role as designers being to connect our design and strategies with people’s needs and initiatives, to assist the creation of communities and to enable systems and spaces for interaction, social creativity, and the emergence of behaviors.

 

“Where do I go to talk to my neighbors about the new building policy?”

“How do I find out about lectures and events around my area?”

“Can I borrow a lawnmower from a neighbor?”

“I want to tell people about how much I love this park!”

 

Think Big

While the internet excels at facilitating discussions with strangers located halfway across the world, there is a conspicuous absence of online services that cater to answering the above questions. These activities are still largely conducted via analog means, ie. bulletin boards and face-to-face encounters. But one can imagine a whole host of applications which can benefit from location-specificity. These include:

 

Can we create an easy-to-use medium for the exchange and dissemination of location-specific information?

 

Start Small

The service will be rolled out in a phased manner. Events and announcements will be introduced first in order to generate site traffic. Discussion boards will follow once a larger readership is established.

 

Act Now

I am currently mocking up a front-end interface for the service. It will initially focus on location-specific announcements and events.


-Think Big-

With growing pressure and demands on city budgets today, municipalities are facing shortages of funds for many of their departments.  In particular, departments that focus on servicing and improving the public realm frequently face cuts in their annual and capital budgets. Often, this means that many urban public spaces don’t receive the attention that they need to meaningfully serve their residents.  A capital project to improve a public square may be shelved until brighter days in the city’s future.  Programs in the park may be cut back because there isn’t money to spend on community activities. Street furniture may slowly deteriorate as cities cut the funds dedicated to street amenities.

At the same time as funding for the public realm is frequently coming up short, public space continues to play a vital role in our cities. Public spaces cultivate community, spur economic activity, promote social cohesion, and enrich residents’ health and well-being, among many other important roles. Given this challenging fiscal climate in many cities, how can we continue to activate public spaces to foster community, connect residents to their neighborhoods and each other, and create vibrant cities in a cost effective manner?  How can we sustain activated public spaces in the long term?

-Start small-

Although I have ideas about how to start tackling this problem this from the top, I am going to begin exploring answers to this question by starting bottom-up, by implementing my own public space interventions and “learning by doing.”  I hope to develop many ideas and try to implement them as I can, thus allowing the process of innovation&implementation to produce outcomes, which I can then learn from – nurturing and learning from both success and failure.  In the process, I hope to engage and involve local organizations and/or municipal departments to form a broader understanding of connections between organizations, residents, the city, and how collaborations can be formed to cost-effectively activate public spaces.

-Act now-

I’ve been speaking with experts in the GSD community and at the City of Boston, and I have a few more contacts I’ll be contacting soon.  I’m still refining my ideas for the kinds of interventions I would like to do.  I would like to implement an intervention in the back yard of Gund Hall, and I’m working with building services to try to make it happen.  I also am studying the Cambridge Common space to start planning some interventions there.


I’m proposing to link the idea of understanding energy infrastructures with public education. I think there is a way to encourage sustainable behavior insofar as it relates to energy conservation by engaging a network of young students in Boston. The first step is to visualize the vast amount of information that exists about our energy infrastructure, and then create a system whereby students can interact with that infrastructure via a web or mobile interface to a social network. Without going into too much detail, I think it’s possible to combine educational programs with incentives to conserve and/or responsibly use energy (in all its forms). I am really inspired by the Natural Fuse project by Usman Haque, and I’m wondering how that system might be scaled up.

Think Big:

How can we encourage people to understand, appreciate, and sustain our urban energy infrastructure. Is it possible to develop a system that teaches people to conserve energy, on a scale large enough to make a significant contribution to offsetting our collective carbon footprint?

Start Small:

The first step is simply to understand how energy is created, distributed, and consumed in the city of Boston. In order to approach the complexity of the energy infrastructure that exists in this city, I propose to develop an energy monitoring and visualization system for a select number of households, to get a sense of how a typical Bostonian uses energy in real-time. The next step is to connect this system to social networking sites (Facebook/Twitter) and open the platform up to students in the area. The ultimate goal is to incentivize energy conservation by engaging a large network of students who can keep each other accountable in terms of their energy use.

Act Now:

Currently refining the ideas of the proposal, and trying to think how this system might be different from energy conservation programs that have failed in the past. What would be the most effective way to visualize the information at hand, and how will I engage the community to garner interest in the project?


Think Big:

How can we better inform people about the unseen infrastructures and energy required to get potable water to their homes, and encourage them to conserve and treat their own water?

Start Small:

I plan to create a website with information on how far your water has traveled, how much energy was used to get it there, and the environmental impacts of moving water- giving people a virtual tour of an infrastructure they usually have no knowledge of.  I also plan on designing a DIY water treatment/rain water collection (mini) landscape that can be used in urban areas… I’m thinking something you can put on a typical Boston porch.

Act Now:

Working on research of water infrastructure in the Boston area, potential areas for water re-use for Bostonians and speaking with key players in this area.


Think Big (and some questions I have): 

Is there a way to connect people in a community, location specific, to expand social networks in one’s public and/or private layers?

I am still really intrigued the idea that individuals have multiple identities which we turn on and off depending on our physical location. I may portray myself one way in a coffee shop versus another way at the GSD. Can these layers of interests, location specific, begin to create connections that would have otherwise been unnoticed?

How much are people willing to share? Are we more willing to share our public layers (ie. skills, job, etc.) to gain business contacts versus private layers (ie. hobbies) to gain friendships? Can this service serve both functions?

 

Start Small:

After visiting New Urban Mechanics, it seems that this office is acting as the ‘middle man’ to create the same connections I am interested in between people in Boston who can help each other accomplish ideas. I proposed working with the office in developing a digital system for submitting proposals so these connections can also occur through a digital layer rather than just contacting the office directly. (Waiting to hear back)

I would like to focus on both the digital submission process and submission of individual skills.  How can this system connect people who can benefit each other?

 

Act Now:

I am in contact with New Urban Mechanics, MIT Media Lab students, and researchers at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

I have also met with a sociology professor at Harvard to discuss the basics of interaction, social identity theory, social networks, behavioral economics, and multi-plex networks.

I am also beginning to envision how a system of location based identity, or a physical social network, can exist. Perhaps coffee shops, community centers, workout facilities are tagged throughout the city which you scan into, turn on the layers you want to share in that location, and connect with others who have also called out that same layer in that location. Or perhaps the system allows you to look for a person with a specific skill set to grow a project. Then how can the connection be made between those two?


I suppose I large part of a successful mobile app intervention/invention is also to get a wide enough user base. Seems like this web platform does not have a mobile app endeavor yet and would like to see if I could partner with them, perhaps design the app together with them, to engage bartering in a more physical realm, catalyzing serendipitous matching of people with surplus and need.

https://ourgoods.org/projects

 



Retrieved from Sunday Secrets, Postsecret.com

If the future is sharing information, resources, and physical spaces, how can we facilitate the process of sharing in cross cultural interactions? Multiple studies reveal that in urban settings where different cultural groups coexist there are high levels of segregation and a lower use of the public space. Cultural frictions can translate into racism, violence, xenophobia, and become obstacles for development. At a global scale, intolerance for other people’s ways of life has resulted in ethnocide. Wades Davis in his Ted Talk Dreams from Endangered Cultures encourages us to value our ethnosphere as it is humanity’s great legacy. In this lecture Davis quotes Margaret Mead’s greatest fear, “as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities.”

Tolerance and respect for other people’s way of living can start being address at an urban scale. Cross cultural interactions are battlegrounds where notions of tolerance and respect get tested. During the semester I plan to develop strategies to encourage and facilitate these interactions.  



Now I don’t speak spanish, but the website from this video has some great information on open-source information sharing, and envisions how it will eventually be integrated into everyday life. In any case, the video is wonderfully mesmerizing.


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networkedurbanism.com is a platform for sharing knowledge and design thinking experiences with the world around us, breaking through the walls of academia in an attempt to improve the society in which we live.