Designing for Civil Society

Walkit, and check your calories and carbon footprint

Sometimes (let's be honest, often) it takes a visitor to tell you something useful about your home city. So just as Ann and I were getting ready for a walk along the Regent's canaI I was interested to find  What would walking do for your carbon footprint and your waistline? from Ewan McIntosh. He extolls the virtue of the London Underground (hmm, sometimes) but says it is often quicker to walk:

I've been spending a fair bit of time in London of late and, while I love the city, I've been facing the same conundrum I had while living in Paris: when is it better just to walk between points instead of taking the Underground?
The London Underground is superb (well, for a tourist it's very practical and there's no snob factor in terms of who uses it, like you find in the Paris metro). But often, where a trip between Embankment and Convent Garden would require a change and lots of steps, for example, a walk would get you there quicker (which TFL already lets you know), in a more pleasant atmosphere and in a way which impacts less on the environment.
Walkit.com, another discovery from Mike at the Edinburgh Coffee Morn, lets you see what route would be most interesting for your to take, tells you how many calories you'll burn and how much less your carbon footprint will be. It's just superb.

Walkit will give you a route between any postcode or street name, with calories burned and CO2 emissions saved. Today we were late starting, so took the bus from home, near Smithfield in the City, to the Angel Islington. We could have walked (fast) in 18 minutes along this route avoiding 0.12 kg of CO2 generated (for comparison, a car ride would have been 0.41kg, though we don't have one). But more likely 35 minutes slowly. We then walked along the canal to Victoria Park in Tower Hamlets, rather than this quicker but less scenic route offered by Walkit. I think the 159 calories calculated by Walkit were more than covered by the sandwiches.
It was a brilliant walk, enlivened by a bit of jossling between walkers, dogs, buggies and cyclists taking not much notice of the instructions to proceed safely. There was even a canal boat passing through one of the locks, demonstrating it is still navigable. The canal was build in the early 19th century to carry cargo from the Thames docks at Limehouse around to Paddington in west London. The cost came in at £772,000, twice the original estimate of expenditure. The original promoter, Thomas Homer, was sentenced to transportation for embezzlement before completion.

These days the towpath is used more than the canal, although there are some house boats moored and some leisure traffic. One (small one) on offer for £10,000, if you are tempted, but high maintenance I should think. Another day I'll take more time and photos, maybe adding to those here, and research a few more encouraging aids like Walkit. Thanks Ewan, but we took the Underground back from Bethnal Green to St Paul's. The 89 calorie burn wasn't quite tempting enough.

Placeblogging

Robin Hamman in place blog aggregation - how to make it interesting tips us off about about a new aggregation site that will pull together feeds from blogs that are place-specific ... thus answering a question I'm sometime asked: "where can I find interactive web sites about local communities". What's more interesting, he suggests, is aggregation of blogs within a locality .. which placeblogger may or may not do. Robin is working on a project with the BBC and local bloggers in Manchester.

Here's Robin's take:

Lisa Williams has posted an invitation for a sneak peek under the hood of placeblogger, a project she's been working on. Placeblogger will be a searchable directory and aggregator of placeblogs which she explains are:

Placeblogs — sites that focus on geographical communities — are the living laboratory of citizen journalism: they say interesting things about how nonjournalists approach covering a fire, or a town council.

There's a screenshot of the site, currently undergoing development work, on flickr. So will it work? Well, there are already lots of sites out that there agregate placeblogs, GlobalVoicesOnline being my favourite example but there are also tons of national and city blog aggregators like britblog and LondonBloggers (which organises blogs around a tube map).

So would I go to a site like Placeblogger? Maybe to have a look, but I can't imagine that if I lived in a specific city or town in America, I'd really be interested in people in other places blogging about school fetes, a house fire in the neighbourhood, or a scandal involving a local priest. It just wouldn't be relavent to me.

Aggregation is great when it helps people find stuff that's relevant but, in this case, I suspect all the aggregation will do is fill the page with stuff that's exactly the opposite of that - stuff of little interest from places I may or may not have ever heard of before. The directory aspect of it, however, would be of interest to me, particularly if the site allowed me to pull in headlines from JUST the placeblogs in my area, as well as things like feeds for place specific keywords on technorati, local papers, local discussion forums, local email groups, etc.

I guess I'm imagining something like Squidoo's Lens service but where much of the work of building a lens is either done for me already or done collaboratively. I'm looking forward to seeing if placeblogger does any of this stuff or if it misses the mark by focusing too much on multi-place aggregation and not enough on focusing on the local stuff I'm really interested in.

Promoting regeneration? First listen to your critic

Perhaps there's something about the traditional public lecture - and lecture hall - that brings out more of the speaker than the usual Powerpoint keynote. It's certainly difficult to find a hall to better the Great Room at the Royal Society of Arts in London, and at the end of this evening's lecture I felt I knew more about Jonathan Glancey than his subject The Re-generation Game. That's not necessarily a bad thing for inquisitive readers of The Guardian, where he is architecture and design editor, and may also be useful for any regeneration agencies interested in gaining Mr Glancey's attention. More on that later.

Location, location - or dislocation, disinterest?

Jack Schofield, writing about Smart Places in Guardian Online, suggests that 'intelligent environments' could be the next big thing. He offers a round up of experimental projects using smart phones and other devices to connect us with content 'attached' to buildings and street furniture. This won't be just tourist info, ads and menus from the restaurants you are passing, but - for example - current and historical story threads woven by the Urban Tapestries project in Bloomsbury, London. Technology could enrich your sense of place.
Jack's piece reminded me that Howard Rheingold, writing recently in The Feature, wondered Does Mobile Telephony Disconnect People from City Life?. NY Times art and architecture critic Paul Goldberger, bemoaned "Disconnected Urbanism" in a recent issue of Metropolis, and Howard mused "Who would dispute that the Montparnasse of even ten years ago is a different place today, in part because more and more of the boulevardiers are in SMS or MP3 land or talking to someone whose body is elsewhere? I'm not as convinced as Goldberger that this represents an unalloyed tragedy, an irreversible breakdown of civilized norms. Don't we change our norms all the time?"
As usual, I expect it will do one thing for some people, and another thing for other people... depending on personality type, communication preferences, enthusiasm for technology and so on. It's not just location, or device - but people, place, technology.

Skyhouse and social software presentation

Will Davies and James Crabtree have now posted the presentation they made at the Emerging Technologies Conference about how social software could help build a sense of community in Skyhouses... proposed mixed-use London housing skyscrapers. Earlier discussion about Skyhouse - and sky neighbourhoods - here.

Local problem solving online

In theory the Net should be a good way for like-minded people to connect and develop ideas, or solve problems, to benefit their local community. But who is doing that - or facilitating it - effectively? Jonathan Briggs, who runs the Reengage blog commented on my speed networking post, saying "I'm really up for some further discussions about how we use technology to link people to other people to solve small problems. Dating sites for problem solving? ;-)"
Jonathan's query promoted me to look again at the 'Who's who in community technology' pages I started a few years ago.

Open Source Informatics for Smart Cities

Dave Greenop adds to my previous item ....

Following our chain of thoughts from the Leeds seminar on Civic Society we started to wonder how the many different types of information and control systems would be implemented and managed in a true Smart City.
The reality is that these systems are mostly supplied to local authorities by specialised companies, for example traffic control systems. For there to be good integration of these systems it is not just the communication aspects that have to be considered but also the interfaces between systems. We guess that these interfaces are API’s (Application programming Interfaces) that would allow the integration of diverse hardware or dedicated system software into a smart city management system. Of course we have no idea whether manufactures of traffic lights, for example, already provide this, if they do then it is likely to be proprietary i.e. you will be limited to what can be done.
If you start to analyse were information technology can be beneficial in managing a modern city then you may come up with very wide and diverse applications, many of which will require the networking of hardware such as sensors etc. All of these systems would require software to drive them and this could be a rich area for the developers of open source software. Along similar lines we can envisage the possibility of open source informatics for providing the overall system design for smart cities, in this way many different local councils and commercial companies could collaborate to provide cost effective solutions in both software and hardware.
It’s interesting that many of the new devices appearing in our home, for example routers, set-top boxes and home automation systems are fairly standard hardware devices controlled by embedded Linux. Could not the same be true of smart city systems.

Cybercities - the cyberlinks

Stephen Graham emails helpfully to point out that there is a weblist of links to complement his Cybercities Reader, after I had suggested a little cheekily that some blog-size bites of content would help communicate the comprehensive content to busy planners and others trying to steer our cities to the future.
The links cover everything from the the geography of cyberspace through digital culture to 3D electronic simulations, telecommuting and congestion charging. There's a site listed devoted entirely to Gated Communities. I know that I (and others) will spend many happy hours cybercity surfing. I'm already tempted by Are cars Cyborgs? "The car-garden hybrid, formerly known as the suburb, is a machine-to-green cyborg, but nevertheless it is wrong" writes Dutch urbanist Paul Treanor. More, more... no, less, less or I'll never get into town.

Time to play Skyhouses

Kevin Harris today adds to the debate on Skyhouse, the proposal for very tall mixed-tenure residential buildings in London, by suggesting their design may be a test of whether we are going for US-style machines for living, to serve the individual in isolation, or more European approaches valuing social interaction. He has a nice quote from J.C Ballard's 1975 High rise. This discussion started at an iSociety seminar around how far social software could help build social connections. Kevin kindly gives another plug for my idea of running a game or simulation to play these ideas through.

Understanding cybercities - by books or games

On the technology-place front Keith Hampton alerts us to a new book from Stephen Graham, Professor of Urban Technology, University of Newcastle, UK. The Cybercities Reader looks as if it has anyone that's anyone in this field contributing a chapter....Philip Agre, Anne Beamish, Manuel Castells, Martin Dodge, Mark Gottdeiner, David Holmes, David Lyon, William Mitchell, Harvey Molotch, Saskia Sassen, and Nina Wakeford. Wouldn't it be great if they would chunk their chapters down into blog-size pieces.... I know I should get the book but would I read it? Will other non-academics? If not, how will these ideas get into circulation rapidly and usefully? As I wrote recently non-academic planners aren't usually well briefed in this field.
Maybe it's time to try again an approach we tested a few years back, when the RICS Foundation supported some scenario development with a group of professionals playing through the changes technology might bring to our towns and cities. We ran a workshop - reported here - but despite the enthusiastic support of the Foundation's chief executive David Fitzpatrick we didn't get a more substantial programme going. David has an unusual background as an early advocate of community technology and sustainable development, now influencing the suits at events like the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Nothing on technology in current Foundation research themes, that I could see though. Were we just too early in our scenario playing, or have built environment professionals decided it doesn't matter much anyway?
Update: David emails to say that he has left RICS Foundation and is off to new pastures. I'm sure it will be something interesting when (or at least after) he arrives.