Instead of idling in frustration about the delayed bus or subway, the potholes in the street, hazardous traffic signals on a particular corner, or the never-ending lines at Whole Foods, cities are capable of moving towards a read/write urbanism, where they will operate like programmable software.

Bruce Sterling imagines how the future interface of the metropolis might operate:

An issue-tracking board for cities? Something visual and Web-friendly, that’s simultaneously citizen-facing and bureaucracy-facing? Heck, that begins to sound like a pretty neat way to address the problems with systems like 311 and FixMyStreet .

You provide citizens with a variety of congenial ways to initiate trouble tickets, whether they’re most comfortable using the phone, a mobile application or website, or a text message. You display currently open cases, and gather resolved tickets in a permanent archive or resource. You use an algorithm to assign priority to open issues on a three-axis metric:Scale, Severity, Urgency.

Cities will start to implement better frameworks for citizen responsiveness. In order to do so, there needs to be a better way for people to interact with public objects. Greenfield, via Speedbird defines a public object as “any discrete object in the common spatial domain, intended for the use and enjoyment of the general public.” Greenfield envisions a geopositioning interactive augmented reality tool, such as “Tap here to report a problem with this bus shelter”

Greenfield says that, “In order for anything like this scheme to work, public objects would need to have a few core qualities, qualities I’ve often described as making them addressable, queryable, and even potentially scriptable.”

This means that each public object can have an assigned address to identify it, an API related to it to allow for real-time information and public interaction, and the ability to inform appropriate resources of the issue. The general public must also be able to receive and use the information.

The Internet is already the platform for urbanism and technological innovations in cities, and it is already turning into a ubiquitous tool to connect public objects (check out Pachube, an internet platform where you can store and share real-time data about objects, devices, and buildings worldwide). It is an innovative idea that Greenfield advocates, that all public and municipal objects will have API’s.

As futuristic as it that seems – that objects will participate in urban living and communicate with each other just as people do – enabling things like throwaway umbrellas to soon have a personality and a history – it is an unwarranted fear that humanity will be overthrown by human intelligence : ubiquitous computing and networked public objects are enhancing urbanism by allowing people be much more efficient at identifying an issue, communicating with one another and with bureaucratic systems, and then fixing the problem.

From Sharable.net

Over at the wonderful Streetsblog, Shareable friend Chris Carlsson reminds us that curbside recycling was once considered a wacky, far-out idea. “We tend to take curbside recycling for granted,” writes Chris. “It seems like common sense, and these days the ubiquitous three bins are everywhere: black for landfill, blue for recyclables, and most recently green for compost. But only a few decades ago it was ‘crazy hippie activists’ who started the process of bringing our trash out of the dark and into the light of day.”

Chris recalls the first recycling programs were small-scale, grassroots efforts run by small groups of activists, such as the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California. As one of those activists, Karen Pickett, recalls:

Back around 1980 or so, recycling was not institutionalized the way that it is now, and it was actually a pretty radical concept to think that garbage was something good. So the public education that was going on around solid waste issues, recycling issues, really felt cutting edge… What sucked me in was the recycling program that the Berkeley Ecology Center started. I [worked on] the curbside program, only picking up newspapers. There was no formal contract with the City of Berkeley, it was a nonprofit running around throwing newspapers into the back of a truck, and we took them down to Ashby and San Pablo, to the Packaging Company of America. They turned the newspapers into egg cartons and fruit dividers. It was a terrific example of local industry because at the end of the day we’d go a mile or less.

You reduce, reuse, recycle. But you ALWAYS reduce first, because it has to do with consumption habits. We have to recycle because we’ve used up the raw materials, the resources, to produce these products… I hate to say this, but in a lot of ways it’s a failure. That’s not to say that all of people’s efforts all of these years has failed, because all these municipalities, county entities, are recycling. By and large, people across the country can do curbside recycling in a convenient way which most people see as a success. To ignore [that] would be foolish. Nonetheless, where does it get us if we’re recycling all this stuff but we haven’t reduced how much we consume? We’re still on a suicidal path.

We worked for so very long at getting people to see the value in touching their garbage and separating things, and the whole idea that if they participated in that process in that way, then things would be re-used in the highest and best use kind of way. And that was the whole reason we separated colors of glass, never mind the glass from cans. And now the irony is, now that it has been institutionalized and it’s so acceptable that everybody is recycling, everything is thrown into the same bin. It breaks my heart every time I do my own recycling and dump my stuff into a recycling bin and see what else is in there, because I know that things are lost in the process.

As someone once said, “Anybody driving faster than you is a maniac and anyone going slower is an idiot.” This little statement really applies to Bangalore.

This model provides an intelligent mechanism to solve traffic management problem in “Namma Bengaluru”.

IBM can involve with the state…

smartercities:

As he introduced Ecobici, a bike sharing service modelled on Vélib in Paris, Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, who attended the failed Copenhagen Climate Conference at the end of last year, said people didn’t need to wait for a global commitment to care for the environment This spring Mexico City launched Ecobici, installing 1,100 bikes at 85 pick-up points throughout the centre of the city.

The mayor said during the first few weeks some 4,000 people had paid $24 for user cards, which swipe at a rack to release a bicycle for 30 minutes, and that some 50,000 trips had been made. Organisers hope to have signed up 24,000 people by the end of this year.

As one of the world’s most polluted and congested cities, Mexico City is determined to green itself. Ecobici is just part of a massive programme. The Mexican government, World Bank and the United Nations are funding a 15-year, $1 billion per year Plan Verde. The plan focuses on transportation issues. In addition to Ecobici, BRT (bus rapid transport) is being introduced, the underground railway will be improved and once a week cars will be banned from the roads.

The mayor’s office said that the plan is already working. The number of days with health-threatening pollution levels has dropped from 333 to 180 and areas with BRT had seen traffic accidents drop by 30 per cent.

smartercities:

smarterplanet:

IBM Plans ‘Serious’ Sim City — InformationWeek

IBM said Monday that it plans to offer a SimCity-style online game that urban planners, students, academics, and others can use to learn more about urban sprawl and how to combat its negative effects on the environment. IBM called its CityOne simulation a “serious game” that can help users “discover how to make their cities and their industries smarter by solving real-world business, environmental, and logistical problems.” 

George Orwell was wrong. Although he said advanced technology would create authoritarianism, it actually creates decentralization and democratization.

That was the message of Julia Vitullo-Martin, the director of the Center for Urban Innovation of the Regional Planning Association (RPA) at the RPA’s annual conference, “Innovation and the American Metropolis,” held in New York City on Friday, April 16th. And it was an idea that animated everyone who came for the event, from policy makers to technologists: populations are expanding, but through creative technological innovation, society can compensate. Read on for a recap and video of William McDonough’s keynote…

Population expansion in the metropolis

The critical questions of how to grow towards smart urbanization and how to implement these technological innovations were addressed at the RPA. The majority of population growth will occur in urban and industrial places: Adolfo Carrion, the keynote speaker, and the director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs, said that the American city is the nexus of necessity and innovation: 85% of jobs are in urban areas, 90% of productivity happens in metropolitan areas, and by 2050, 75% of Americans will live in metropolitan areas (in other words, American cities will have to compensate for 120 million more people).

That seems daunting when getting on the subway at rush hour is already a superhuman feat due to of the dense throngs of commuters. How will New York City sustainably support even more people, as we rapidly approach a population of nine million? How can urban planning lead to increased affordable sustainability and stronger, opportunistic, wealthy cities?

Architect William A. McDonough, speaking at the RPA assembly, April 16, 2010 at the Waldorf-Astoria, NYC.

Catch-up ball

America already has many systems that need work: healthcare, education, the financial sector, housing and urban development patterns, and possibly the political system. Furthermore, with regards to the transportation system, “America needs to play catch-up ball”, said Robert Yaro, the President of the RPA. He pointed out that America still lacks even the high-speed rails found in Europe, Japan, China, India, Indonesia, and even Morocco.

Gerard Mooney of IBM believes that New York City can be the number one green city, and transportation is the building block to economic viability. But in order to achieve this status, New York needs to make some changes. Change is critical to US urbanization, and this must be fueled by the production of green technology, sustainable infrastructure / transportation, and affordable alternative energy.

Open-source data
One way the NYC transportation lags behind many cities, including Boston, Portland, Chicago, Berlin, Tokyo, and London, is that there is not real-time, digitalized transit information. In order to achieve this, we need open data.

Chris Dempsey of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MDOT) explained that after Boston opened MBTA data to the public in November 2009, people unconnected to the DOT jumped on the data — within weeks, they produced real-time data feed interfaces, for example, transportation updates for phones and desktop, and digital displays for subway and bus stations.

Open source data increases the efficiency of city travel and transit, and the collection of transportation data can be used to study what works well with regards to congestion pricing, healthcare systems, and Information Technology systems.

Additionally, public data collection and monitoring, including GPS information in people’s cars, and the implementation of security cameras in places such as stop lights, toll booths, and building entrances, could also allow for transit efficiency and better use of public space in urban areas. The sharing of information will also help coordinate industry, research, and educational institutions.

New York City needs to catch up to other cities in these regards, but Yaro acknowledged that people are trepidatious of open data collection domains, fearing an intrusion of privacy and privileges.

Interagency Integration
Yaro stressed the importance of information sharing and communication between small companies (such as start-ups of smartphone apps), between federal agencies, and between cities. At the moment, open source applications are inefficient — there is not enough sharing of code, leading to redundancy.

We need to think of communication in a whole new way, and the government must be involved in developing common applications. He said that the Internet is a command post in the global economy, and human intelligence must be used to implement communication in tactile ways, and to integrate all modes of transportation.

New York City also needs better pricing mechanisms, including using web based technology to connect all transit systems, for example, with mobile and single pass payment methods (already used in cities in Japan and Korea). Similar to integration of transit systems, Thomas Prendergast, President of New York City Transit, emphasized that shared infrastructure ( taxi and car sharing, for example) is necessary to improve surface transportation efficiency.

In order for sharing of information and communication to improve, private sectors and small companies must take advantage of opportunities for federal partnership and funding. Many RPA members emphasized the need for decentralization and integration of funding. Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner of the New York City DOT, emphasized that there is federal money for transportation technology start-ups, and Belcher stated that “Government’s work is God’s work”. However, Belcher also stated that unfortunately, critical change will require big tax increases.

Change we can believe in
The emergence of technology and transportation innovations are crucial to sustainable growth of US metropolitan areas. American urban regions must keep the existing systems in place, but the US is facing a crisis as we move towards lagging behind the rest of the world (technologically, economically, politically, and in areas of education and healthcare). Change is critical to US urbanization, but as Sadik-Khan said, “Authentic signs of hope are on the horizon.”

Read more and attend the conference virtually at RPA.org

MTA has a new flood mitigation policy for New York City. Rogers Marvel Architects, with di Domenico & Partners and Stantec have implemented a new project to protect the subway from excessive water in times of flooding. Most of the New York City’s excess floodwater pours through sidewalk grates, often directly into the subway system, leading to delays and electrical damage, for example, during the flood of August 8, 2007, which shut down the F train altogether during rush hour. This led to traveler’s mayhem and public criticism of the unprepared MTA.

In response, Rogers Marvel Architects and Engineers designed a new ventilation system that meshes functionality with aesthetics – it is composed of elevated grates of different heights, the tallest one about knee level, and each is equipped with a sidewalk bench at one side. The varying heights of the grates drain 98 percent of running water.  This is much more efficient than the typical New York City grates that are only raised a few inches above the ground, which allow for excess water to run over the surface without draining, entering the subway system.  The grates are about five feet long, and of varying widths, depending on the size of the particular sidewalk. They have been installed in 2400 spots along Hillside Avenue in Queens, a particularly flood-prone area, and more are being installed along Northern Boulevard, Queens Plaza, and Long Island City.

Since the August flooding event of 2007, which impeded NYC transportation, the MTA, the NYC Transportation and Environmental Protection commissioners, and the NY DOT commissioner have worked together to improve preparedness and response time to extreme weather events. They are also hoping to increase communication to the public, including real-time information regarding trains and buses (an area of technology in which NYC lags behind most other major cities). The bigger picture of flooding damage stems from poor infrastructure and soil permeability, but Rogers Marvel Architects and collaborators provide a temporary solution to the perpetual but intermittent problem.

Rogers Marvel Architects, with di Domenico & Partners, and Stantec have earned an Urban Design Merit award from the AIA annual Design Awards Program, for the MTA Floot Mitigation Streetscape Design.

The 2010 AIA Design Awards are on display until July 3, 2010 at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, (212) 683-0023.

Taxes on Yellow taxis go to the MTA. Black cars don’t collect these taxes.

Organized by the folks at The Mobile City and The Virtueel Platform, Designing the Hybrid City is a conference “on the role of digital media and technologies in urban design.” The conference is taking place at the Dutch Cultural Centre located at the World Expo in Shanghai from August 16-17…