Quiero rescatar esta serie de 9 panfletos sobre la implicación de la computación ubicua en la arquitectura y el urbanismo. En la contraportada sus editores; Mark Shepard, Omar Khan y Trebor Scholz; ponen las siguientes preguntan sobre la mesa:
“…How is our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics, and other situated technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the way architects conceive of space?…”
No pretendo hacer un resumen sino destacar algunos puntos que me han parecido interesantes del primer número: Urban computing and its discontents. Una conversación entre Mark Shepard (MS) y Adam Greenfield (AG):
+ Espacio público físico Vs. espacio público en internet. La importancia de rescatar del espacio físico la diversidad, la posibilidad de encontrarte con el diferente, ya que internet está enfocado a encontrar personas con intereses similares:
“MS: Hannah Arendt has described public space as the place where we encounter the stranger, a space of friction that breeds tolerance through encountering differences in opinion, social standing, ethnicity, economic background, etc. Yet so many of the applications being developed for ipods, Blackberrys, and mobile phones are oriented toward finding a partner with similar interests and maintaining constant contact with our established social networks or favorite places and things. So looking forward, it would seem one strategy for urban computing would be to reclaim urban space as a place for encountering difference….”
+ Podemos encontrar ciertos paralelismos entre el momento actual, con los espacios híbridos, y algunos proyectos arquitectónicos de los 60 (Archigram, Cedric Price, Yona Friedman…) en los que se proponían estrategias bottom-up (de abajo a arriba) para las ciudades. Defendían una arquitectura y un urbanismo “sin plan” en el que los ciudadanos pudieran participar de una forma activa y determinante. La diferencia ahora, es que pasaremos de diseñar hardware a trabajar sobre el software:
“MS: Yet rather than proposing material interventions that are open, extendable, and adaptable to changing patterns of use and activity, it would seem the locus of current research has shifted from designing the architectural hardware of what effectively became modular spaceframe structures and sevices, to the immaterial architecture of software infrastructures and their ability to perform or enact new urban organizations and experiences. Yet to what extent do they offer any meaningful sort of participation? And maybe more importantly , what if anything, have we learned from the failures of the 60’s?”
+ Adam Greenfield se pregunta quién debería preocuparse de la degradación tecnológica de una posible ciudad híbrida, qué ocurriría sí colapsaran los elementos mediáticos y computacionales. Para mi un buen ejemplo cercano, aunque no sea computacional, es el ecobulevar de ecosistema urbano. Está basado principalmente en su funcionamiento tecnológico, pero tiene un valor arquitectónico que permanece o se lee de manera paralela. Si la parte tecnológica deja de funcionar su valor no desaparece.
“AS: And again, I’d want designers to attend to the default state, to what enginers call graceful degradation. Jean Nouvel’s Institut du Monde Arabe, I suppose, is a decent example of this. I don’t believe the very complicated (and very expensive) sunshade irises have ever functioned properly, but they’re indubitably surpassingly lovely, even in a semi-inert state. I don’t know what a neighborhood looks like when its technological substrate has defaulted, how it remains viable under conditions where all the various sorts of overlay and intervention and mediation have collapsed…but someone’s going to have to put some effort into figuiring it out.”
Urban Computing and its Discontents. (Buy here, or download the free PDF. Be sure to check out the other pamphlets in the series, too.)