Implementing Advanced Knowledge
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3.2.2 App-City Pablo Ros
App-City The contemporary city is to the digital platform what Rome is to Piazza Lifestyle, reality and architecture are not simple; they can not be subjected by norms established by orthodoxy. After Complexity and Contradiction, Robert Venturi writes with Scott Brown Learning from Las Vegas, a book that is not only analyzing the use of symbolism as a significant element of architecture but also a text that can be interpreted as decoder of the complexity of the city. Learning from Las Vegas is a very efficient analytical system to understand and describe the city through a method which integrates under the terminus of architecture such different concepts as communication, iconography, infrastructure or advertisement. Never before these disciplines were used to describe the city with so much intensity and never before were evaluated as generators of the city. The analytical process of Venturi and Brown is totally necessary for understanding the multiplicity of factor conditioning the city. The urban place agglutinates new parameters that transform it into a complex organism. The architect must interpret and decipher this codification and consequently how to use these new languages. But which are these new languages and how they affect the contemporary city? Big changes in society have happened in the last fifteen years through the use of the media and internet. These tools have allowed to society to share information in real time, broad the content of this information or build social networks among other possibilities, with big transformations in all disciplines. These changes have also happened in the architecture of the city, where the use of the internet can be understood a new system of studying, proposing and modeling the contemporary city. Venturi and Brown’s complexity can be extracted nowadays by adding the factor of the media in the city, which includes sources that could include researching tools, hosting webs, blogs or social applications. The proliferation of specialized media platforms has produced a mediaarchitecture complex, the media-city, that has the potential of building itself through the media. The net has promoted social identities and collective interests, converting it in a resource with strong influence in the urban field. Therefore, media-city can be understood as the intersection of the concepts that activate the virtual world of Internet and the physical place of the city. Cover - GAS, Roberto DĂaz Figure 1 - [IM]pulsative, Luca Gamberini, Ryan Christoffer Chua, Atessa Zandi Mofrad Figure 2 - [IM]pulsative, Luca Gamberini, Ryan Christoffer Chua, Atessa Zandi Mofrad Figure 3 - [IM]pulsative, Luca Gamberini, Ryan Christoffer Chua, Atessa Zandi Mofrad 2
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As an alternative to the conventional city, the media-city can be considered as the possibility of a group of citizens to organize the construction of the city through the organization of social networks and the use of digital technologies. These citizens are providers of continuous information through collaborative initiatives to generate an infrastructure of geographical data, city activation and transformation, which can be classified depending of the type of organization. This new order and complexity generates a new definition of the city that needs from the internet to be understood.
Self-organization
Internet has transformed the rules or power distribution, promoting autoorganizations than can be understood as horizontal or cloud, with the best example in Free Encyclopedia Wikipedia. These experiences are very efficient when they expand to reality and actions in the city. It is the case of FixMyStreet (fixmystreet.com), where citizens draw a map of problems and malfunctions found in the streets. The administrators of this page and others with the same format, like ImproveMyCity(imrpovemycity.com), act as mediators between the local administrations and the citizens.
Relation
Relations are one of the most common and successful applications of the net. Facebook, Ello or Twitter allow the immediate contact between communities and new groups of people. In the case of Critical City (hof.criticalcity. org), users can propose urban action, meet their neighbors and improve the environment where they live. Similar examples can be found in Loomio (loomio.org) or redConvive (redconvive.com).
Figure 4 - GAS, Roberto DĂaz Figure 5 - [Re]phemeral/Intelligent Social Urbanism, Robert Douglas, Sahil Sharma, Chirana Lemuel
Interaction
The net not only has the capability of connecting people but also urban sensors and mobile devices. In Google Latitude (google.com/latitude) we can find the exactly position of the users or member of our community that are using this service. This allows the user to utilize the city as a field where the space can be understood as continuous, without physical distances, and as a source of interaction.
Expression
Claimings on the Internet can be transformed into urban spontaneous actions. The net allows formation of a critic mass with enough initiative to activate situations in the real space of the city. Bicicritica (bicicritica.ourporject. org) is an organization that promotes the use of bicycles within the cities. In Madrid this organization joined more than 4000 nude cyclers asking for more bicycle lanes while collapsing the traffic in the center of the capital of Spain. Guerrilla Gardening (guerrillagardening.org) transforms abandoned lots into gardens, activating useless spaces in the city.
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Self-managing
The public space is used and organized by some internet initiatives that promote a controlled public disobedience with the aim of the revitalization of some parts of the city where regulations and social established rules are causing an abandon of some areas. With the Freehouse (freehouse.nl) initiative, groups of people invade some areas of the city with market, music, and art expressions creating a new revitalizing environment for depressed spots of Rotterdam. So, where are architects in the App-City? Architects could be considered as integrators and dynamizers of this information based on the standpoint of the citizen and the urban planning parameters of the city. App-cities are then considered as spaces of interaction where citizens can become actors directed by architects in a collaborative and interdisciplinary structure. A list of simple and real examples are already working almost spontaneously in the cities but, can the architect project a new city with this new tools? Effectively it is possible, but it needs as it happened after Learning from Las Vegas, the hybridization of the architecture with another discipline, in this case internet. While Beatriz Coromina defines modern cities to be understood “not simply by using glass, steel, or reinforced concrete, but by engaging with the new mechanical equipment of the mass media: photography, film, advertising, publicity or publication�, digital platforms are creating and sharing information and knowledge to mobilize the collective knowledge to build contemporary cities. Using Learning from Las Vegas as a main reference, it is possible to conclude that contemporary app-city is to the digital platform what Las Vegas is to the Strip, what Rome is to Piazza. Media and net are no longer separate from the contemporary city and architects are responsible to decipher and work with these new sources, as Venturi and Scott Brown did in Learning from Las Vegas.
Figure 6 - Ecosophy City Model, Francisco Castillo, Miguel Landinez, Jose Manuel Reyes Note - The pictures here presented are a selection of projects developped by students under the supervision of the author
Copyright Š 2014 Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia All rights Reserved.
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IAAC BIT FIELDS: 1. Theory for Advanced Knowledge 2. Advanced Cities and Territories 3. Advanced Architecture 4. Digital Design and Fabrication 5. Interactive Societies and Technologies 6. Self-Sufficient Lands
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