City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn

"Meanwhile, I was learning a lot from very advanced architects like the Dean of Architecture and Planning at MIT, an Australian named William J. Mitchell; Bill to his friends and students. His 1990s books City of Bits, E-Topia and Me++ inspired me greatly. Not just because his work was so informative about the cutting edge of architectural research – which MIT is famous for – but also because he had an incredibly luminous way of writing. His prose really carries you forward, and you can’t help getting engaged with the content just because of his stylish wordplay. I came to know Bill quite well, along with other leading protagonists in America and in Britain. At that time, I just would lap up anything they had to say about the future of computer-aided design. But when I left Architecture Australia in 2000, I decided to look at the future of urban development rather than just architecture because I felt that progressive architects were ahead of technology, but cities offered the real potential for dynamic, networked applications. These applications seemed to be super-effective but invisible: the new information architecture was not about sculpting awesome forms in the traditional concept of architecture. But there was a real gulf between the theory and the practice and the disciplines of architecture and planning. Most planners I knew in Australia seemed not even hostile about post-internet technology potentials, just wilfully ignorant. Gradually I learned that just as the future for architecture was to model the building virtually on the computer before you actually went on site, making your mistakes and improvements in the model, so computer modelling would need to be applied to planning and designing cities of the future. In the years around Y2K, the term ‘smart cities’ was not yet in currency. Bill Mitchell didn’t invent the term, but he popularised it in the early 2000s, when American designer Will Wright also released Sim City the computer game. In the mid-to-late 2000s, several global corporations – Cisco, IBM, Siemens and the engineering firm Arup – began to exploit the term ‘smart city’ in order to win massive government contracts for installing broadband cables and new telecoms equipment at suburban to metropolitan scales. They went ruthlessly after a global market worth many trillions. But just installing cables didn’t seem to me to be inherently ‘smart’. It seemed that this was just the first step to enable actors in cities to access what Bill Mitchell called ‘bits’ of information. As a journalist I understood the notion of gathering ‘facts’. But computer scientists were using the word ‘data’, which seemed to have the potential to become most prevalent. Later I discovered an organisation called the International Society for Digital Earth that was essentially a neo-Buckminster Fuller organisation, based at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but including remote sensing and geospatial science leaders in Europe, Russia, Japan and even North Korea. This society was determined to promote the idea – from Bucky via Al Gore’s 1992 term ‘Digital Earth’ – that we needed to use sensors and scanners aboard satellites to help monitor and model all the world’s environmental systems. This was not just SimCity but SimPlanet! Where early Mediterranean cartographers had talked about mapping the world by land and sea exploration, Bucky was the first to imagine mapping the world by observing its behaviours from space; we include in Data Cities his famous 1927 drawing and quote his 1970s and early 80s ideas of using electronics to help auto-pilot what he called ‘Spaceship Earth’. Al Gore updated his Digital Earth theme during his presidential campaign in the late 1990s. “I would go further and say that it is as important as the invention of the steam engine and is transforming the world to a similar degree. Satellite technology and the data it mediates is literally at that scale of innovation.” Since the late noughties, I’ve been promoting to many Digital Earth science boffins the idea of ‘data cities’ being a crucial subset of their goal to observe and visually simulate the world. But I’ve also tried to persuade urbanists – not always successfully – that they have to understand how global Earth observations methods are fundamental to understanding cities and the ways we inhabit them today. This is where satellite-mediated data comes in. While meteorological satellites have been around for decades – clarifying tomorrow’s weather on tonight’s TV news – telecommunications satellites are now essential for all our networked devices – ranging from smartphones to drones. Now we have satellites equipped for different types of Earth observation: receiving and beaming all the waves of the electromagnetic spectrum to detect surface temperatures, vegetation states, soil types, and the locations, heights and sizes of landforms, buildings, structures and vehicles. We’ve got scanners filming and sensors pulsing from squillions of aerial, nautical and terrestrial vehicles and fixed structures. All the data they capture flows through satellites in orbit. This is how our world is being surveyed today – and throughout history, architects and planners have always relied on survey data as the basis for designing every new development. From this major revolution in the history of surveying must come an equally major revolution in the history of urban design. I would go further and say that it is as important as the invention of the steam engine and is transforming the world to a similar degree. Satellite technology and the data it mediates are literally at that scale of innovation. I wrote that article on request by Virginia McLeod, an Australian architect who is the architecture editor for Phaidon. In the early 2000s, she was looking for a writer to represent the southern hemisphere among a group of prominent critics for a new edition of their popular 10 x 10 tome surveying 100 contemporary architects. I had studied a lot of architectural theory for my masters thesis titled @home: Another Revolution in Architecture’s Theory of the House and I’d got an idea that in the internet age, it would be essential for Australian architects to revise their commitment to Kenneth Frampton’s then-pervasive theory of ‘critical regionalism’. Instead of designing buildings as isolated objects related only to the conditions of their site, they needed to understand that occupants of buildings now would be constantly connected around the world. “My instinct was that after the internet, you simply could not try to resist globalism. Wherever you are based, as an architect or urban planner, you are going to be ‘infected’ by ideas, events and trends. Post-internet culture would be virally transmitted.” I felt that the internet was going to transform the theory of architecture. The term viral internationalism came spontaneously, and seemed like a logical antidote to Ken Frampton’s famous theory. Ken is a lovely human and great scholar. He was often invited to Australia by his friends and former students to speak on critical regionalism and its importance for Australian architects. But as I said in my Phaidon essay, his idea seemed fairly Marxist: a call to critically resist the relentless pressures of the global media and capitalism. It seemed that his message to architects, in practical terms, was to avoid mindlessly copying foreign ideas and to instead represent your particular place of building. You could refer to foreign magazines and other influences, but you would have to consciously decide what you believed it was appropriate to emulate. My instinct was that after the internet, you simply could not try to resist globalism. Wherever you are based, as an architect or urban planner, you are going to be ‘infected’ by ideas, events and trends. Post-internet culture would be virally transmitted. I met Richard Florida and attended a number of his lectures in Australia. At the time that The Rise of the Creative Class came out, it seemed that he, like me, was very influenced by what was happening with some of the first 3D mapping and modelling of cities, looking at data relating to cities beyond population-density spikes. Cities came to be depicted visually as mountains based on population data for particular places on the map of the city. It was an approach that became very popular in architectural circles, and particularly via Ricky Burdett, Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics. He exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale some wonderful urban ‘mountain’ sculptures that had been 3D-printed from BIM data files. A team of academics in Tokyo did a wonderful video that’s online called PopulouSCAPE: A night flight around an urbanising world , showing UN population data for different cities as soaring up to the sky. Manuel Gausa, a Portuguese architect living in NY, was another pioneer of post-internet data visualisation."