Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design and the Nature of Cities

"The author Nicholas de Monchaux is the son of Jean-Pierre (known widely as John) de Monchaux, the dean of architecture and planning at MIT before Bill Mitchell. The younger de Monchaux is also something of a prodigy, and while he’s certainly benefited from his upbringing in a prominent architecture family, he is a formidable planning theorist and now the professor of architecture and urbanism at Berkeley. This book is impressively illustrated with many speculative urban design projects by his students. These are visually stimulating and glamorous. However the book’s best content in my view is three key essays by Nicholas which give unprecedented biographical histories of Gordon Matta-Clark, Jane Jacobs and a data cities pioneer from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, named Howard Fisher . At Harvard, Fisher developed a data-mapping system called SYMAP which relied on typing Os and Xs to visualise geographical terrain. This system was revolutionary in its day – too far ahead of its time. But Nicholas now has clarified how that system emerged from Harvard via one of Fisher’s graduate students, Jack Dangermond, to become ubiquitous in today’s environmental mapping industry. Dangermond organised to take Fisher’s SYMAP methods out of Harvard and into his own entity called the Environmental Science and Research Institute, ESRI. Under Dangermond, Esri has grown into a global multi-billion dollar software company, the world’s leading GIS (geographic information systems) provider. Today, anyone in urban planning who needs to map anything – including for example the spread of the coronavirus epidemic – needs to use Esri maps and often its data to produce their visualisations. It’s more or less a global monopoly that originated with Howard Fisher. He made not a penny from his invention – but that’s how sometimes these things happen. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Esri as a private company is now encouraging universities around the world to develop ‘geodesign’ programs that are dependent on using Esri tools. Geodesign is data-mapping, but it extends well beyond cities to include natural regions, resources and realms like forests and lakes, and even to the scale of the whole ‘Digital Earth’. Initiatives like these will need to focus on data mapping to understand how 21st century cities actually work. This is integral to the vision of the Digital Earth movement now. Anyone with a serious scientific interest could refer to our ‘Digital City’ chapter in the new Springer open-access science anthology, Manual of Digital Earth . The Digital Earth movement really coalesced around Bucky’s 1928 diagram of the world, a fabulous image of the Earth pulsating with electronic waves. It presages a digital understanding of the world well before the first electronic computer was even a notion, well before the Enigma coding machine. We are all on Spaceship Earth together, needing incredibly powerful new tools and systems to help pilot our planet more safely."