The Boston Society for Architects recently asked me to write a series of articles for them outlining strategies for “The Resourceful City” by reprogramming existing urban infrastructure to serve new urban functions. The four-part series runs this month, and the first two installments are up now.

The overall arc of the four parts is about urban resourcefulness and exploring alternative potentials for the city through the reuse and reprogramming of its existing buildings, objects and spaces instead of tearing things down and starting over again. As urban citizens, we are dealing with two realities. We have come to terms with the fact that our resources are finite, whether material, financial, or spatial. We also live in agile times – our cultural, economic and political relationships are in a constant state of flux, and often the physicality of our structures and cities are not able to respond to these shifting dynamics. Reprogramming the City introduces agile and malleable responses to a usually rigid urban environment. The existing city is the infrastructure we have inherited; it is our shared hardware. Strategies to reprogram what we already have is the software.

The four parts of the series are below:

+ The Resourceful City, Part 1: Reprogramming Buildings

+ The Resourceful City, Part 2: Reprogramming Space

+ The Resourceful City, Part 3: Reprogramming Infrastructure

+ The Resourceful City, Part 4: Reprogramming Possibilities

I hope you enjoy the series.

If you would like to keep track of my future articles or projects, please subscribe for RSS updates. Thank You.

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My starting point was something I’ve long been obsessed with – desire paths. Desire paths are the footpaths created by the public when the formal paved routes of a space don’t represent the most efficient, or desired, route between points A and B for the public, and they chose their own paths, their desired paths, as shown above. I wanted to find a way to capture the desired movement of people in a public space and use this incidental movement as a tool to enable a sense of contribution, connection and ownership between individuals and the shared spaces of the city.

Working with designer Jon Stam (centre, above) and programmer and Studio MSP guru Mattijs Kneppers (far left), we identified a space in the NDSM area of Amsterdam and set out to create a system to transform it into a platform for aesthetic narratives created by the movement of the public.

The beauty of only having a couple days to create a prototype for a project is that you instantly shift to hacking and rapid prototyping mode. So we grabbed a Kinect, some cables, a few blocks of Styrofoam, booked some time on a CNC machine, and went at it to communicate our idea. The full narrative outlining the concept and the playback system we devised for the space during night time follows. For those who want the quick walk-through of the concept, our summary presentation can be found at the bottom of this post; for an even quicker bite, here’s a video of us demoing it:

Concept Overview
We hacked the Kinect to serve as a prototype of a public camera overlooking the space, layering it with the ability to pick up a single object or colour on a visitor when they enter the space, and then remember that object and track it as it, and the person, moves through the space. If visitors to the space want to remain anonymous, they simply enter the space and walk through. If someone wants to take ownership of their movement in the space, they touch in at one of the check points with an RFID tag on their key fob, and they are given a unique colour path, which which they can draw something in the space, and then download an image of what they’ve drawn with their movement if they wish.

As the visitor walks across the space, his path leaves a trail in the grid of LED lights are embedded in the surface of the space. The next visitor to enter the space will see the trail left by the previous visitor, and other recent ones as the ghost of their travels are held by the LED lights in the pavement, each previous path fading slowly with time. The space holds a living history of its use throughout the day, and becomes a canvas for those who have ID’d themselves when they entered the space.

Night Time Use
The space holds the memory of its use at night. When dusk falls, a playback of the daily travels through the space begins, each path glowing and traffic patters growing as the timeline of the space’s use from the previous day is played back over night, as this video shows:

Through this playback of the day’s movement in the space, a relationship builds between those who use the space during the day and those who use it at night. The brightness and density of the light paths in the space at night will depend upon the traffic patterns in the space during the day – the more traffic during the day, the brighter the space will be at night. Ultimately, the normally ephemeral qualities of safety and security in the space at night become factors created and influenced by its use during the day.

For those who use the space both during the day and at night, the relationship between the two realities will form. Perhaps a few co-workers will be gathered to create some crazy shapes in the space during the day for them to enjoy as they come home that night. Or paths will be formed in circles to see if pedestrians at night will follow.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, every night, the design of the space will be different, directly correlating to the use of the space during the day, its animations, patterns and luminosity being the creation of those using the space 12 hours earlier.

Platform for Play
People are not the only thing able to be tracked in the space. Someone can place a ball on the square to be ID’d, and it will be tracked as well as it moves throughout the space. Children can enter from different entrances and invent a game where their movement become games pieces on a large urban board.

The space no longer becomes a passive area for its population, but an active participant in their daily lives, enabling creativity, connection, safety and narrative to be built during its daily use.

Platform for Data
In addition to the personal and narrative relationships enabled by use of the space, the space will generate data for use by the city. Data created by the space will be visual use patterns; data of the visual flow and use of the space.

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The classic newspaper vending boxes have always played role in the city larger than their designated one. At their peak, when each box was filled with that day’s issue, even the most hurried urban citizen running for the bus could get an analogue news feed of current events by scanning the headlines as they ran past. They were infomatic barometers of an area – you could tell a lot about the average population of an area by the number of financial newspaper boxes vs. daily tabloid boxes on a given street corner. For the enterprising street merchant, they were a quick entrepreneurial resource – for the investment of a few quarters, you could grab that day’s entire stack of papers and go around the corner to increase your investment ten-fold. Even before Craigslist the business model of the daily newspaper had its weaknesses.

When I was in Chicago a couple weeks ago to speak at the Future of the City Conference, I was waiting to cross the street when I found myself next to one of the last innovations these form of vending will see – the unified newspaper box. Saddened by the lack of papers still populating these boxes, I stole a quick glance of the headline of that day’s FT to get a bite of the news. “Bush seeks remaining $350bn of rescue fund” the headline told me, and I crossed the street. I chewed over the headline for a while – “Bush? In the news today?” I thought to myself. Then, thinking about the $350bn referenced, the only thought I had was maybe that was how he was funding his retirement. Nothing about this made sense, so I doubled back across the street, and looked again – the issue of the FT I was referencing was dated January 13, 2009. My instinctive bite of the daily headlines was drawing information from 2 and a half years earlier.

While it was unfortunate that another newspaper box had been abandoned, the interesting thing for me was that my perception of the information delivery vehicle, the newspaper box, was still wired to an outdated model. Now, I’m about as much of a RSS feed addict as it is possible to be, and no luddite by any definition, but in my rushed moment of stealing a glance of the news in the hustle of crossing a busy street, I was drawing on an almost subconscious wiring formed during my student days in Boston when this would be my quick news feed on my way to class. My relationship with the newspaper box had already been formed, but instead of having to re-learn a relationship with this object, the responsibility now seemed to “un-learn”, essentially to have no relationship with this function-less object. That’s a tough thing to do – to change an existing relationship with an element of the urban landscape not into a new one, but into a non relationship.

Back home in London, I was sitting outside at a cafe thinking about this when a uniquely London game of cat and mouse was unfolding in front of me that linked with my thoughts. A public maintenance worker had just finished cleaning out one of London’s iconic red phone booths, with a pile of garish escort cards being swept up into his cart before he walked around the corner to tackle the next booth. As the sounds of his wheels faded into the next street, a man stepped into the clean phone booth, took a stack of cards from his pocket and began pasting a new batch of escort cards throughout the booth.

With the near universal adoption of mobile phones and almost total abandonment of using public phones, particularly in London, this has become something of the default function of these public booths – a street-level adult services directory. There is a slight sophistication to this use of the dormant phone booths, as each booth displays cards from locally based escorts; in this way, each booth becomes something of a local directory of services, and provides a private booth from which to make a call on your mobile phone. While it is easy to dismiss or discard this notion of use of these phone booths, the booths retain an informational function within the urban landscape by hosting these cards. The cleaners, while respectfully doing their job and removing the cards, also remove the booths of their new function. Yet within minutes, the cards come back and the modified function returns.

We are at a fascinating moment in our physical relationship with the city. As our relationship to information, news and communication channels have become deeply individual in both use and access, the public icons and objects anchored to our streets and shared spaces remain as memorials to when these services were points in the urban landscape. At times, we are left with no choice but to try and train ourselves to un-learn our existing relationships with these objects, such as with the American newspaper boxes, or to accept the informal re-purposing of these objects in the case of the London phone booths.

The instinct of most cities is simply to remove these physical embodiments of past behaviors. I’d like to think in a different manner – to think of re-programming these analogue structures into serving new functions in the city. A re-programmed, re-purposed object still retains its link with its original use, and there is value in that. There is a balance between sentimentality and breaking the commonality of relationship that we had with our physical urban icons. When we remove these tributes to objects of common use, our notion of common relationships with our physical surroundings is removed slightly as well.

For some examples of re-use and re-purposing of newspaper boxes, phone booths and more, see The Urban Guide for Alternate Use. You can also keep up with updates to The Guide and this site by following @scottburnham on Twitter.

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I posted this a while ago on the Urban Guide for Alternate Use site, but the more I think about it, the more I love the concept, so thought I’d bring the idea over here. German artist and open source tech pioneer Aram Bartholl brings location-specific data to new levels with his Dead Drops project. Using a USB memory stick and the superfluous supply of pock-marked buildings in NYC, Aram set up an offline data sharing network in the city’s streets. As he explains on the Dead Drops website:

‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. USB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessible to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project.

While I try to get over my frustration that Aram didn’t tell me about this when I saw him recently in Berlin, here’s Aram giving a DIY lesson on how to transform buildings in your own city into Dead Drop data points:

Dead Drops ‘How to’ – NYC from aram bartholl on Vimeo.

You can check out his flickr gallery for more shots of him installing Dead Drops in New York, or go forth and install your own and register its location on the Dead Drops Database here.

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Moon Capital Winner: "LPS: 2069" by Bryna Andersen

SHIFTboston has run some fantastic design competitions lately (discloser – I have been on the jury for one of them). Their Moon Capital competition is their latest offering of “What If…” competitions, asking designers and architects to think outside the box planet to imagine future opportunities. As they summarise the competition:

When considering the future of design let’s start looking out into space. WHAT IF we could occupy the Moon only 100 years after our first visit there in July of 1969? Might the Moon become an independent, self-sustaining, and sovereign state? If so WHY NOT start designing for that new world NOW?

They have just announced the winners on their blog here. Some excellent imaginative ideas worth checking out. I particularly liked the tag line for their first call for ideas for creating future cities on the moon “let’s not screw it up this time”.

Finalist: "Lunar-Base" by G. Leech

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If there are two things I love, it’s serendipity and clever urban interventions. As I was working on my Urban Guide for Alternate Use today the two came together when Collective CC in Lisbon sent me some images of their latest intervention, Senioritas.

As most who live in or visit Lisbon and most southern European cities will know from experience, there exists an eagle-eyed population of women who spend their days keeping watch over the street outside their window, one phone call away from reporting any wayward activity to the police – in effect, functioning as an alternate version of CCTV in these neighbourhoods. So within Collective CC’s intervention – in addition to the clever re-contextualization of the role these women serve – is another great visual joke. The signs that Collective CC has secretively placed beneath these women’s windows is a perfect copy of the omnipresent Securitas security/CCTV company visual identity.

There’s nothing about this project that isn’t superb. Well done, guys, and thanks for sharing.

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Oscar Lhermitte working rooftop on his Big Dipper Project

One of the drawbacks of living in London (and most other major metropolises) is that the ambient light from the buildings, street lamps, etc, make it impossible to see the stars in the sky at night. So when designer Oscar Lhermitte applied to the London chapter of the Awesome Foundation, of which I am a proud trustee, with the proposal “to recreate the missing stars in London”, we knew we had something Awesome to consider.

Oscar’s The Big Dipper project is an ongoing project which uses a combination of balloons, LEDs, and various control mechanisms to recreate stars and constellations in the night time sky over London.

An Early Prototype of Big Dipper over London. Photo by Cormac McGloin

He presented his project at the Awesome Foundation London award ceremony earlier this month along with four other strong contenders, and at the end of the evening, walked away with the Awesome Fellowship to advance his work. If you were unable to make it to the awards, you can see his presentation here on slideshare, and view his video overview of the project below (see it on vimeo here), which features some touching commentary from people on the street who have watched his experiments:

For those of you in the UK, Awesome Foundation London is receiving submissions for our June 2010 funding award. Submissions close on 30 June, so please go here to submit your Awesome idea for funding consideration.

Congratulations to Oscar for an inspiring and Awesome idea. He’ll be back later this year to show us how the Awesome Fellowship advanced his work, so stay tuned.

Oscar Lhermitte with his Awesome Fellowship cheque

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Just back from a few days in Berlin, where, among many other things, I had a chance to get together with Aram Bartholl to talk about his SPEED SHOW project, a beautifully simple initiative to turn your local internet cafe into a digital art show.

As Aram describes in his SPEED SHOW manifest:

“Hit an Internet-cafe, rent all computers they have and run a show on them for one night. All art works of the participating artists need to be on-line (not necessarily public) and are shown in a typical browser with standard plug-ins. Performance and life pieces may also use pre-installed communication programs (instant messaging, VOIP, video chat etc). Custom software (except browser add-ons) or off-line files are not permitted. Any creative physical modification to Internet cafe itself is not allowed. The show is public and takes place during normal opening hours of the Internet cafe/shop. All visitors are welcome to join the opening, enjoy the art (and to check their email.)”

I love the simplicity and DIY nature of SPEED SHOW, done in five easy steps:

1. Find Internet Cafe. Rent time on all the computers for the evening.

2. Select work to show on standard browsers. Create gallery plan.

3. Invite people.

4. Enjoy the show.

5. Make Internet Cafe owners incredibly proud and happy.

For a full description of the project and more video and photos, visit the project site here.

Photos by Kuc, top video grab from Aram’s video on project site.

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When I was on the jury for the SHIFTboston design competition a few months ago, I was impressed by their desire to go after and embrace Big Ideas for the future of Boston. From contemplating transportation corridors for blimps and corresponding air ship terminals to floating extensions of the city, I came away from the experience wondering where they could possibly go from here. Well, now I know. Moon Capital is SHIFTboston’s latest competition, which humbly challenges:

“When considering the future of design let’s start looking out into space. WHAT IF we could occupy the Moon only 100 years after our first visit there in July of 1969? Might the Moon become an independent, self-sustaining, and sovereign state? If so WHY NOT start designing for that new world NOW?

SHIFTboston is calling on architects, space-architects, scientists, engineers, urban designers, landscape designers, industrial designers, fashion designers, artists and futurists to submit their most provocative ideas for the moon. Think: WHAT IF this could happen on the moon? SHIFTboston seeks to collect visions that will provoke thought on the moon as a new destination. We want radical ideas for new lunar elements such as rovers, growing pods, inflatable structures, droids and lunar habitats. How about a new moon culture? Envision: Fun on the moon – activities, moon fashion, and spacesuits! YOU TELL US. Competitors are encouraged to form teams in order to tackle multiple concepts.”

With some impressive momentum coming off of their last competition, they’ve assembled a stellar impressive cast of partners and jurors for the Moon Capital competition – visit the SHIFTboston competition website for more information.

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Several years ago I was the victim of a fairly vicious case of identity theft. Vicious may be a strong word to use in connection with identity theft, but I feel it fits here, as the perpetrator went the extra mile: as bizarre as it sounds, he legally changed his name to Scott Burnham, and then began to absorb my personal data and identity as his own.

If you think it’s difficult when someone gets ahold of your bank statement from your trash or copies your passport information at a hotel, try having someone claim to be you, armed with legal documents showing that, actually, he is you… but he’s not. It’s not a lot of fun.

I don’t talk about that experience much, but the steadily eroding data privacy policy of Facebook and my own brushes with it have brought identity issues – specifically the relationship between trust and identity – back to mind.

As online privacy issues appear in the news daily, it is becoming increasingly obvious that there is a huge opportunity for an online service which anchors our identities securely within a trusted framework. Facebook had that chance, but its callous drive towards the commercialisation of our personal information and identities quickly kicks the supports out from beneath an allusion of trust. In other words:

When hundreds of millions of people hand you their personal data, the business opportunity is to protect it, not pimp it.

The latest episode of the podcast This Week In Google nailed it when co-host Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine identified a fundamental problem when our identity becomes more of a commercial resource for another company than our own property. In order to maintain privacy over aspects of our identity we don’t want commercialised, we have to exclude or obfuscate our personal information, which in turn erodes the larger framework of our online identity, lowering trust and truth. As Jarvis says:

“The more our identity becomes Facebook’s property, the more we feel free to lie about it. The more that the canonical ‘me’ becomes my property, the more truthful I’m going to be about it. We have to own our own identities, and when we do, that will maintain the highest value possible … [the opportunity] starts with services that help you maintain your own identity. That give you control. The reality of where we are right now is that our identities are what you find online about us. So how can I manage that?”

The seasoned netizen will respond that there are an array of services out there that allow you to manage your online identity. There are, and I use most of them daily. But they are reactive by nature, with most offering you the chance to track what is being said about you elsewhere on web. We need more services to control what is, as Jarvis says, canonical information about ourselves, and what is not, without having to worry about how our identity is being monetised.

Google Profiles has a foot in the door there, but they’re not leveraging it actively, at least not yet. And while many give Google a higher trust index than other online services (due largely to their embrace of The Data Liberation Front and open standards), the recent uproar over Google Buzz privacy holes show just how fragile trust can be when dealing with our online identities.

Regardless of the media or the medium, one thing never changes: the killer app is always trust. It is only recently that we have had to debate the exchange of our trust and identity for the sake of connecting with other people, which is a perverse exchange. Identity should never be treated as a monetised platform, and trust is a commodity that holds limitless value. And there’s the window of opportunity.

For those who want to dig further into the issue, Jeff Jarvis goes deeper into some of these ideas on his blog here.

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