Contemporary cities have been expanded by digital technologies. They have made it possible to occupy façades with screens and access information through apps, from traffic flow to maps of evictions resulting from public works. While throughout the 1990s experts discussed how to appropriate networks to make cities more interactive, today, as technology spreads, the focus is on how to use them to intervene in the everyday life of cities.
The discussion of “smart cities” thus gives way to citizenship, reinventing ways of occupying the streets and the very notions of urban politics. It is no longer simply about planning and regulating collective space, but about mobilizing people so that those rules are flexible enough to establish and reestablish common use according to the needs of the moment. A basic example: how do we make cars actually stop at red lights and pedestrians cross only at crosswalks? And a more complex question: how do we move from the idea of digital citizenship—which goes no further than using apps—to practices of networked citizenship grounded in collaborative action among everyone?
https://youtu.be/SB_0vRnkeOk
A Smart car project in Lisbon allowed members of the public to dance inside a booth and transmit their images to traffic lights in real time
Dancing streets
Crossing streets in major city centers has become a kind of pitched battle between humans and machines. This applies to the chaotic traffic of Brazilian metropolises, but also to several European capitals. Cars often fail to respect crosswalks, yet there is no denying that many people in a hurry risk running between cars. With this in mind, the Smart car brand sponsored a project that placed pedestrians at the center of traffic. It installed human-scale replicas of traffic lights and invited people to dance inside them. Their images were rendered as little silhouetted figures and appeared dancing on the signal in real time, replacing the traditional—and boring—stop symbols.
After a month-long trial in Lisbon late last year, the result was an 81% increase in the number of people stopping at red lights. There is no doubt that the project’s recipe for success rests on two pillars of information design: investment in user experience (UX) as a participatory experience, rather than one merely reacting to clicks, and exploration of the full potential of networked cities. After all, it is the fact that this urban equipment operates in networks that allows it to be interconnected in systems the population can appropriate in other ways.
Parasitic systems
Using the technological infrastructure already in place to create new sociomedia ecologies is what lies behind the idea of parasitism in the vocabulary of contemporary activism. It is not simply about hacking a system for one’s own cause, but infiltrating it to create shared platforms. In a nutshell, we are talking about moving from the celebration of DIY (Do It Yourself) individualism to the collectivism of DIWO (Do It With Others).
In practice, this appears in projects such as Bueiros Conectados by young São Paulo designer Andrei Speridião. They operate through a device—developed by Speridião—installed in storm drains and fed by information captured and transmitted by drain sensors (such as water levels). This parasitic device provides information for a mobile app. Anyone could thus access data generated by a drain and participate in managing the city by identifying its physical integrity and the level of its usable capacity. The app allows this information not only to be added to a collective map, but also to be transmitted immediately to the agency or institution where the drain is located and to the relevant local borough administration.
A winner at IDEABrasil 2014, an international award devoted to design excellence, Bueiros Conectados places its hopes in the potential of connections between objects and citizens, prioritizing collective mobilization for preventive decision-making. The project awaits partners for implementation.
Giselle Beiguelman
Article originally published in seLecT magazine, no. 23, April/May 2014.