WNYC Cityscapes: Ubiquitous Computing

"What's next?" is the question in the air tomorrow, when architect Liz Diller takes the stage at the new Greene Space on the Brian Lehrer show for the conclusion of Cityscapes, our month-long look at a city on pause. What city will emerge when the fallow construction pits again sprout concrete, steel and glass? Will the architecture of this last boom seem extravagant in comparison? Will the parks be privately run? Will the buildings be shorter? (We know they can't get any glassier.) One coming change in the cityscape that I'm expecting will be subtle, but pervasive: technology folks call it "ubiquitous computing." The city will be alive with information, even more so than it is now. Every object—street signs, food carts, trains and busses, and especially people—will be digitally connected into an "internet of things." It sounds Buck Rogers but in many ways it's here already: Metrocards are connected to bank accounts, cell phones know where you are (and what's nearby), signs on some subway platforms know when the next train is due to arrive. The things in the city that used to be dumb and physical are becoming smart and digital. Shake Shack—the great burger stand in Madison Square Park with the endless lines—has a webcam and a Twitter feed, so you can check the queue before heading there for lunch. Lower Manhattan is enveloped by a so-called "ring of steel"—a combination of surveillance cameras, license plate readers, and biological and nuclear detectors meant to protect the city from a terrorist attack. Information gathered by the high-tech system is kept on file for up to five years—to the chagrin of the New York Civil Liberties Union. This is a public space issue. Ubiquitous computing has been seen as the realm of gadget makers and digital privacy activists. But recently, architects and urbanists—people who traditionally think about the physical world, not the digital one—have recognized that it belongs to them as well. As the lines blur the traditional arguments over free speech, privacy, advertising, commerce and public space are popping up in new forms and in new places. This fall the Architectural League of New York will mount an exhibition, "Toward the Sentient City," that looks at the coming role of pervasive technology in the cityscape. The goal isn't gee-whiz, but to "imagine alternative trajectories" for how ubiquitous computing might affect the city and the way we live in it. It's a cautious and critical look that steps back from a hollow consumer-based vision of the city of the future. What strikes me is how much this adds an entirely new dimension to the way we've looked at and evaluated cities for the last 150 years—since Marx. The cityscape has been about aesthetics and economics. It's about climate change. Now it's about technology too.