A Modest Proposal...

A few years ago I made a series of hackmaps, using Google Earth to cobble together a few visualizations of alternate urban realities. I'd always planned to post some of the better ones to Where, and never got around to it. Recent events, however, made me think that there was one  in particular that was worth sharing.

The image above was created in the fall of 2008, right as the financial meltdown was getting white-hot. The idea that the wizards of Wall Street should share their posh financial district with a Rio-style favela seemed fitting, given the number of people who were suddenly finding themselves homeless. Luckily, there was a huge hole in the ground right next door.

The site may have been overly ambitious, but it's good to see that some people have been feeling the same way.

Exploring the City of Tomorrow

A hypothetical Aura Map of Istanbul's Golden Horn.

Google Transit wants your city to get on their bus. At the American Public Transportation Association's recent TransITech conference the web giant's mass trans-tracking maps app (say that five times fast) challenged every transit agency in attendance to upload their schedules and information to the site by Earth Day of 2008. If Google's effort at TransITech is successful, live, up-to-date GPS-powered transit tracking for every major city in the country (and beyond) could be a reality much sooner than one might imagine.

It's a bit freaky at first; there's a whiff of Big Brother, and a dash of 1984. But once the knee-jerk paranoia passes, the benefits begin to sink in. With live-feed transit information, Google Maps and Google Earth could eliminate the need for standing on a windy or snowy street corner for twenty minutes, waiting for a late bus. Outside it could be pouring rain, but you'd know exactly when to leave the house to catch your train. Even making connections could be more easily choreographed. Suddenly, one of mass transit's biggest drawbacks -- unreliability -- is eliminated. Overcrowding becomes less of a problem, and the whole system runs more smoothly. Everyone wins.

Online mapping technology has come a long way since the basic click-navigation maps of MapQuest hit the web back in the 1990s. Nowadays you can easily access street-level views, satellite images, and highly-detailed maps of buildings and amenities of dozens of cities. Certainly, this makes the prospect of taking an exploratory walk through a new part of town less daunting; you can preview your route, get a feel for landmarks, even decide where you want to stop for lunch. But there's still a dimension missing. Online maps are still very much stuck in the 3D-level, at least as far as the masses are concerned. We're still figuring out how to map the most important factor in cities: people. Not individuals (again with the creepy 1984ishness), but crowds, traffic patterns, and even emotions.

Think back, once again, to the SimCity game franchise. In later versions of the game, players could open up maps that charted everything from traffic to crime to the general happiness (aura) of the entire city. Live. Can you imagine the potential of people-mapping technology as a tool for planners and policy-makers?

A scenario: it's 8:00pm on a Friday in the year 2015, and you're looking for something to do. You grab your wi-fone and fire up the GoogleCity live maps app. There are three parties within a ten minute walk of your house being advertised on GoogleSocial (a convenient MeetUp/Bebo-powered mashup), a wifi-gallery showing one of your favorite artists from deviantArt four subway stops to the south, a restaurant opening on the corner where that hookah bar just closed last spring, and a band whose iSpace page you just subscribed to because you heard one of their songs on Pandora's new Loc:Audio channel. There's no excuse to be bored. And oh, look -- if you leave now, you can catch the next bus, but it'll be at least five minutes for a train. Perhaps tonight will be a concert night? The e-stars have aligned...

You're happy. You're entertained. You click a button on the screen that tells Google that someone on your block is in high spirits. The block's aura jumps up one point. At City Hall a few weeks later, the general happiness trend of your neighborhood is noticed to be on the rise. Civic officials study the area to learn why this spike in aura has been occurring, and use this people-powered live information to liven up some less brightly-colored spots on the map. Repeat this process with any resource, tangible or otherwise. The places that need something get it more quickly, and the decrease in wasted funds leaves more tax money to be distributed wherever it's most needed.

Now you, as a citizen, have every right to see this information if your elected officials are looking in. So the aura map overlay is available via GoogleSocial. You tap the screen, pull it up. There's a spike near your friend's apartment building downtown. What's the deal? Street fair. You are so there. You lift the phone to your ear, call the friend, and then check a transit map. You just missed the train, which means 10 minutes of waiting. But oh, there's a cab around the corner. You ping it with the push of a button, and you're on the road a few seconds later.

The next day, you're ready to go for a run. You check out air pollution and crowd overlays. The wind is blowing everything to the south today, so air quality will be best on the north side of town, which is good, because that's where you live. The big orange blob in the middle of the park closest to your house suggests some kind of festival is going on. Not wanting to deal with people-dodging, you check out the riverfront. Clear as crystal. And you're off!

The full potential of maps, in terms of improving the quality of life in cities, is just beginning to be realized. Soon, maps won't just tell you where movie theaters are; they'll tell you which ones are less likely to be crowded, dirty, or noisy. Get ready for the cartographolution.

Links:
Get Your City On Google Transit (WorldChanging)

How Google Earth Ate Our Town (Time)

WEEKEND READING: April 14-20, 2007

First item on today's Weekend Reading: I can be kind of absentminded sometimes. For example: forgetting that yesterday was Friday. There I sat in a wifi cafe in the Loop, waiting for friends, and trying to figure out what to blog about. Weekend Reading never even crossed my mind. Like I said: absentminded. So anyway, my apologies for the delay. And now:

Google Earth has added what they're calling a "Global Awareness Layer" that incudes features like An Atlas of Our Changing World (check out the Las Vegas overlays!) and the well-publicized interactive history of the Conflict in Darfur. This is a great example of how electronic mapping technology can be used to educate people about conflicts going on around the world--or in their own communities. Neighborhood action maps could be used to indicate dangerous areas in need of increased police presence, damaged or deteriorating infrastructure, empty lots and other community problems. This is considerably more small-scale than the Darfur map, but just consider the possibilities that tech like this has for empowering individual citizens. If you don't already have it, you can download Google Earth, free, HERE.

Speaking of Earth, tomorrow is Earth Day. Yay, Earth. (Image from www.msss.com)

And here's a link to a Wikipedia article about the "Triple bottom line" business philosophy. Sounds like a great way to incorporate the ideas of the market economy and the humane metropolis.

BLDGBLOG is, of course, one of the most delightfully cerebral blogs on the web. This week saw one of my favorite posts yet; focusing on an old interview with Paul Virilio, it draws a subtle parallel between Europe's post-WWII lanscape of fear and today's. The post is accompanied by haunting images of crumbling bunkers and, just in case you're not interested yet, includes this line: "War, in Virilio's formulation, was thus a kind of terrestrial reorganization – a reshaping of the Earth's surface; it was, among other things, landscape architecture pursued by other means." That's good stuff.

Brand Avenue featured a rather lovely essay on architectural context in the urban environment, using a striking City Hall extention in Cork as a sort of case study for how to properly insert modern architecture into an area not rich in the style.

I love benches. Theirs is probably the most egregious absence in American cityscapes. No matter where you go, there's nowhere to sit and relax or people watch...hell, most bus stops in the cities I've visited are bench-free. Here in Chicago, L platforms with more than one or two benches are a rarity. This article from Treehugger brings to our attention "guerilla benchers" in London, who do...well, after the intro there, probably exactly what you think they do. Now if we could just get those guys to start doing "installations" across the pond...

Everyone's favorite random links blog, Growabrain, features a post today entitled Architects in film. There are plenty of architecture/planning-related links to help you justify taking a lazy afternoon, including Mark Luthringer’s fascinating Ridgemont Typologies e-xhibit.

And finally, a short'n'sweet op-ed from the International Herald-Tribune about the important role that cities will be playing in the coming push to create a sustainable global community. Check that out here.