Abstract
This chapter discusses the issue of approaching the design of the ubiquitous city as a matter of topology. The general context here is the design of contemporary global urbanity in the form of u-cities, smart cities, or intelligent cities emerging with the second phase of network societies that increasingly develop mixed reality environments with context-aware out-of-the-box computing as well as the sociocultural and experiential horizon of a virtually and physically mobile citizenry. Design here must meet an ongoing and exceedingly complex interactivity among environmental, technical, social, and personal multiplicities of urban nodes on the move. This chapter focuses on the design of a busy traffic intersection in the South Korean u-city Songdo. Hence, the discussion whether and how Songdo may be approached via design as topology primarily considers the situation, event, and experience in which multiplicities of environmental, technical, and human interactants tend toward gathering and dispersing in a single mixed reality street transport scenario. The need for “intelligent” ad hoc connection, routing, and disconnection of multitudes of humans, technical systems, and environmental entities makes this scenario one of the more crucial design test beds. This article offers a critically comparative discussion of a variety of ontological and epistemological approaches to design as topology, including realist, nominalist, and constructivist efforts in both cultural theory and technical studies. It is demonstrated that design as topology offers significant resources with respect to traits of the u-city such as continuous material and energetic flows, its environmental landscaping of mixed realities, its ongoing virtual and physical infrastructural developments, the folding and unfolding of its architecture, its nodal dynamics, and the relational mobilities at stake. However, this chapter also questions design as topology as an approach when it comes to decisive aspects of urban finitude: citizens’ lived experiences, concretization of urban information and communication technology ICT, and sustainability.
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- 1.
I am referring here broadly to the third wave of computing, after mainframes, after personal computing, and in tandem with the rise of mobile and social media technics. More specifically, I am indicating the developments in urban cultural contexts after Mark Weiser and his Xerox Parc colleagues’ early vision in the mid-1990s for a calm human-oriented computing, i.e., the developments during the last 20 years, notably in and around cities in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the USA, of ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, the Internet of Things, and Things That Think.
- 2.
My focus in this text on the design of lived urban cultural experience, technics, and the environment is, of course, a vast reduction of the complexity at stake in contemporary global urbanization processes and their ensuing functionalities and structures. Although this has its own merits and is also dictated by the brevity of an article or chapter, I would insert two remarks. (1) My indication of what a “smart” and “intelligent” city might mean here already deviates on purpose from most other definitions of these terms in existing research discourses, which are moreover usually left rather implicit. I am calling for cities smart and intelligent in their maintenance and development of the quality of the social and individual urban life forms and experiences of their inhabitants and visitors, in their maintenance and development of environmental sustainability, and in their maintenance and development of technics seeing to the membranes between these two and the transports through them in both directions. The complexity of this aside, this is already to signal a departure from the most common de facto approaches to “smartness” and “intelligence” which seem at one in deploying the currently most advanced information and communication technologies as infrastructural and infrafunctional determinants of a city formation, guided by a belief or assumption that this will drive economic growth. That technological determinism and overdetermination by quantifiable economic growth are also primary concerns in the development of Songdo, to the detriment of urban governance, urban culture, social and individual city life, and the environment, is made evident already in the first set of national and international research efforts in the area (Shin 2009; Kim and Kim 2012; Kim 2008). See also Germaine Halegoua’s interesting observation that national politics for this have all along been significantly guided by the idea of an urban design experiment generating an exemplary prototype of the u-city which would be native to South Korea, incorporate massive foreign investment, and then be a profitable export model later on (Halegoua 2011). Other critical discussions of the meaning of the “smart” and “intelligent” city, generally supporting my remarks, can be found in Allwinkle and Cruickshank (2011), Aurigi (2006), Böhlen and Frei (2010), Graham (2004) and Hollands (2008). (2) Perhaps one of the strongest and best arguments for pointing to the design of the u-city as a topological issue is to be found by the very noticing of these kinds of predominant reductions of urban complexity and the effects of tendentially privileged weightings of economics and technics. For this makes it clear that another kind of complex, holist, and continuist diagramming might be what is solicited.
- 3.
I am parenthesizing here the issue of the ontological and epistemological traits of “mixed reality” and “augmentation,” along with several existing notions of the human experience of these. I am adopting here shorthand versions of the recognized and widely used definitions from computer science and HCI supplied by Azuma, Milgram, and Kishino. I go into further detail with respect to competing notions in Ekman (2013), 13–18, 44–49. A post-phenomenological approach to embodied experience in and of mixed reality can be found in Hansen. The interested reader can find other treatments of mixed reality in the fields of architecture, design, and construction(e.g., Wang and Schnabel 2008) and in the field of augmented urban spaces (e.g., Aurigi and De Cindio 2008).
- 4.
For Stjernfelt, the diagram is a special icon, often governed doubly by a symbol, both by the type of rational relations used and by the empirical phenomenon referred to. For a more detailed account of such a diagrammatology, including reinterpretations of Husserlian and, notably, Peircean semiotics, I refer to Stjernfelt’s book, notably the introduction and chapters four through six.
- 5.
As Francis T. Marchese points out in his chapter in this volume, pervasive media technology may permit certain breaks with urban space conceived as a Euclidean grid or container. Urban space is perhaps rather to be considered a by-product of the relational dynamics proper to a multiplicity of contiguously overlapping spaces (physical, technologically augmented, communicational, social, and individual environments).
- 6.
- 7.
For an interesting effort to convey visualizations of such network complexity, see the many examples presented in Manuel Lima’s work in design and information visualization, e.g., http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/index.cfm?domain=Transportation%20Networks. See also his book on visual complexity (Lima 2011).
- 8.
Interestingly, addressing the question of the morphogenesis of the u-city as a mixed reality from a holist angle of approach will lead one to a diagramming of continuities across the existing major disciplinary borders separating the scales and speeds of urban planning, urban design, and architecture. This would be tantamount to a topologization of the u-city that would articulate as one process of deformation the slow speed and long time frame of change for the environment and the urban region (urban planning); the medium speed over more than a 5-year change rate for the city, its neighborhoods, and streets (urban design); and the faster pace and frequent minor changes within a few years supposed to characterize an urban place, an intersection or square, and buildings plus their interiors (architecture).
- 9.
Naturally, technical designs exist which will reduce this kind of problem significantly, although it tends not to disappear. A distributed reasoning engine ecosystem with some kind of peer-to-peer agent architecture will probably be capable of handling the problem via a divide and conquer strategy that reduces the inference times (Almeida and Lopez-de-Ipina 2012).
- 10.
For an interesting study of wirelessness along such lines, including a treatment of digital signal processing in wireless chips as a conjunctive envelope, see the recent work of Adrian MacKenzie (2011, 59–86).
- 11.
The last 15 years of technical urban developments along these lines are accompanied by both analogous and surprisingly different sociocultural developments of normative and qualitative approaches to living in cities that are their virtual and physical environmental connectivity in emergence. This is perhaps most easy to diagnose in terms of studies of cultural developments and the use of mobile and social media for urban world spacing as a media ecology, individual cocooning, and loosely aggregated social participation (hanging out, playing around, or flash mobs). For an initial set of interesting examples of such work, see Choi (2010), Goggin (2008), Ito et al. (2005), Ling (2008), Varnelis (2008) and Wajchman et al. (2008).
- 12.
For a good overview of topology control techniques developed, including homogeneous and nonhomogeneous (location based, direction based, neighbor based), see Santi (2005).
- 13.
Lyapunov optimization refers to the use of a Lyapunov function to optimally control a dynamical system. Lyapunov functions are used extensively in control theory to ensure different forms of system stability. The state of a system at a particular time is often described by a multidimensional vector. A Lyapunov function is a nonnegative scalar measure of this multidimensional state. Typically, the function is defined to grow large when the system moves toward undesirable states. System stability is achieved by taking control actions that make the Lyapunov function drift in the negative direction toward zero. Lyapunov drift is central to the study of optimal control in queuing networks. A typical goal is to stabilize all network queues while optimizing some performance objective, such as minimizing average energy or maximizing average throughput. Minimizing the drift of a quadratic Lyapunov function leads to the backpressure routing algorithm for network stability, also called the max-weight algorithm.
- 14.
As indicated in my reference above, I am arguing in favor of having design as topology also reconsidered via the thought of Gilbert Simondon which is perhaps still too little read in non-Francophile contexts. More specifically, this would think urban design as a matter of a relational ontogenesis that need not be Euclidean but may rather be a self-maintaining of topological conditions for an urban spacing that continuously relates a milieu of interiority to a milieu of exteriority. Insofar as the u-city is alive, its ongoing design can be said to maintain as technics of a membrane that is polarized and asymmetrical. Urban technics will let pass some kinds of bodies in centripetal or centrifugal directions, but it will oppose other kinds of bodies. This is the way in which the urban maintains itself topologically, always repolarizing itself asymmetrically via selectivity. It keeps an interior in relation to an exterior milieu by living at and on itself own limit of self-maintenance, more or less sustainable. The u-city of Songdo is one example of a highly complex urban organism with diverse levels of interiority and exteriority. The structuration of Songdo is not solely a matter of integration and differentiation, but rather also a prior dynamic topology: the continuous transductive instauration of numerous mediations of interiorities and exteriorities. See also Simondon’s remarks on information and ontogenesis in the second chapter of the second part of his book on physical and biological individuation (1964, 222–266).
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Ekman, U. (2015). Design as Topology: U-City. In: Marchese, F.T. (eds) Media Art and the Urban Environment. Future City, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15153-3_9
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