the street as platform

I was recently asked to comment on ‘the street of the future’; a response for a quango (in Australia) responsible for the built environment and a government department responsible for transport, roads and so forth. Which means it’s really the street of the near-future.

It’s remarkable to consider how much data is around us, and is near-invisible to traditional urban planning perspectives. I suggest that this data beginning to profoundly affect the way the street feels. Some quick analysis follows the following narrative, raising a series of questions for governance, legislation and the public-private partnerships that also constitute the contemporary street.

Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9am taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture.

Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see?

We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic.  

This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

Such data emerges from the feet of three friends, grimly jogging past, whose Nike+ shoes track the frequency and duration of every step, comparing against pre-set targets for each individual runner. This is cross-referenced with playlist data emerging from their three iPods. Similar performance data is being captured in the engine control systems of a stationary BMW waiting at a traffic light, beaming information back to the BMW service centre associated with the car’s owner.

The traffic light system itself is capturing and collating data about traffic and pedestrian flow, based on real-time patterns surrounding the light, and conveying the state of congestion in the neighbourhood to the traffic planning authority for that region, which alters the lights’ behaviour accordingly. (That same traffic data is subsequently scraped by an information visualisation system that maps average travel times on to house price data, overlaid onto a collaboratively produced and open map of the city.)

Read the full article on city of sound.com