A TO Z
THE UNSEEN CITY
U by Julian Tait
Urban Environment
The majority of people in the world live in an urban environment. According to the United Nations, this watershed was reached on 23 May 2007. Cities are seen as places of opportunity, from London’s streets paved with gold to New York’s ‘Big Apple’. They have a gravity that pulls in people, resources and land. Cities are places where disparate communities live cheek by jowl, where serendipity and spontaneity create potential for new direction and opportunity. This isn’t a flat landscape. Within the city many factors create inequality—whether it is access to services, jobs, transportation or even opportunity. Cities themselves are complex organisms composed of many layers that have, in most cases, evolved with the city. The physical manifestation of the city is that of roads and buildings, of built environment. It is tangible, concrete and visible. There are layers of processes, relationships and flows within the city, and what Matt Jones, Founder of Dopplr, described as the ‘immaterial’ layer. The immaterial layer is data. It tracks, evidences and actuates. Although a proportion of this data is in the domain of commercial organisations, much of it is created by the city as part of its normal function of service delivery. 105