Sustainable Everyday

graphic data, or outputs from Geographical Information Systems (GIS). ‘With the Regionmaker, there is no limit to visualization. You can look at maps, study charts, access databases, export images, import video feeds from helicopters or satellites, connect to the internet, use CAD drawings, and so on.’ Maas hopes the Regionmaker will evolve as a tree-structure of sub-machines and routines. He has plans to add knowledge on the movement of people, goods and information. A housing sub-routine could develop scenarios for optimal housing design. A light calculator could optimise the need for and control of natural light in built spaces. A function mixer could propose optimal mixtures of activities according to economic, social or cultural criteria. Maas speculates that such systems could become decision support systems in a more pro-active and critical sense. ‘We could add an Evaluator or an Evolver that can suggest criticism of the input we make,’ he speculates.

The emergence of multi-centred cities will really accelerate as the effects of pervasive mobile communications, and in particular location-based services, make themselves felt. User-generated, location-specific events and services are already evident on the streets of cities like Seoul and Tokyo. The Economist described a Japanese restaurant review service that enables reviews, contributed by previous customers, to be called up on a mobile phone by somebody outside the restaurant who is wondering whether to eat there. ‘In effect, previous customers leave their comments floating in the air around the restaurant.’

Pervasive computing and location-based services undermine the need for services to be clustered in one place, as in big cities. As the writer Bruce Sterling observes, ‘if you know where a thing is, you do not need to own it, or keep it in your house’. Anthony Townsend, an urban planner at New York University, is among those who believe location-based services will be integrated with urban and city planning. This, he says, will confront designers with a complex task – ‘human-machine-environment interaction’ – but it may well be the design process that makes the post-spectacular city, the participatory city, the working city, a reality.