PARALLEL
CITY
THE AUGMENTED FLÂNEUR
THIRD YEAR HTS|NATHAN SU
THIRD YEAR HTS - NATHAN SU
Contemporary life sees us increasingly connected, with mobile devices, geocoded data, social networks, and online transactions creating physical environments that are more and more flexible, dynamic and customisable to user preferences and behaviours. A hidden digital infrastructure of site specific data is being embedded into our physical cities, bringing with it a host of risks and opportunities yet to be fully explored in architectural discourse. Furthermore, advances in technologies around Augmented Reality are likely to make expression of this largely unseen datascape an integral part of our built environment. This essay proposes these increasingly ubiquitous conditions need to be considered integral to the architectural design process and aims to introduce the notion of the networked individual, later defined as the 'Augmented Fl창neur', to architectural discourse. The argument will be made through six brief explorations. The first, Parallel City examines the current role of digital technologies in the urban environment, proposing that their global ubiquity is in many ways, prompting a considerable shift in the way meaning is generated and encoded into the 21st Century city. Augmented vs Virtual distinguishes the difference between the commonly associated terms 'Augmented Reality' and 'Virtual Reality', arguing that the two have fundamentally opposed agendas and implications regarding the production of space. Dystopic Visions investigates an archetypical narrative around Augmented Reality through Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash', highlighting a cultural suspicion and fearfulness around digitally generated realities. As a counter argument, Transhumanism draws on the work of Allenby and Sarewitz (2011), proposing that the augmentation of human capabilities through technologies is not unique to the digital age, and need not necessarily be considered 'unnatural'. Augmented Fl창neur then speculates on the role of the individual and his/her relationship with the city in the near future, before exploring the subsequent implications for the architectural profession in the final section - Potential.
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PARALLEL CITY The city of the 21st Century is changing at an unprecedented rate. New construction technologies are increasing the speed at which we can build, global urbanisation is pushing city bound populations through the roof and the emergence of world wide resource and labour markets are driving monumental flows of people, goods, and ideas through our cities. However, and perhaps more significantly, an invisible change is occurring also, faster, and with much more far reaching implications on contemporary, and future urban life. This is a change manifest in digital code, and networked data. Technologies like contactless payment, cloud computing, 4G mobile web access, geo-tagging, and GPS tracking are just some examples of our increasing dependence on digital networks of computation and memory. Increasingly, our interactions with the digitally coded world are becoming faster, smoother and more frequent, and conversely, these data are embedding themselves in the infrastructural functioning of our cities - determining traffic flows and timetables, recording social activites, and signposting events. With over sixty percent of Earth’s population now accessing the web via mobile phones, we are experiencing a “blending of content, code, and place” (Graham, Zook & Boulton, 2013, p.465). A Google search of ‘London’ reveals that the experience of the city is now embedded in millions of photos, tweets, online restaurant and theatre reviews, political analyses, open-source maps, business webpages and Facebook groups, LinkedIn networks and tourism deals. It is not these interactions and events themselves that are novel (cities have always been sites of intense social networking and information distribution), but rather that all of these happenings are now recorded, codified, and nearly instantly accessible to just about any of the city’s inhabitants. Furthermore, the creation of these data is now largely in the hands of the public. However, despite the ubiquity of code and the extent of its effects, the operation of digital information remains largely unseen - “it is precisely the invisibility of code and the ambivalence of its authorship that makes its deployment unnoticed” (Graham, Zook, & Boulton, 2013, p.467). The real-time, temporary nature of the virtual worlds also contributes to their lack of visual or felt form, they are “remade every time they are engaged with” (Kitchin & Dodge, 2007, p.335). Invisible as this parallel world is, it most certainly cannot be ignored. Businesses are quickly becoming aware of this, with product advertising becoming increasingly personalised and targeted, tapping into the vast depository of personal information on each of us that is social media. With these data infrastructures in place, it would seem that we are headed toward a future of increased surveillance, with ever faster computing allowing for hyper-personalisation of all the information we receive in everyday life. The true scale of this global digitilisation of society is revealed through inventions like ‘M-Pesa’ in Kenya, showing us that the parallel digital city is not confined to the ‘developed’ world. According to the World Bank, by 2012 Kenya had more mobile phone subscriptions than adults
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in the population, with over 80% of these mobile owners using ‘M-Pesa’ (Fengler, 2012). ‘M-Pesa’ is a mobile money initiative, started in Kenya in 2007, allowing for the deposit, withdrawal and transfer of cash independent of banks (Mas & Radcliffe, 2011). In fact, it is claimed that “60% of Kenyans living on less than $2.50 USD a day have mobile phones” (Gilpin, 2014). Surely this fundamental addition to the cities of tomorrow must have a significant impact on the practice of architecture in the future. Emerging from these complex virtual relationships is a new semiotics of space (defined now not only through physical form, but also through the interfaces we use to access it), and consequentially a new architectonic opportunity. And yet, the consideration of the digital environment has been somewhat slow to emerge as a prominent design agenda in contemporary architectural projects, with the majority of digital innovation in architectural practice being focussed on the material and formal opportunities offered by advanced computation (Schumacher, 2009). The idea that we might start to utilise the data rich virtual overlay on our cities itself as a material for architectural design through engagement with Augmented Reality technologies is still nascent and has not properly “been discussed in a sociological and architectural context” (Matsuda, 2010).
AUGMENTED vs VIRTUAL Augmented Reality (AR) has its origins in engineering; the term was coined in 1990 by Boeing researcher Thomas Candell who developed software allowing for the superimposition of digital schematics of aircraft cabling on real components during construction. Since then AR has primarily found applications in military, advertising, mapping, and gaming industries, and is commonly understood to refer to “a process combining or ‘augmenting’ video or photographic displays by overlaying the images with useful computer generated data” (Hosch, 2013). It is crucial to recognise the distinction between AR and VR (Virtual Reality), as they have fundamentally opposed implications on human engagement with space and the physical environment. VR was introduced in 1987 by Jaron Lanier, and can be defined as the simulation of a 3D environment, usually through the use of a wearable device that replaces a user’s visual field with a digital model (a contemporary example being the gaming interface ‘Oculus Rift’). In VR environments, the subject is removed from their physical geography through a process of reality replacement, and is inserted into an entirely different experiential world. In contrast, AR proposes and overlay, rather than a replacement to human experience. Additional data is added (usually visually) to our existing biological sense in real time, aiming to enhance connection to physical environments; this ambition can be seen in the range of proposed AR glasses such as ‘Google Glass’ and Meta’s ‘Space Glasses’.
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The potential of AR remains largely unexplored in architecture and even in the commercial context has faced much criticism and resistance. Excluding the exceptional applications of AR in advanced military systems (Livingston et al, 2011), speculation on AR applications in everyday life has remained predominantly rooted in the fiction of cyberpunks, gamers, and techno-utopists (and in occasional dystopic sci-fi films). One possible reason for this is proposed by Keiichi Matsuda, who asserts that AR and VR are not commonly understood to be separate fields and that VR has largely failed to live up to expectations as a viable or serious alternative to physically experienced life (2010). Since its inception, VR has provoked many negative responses and controversy, particularly through its often regarded ‘unnatural’ tendency to dislocate people from their ‘natural’ surroundings and encourage a model of human who is physically isolated and lives most of his/her life through a screen. AR has been, perhaps rather dangerously, associated with this negative image, especially given that AR’s ambitions are to promote more intensive engagement with physical reality rather than disengagement from it. Perhaps also contributing to a public ambivalence toward AR is the fact that AR technology has largely been rather cumbersome in its representation, with even the slimmest interfaces such as ‘Google Glass’ being rather obstructive, stigmatising and bulky headsets. However, with the near future prospect of near invisible AR interfaces such as the experimental ‘iOptik’ digital contact lenses (Nguyen, 2014), and even direct brain stimulation (Millns, 2014) being seriously investigated, it seems only a matter of time before the AR becomes part of the everyday.
DYSTOPIC VISIONS And yet, why is architecture so tentative to deal with AR technologies, and to consider their applications as serious design variables that need to be accounted for in the future planning and flexibility of our cities? After all, the notion of the combined digital and physical experience of space is not new to architecture. Over fifty years ago, thirty-two years before the invention of the World Wide Web, Iannis Xenakis and Le Corbusier were experimenting with projecting audio visual displays on built architecture, overlaying virtual and real space in the 1958 Philips Pavilion for the World’s Fair Expo in Brussels. Xenakis himself proposed the idea of the ‘Polytope’, a spatial experience that merged light, sound and architecture in real-time events, imagining a new architecture which is flexible and dynamic (Lovelace, 2010). However, since then it would seem we have made little progress. The technologies of AR currently seem to beapplied only to the simulation of our yet to be built projects - as demonstrated in a recent Augmented Reality collaboration between London tech firm Inition and Zaha Hadid architects, where a 3D printed exhibition model of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum was overlaid with visualisations describing the future building’s structure, internal programme and its potential effects on wind flow (Dezeen, 2013). 5
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Perhaps some of the reluctance to seriously investigate AR stems from its historic associations in literature with dystopic visions, particularly in the cyberpunk genre. Neal Stephenson describes the Metaverse in his 1992 Novel ‘Snow Crash’ as a digital universe, manifest as a network of virtual cities accessed through VR goggles by those who can afford the technology in a highly commercialised dystopian future. Granted his Metaverse is essentially a VR experience rather than an AR one, as he does not correlate the virtual cities of the Metaverse to physical geographies, but his representation of this future hybrid digital-physical world does offer some useful insights and predictions for today’s image of AR. Firstly, access to the Metaverse becomes a tool for the enactment of power through surveillance. Stephenson introduces an early idea of data-mining through the notion of a ‘stringer’, a person employed by the CIC (the Central Intelligence Corporation) to harvest useful data from the Metaverse (1992). The concept that digital data can be used to wield power over physical environments is of extreme relevance in today’s cities of social networking and geo-tagged information. Secondly, the Metaverse is conceived of as an intensely spatial environment - users walk around in simulated human bodies, inhabiting architectures quite similar to those experienced in real life. Here, the Web is inherently three dimensional, and location specific, similar to the geo-specific data of today’s internet. Thirdly, the completely interfaced human, the ‘gargoyle’ as termed by Stephenson, is regarded as a social outcast. In a grossly exaggerated version of today’s wearable headsets, the ‘gargoyle’ is instantly recognisable as being constantly online, and augmented in his surveillance capabilities. Carrying his computer around with him, literally strapped to his body, the ‘gargoyle’ becomes a cyberpunk archetype, the person who has traded in his humanity for augmented powers. Interestingly, the main character of the story ‘Hiro Protagonist’ becomes a ‘gargoyle’ himself - championing the idea of the hacker in a dark room as the stereotypical cyberpunk hero - an image that has now become one of distaste, especially among parents looking upon their video-game obsessed children. Since then, many iterations of the dystopic hyper-technological society have emerged in fiction, particularly memorably expressed in popular films such as ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Minority Report’, where systems of control, power and surveillance are taken to their darkest manifestations through society’s blind and total dependence on digital technologies.
TRANSHUMANISM But why have representations of technology been so overwhelmingly associated with the dire and the negative? It is perhaps easiest to understand and investigate this question through the lens
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of Transhumanism. Transhumanism, as defined by Humanity Plus (a worldwide organisation for Transhumanists) is “a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades [and] takes a multidisciplinary approach in analyzing the dynamic interplay between humanity and the acceleration of technology” (2014). Essentially, Transhumanism proposes that humanity is in a constant state of evolution, suggesting that what constitutes a human being is dynamic, and changes fundamentally as we supplement our abilities and capacities with technology. However, as Allenby and Sarewitz note, Transhumanism is hardly a new thing. The human being of today is as far removed from the renaissance citizen as he/she was from the hunter-gatherer of ten thousand years ago (2011). Our species is constantly modifying itself and its capabilities, through technology, clothing, vaccines, and our built environment. Compared to our ancestral counterparts, we (tend to) live longer, can communicate across vastly increased distances, and have (through the mobile internet) instantaneous access to a networked memory - that is, we no longer need to rely on our individual brain’s ability to store information to be able to access a record of history, literature, and scientific enquiry. Throughout human history, technology has played a crucial role in the evolution of human society and the individual. Major shifts in the logics of urban space have been associated with technological leaps such as the development of agriculture, the creation of writing, the industrialisation of production, the invention of the printing press, and now the global networking of information and communication. With each of these shifts a new set of urban complexities, ethical dilemmas, and individual routines has emerged; new scenarios which must be considered and assessed (both as risks and opportunities) by the architects and designers of today, who through the nature of their work hold a unique power to respond to futures not yet obtained.
AUGMENTED FLÂNEUR So what is this future augmented city likely to look like, and is there any use in trying to predict this at all? After all, architects’ speculations of the future have often tended to be rather limited in their predictive capabilities; from Ebenezer Howard’s ‘Garden City’ to Corbusier’s ‘Plan Voisin’, architecture’s future propositions have often been more useful as expressions of the ambitions of their era, rather than as genuine models for the future. Perhaps a better question to consider is this: how would an augmented city be experienced, and by whom? There is the opportunity for a more subtle and more flexible speculation, one that aims to elucidate the likely risks and opportunities of future cities rather than their form or expression. To begin to start raising questions on the implications of the augmented city, it may be useful to return to Baudelaire’s character of the ‘Flâneur' (1964). The ‘Flâneur’ was described as the archetypical connoisseur of the street in Baudelaire’s poetry; one who wandered the city simply to 7
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experience it. The concept was later adopted into scholarship by Walter Benjamin and subsequently became a tool used by later scholars and writers to describe urban space. Bejnamin’s ‘Flâneur’ was in a way an amateur detective - an investigator of the city (Benjamin, 1982). If we are to understand the nature of augmentation in urban environments, we can start by exploring the way in which they are accessed and experienced. The Augmented Flâneur can be thought of as a contemporary tourist, seeking to find their way in a novel city. Today’s ‘Flâneur’ has some crucial differences to Baudelaire’s. He/She has lost his/her anonymity - no longer just a passive observer of the city, the Augmented Flâneur has their preferences and identity integrated into the city fabric. The Augmented Flâneur has in their pocket (or potentially in the future in their eye) a device which mediates their experience of place on their behalf - it plans their routes, identities nearby friends, manages their transactions, and facilitates the perception of the city's invisible data infrastructure. By implication, the wandering of the Augmented Flâneur is customised to their preferences, and the expression of the city is responsive to their needs. Furthermore, the Augmented Flâneur has at their disposal the ability to create zones of private space around themselves; headphones deliver a private audio stream, whilst password protected networks on their portable online devices allow for the select sharing of content with specific individuals, even whilst in an entirely public setting. The potential for eye-wear to deliver unique visual stimuli further empowers individuals to set up sensory seclusion spaces around themselves. If we follow the notion that the city is defined through the Flâneur's experience of it, and add to this the notion that the Augmented Flâneur's experience is customised to themselves, the city that results is a deeply multiplicitous and dynamic place; for each individual, there is a tailored version of the city which is constantly being modified by their behaviours and preferences. The city then becomes a site of thousands of simultaneous digital representations and expressions, all supported by the city’s physical infrastructure. It is important to note that this does not imply that the physical city and its formal expression is superseded by the digital. On the contrary, the physical city needs to be specifically and carefully designed to support these augmentations, which rely on site specific characteristics and data to find their relevance. The physical city of the Augmented Flâneur is a place where space forms the infrastructure for architectural programming and reprogramming by its users, rather than defining rigid and permanent programmes through its formal qualities. The digital infrastructure for this new layer of urban experience is already well under construction, and the production of these hybridised spaces is underway. However, the creators of these new architectures are not architects - the Augmented Flâneur themselves construct these digital worlds, these parallel cities - with each tag, post and photograph adding to the urban environment’s digital form. Matsuda describes this new type of architecture as analogous to cloud computing, where augmentation to the physical city is processed and built locally, by individual users, with the built 8
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architecture acting as 'servers' that accommodate the basic shelter and amenity requirements of space (2010, pp. 34-35). This increased power individuals have to define their own spatial environments is perhaps the next step in the Transhuman trajectory. In the augmented city, space is designed to be constantly reappropriated. The occupation patterns of space become temporally flexible, and the city becomes a site where the distinction between settler and nomad is blurred (Mitchell, 2004). The implications of this are somewhat unsettling for the architectural profession. How will the augmented city be governed and legislated? Do these technologies of extremely personalised spatial ‘design’, or at the very least ‘reprogamming’ make the traditional role of the architect somewhat redundant? If the Flâneur is empowered to define the programme and expression their own spaces, what then is the role and the responsibility of the architect? Further to this, how can the practice and theories of architecture respond to this demand for temporally dynamic and re-programmable space, when the agenda of architecture has up to this point been primarily concerned with the creation of permanent and defined programmes? But amidst all this speculation, the architect's 'site' is already changing. As increasingly interdisciplinary design practice makes it difficult to draw distinctions between artists, programmers and architects, so to does the agenda of the architext need to expand beyond that of the built environment.
POTENTIAL The inclusion of Augmented Reality environments in our cities seems likely to suggest a wide range of risks and opportunities; for the urban environment itself, and for the architectural profession. In addition to the preceding analysis, there are a whole host of issues around the ownership, expression, security, privacy and ethics of augmented spaces. Though limited in scope, this essay aims to bring the notion of the Augmented Flâneur into architectural discourse, and raise the idea that there may soon be two realms of the city in which future architects might operate: the physical and the digital. We are at a point where AR technologies are still relatively nascent, yet certainly seem developed enough to likely be of significant influence in the future. Given the power of AR to bring the invisible, datascape, ‘parallel city’ to life, it is essential that it is included as a variable in the architectural design process - not just by those few pioneers like Matsuda, who hope to see AR technologies integrated with future architectures, but also by the broader architectural community. For better or worse, AR seems poised to be the next step on the Transhuman path, and we need to start talking about it, questioning it, and exploring it’s potential.
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REFERENCES Allenby, B & Sarewitz, D 2011, The Techno-Human Condition, MIT Press, Cambridge Baudelaire, C 1964, The painter of modern life, and other essays, translated by J Mayne, Phaidon, London Benjamin, W 1982, The Arcades Project, translated by R Tiedemann & H Schweppenhauser, Harvard University Press, USA Dezeen 2013, Inition develops “augmented 3D printing” for architects, Dezeen, available through <http://www.dezeen.com/2013/01/04/inition-develops-augmented-3d-printing-for-architects/>, accessed on 11 December 2014 Fengler, W 2012, How Kenya became a world leader for mobile money, The World Bank, available through <https://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/how-kenya-became-a-world-leader-for-mobilemoney>, accessed on 15 November 2014 Gilpin, L 2014, The world’s unlikely leader in mobile payments: Kenya, TechRepublic, available through <http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-worlds-unlikely-leader-in-mobile-paymentskenya/>, accessed on 15 November 2014 Graham, M, Zook, M & Boulton, A 2013, ‘Augmented reality in urban places: contested content and the duplicity of code’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers [e-journal], Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 464-479, available through WILEY, accessed on 8 November 2014 Hosch, W L 2013, Augmented Reality, Encyclopaedia Britannica, available through <http://www. britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1196641/augmented-reality/>, accessed on 15 November 2014 Humanity + 2014, Philosophy, available through <http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/ philosophy-2/>, accessed on 15 November 2014 Kitchin, R & Dodge, M 2007, ‘Rethinking maps’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 331-344, available through < http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/rethinking_ maps_paper_pageproofs.pdf>, accessed on 15 November 2014
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Livingston, M A, Rosenblum, L J, Brown, D G, Schmidt, G S, Julier, S J, Baillot, Y, Swan, J E, Ai, Z & Maassel, P 2011, Military Applications of Augmented Reality, available through <http://www. nrl.navy.mil/itd/imda/sites/www.nrl.navy.mil.itd.imda/files/pdfs/2011_Springer_MilitaryAR. pdf>, accessed on 16 November 2014 Lovelace, C 2010, ‘How do you draw a sound?’, In: I Xenakis, S E Kanach & C Lovelace, ed. 2010 Iannis Xenakis: composer, architect, visionary, Drawing Center, New York, pp. 35-85
Mas, I & Radcliffe, D 2011, ‘Mobile payments go viral M-Pesa in Kenya’, In: P Chuhan-Pole & M Angwafo, ed. 2011 Yes Africa Can, The World Bank, Washington D.C., pp. 353-369 Matsuda, K 2010, Domesti/city: the dislocated home in augmented space, Diploma thesis, Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), available through <http://www.keiichimatsuda.com/kmatsuda_ domesti-city.pdf>, accessed on 1 November 2014 Millns, A 2014, Augmented reality devices “in your eye” will change how we see the world, Dezeen and MINI Frontiers, available through <http://www.dezeen.com/2014/02/05/movie-andy-millnsinition-augmented-reality-devices-in-your-eye/>, accesed on 16 November 2014 Mitchell, W J 2004, Me++; The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, MIT Press, Cambridge Nguyen, T C 2014, Will These Augmented-Reality Contact Lenses Replace Your Smartphone?, Smithsonian.com, available through <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/will-theseaugmented-reality-contact-lenses-replace-your-smartphone-180949342/?no-ist>, accessed on 16 November 2014 Schumacher, P 2009, ‘Parametricism: A new global style for architecture and urban design’, Architectural Design [e-journal], Vol. 79, No. 4, pp. 14-23, available through WILEY, accessed on 15 November 2014 Stephenson, N 1992, Snow Crash, Bantam Books, New York
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