Category Archives: City

Changing the Environment

June 6, 2014 shiptorch Leave a comment

The topic of the “smart city” is one that is cropping up over and over again in various streams and sources, as much a sign of the rapidly urbanising times as of how technology is striding ahead purposefully in the city, albeit in a much different way to development in the countryside.

An interesting and captivating article on the BBC News website from September 2013 is a typical example. It highlights the various ways in which residents of some of Brazil’s favelas use a combination of simple (kite) and new (smartphone and camera) technologies to map out and instigate change in their communities. Much of the new technology associated with smartphones in particular seems to fit snugly into the environments of these dense social worlds, and it would appear that the people living there are by themselves able to modify and improve their surroundings by simple means, rather than by edict from above.

Nevertheless, one interesting facet that appears time and time again is that at some stage, no matter how intricate the technology, there is always a human node, a gatekeeper perhaps, or at the very least a transition stage through which the information has to pass, and who consequently and inevitably has an impact on the form and shape of the data passing through. Information is selected, favoured, filtered as it flows: all these macroscopic changes that are seen at the end of the day come from microscopic inputs and manipulations along the way.

It is at this stage that once again technology intersects with psychology, economics, and geography, and is presumably the reason why even an identical technical solution in one location is bound to have a very different flavour when applied to another. Changes start at this microscopic level and then propagate outwards: after all, how can individuals change the flow of a city in a substantial way? By moving away from a roundabout, spreading news about congestion, proposing or crowdsourcing an easier route, anything that will change people’s behaviour might be said to influence the currents of a metropolis. By logging in at a specific place, a reference, a rapid dispersion of a key event, this might trigger further steps and stops down the line, if only enough connections are fired up.

In cancer there is talk of a microenvironment, and if you want to influence the tumor it is really necessary to focus on what goes on at the microenvironment level rather than just the systemic (with therapies to match). The interaction between individuals and the environment is not that different: there are systemic changes that will influence all city-dwellers (e.g., the weather: some more, some less), and then local/microenvironmental changes (street-related, drain-related, connections, internet, maintenance) that have an impact on groups, how individuals interact with groups, and consequently how localities shift. Most normally I suspect that this results in local oscillations, and minor changes in a specific locale do not have much of an impact on neighbouring areas, let alone spaces on the other side of a metropolis.

Sometimes, however, an idea might catch hold and spill over from one region to another. Again there is an analogy in the natural world: systems that change might reach a critical mass, a certain power and influence that by its very nature causes a shift away from equilibrium in spatially distant zones. And here again is the key influence of the human element: any geography story always contains elements that can be used in a human story, the psychogeography, trying to pinpoint and define specific focal points, corners, familiar pavements that serve as anchors for an individual. Unlike what is normally found in physical systems there are dotted lines between individuals, a certain tunnelling of ideas across social and spatial divides, that can distribute change in a multitude of often unexpected ways, and eventually takes over society like a slowly creeping bacterial colony across a petri dish.

City, Geography, Social

Immersion

May 1, 2014 shiptorch Leave a comment

Re-visiting a BBC Radio 4 – Start the Week podcast from late last year (28 October 2013) in the context of a story that is in a continual state of creation I was returned once more to the subject of the city, and how the individual interacts with the city.

Three main topics came up that are all inter-related and weave in and out of each other:

Seeing the city – Seeing the city when you visit, and when you live in it. You see the city at different levels, you see different layers: different distances, perhaps, as visitors often see the up-close, the grime, the quotidien, whereas locals overlook these, at a different height, blending out the noise (different signal-to-noise ratio).
Re-using old buildings, re-purposing: building life, or perception of people living in them? – Are old buildings worth saving? What constitutes the criteria for preserving something? Is it a feeling of an era, something representative, something that fits into a temporal environment? And so when moving out of this frame/window, what happens to the building? Does it become a museum, attracting visitors, or can the building be used again to attract people who will live in it (again, the immersion question)? And how is the feeling of the building perceived, depending on which it will be?
Patrimonie, not heritage nor nostalgia – A call to define something that is not heritage (i.e., needs to be preserved as is) or nostalgia (i.e., go back to how they were), but rather that the old becomes incorporated into a library of “things” which the people living through an era, and those coming directly afterwards (since the effect wears off over time), share and can at any time dig into to root themselves, ground themselves, and find a framework.

Overall, the sense is one of what happens when one immerses oneself consciously in a city, beginning to see things that one might not have seen before. Light, layers, a built-up history of settings, buildings, an urban environment in which one is both forever a (transient) visitor as well as a permanent resident, leaving behind a scent, a trail, a kernel of existence.

City, Geography, Social, Uncategorized

Community and geography

January 9, 2014 shiptorch Leave a comment

Inspired by a Start the Week podcast from December 2013, I made myself a note before Christmas to spend some time thinking about the lively discussion, which was loosely centered on the idea of an “old-fashioned” community based on geography, and whether this can really be re-created in the current modern world, with its variety of different connections and reasons for connections. As a counter-point, the idea was raised to what extent a community arises from the existence of a common purpose as opposed to simply a physical geography. This is probably especially interesting if the common purpose exists in the face of adversity, and raises a multitude of additional tangential questions:

How does one define a community?
Who defines a community? Those within it or those from without?
Do communities form in physical locales, or do individuals/groups move to a specific locale with the creation of a community in mind?

My particular interest, as might be expected, relates to the psychogeography aspect of this discussion. Psychogeography is also tied to community, but in two different ways. On the one hand, it is tied to community as most of the memories linked to its geography happen in the community, in a shared area that is familiar. On the other hand, however, one of the key points of psychogeography as it has been studied, described, and formulated was to move into the unfamiliar, explore the areas outside the community, or perhaps to better describe it: outside the known community. This generates in my mind an image not just of overlapping communities, but stacks of communities, where sub-groups exist within larger entities, and individuals are defined (and define themselves) as belonging to different circles based on their personality, belief, or other subjective or objective criteria.

An idea for a story that came to mind (related to the additional discourse on the disappearance of the traditional high street) was of a person walking down such a high street, with the narrative focussed on the sensory experience: sights, smells, the overall experience of what made the high street a special place and often a/the central location of a community.

Just in time to save me the effort, a recent Thinking Allowed podcast about the multicultural smells of an East End market in London brought this back again. This kind of sensory description can be used to link different cultures with different locations, different times, and the many layers and waves of immigration and assimilation into big urban centers such as London. And at the core are people such as “Ali the assimilationist hero” who by understanding his customers (from many different backgrounds) is able to stitch together a pathwork of sensory and cultural triggers that not only satisfy each customer individually but make up the rich tapestry of which each individual is a part.

City, Geography

“Farewell” to London (for now)

November 25, 2013 shiptorch Leave a comment

So this was my personal “farewell” to London. I’ve had ample time to reflect on this topic, as the streams of geography and psychogeography wash over me and I prepare to go to Merrimoles for what will probably be a last visit.

London, of course, isn’t going anywhere: but I am certainly not expecting to be here again anywhere near as often as is currently the case.

It is not going to be possible to see everything, say a personal goodbye to all the different corners and roundabouts that have marked the paths trodden during 18 years in and around London, but I will try to visit the nodes, those points where the energy and the intersection of energy lines flows strongest.

For my interest in cities and urban life London has always served as the epitome, the example I hold up against the light whenever I am contrasting any other town or city in its light (for better or for worse). It has shaped my feeling things as diverse as weather and culture: the ever-changing seasons, spring and autumn in London, music (Royal Festival Hall), art (Tate Modern), the breeze driving in from the sea (the Thames). In all these things and many more, London as a geographical entity was intimately involved: perhaps because of the people it draws in, its multicultural nature, its location and island home, or simply because all the things that interconnect within me are also somehow interconnected within this urban conglomeration of Londinium.

London is, moreover, a powerful magnet: for most of my 18 years in the UK I did not live in London, but at what might be called London’s periphery, assuming that the focus is all. The focus, of course, in many ways was the family home: and a big part of my farewell will necessarily revolve around the center as seen from the perspective of Gerrards Cross and the years spent there. Walks in Cliveden and Kew, sports both in GX and in the satellite competitor towns spread around South Bucks, visits to friends’ houses in Amersham, Beaconsfield, High Wycombe, Missenden, and frequent mixed-bag days in Eton and Windsor.

Because although London beckons, it is these outlying fields that I should spend contemplating, since they are the least likely places to see me again soon. London will remain London, much as a broom remains a broom, no matter how many times the handle and the head are exchanged. The river will still be there, as will the Tower and the Houses of Parliament, and visits to Great Britain will inevitably focus on the great city itself, rather than the Home Counties.

So these should be enjoyed and stored in the memories of departure: the difference between city and country is never much larger than traversing these 30 miles across the M25, and both have shaped me and my being in the most formative years of my life.

fertilising ideas