"Yet there is possibility for more active conscious interventions too. To enable this, the informational city must be reconfigured with a series of seams, hooks, handles and portals. In the language of code, the city itself has APIs, through which information can be read and written, enabling a self-reflexivity that in turn enables the city to adapt, just as those early cities were able to through physical proximity. A panoply of varying smart meters, sensors, and schema are required to feed data to the model, and so the only possible technical architecture is an open one. This openness also provides safeguards against misuse, opportunities for creative hacking and enables a vast set of possible outputs. As openness informs the model, with more data-sources providing a richer model, the aggregate is open too, a web service that citizens can immerse themselves in just as much as city officials and planners. The model is something everyone can touch, as it is comprised of everyone. It encourages interaction, reflexivity and adaptation."
And he wonders:
Will architecture, property development and urban governance be able to deal with a system which indicates the pace the city is actually lived at, which indicates how designs are actually used and abused, which requires an ambient ongoing service design model?
How much more easily could these technologies he imagines be implemented in small places: cyber cafés, learning commons, libraries. These are places that are now immersed in technology and where the pace of unfolding technology technology use is a major challenge.
