Responsive Cities

Ben Cerveny from Stamen on how urban scale computational infrastructure could transform everyday life in the city. The city, as a social environment, is a medium of collaborative performance through which the individual writes desire with the 'handles' of mobile, ubiquitous computing. One important point he raises towards the end is the convergence of 'code' and 'law' in the provisioning of services in public space. Provisioning is scarier than surveillance. It is one thing to have a law against playing your boombox in the park after curfew -- a 'soft law' that can be broken despite the surveillance technology to dissuade one from doing so -- and 'hard code' that, for example, would give permissions to technological services to only certain individuals at certain times.