The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.
Blockquoting for GreatJustice this very simple and clear explanation of the Google/Verizon Net Neutrality proposal, and just what a turnabout for Google it is:
In 2006 Google produced the following public service announcement to help sway legislative opinion leading up to the vote on the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2007 (S.215). Senator Barack Obama was a cosponsor of this bill. The PSA aired in key districts for approximately one month leading up to the vote.
http://www.vimeo.com/14099243
Early this week Verizon and Google issued a joint statement to U.S. legislators titled “Verizon-Google Legislative Framework Proposal.” In this statement, Verizon-Google suggests exempting wireless broadband access from net neutrality. This was not an oversight. This is a departure from Google’s public stance and advocacy for net neutrality.
Increasingly, technology companies are shipping devices with access to wireless broadband networks pre-installed. It’s not just smart phones any more: laptops, tablets, gaming devices, entertainment systems, navigation tools, automobiles… And while the term “wireless broadband” has come to mean wireless phone services like 3G and 4G networks, the term also likely includes wireless city initiatives. So… what could have caused Google’s founders to abandon the principles of net neutrality just as the web begins entering its wireless era? Could it be that they have the opportunity to control and to profit from a web user’s wireless experience in a not so distant future when being “wired” will be like saying you use a rotary dial phone?
Keep reading on the Voogle Wireless site for ways to encourage Google to reconsider their proposal. Don’t be EVIL!
This is what Futurism looks like today; not rabid predictions of jetpacks and flying cars, but sane, measured statements that pick up recent trends and forecast their result.
In South America the slums are attached to the outskirts of mega-cities such as Caracas and Mexico City like wasps’ nests on a cliff face. In a hilly island city like Hong Kong, however, living space is limited. Here you only see the laboriously constructed huts made of corrugated iron and planks of wood in which the poorest of the poor live if you look upwards – they occupy, to put it in cynical terms, a penthouse location.
Some of these rooftop shacks, which in the year 2006 after the government’s first slum clearance programme still housed 3962 people in 1554 households, are up to three storeys high. Improvised structures made of ladders and bits of furniture create connections between the individual parts of the buildings and join these impoverished dwellings into complete rooftop settlements – sociologists even talk of a “self-organising niche architecture” and point to the utopian aspects of this urban way of life.
HP has just unveiled an incredibly ambitious project to create a “Central Nervous System for the Earth” (CeNSE) composed of billions of super sensitive, cheap, and tough sensors. The project involves distributing these sensors throughout the world and using them to gather data that could be used to detect everything from infrastructure collapse to environmental pollutants to climate change and impending earthquakes. From there, the “Internet of Things” and smarter cities are right around the corner.
HP is currently developing its first sensor to be deployed, which is an accelerometer 1,000 times more sensitive than those used in the Wii or the iPhone – it’s capable of detecting motion and vibrations as subtle as a heartbeat. The company also has plans to use nanomaterials to create chemical and biological sensors that are 100 million times more sensitive than current models. Their overall goal is to use advances in sensitivity and nanotech to shrink the size of these devices so that they are small enough to clip onto a mobile telephone.
Once HP has created an array of sensors, the next step is distributing them and making sense of all the data they generate. That’s no easy task, granted that a network of one million sensors running 24 hours a day would create 20 petabytes of data in just six months. HP is taking all that number crunching to task however, and will be harnessing its in-house networking expertise, consulting, and data storage technologies for the project.
no speed limits in Beleize City, so speed bumps are placed at strategic locations to help keep things under control. no word who they got to model for the sign.
From Inhabitat comes another dose of future-pr0n, a truly epic vertical farm project:
Urban Forest is a commercial high-rise building that takes the form of an urban mountain with over 70 floors, each one different and unique. Each floor is an abstract curved shape, layered slightly off-center to give the facade an organic look as it rises up into the sky. A central cylindrical core structure supports all the floors and hosts the mechanical systems and elevators.
Each floor is also covered in floor-to-ceiling glass windows, providing expansive views of the city. A walk-around balcony of differing widths hosts the green garden space, as well as pools, trees, and courtyards. Some floors are nothing but open space, while others contain offices or residential space. Each floor is seen as a separate and unique level of the urban forest and is meant to combine both nature and the urban metropolis.
Why do I keep blogging these crazy schemes? Because eventually one of them will succeed and I frankly can’t wait to go check out the one that does in person.
A giant “digital cloud” that would “float” above London’s skyline has been outlined by an international team of architects, artists and engineers.
The construction would include 120m- (400ft-) tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data.
The Cloud, as it is known, would also be used an observation deck and park.
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Its designers plan to raise the funds to build it by asking for micro-donations from millions of people.
“It’s really about people coming together to raise the Cloud,” Carlo Ratti, one of the architects behind the design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told BBC News.
“We can build our Cloud with £5m or £50m. The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached.”
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The different spheres would act as structural elements, habitable spaces, decoration and LCD screens on which data could be projected.
“We could provide a custom feed of… searches made by Londoners during the Olympics to give a real time ‘barometer’ of the city’s interests and mood,” said Google, one of the supporters of the project, which has also offered to provide the information feeds.
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The structure would also be used to harvest all the energy it produces according to Professor Ratti.
“It would be a zero power cloud,” he said.
As well as solar cells on the ground and inside some of the spheres, the lifts would use regenerative braking, similar to that in some hybrid cars.
That way, the designers say, potential energy from visitors to the top of the tower can be harnessed into useful electricity.
The 72-storey building in the London Bridge Quarter will contain premium office space, a world-class hotel, luxury residences, a spa, restaurants & cafes, retail space and a 15-storey public viewing gallery. On the ground level, public piazza, restaurants and cafes will be open to the public with places to rest and changing art installations. Access to public transportation via bus line, train and underground will be directly on site.
How very pretty and science-fictional is that cityscape? And for once this isn’t design-pr0n, they’ve actually started construction on it. Of course, whether they finish it is another thing entirely. Worst case, future-London gets a 72-storey squelette.
