Cities Are All About Difficulty

Adam Greenfield is an internationally-recognized writer, user experience consultant and critical futurist, who writes and thinks about information architectures and cities. He was happily living in New York with his wife, artist Nurri Kim, working on his new book about cities and information systems, until an unexpected invitation from Finland arrived. We caught up with Adam in mid-summer Helsinki, where the evening skies are mesmerising and all the shops are closed.

So, moving from New York to Helsinki!! That's a big step..

"Oddly enough, I've taken a job with Nokia - I am their new Head of Design Direction. Anyone who knows me, of course, knows that I've been having a ball these last few years writing and teaching and giving talks. I had virtually no intention of "getting a job" to begin with, and none whatsoever with an organization as large as Nokia.

Nevertheless, when an opportunity of this nature comes along, I think you'd have to be crazy not to at least check it out - it's something on the order of Kurt Vonnegut's proverbial dancing lessons from God."

How is Helsinki in August? What aspect of daily life so far has surprised you most?

"It's a fairly placid town to begin with, but Helsinki at the beginning of August is something like Paris at its end. Everyone is on vacation somewhere else - most likely up at the summer cottage. It makes for an interesting transition from Manhattan life, to say the least.

Nurri and I go for a walk every evening. The light takes on a particular quality just around dinnertime that's virtually impossible to put into words...it's just stunning. Rather makes up for the fact that literally everything - restaurants, galleries, all the interesting little design shops - seems to be closed".

Earlier this year, you decided to publish your new book yourself, and invited your readers to pre-order, 'The City is here for you to use'. So when can I expect my copy? How is the writing going?

"Rougher going than I'd thought! After Urban Computing and its Discontents, I'd figured it was going to be relatively straightforward to spend a few hundred pages describing the subtle but total change I see sweeping over the nature of metropolitan experience in the wake of networked informatics, but that has turned out not to be the case.

The hardest part is finding the right tone and voice: it's not a technical manual, it's not a work of High Theory, it's probably got more in common with the humanist urbanists of the nineteen sixties...but to be honest, it's hard to find the courage to write as purely and directly as Jane Jacobs ('‘Death and Life of Great American Cities") in the wake of Foucault and Deleuze and De Landa. I can feel myself finding the line now, but it's taken far longer than I would have liked - and especially so given what I owe those who have supported the project."

You will talk about our future cities at PICNIC. How do you think about the future? What do you think will change?

"You know, I believe that cities are all about difficulty. They're about waiting: for the bus, for the light to change, for your order of Chinese take-out to be ready. They're about frustration: about parking tickets, dogshit, potholes and noisy neighbors. They're about the unavoidable physical and psychic proximity of other human beings competing for the same limited pool of resources….the fear of crime, and its actuality. These challenges have conditioned the experience of place for as long as we've gathered together in settlements large and dense enough to be called cities.

And as it happens, with our networked, ambient, pervasive informatic technology, we now have (or think we have) the means to address some of these frustrations. In economic terms, these technologies both lower the information costs people face in trying to make the right decisions, and lower the opportunity cost of having made them.

So you don't head out to the bus stop until the bus stop tells you a bus is a minute away, and you don't walk down the street where more than some threshold number of muggings happen - in fact, by default it doesn't even show up on your maps - and you don't eat at the restaurant whose forty-eight recent health code violations cause its name to flash red in your address book. And all these decisions are made possible because networked informatics have effectively rendered the obscure and the hidden transparent to inquiry. And there's no doubt that life is thusly made just that little bit better.

But there's a cost - there's always a cost. Serendipity, solitude, anonymity, most of what we now recognize as the makings of urban savoir faire: it all goes by the wayside. And yes, we're richer and safer and maybe even happier with the advent of the services and systems I'm so interested in, but by the same token we're that much poorer for the loss of these intangibles. It's a complicated trade-off, and I believe in most places it's one we're making without really examining what's at stake".

Your wife Nurri is an artist. What books or writers or artists do you both admire?

"We're really fortunate in that we pretty closely share a sense of what makes something beautiful - I can generally be reasonably certain that if a car or a painting, a pair of shoes or an airport sign stops Nurri in her tracks I'll feel the same way about it, and vice versa.

We both like the artists On Kawara and Richard Serra. In design, Jasper Morrison; in architecture John Pawson. The filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien. And Nurri's grandfather, who's 89 and never, ever misses a day of practicing his calligraphy"

Adam Greenfield.is presenting in the PICNIC conference on 25 September in the afternoon. He blogs at Speedbird, lives the secret live of an international rock star at his protected Twitter account and shares his pictures at Flickr.