The City of the Future

IT has “started to change the affective way we perceive the city,” argues Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. At PICNIC, he’ll discuss phenomena he calls the ‘Long Here’ and the ‘Big Now’. The first is the accumulation of digital information about how people have used a certain place; the second is the simultaneous availability of data on what people are doing at a given moment. These change our experience of the city, Greenfield argues, but at a price: serendipity and hard-won personal knowledge are being lost.

The PICNIC audience will receive a sneak preview of some uses of pervasive technology that could profoundly influence how we see tomorrow’s cities. For instance, the Sensible Future Foundation will launch a project that visually tracks the Amsterdam population’s movements using mobile phone data. Visible Amsterdam’s animated maps reveal densities and traffic flows but not individual comings and goings. A joint project of the foundation, VU and Salzburg universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Visible Amsterdam could help the city keep order, plan transport and regulate energy consumption. Commercial parties could use the data to price shop rents and billboard space.

Though the data on the maps is anonymous and aggregate, being based on phone-call records furnished by KPN Mobile, it’s bound to generate controversy. It’s “nonsense” that the confidentiality of such data can be guaranteed, argues Greenfield, also Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user-interface design. With such data being stored, the extent of our privacy is up to our governments and ISPs.

Perhaps more scarily, surveillance will soon be possible at the invisible level. Hewlett-Packard plans to market microscopic sensors to detect a host of things we can’t – certain molecules, tiny vibrations, particular sounds, moisture levels. HP will start field tests this year with an unnamed client, says Stan Williams, the head of HP’s Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory. He’ll discuss the project, called CeNSE, at PICNIC.

Initially, the sensors will predict system failures and improve production efficiency in industrial facilities, Williams says. By next year, though, they could be in phones, PDAs and game consoles – mostly to enable “biosignatures that your devices would use to know that you are you.” In a few years, grocery stores and shoppers might use them to detect pesticides and bacteria, governments to monitor the condition of steel bridges, and environmental groups to check pollution.

But what about more nefarious uses? Could people use the sensors to snoop? “There will be issues of privacy over their use that will require some careful thought,” Williams confirms. “One might be able to determine what someone else had for dinner the previous night.” Even now, airports have devices that detect chemical traces. “They will get smaller and more reliable and more stealthy with time,” says Williams.

To anyone worried about breathing or consuming nanoparticles, he points out that HP’s will be chemically locked into the products in tiny amounts. Even if someone managed to scrape them out, “it would take decades or longer to accumulate even a gram... This is frankly not something we worry about.” Nanoparticles have always been in our air and food. And in the environment, they clump into larger particles or become oxidized anyway. Still, says Williams, “we certainly need to be doing more research to catalogue what is in the environment already and the health and environmental impacts of anything we make, whether it is nano or not.”

Beyond that, he says, “people and their representatives need to understand at some basic level what the technology is, what it is capable of, and as important, what it is not capable of.” This, he says, is the job of schools as well as researchers and companies.

Not every form of technosaturation is so controversial. The second Connected Urban Development (CUD) conference, taking place on 23 and 24 September in Amsterdam, will feature the launch of the first Smart Work Center. A planned network of these sites around Amsterdam will provide former commuters with computers, connectivity, restaurants and child care, cutting car use and wasted time. CUD is a Cisco project that helps cities to reduce pollution and improve transportation using IT. In San Francisco, for instance, commuters get GPS-enabled bus information and see LED displays of emissions data. In some ways, the computerised city of the future could prove a friendlier place for us and the planet.