Yule Heibel's Library tagged open_source →  View Popular, Search in Google

More on urban planning and social media/ input by the people:
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The NYC Dept of Transportation continues to re-imagine traffic throughout the city; employing a system of bike paths, street closings and new traffic alignments to create public space and make traffic safer and more efficient. The task was to imagine the public spaces created by the new traffic alignments, and design a language of street furniture and planting that helped to define the space. Before beginning to develop our design principles, the design team first had to ask, what should a public place be?

The aim was to engage a wide audience in answering this question. Forty Dutch urban design students and their professors, landscape architect Erik de Jong and planner Arnold van der Valk, happened to be in town and were eager to discuss urban public space in the American context.

These young designers joined Balmori Associates staff and the client in a design discussion. The team also extended the conversation to a worldwide public through live video and twitter. The discussion touched on topics that including ecology, funding, furniture and materials, program, public/private, public amenities, scale, and circulation/traffic. In the Twitter forum, the discussion focused on sharable space, urban decorum, and contextual appropriateness. These topics helped us to develop our design principles.
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open_source placemaking streets reclaiming_streets urban_design urbanplanning balmori nyc

Lots of great ideas here:

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In its most naked form, 'open source' place-making is about taking a development site, establishing a very basic planning framework for it, triggering population of the site and then through its unfolding occupation form a forward plan for its development.

(...)

A second dimension to open source place-making is to innovate the management of a neighbourhood, prioritise opportunities for tenants to benefit from short leases, self-build and self-management of the way in which they relate to buildings; also support different terms of trade and promote internal markets in goods and services on a barter basis - perhaps even follow a model by which tenants provide services-in-kind to external grant funders of a site, in lieu of rent.

(...)

...be a talent scout, recruit and capitalise upon its momentum.

On one level, 'open source' place-making is asking the development sector to open its mind up to a different way of thinking about design and site assembly: what tech people call interaction design.

Start to see physical space as a form of sovereign real estate - much like a web page - who's personality unfolds through the involvement of users - and see activity on site as a sequence of what geeks call transient interrupts that develop, die or mutate in to profitable enterprises over time.

(...)

On another level, 'open source' place-making is a plea: to slim down bureaucracy, open up development to taking an equity stake in the customer and reflect the fact that in an internet economy, people are loyal to data and experience and 'modal switch' between platforms; what's more, maximise opportunities to win a return on investment in certain markets or market-makers: such as social enterprise, independent retail, consumers who live in online, as well as offline spaces, and those who want autonomy.

(...)

urban development has wound right down, with producers and consumers of land either deleveraging or starved of bank credit.

You don't need to be Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve t

open_source placemaking urban_design david_barrie innovation

Very interesting: Urban planning as not-planning, informed by social media...?

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The rise of social enterprise prioritises human relationships and transactions of social, not just commercial value, says Barrie. ‘It shifts the narrative of renewal from the provision of space to services, with sites acting as places that enable change, rather than dictate them via a masterplan.’ Social productivity, he concludes, presses for a new narrative in urban development. Historically, it has been social networks that have made places.

In online social networks, people have multiple independent groups of friends, often linked to family, shared experience and hobbies. Temporary ties are common-place. People rely upon the recommendation of friends to make decisions. Historically, these are drivers of human association with public space and it has been the physical public realm that has made a market in these relations.’

‘Increasingly, says Barrie, ‘minds copy the workings of the internet and flit sharply from one idea to another, addicted to the breadth of everything, rather than the depth of something This is at odds with one of the traditional functions of places and placemaking: to create fixed opportunities for human interactions and narrative. In this context, physical places start to look like either passing scenery or locations that host uses that enable people to fulfil a task.’

There is nothing new, he continues, about designing places that embrace the sociability and social value of business or human relations. ‘However, places that explicitly integrate the unfolding development of social ventures, or could be described as living rooms for a networked society, have been thin on the ground. 'no doubt because of the risks associated with social enterprise paying rent, the failure to find a profitable operating model for municipal wi-fi, the perception of social business as a means of addressing market failure, rather than creating wealth'.

Approaches to urban development that seek to trigger or build networks

placemaking rudi david_barrie urbanplanning urban_design socialmedia open_source

Virginia Heffernan makes a case for parallels between flight to suburbia (for "safety") and the contraction of the open web in favor of closed platforms. It's a short opinion piece, not a long article, but interesting (if you happen to be interested in cities *and* the web):
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People who find the Web distasteful — ugly, uncivilized — have nonetheless been forced to live there: it’s the place to go for jobs, resources, services, social life, the future. But now, with the purchase of an iPhone or an iPad, there’s a way out, an orderly suburb that lets you sample the Web’s opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff. This suburb is defined by apps from the glittering App Store: neat, cute homes far from the Web city center, out in pristine Applecrest Estates. In the migration of dissenters from the “open” Web to pricey and secluded apps, we’re witnessing urban decentralization, suburbanization and the online equivalent of white flight.

The parallels between what happened to cities like Chicago, Detroit and New York in the 20th century and what's happening on the Internet since the introduction of the App Store are striking.
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nyt virginia_heffernan cities urbanism web computing apps open_source

Excellent article by John Geraci on how/why "the long tail" analogy has to come alive in cities, and what it would mean.
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Most cities right now are models of closed, rigid systems, systems that rely on a few, top-performing agents to get civic tasks done and keep quality of life high for residents. Most of these agents are departments of the city itself, though some are outsourced. Either way, cities rely on one agent per issue, no more. (...)
...imagine instead a city that has totally open, unrestricted access to data (say, San Francisco or DC in 2011). What does it look like? It has all of the familiar city-run departments providing all of the services and assistance they've always provided - that's not going away. Then it also has public services offered by the mega companies, the Google Traffic, IBM's Smarter Cities, and so forth. Those are huge added value to these open cities - they're used by a large percentage of residents and make life in those cities better. But THEN, it also has an insane long tail of services set up and run by anyone with an interest in doing so, just by hooking into city data, distributing it in a new way, improving on it, mashing it up, giving it back to the city, etc. These services each individually get used by a small minority of people, but collectively they get used by more than any other single source in the city.
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It's interesting to think about the differences between Canada and the US here. In the US, all government data is owned by the people - governments can't keep it back. But in Canada, all government data is owned by the Crown. That means, Canadians have to first get someone in authority to grant them access to it and they have to get permission to use it. #fail #deadendfeudalism

john_geraci cities data open_source democracy long_tail o'reilly

Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Radar) ponders Adrian Holovaty's announcement that Everyblock will be opensource/ available. Some interesting comment responses.

everyblock local_news business_model open_source adrian_holovaty

Mark Gorton, software entrepreneur, turns to urban planning (transportation, specifically), using opensource to revolutionize planning.
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You might call it a "P2P-to-people" initiative -- these efforts to make cities more people-friendly are partly funded by people sharing files.

That's not the only connection between open-source software and Gorton's vision for livable cities. The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.

Gorton's open-source model would have a positive impact on urban planning by opening up the process to a wider audience, says Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an organization that deals with urban planning issues in the New York metropolitan area.

"99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym," Wright says. "Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards... [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field."
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Yes!

wired_magazine mark_gorton open_source local_government urbanplanning cities limewire transportation

Article about American Solutions, "a national grassroots group based in Washington, DC, that was founded by former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich but describes its Internet effort as nonpartisan, is preparing to launch a site that will, at first, allow people to enter basic contact information on all local officials. Then future users can enter their full nine-digit zip code to find the local officials who represent them."

wiki local_government open_source politics mit_techreview american_solutions

Must-see/ must-listen presentation at the City of Toronto 2.0 Web Summit, by Mark Surman on getting cities to think like the web: open, transparent, shared data, mashable, hackable, improve-able.
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three simple challenges to City Hall. They went something like this:

1. Open our data. transit. library catalogues. community centre schedules. maps. 311. expose it all so the people of Toronto can use it to make a better city. do it now.
2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city. somebody would have FixMyStreet.to up and running in a week if the Mayor promised to listen. encourage it.
3. Ask for help creating a city that thinks like the web. copy Washington, DC’s contest strategy. launch it at BarCamp.
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mark_surman web_2.0 commonspace cities open_source mozilla urbanism toronto

Great essay by Doc, asking if Linux, open source, the web -- all these things -- are infrastructure. "What is 'infrastructure' anyway?"

infrastructure commentary doc_searls linux open_source