DATAAMSTERDAMURBAN LENSESTOM COATES

The lens that I'm looking through today is the lens of data, and through it I see at least two separate and distinct Amsterdams.

AMSTERDAMCIRCA 1900PUBLIC DOMAIN PHOTO

FROM WIKICOMMONS

There's the Amsterdam that we're sitting in at the moment - a physical Amsterdam of brick and concrete and glass - that in some ways hasn’t changed a lot since this picture was taken around a hundred years ago. Then there's another parallel version of Amsterdam - a model or map of Amsterdam - that exists online.

SECOND LIFEAMSTERDAM TOTALLY BIZARRE

STUFF THAT PEOPLE DO

This is Second Life’s version of Amsterdam and it is resolutely *not* what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is a Matrix-style alternate Amsterdam, created as a collage by the interplay of dozens of different datasets.

OPEN STREET MAPAMSTERDAM CREATIVE COMMONS

SHARE ALIKE LICENCE

This is one layer of it - the map - here created by thousands of people just like you, and available to everyone to use, from Open Street Map.

OPEN STREET MAPA YEAR OF EDITS VISUALISATION FROM ITOWORLD.COM

CREATIVE COMMONS

Open Street Map is an incredible project, which I imagine a large number of you are more than familiar with. This is a visualisation of all the edits on Open Street Map made in 2008 world wide - you can see great swathes of the world coming online.

MOVEMENTSAMSTERDAM REALTIME.WAAG.ORG

ESTER POLAK, JERONE KEE & THE AMSTERDAM CITY ARCHIVE WAAG SOCIETY

On top of data about the physical space itself, there’s the layer of transport and travel information - a much more dynamic dataset, representing movements around the city - both in terms of civic transport systems and new bottom-up ways of self-declaring your position.

MOVEMENTSAMSTERDAM REALTIME.WAAG.ORG

ESTER POLAK, JERONE KEE & THE AMSTERDAM CITY ARCHIVE WAAG SOCIETY

Among many things that I’ve been really impressed with since coming to Amsterdam has been these cards - printed cards, filled with RFID technology that you can see if you hold them up to the light. Printed bits of computing that allow trips to be collated and kept track of. I’ve not seen tickets like this anywhere else in the world yet - although I might not have been paying attention....

POWER CONSUMPTIONHOLLAND PHOTO BY MIRKO TOBIAS SCHAEFER

CREATIVE COMMONS

And of course, then there’s information about power consumption and stuff that we care a lot about at the moment because of global warming.

SOCIAL LAYERFOURSQUARE FOURSQUARE.COM

CHECK-INS

Then there’s the social layer - information about people moving around and sharing information with their friends.

PHOTOGRAPHSFLICKR FOURSQUARE.COM

CHECK-INS

And people collectively annotating space with photography etc. This is Flickr’s Amsterdam page, with hundreds of geolocated photos and images.

FLICKR SHAPEFILESEUROPE MADE BY AARON COPE

FLICKR / STAMEN

The Flickr guys have even processed their many hundreds of millions of geotagged photos to create even more interesting information - deriving shape files for almost every city, neighbourhood and administrative district in the world that create a sense of how people understand their world.

PRETTY MAPSAMSTERDAM MADE BY STAMEN

IN SAN FRANCISCO

http://prettymaps.stamen.com

This is Amsterdam in a related project called Pretty maps from Stamen in San Francisco, fusing together the Flickr Shape files with information from Open Street Map and Natural Earth. You can see that at prettymaps.stamen.com

I could go on and on, frankly - Wikipedia has nearly two hundred thousand geocoded articles about buildings, points of interest - Microsoft’s Photosynth project is collating photos and turning them back into 3D models of the world, Google takes in 3D versions of buildings assembled in Sketch up and integrates it into their maps services.

There are hundreds of millions of geocoded twitter messages creating another layer of information and annotation, capturing a sense of the opinions and interests of residents of Amsterdam in real-time. Weather Underground tracking the climate, datasets of wifi nodes revealing an invisible topography, Google Street-Map recording high streets and backstreets.

MAPTERRITORY

So there’s a huge amount of data out there creating this model Amsterdam, but honestly, compared to where we’re going, it’s still tiny. And the links between the version of Amsterdam that lives on the web and the physical environment are still fairly weak. They’re not responsive, they don’t impact on each other that much, they operate on different time registers.

The map and the terrain are still very much distinct.

The true potential of all of this stuff comes when the two merge into an indistinguishable whole, much like the representations of our relationships in social networks have gradually merged into being a core part of what it means to be a social individual - at least for great swathes of the Western population.

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My perspective on all of this is heavily influenced by my understanding of what’s going on at the web at the moment. A new network seems to be forming between the fibre network of the Internet and the network of links that connects individual web pages.

This is a network of interconnected data sources and services, a network that makes it possible for data from one place to be used in many others, for people to build new services using components of others. I really think this is a transformative change with implications that we haven’t even started to explore fully.

I BELIEVE THAT AT SOME POINT IN HUMAN HISTORY, IDEAS BEGAN TO MEET AND MATE, TO HAVE SEX WITH EACH OTHER...”

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MATT RIDLEYTHE RATIONAL OPTIMIST

This is a great quote in Matt Ridley’s new book ‘The Rational Optimist’, which is talking about cultural evolution and what makes it possible for us to make cameras and mobile phones where other animals cannot. He believes, as do I, that the networks that we build make it possible for physical goods, informational goods and data to recombine in interesting ways. He asks us to imagine the evolutionary possibilities that occur when ‘IDEAS HAVE SEX’.

THE NETWORKED CITYNY TIMELAPSE VIDEO BY TOM COATES

CREATIVE COMMONS

I want to take that a bit further. If we imagine a world where network connectivity is wide and cheap, where its components are tiny and easy to incorporate into things - much like the printed RFID card I showed you earlier - and we imagine objects in the real world writing to and reading off the network of connected data that we see behind the scenes, endless new possibilities for recombination emerge. So the question there, in a networked world is ...

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN BUILDINGS, ENVIRONMENTS, DATA, TRANSPORT AND IDEAS HAVE SEX?

And I’ll tell you what happens. Bloody awesome things happen. I’m not actually going to talk too much about those things, because I think that the other people will dig into more detail, but we’re obviously talking about systems that make urban living more efficient, that are designed to save money and energy consumption, we’re talking about optimisations to the way that the city helps support human and collaborative activity. But we’re also talking about buildings that react to the environment, to tides of information on the web, that can become surfaces for visualising data...

THE CLOUDLONDON OLYMPICS 2012 PROPOSED PROJECT

www.raisethecloud.org

This is one example, assembled by Arup. I know it’s one that Adam isn’t very keen on but unfortunately many of their projects in this area aren’t yet officially public and so I can’t talk about them. It’s a proposed project for the London 2012 Olympics - a huge, literal cloud of a building in the middle of London, filled with informatic visualisations of the games and the cities, where the outside of the building iself is also a form of display for people surrounding it. It’s a bit out there - it didn’t win the bid - but I think it’s fair to say we can see a whole range of cool shit happening in this kind of direction.

MAPTERRITORY

But going back to this idea of the Map and the Territory again for a moment, I wanted to talk finally about one of the big gaps that exists, and it’s about buildings and businesses.

OUDE KERKCONSECRATED 1306 PHOTO FROM WIKICOMMONS

CREATIVE COMMONS

This is the Oude Kerk - apologies for my pronunciation if it’s wildly off the mark - it was first consecrated in Amsterdam in 1306 1306. It has an extraordinary and rich history, and because it’s a famous building, we have quite good information about it over time. If you talk about the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, people know what you’re talking about. Online, you can find it in many databases and sets of information.

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THE MAP & THE TERRAINWE NEED IDENTIFIERS TO UNITE THEM

That’s unfortunately not true of most of the other buildings and businesses in Amsterdam. If we really want to make the map and the terrain come together effectively, we’re going to have to make the representation of all buildings much more ... forgive me ... concrete than it is at the moment.

And I believe that’s only possible by agreeing on a set of unique identifiers that the whole web agrees on when it’s talking about these kinds of spaces. At the moment, each service that currently exists uses separate information about buildings and businesses. I’m talking here about Wikipedia, Yelp, Foursquare, Yahoo’s Where on Earth IDs, Geonames, Gowalla - the whole lot.

Without some kind of standardisation body or foundation coining identifiers, we’ll never be able to bring together all the information that’s currently on the web for physical space, which means we simply can’t make the best use of the vast amounts of information that we have, let alone realise the full potential of the future.

#4But with that data, we can bring everything together - make each service interoperable, allow each to build on the strengths of each other. Obviously there will be substantial areas of substantial competition where people won’t want to work with each other, but on the whole the value that this dataset could bring to all would be far greater than any potential competitive loss.

And these identifiers would be perfect for attaching sensor information to, and power consumption and all that kind of awesome stuff, making it possible to aggregate that data upwards and get useful neighbourhood and city-level perspectives as well as hyper local comparisons.

More interestingly, with a unique universal identifier at the middle of everything, people could attach digital objects to their homes, Flickr photos, floor plans, memories, historical sensor data, stories of the experiences they had there. Each home, each office, each building could become self-historicising, connected and full of rich information. Every building could be the Oude Kerk...

SYMPATHETIC MAGICPRE-HISTORIC CAVE PAINTING PHOTO BY KLEARCHOS KAPOUTSIS

FORM THE MAGURA CAVE, BULGARIA

In studies of ancient religion and superstitious belief, there is this concept of ‘Sympathetic Magic’ - the idea that you can control or influence something by changing a representation of that thing. It’s a peculiar quick of human thinking that undlies ritual, cave paintings, even voodoo.

My aspiration is that we can take this quirk of our psychology and make it real in objects and the environment - permeating and filling the world. A model and a reality that are so heavily intertwined to be inseparable, the model backgrounding itself to become just another fact of our environment - a data landscape that we live within, can nuance, react to and control in a way indistinguishable from how we work with the physical environment. I think that’s a future that is gradually coming and which we can help collectively to create.

And that’s the lens through which I see Amsterdam...

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