The Asynchronous City

The city is growing ever more sentient, snapping photos of our misbehavior at intersections and tracking our movement past banks and federal buildings. Our phones let us connect with that sensing data, pointing us to the nearest Thai restaurant and illuminating the freeways in rivers of red, yellow, or, on occasion, green. As we grow accustomed to the data-driven, real-time city, though, what do we lose? That question forms the foundation for LA-based designer and research Julian Bleecker and researcher Nicolas Nova's intriguing essay, "A Synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing," a Situated Technologies Pamphlet recently published by the Architectural League of New York. The essay asserts a provocation, namely to rethink the fetishization of the real-time data-enabled city in order to "stretch out the space of possibility and the space of possible imaginings." What does this mean? In short, the pair is less interested in how data delivered immediately and orchestrated bureaucratically in a top-down approach may "help" city-dwellers, and instead ponder the potential for more speculative and poetic layers of information, and for a notion of the city that's not static and fixed but rather in process. In the later part of the conversation, Bleecker describes a series of objects that were designed to provoke different ways of interacting with the city, moving beyond the expected and the screen-based. "We're in the realm of epistemological monkey-wrenching broadly conceived," he explains. "Creating objects that shift meanings and provide new, unexpected points of view. Or, they may just show you the obvious, but do so in a more legible way..." Check out the essay to read about these objects, and to get a glimpse of alternative ways of considering the sentient, asynchronous city.