The New SUV: Semantic Urban Volcanoes

Ants and bees build amazing homes, but no creature can match the human obsession for augmenting living landscapes with built structures. And you haven’t seen anything yet.  Think about our deeper obsession with media.  What happens when we’re able to augment our built environments with media structures? Cities formed of bricks and glass are about to be reformed with media and meaning. Welcome to the semantic city.

The world is experiencing an interesting reversion of power from nation-states back to city-states.  While recent world is flat thinking focuses on the growth of a planet-state, the real phenomenon is that nation-states are diminishing with respect to both the planet-state and city-states, so that creative city-states are peaking strongly on a flattening landscape.  So yes, the world is already city-spiky.  And the spikes will get much sharper as mobile media begin to reinvent urban experience.  How and why?  Urban lifestyle potentials will expand enormously as the semantic web couples with ambient culture and built infrastructure. 

Imagine cities as social complexes emerging naturally from multiple layers of civic infrastructure.  A grid of roads carries people and goods.  A grid of pipes carries water.  Separate grids of wires carry power and communications.  A grid of schools serves education.  Within this decade our cities will be implementing a new layer of infrastructure – a context-aware, wireless, broadband network.  What will it carry and serve?  An obvious answer is “media”, but a more intuitive response might be “pulse”. The myriad contexts of the existing infrastructure and its occupants have never shared a live digital medium. It won’t be adrenaline-quick, but the effect will be like jumpstarting a cultural and operational heartbeat in our cities.

Where does the semantic web fit into this?  The original semantic web concept was that a machine-readable information environment would transform the value of the web.  Yet folksonomy sites like Flickr and Del.icio.us, which leverage added social-participation value, are among the first demonstrations of the semantic web promise. It is people, acting socially and working unconsciously with Internet machines, which create the value.  When considering cities the analogy is that most logistical planners believe that cities will become ‘intelligent’ when networks of embedded sensors can read and respond to what is happening, everywhere and all the time.  Yet it is certain that engaged citizens – two-legged sensors – will generate a streetwise folksonomy that will drive the richness and value of urban experience.  These two conjoined sensor networks – silicon and flesh - will act in unison, like the auricle and ventricle of a heart, to produce the pulse of the city.

So the most reasonable premise is that ordinary urbanites, casually tagging and annotating their daily experience, in all of the contexts of the city, will augment their built environments with media structures of enormous collective value.  Why will we do it?  For the same reason we paint our walls and tend our gardens - to create and transact social capital.  Like ant mounds and beehives, cities are highly evolved social structures.  Humans have resonated to our physical environment’s capacity to host social interactions within built structures.  We will resonate at least equally to it’s emerging capacity to host social interactions within media structures.

As semantic cities ‘turn on’ the value of living in our urban centres will grow dramatically, with that value concentrating at the core. Imagine that the effect of my participation in contextual mobile media is that my presence creates a beneficial social 'wake' as I move through a city.  Due to constructive interference with millions of other residents it is inevitable that the most valuable social, cultural and community 'surfing' will peak sharply toward the centre of my city.  Sharper spikes still.  What does this emerging dynamic imply for the relative quality of life and municipal economic models as I move away from the core and into suburbs and beyond?  An interesting question.

A comforting media trend is that global media don’t overwhelm local cultural identities, and may actually help to focus useful attention on them. Like people, no two cities are alike, and it is likely that semantic media development will serve as city personality amplifiers.  I don’t know all the factors that allowed the first Renaissance to occur, but I’m expecting that in any number of cities around the world we may soon have Renaissance 2.0 on our hands.

Switching metaphors yet again, the image in my mind as I’m writing this is residual from my geophysics background – I’m thinking of the Cascade Range volcanoes (Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Shasta, Mt. Rainier, etc.) of the Pacific Northwest.  These stratovolcanoes grow into perfect cone-shapes atop the flat terrain – like so many pimples on clear skin - due to hot magma pushing up from their cores.  Yet each of these beautiful mountains has developed its own unique personality and style for eruption. 

No, I won’t start talking about cultural magma, although it is an attractive metaphor. Perhaps cities and volcanoes aren’t alike, but it was the heat of volcanoes that breathed life into the world and I believe it will be the semantic heat of our cities that breathes life into the future of humanity.