cityofsound

Lyons House, Robin Boyd, Sydney

(An account of a house-visit to a modernist classic, with reflections on the importance of clients who know what they want, and can express it in terms that increasingly make sense 40 years later, and the results of a Melbourne architect working in Sydney.)

A couple of months ago, the Trimbles and I drove down to the south of Sydney to see the Lyons House. Designed by the great Robin Boyd in 1966, it's a wonderful house, and still inhabited by the original owner, Dr. Lyons, some 40 years on.

After Boyd died young, aged only 52 in 1971, Joseph Burke said he was "the artistic conscience of his country, in the future of which he believed passionately." That gives a sense of his importance as an architect - particularly in practice with Roy Grounds and Frederick Romberg - but also as an influential writer and critic (I’ve mentioned his influential ‘The Australian Ugliness’ before, but more influential were his weekly columns for The Age, work for the Small Homes Service and his book 'Australia's House'.) This, however, was the first Boyd house I'd experienced in the flesh.

The Lyons House is essentially unchanged, functioning beautifully and well-cared for. It’s a great example of a form of mid- to late-century modernism, and still stands out in its environment as brave, progressive and thoughtful architecture. The access was arranged by Nic Dowse, organiser of the Boyd Homes Group, and we joined a group of around 10-15 Boyd home owners (lucky devils), fans or folk otherwise interested in Boyd’s work or the architecture of that time. (I've put a full set of photos up on Flickr, though I have to say, it was a difficult building to capture.)

The sprightly Dr. Lyons described the house in intelligent detail, and in particular its commission and relationship with Boyd. This last aspect is particularly fascinating and Lyons himself indicated the value of a client who knew what he wanted in terms of function, and his good fortune in meeting a sympathetic architect at the top of his craft.

Music for 2007, 2008 and beyond

Given the gradual tendency of this journal towards almost solely focusing on architecture and urbanism - albeit in the broadest sense - I decided not to do an update on the previous year’s listening (for previous: see 2006, 2004, 2003, 2002). My Last FM profile shows what I’m listening to in startlingly forensic detail, either way - and currently mainly podcasts.

(Just briefly, ignoring Last FM’s statistical ‘truth’ - which might reflect listening habits but not feelings - the highlights from last year would be The Necks, Victrola Favorites, Oren Ambarchi, Mark Templeton, Saddleback, the Four Tet and Cristian Vogel remixes of Thom Yorke, OOIOO, Grinderman, Helios, The Whitest Boy Alive, Klimek, Stars of the Lid, and live, the Bang on a Can 24-hour marathon at the World Trade Center site, NYC, particularly their shimmering rendition of Music for Airports (listen here). Best online retail goes to Boomkat (umpteenth time) and best physical retail to the TITLE store in Sydney.)

But the most enjoyable, rewarding musical discovery and listening experience of this year and last year has been DJ Rupture’s show Mudd Up on the WFMU community radio station out of New York City. Rupture - aka Jace Clayton - spoke at Postopolis! and I’ve looked out for his work ever since. (He also blogs here.) And now his show is available via podcast I’ve been listening avidly.

While I have doubts about New York continuing into the 21st century as a genuine creative force, it’s a credit to the city that Rupture bases himself there. However, his work is more informed by time spent travelling through several so-called liminal zones - the immigrant-rich spaces of Barcelona and Brussels amongst others - where local culture is a complex hybridised cocido. Ingredients in such a stew might emerge from the music scenes of Osaka, Morocco or Mexico. Just listening to this show tells you as much about global urban centres, and their culture, as ploughing through hundreds of academic texts purporting to be about the same thing.

Flamenco hits thai hits grime hits hip-hop hits cumbia hits dubstep hits pop music from all over the Global South. Occasional guests might play tapes from Ghana or Hackney or both, or get interviewed about the state of the underground scene in Brooklyn or somesuch. Clayton doesn’t get in the way of the music at all, instead taking time to give full information on artists, tracks and labels. The overall effect is, as he puts it, “a shantytown unfolds in radiophonic space”. It’s bloody good.

Mudd Up! with DJ Rupture [WFMU]
Rupture's blog, Negrophonic

‘Place Makers’ and architectural scenes

Cities can sometimes get too large to have coherent music scenes, and thus they splinter, into Shinjuku, Lower East Side, West London, and so on. just as they can be too large to enable a novel format. So the city-wide scale of Our Mutual Friend becomes the focused suburban view of London Fields.

I find myself wondering whether cities have to be relatively large to enable an architectural scene. The physical infrastructure, higher unit costs and lack of pace endemic to building urban fabric require a little more scale than lighter, more fluid creative industries. A medium- to large-sized city is required, perhaps, to go beyond the influence of a single architect or practice.

The big three eastern Australian cities are certainly big enough to have claims over architectural scenes, though it’d take a braver person than I to offer a detailed demarcation of each. So what follows is a brief theory constructed to provoke and confuse, based on a reading of the city's scenes in which any contrary examples are ignored in order to make my point.

The Melbourne scene is clearly expressive, discursive, chock full of ideas, playful, bold, aware that the rich loam that is the city’s uniquely rich discourse in architecture and design offers up opportunities for experimentation. And thus firms like ARM, DCM, Wood Marsh, Paul Morgan Architects, John Wardle Architects, BKK, Crowd, Andrew Maynard etc. (It’s where FAT would be based, were they Aussie.) Derived from the intellectual platform of Gromboyd rather than their formal approach.

Sydney famously specialises in a regional modernism or organic modernism, derived from the Sydney School (aka ‘nuts and berries’ school. 50/60/70 has more on that.) Thus JPW, Hill Thalis, Stutchbury & Pape, Alex Popov. Cox and Seidler to some extent. The sails of the Opera House and lightness of touch of Glenn Murcutt above all.

But Brisbane has been the story of the last few years in Australian architecture, as noted here before. The freedom afforded by the sub-tropical climate and the rich vernacular of the ‘timber and tin’ tradition combine with a newly found economic and cultural confidence, to enable a scene which plucks what it likes from both the aforementioned traditions and fashions something new. This confidence is manifest in a forthcoming exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art this August to November. It'll necessitate another trip - at least the fourth this year. Oh for a high-speed rail link - but I'm already excited about it.

The exhibition is dubbed ‘Place Makers’, hinting both at the wider remit of good architects and their contribution to the new Queensland. Apparently, it’ll be the largest exhibition of contemporary architecture ever staged in an Australian art museum, so it’ll be fascinating to see how they present the work, as place-making doesn’t necessarily lend itself to models and drawings, as beguiling and useful as they might be.

The place making practices featured are:

Rex Addison / Andresen O’Gorman / Arkhefield / Bark / Bligh Voller Nield / Bud Brannigan Architects / Lindsay & Kerry Clare (Architectus) / Cox Rayner / Donovan Hill / Elizabeth Watson Brown Architects / Ian Moore Architects / James Russell / JMA Architects QLD / m3architecture / Owen & Vokes / Phorm Architecture + Design / Gabriel Poole / Richard Kirk / Riddel Architecture / Steendÿk / Jennifer Taylor & james Connor / Wilson Architects

Some spiel from the exhibition website:

“‘Place Makers’ presents architectural projects that successfully address key aspects of subtropical living, as well as urban renewal and density, and the timeless concerns for basic human needs and wellbeing.

The exhibition reveals the extraordinary diversity of residential work being produced in Queensland, and includes internationally recognised commissions for individual houses, modest suburban ‘infill’ designs, an isolated dwelling in regional Queensland, innovative new public housing, and an exemplary coastal high-rise.

‘Place Makers’ contextualises some of the state’s most exciting recent architecture, and profiles the capabilities and inventiveness of Queensland architects today.”

Place Makers: 2 August-23 November 2008 [Queensland Art Galleries | Gallery of Modern Art]

(Apologies for collating all these woeful websites of the firms featured. What is it with architects and the web?! Any claims that architecture makes in terms of its fitness and facility for digital spatial organisation in general must be resisted until a little progress is made in this most basic of areas. DCM's site is retrievable, maybe one other.)

“I come from Brisbane, I’m quite plain”* Cities have music scenes and that’s why ICT doesn't enable decentralisation

A while ago, I contributed two ABC Radio National shows to Speechification: documentaries on two Australian cities with two distinct and rich musical histories: Melbourne and Brisbane.

In terms of the genuine 'musical scene', Brisbane emerges with one of the richest scenes in the history of Australian cities - a fierce counterpoint to the “boot stamping on a human face forever” school of governance then in play in 1970s Queensland. The Melbourne scene, as recorded in the documentary, is more focused on a particular time and place. Very particular.

The 'scene' is distinct from the city's musical history, which has a longer term arc of course, or the idea of conjuring a city through music, Metropolis Shanghai and Chavez Ravine for example. Or one band's work in and about particular cities, as with this fantastic rendition of the work of Canberra-and-then-Sydney post-punk outfit, Tactics, for example.

No, the scene is usually a relatively short-lived concentration of artistic activity, but one that kick-starts or exemplifies some wider creative, and usually economic, actvity. Over the years it becomes subject to furious debate and wild claims but there's something there and something powerful, no matter how intangible.

Richard Florida, and others many others before him, noted the importance of music scenes in cities, despite his focus being too limited by genre and US-focused at that. Florida calls it the ‘audio identity’ of the city, which doesn't feel quite right given the transient nature of most scenes. Audio identities, perhaps, as cities can lead multiple lives here. ('Madchester' is long gone, for instance, though it was a sort of identity at the time, or just after the time. It can co-exist with the city getting a new centre for classical music around the same time, all arguably stemming from cultural patterns discernible from the mid-19thC onwards.)

But Florida gets the gist nonetheless. In an article back in January 2008 (in the Globe and Mail, and on the back of him observing the healthy music scenes in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver) Florida discerns the overwhelmingly metropolitan nature of music, seeing them as classic examples of what Michael Porter would call 'local clusters in a global economy'.

“Music scenes provide a useful lens through which to better understand why innovation and economic activity continue to cluster in today's global economy. Their clustering is puzzling because music-making requires little, if anything, in the way of physical input (such as iron ore or coal) to succeed, and they don't generate economies of scale. Because musical and artistic endeavours require little more than small groups to make their final products, you would think that musicians should be able to live anywhere they want. Music scenes have every reason to "fly apart" and spread our geographically, especially in this age of the Internet and social media. But they don't. Instead, they concentrate and cluster in specific cities and regions.”

To me, having grown up in scene-rich Sheffield and Manchester, this is all rather obvious. (I was also influenced by doing my MA in Manchester studying creative industries and the city, where my colleagues Adam Brown and Justin O’Connor were more actively researching the music industry and the city specifically, from the early ‘90s onwards.) In those ABC RN documentaries Brisbane and Melbourne have distinct 'audio identities' on display - identities which appear to have little in common with the large, successful cities we see today, but in fact were important formative influences on both. There are numerous other examples of transformative scenes from the last few hundred years.

Charlie Gillett once listed these, for example:

1. San Francisco, 1966-68 (Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Steve Miller, Bill Graham's Fillmore, Tom Donahue's 'free form radio,' Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone magazine)
2. New Orleans, 1900-1910 (Jazz)
3. Paris, 1987-2004 (Les Negresses Vertes, Mano Negra.)
4. Liverpool, 1961-63 (Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen, Big Three, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, The Silver Beetles)
5. Memphis, 1951-56 (Johnny Ace, Bobby Bland, Rosco Gordon, Sam Phillips)
6. Barcelona, 2000-2004 (Ojos de Brujos, Dusminguet, Macaco)
7. Detroit, 1959-68 (Berry Gordy & Motown, Bob Seger, the MC5, Iggy and the Stooges)
8. Dakar, 2004 (hip hop, Daara J)
9. New Orleans, 1955-1956 (Fats Domino, Little Richard)
10. St Petersburg, 2000-2004 (Leningrad, Markscheider Kunst)

To which I'd add these:

• Chicago from the mid-50s to the mid-60s (large scale African American migration north creates electric blues);
• Vienna (early-20th century contemporary composition of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg etc.);
• Canterbury (early 1970s folk-rock scene);
• Seattle (early to mid-90s grunge);
• Manchester (mid-80s to mid-90s, from Joy Division through to the 'Madchester' of Happy Mondays, via Smiths, New Order, Stone Roses etc.);
• Sheffield (early-80s: Heaven 17, Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, ABC etc.).

And you could add in Kothen 1717-1728, London 1962-66, Düsseldorf in the early 70s, Brisbane in the late-70s as above, Liverpool in the late-70s, Chicago House and Detroit Techno during the mid-80s, and probably hundreds more. Canterbury is perhaps the odd-man-out there; the rest are all splendidly urban.

But not only do music scenes, and their study, form vital examples of how creative industries make the city and vice versa, the finding that music scenes are distinctly urban also tells us a wider truth about creativity, technology and cities.

All this ‘soft infrastructure’ - such as cultural industry - is overwhelmingly metropolitan in nature (70% of the UK's creative employment is metropolitan.) This is only reinforced by information and communications technologies. Contemporary cities are characterised by networks; creative industries are predicated on the most hyper-networked of organisational forms; ICT is enabled by, and in turn enables, networks above all else. So ICT and cities tend to be a good match.

(In fact you could argue, even though I’d certainly class ICT as soft infrastructure, that the very real capital costs and physical outlay of facilitating ICT are even more of a reason for focusing it ever more in cities. Far more so than music.)

Yet there’s still this decentralisation myth about ICT and cities. And it’s alive and well, believe me. There exists a surprisingly robust school of thought that ‘telecommuting’ - and how quaint and Toffler-esque that sounds - will enable human activity to relocate and work in ex-urban or rural locations in usefully significant numbers. Odd, I know, but it’s a constant theme still echoing round the intersection of urban planning, regional policy, and the various ICT industries. It’s around in Australia, with its complex, too-successful cities and superficially limitless spaces in-between, but it’s also abroad in the USA and Britain. It’s perhaps associated with so-called digital immigrants, but it might also exemplify an inability to deal with cities intellectually and emotionally (a desire to look for an answer elsewhere, as intrinsically unsustainable as that may be).

It’s also a misunderstanding about some contemporary working practices - and innovation and creativity - which is better characterised instead by ideas such as ‘nomadism’, as The Economist has it, or other ways of working increasingly influenced by the structures and approaches of the creative industries. (I'm not suggesting everyone enjoys the ability to be nomads in The Economist mould. Many don't have that luxury, of course. But the knowledge workers envisaged to be telecommuters would certainly fall into this category.)

Those expecting ICT to enable a decentralisation of urban activities fail to recognise this apparently essential truth about cities and technology - that they only reinforce each other, and that both are enablers for something else. Even though I'd be the first to suggest we need to see 'information as a material' and that it can be be useful to consider it a medium in its own right, for most of the time it is simply a quiet platform for other things. This analogy with music might be useful to make the point even clearer.

As Florida points out, there’s essentially no physical logistical reason that music scenes are centred on cities. Yet they overwhelmingly are, for the reasons he describes in his article. People go to the city to test their ideas, perform, learn, sell, discuss, share. And they do this physically and digitally, in and around the city. Suggesting that ICT might enable decentralisation instead is focusing on technology at the expense of understanding what people do with it.

It’s somewhat like suggesting that the Fender Stratocaster's potential availability in a village would mean that music scenes will relocate there. The evidence suggests the opposite, of course. ICT enables distinctly urban activities, and does little - save for a relatively small handful of edge cases - for anything else. It is a means to an end, and that end is generally urban in context. I’d guess the increasingly pervasive nature of ICT - this physical computing - is only likely to reinforce this urbanity.

In his Flight of the Creative Class, Florida also rejects Thomas ‘The World Is Flat’ Friedman’s assertion that technology has levelled the playing field. Whereas Friedman states that “you can innovate without having to emigrate”, Florida instead finds that the world is not flat but “spiky”, consolidating in cities.

“The tallest peaks - the cities and regions that drive the world’s economy - are growing even higher, while the valleys mostly languish.”

(Of course, Florida’s work has been critiqued elsewhere, but the critique does nothing to level this spiky world, instead offering up other cities to disprove Florida’s other theories.)

A little fluidity within the urban growth boundaries - the nomad model - does not equal decentralisation, but a richer, more evenly dispersed city in which the CBD is usefully dissipated over the built fabric. Thus ICT reinforces the city rather than displacing or dispersing it, as it's an enabler for something else, something deeper - a human instinct and desire for physical connection, expression and exchange, which cities then consolidate in social capital, intellectual capital and cultural capital.

Brisbane and Melbourne in the late-’70s/early-’80s were not cultural backwaters but fertile environments for change, creativity and cultural exploration, as those two documentaries so vividly depict. Both cities still have strong aspects of innovation, perhaps characterised now by other creative industries rather more than distinct music scenes. But just as music scenes locate there, ICT as an enabler for creativity and innovation is only more likely to reinforce these, and other, urban centres. Music scenes, and their history, provide a clue as to why technology-enabled decentralisation will essentially remain an un-helpful myth.

* Lyric taken from the fabulous Go-Betweens track, ‘Lee Remick’.

A handbook

The field of urban informatics - or whatever it gets called in the long run - feels like it’s burgeoning about now. Of course, people working in a particular field often say, “You know, this field is really burgeoning about now.” But there’s certainly a critical mass of interest and activity building, and at a different level to the last few years. And with uncharted territory, it’s handy to have a few guide-books emerging (e.g. Greenfield's The City ...)

Another such book is being put together by the indefatigable Marcus Foth of QUT (previously, here). It’ll be out around December 2008 and I’m looking forward to it very much. (Disclaimer, I was one of the referees for this book.)

It’s called the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City and you can view the table of contents here, and download that, plus the foreword, preface etc. here. Check it out.

The Necks, three years later

Amongst the myriad reasons I moved to Sydney, the chance to see The Necks live more often was one of them. Not particularly high up the list, admittedly, but on the list nonetheless. Ironically then, as soon as I moved here they embarked on a lengthy European tour.

Yet last Friday night I got to see them play, live at the Sydney Opera House. My review last time, three years ago, was unusually pithy but also honest. This most recent performance was just as good. Playing in front of two films by Tony Buck, projected onto three screens, the band played two phenomenal sets. They seem to me to be pursuing a form of music with real structure, inverting that hoary old epithet of Goethe and playing defrosted architecture. That's my own peculiar interpretation of course, and perhaps influenced by the weight of the Opera House around us, but it's something about the way they 'show their workings' in their improvisations, building dense blocks from discrete motifs and with such a pronounced sense of dynamics.

Once again, cannot recommend highly enough.

TITLE Music and Film, and the importance of being locally-owned

Locally-owned independent retailers contribute a vast amount to cities. Equally, it's almost impossible to see how national or multinational chains genuinely contribute much to cities at all.

That's not to say that national retailers don't have a place - the Mujis of this world clearly contribute a great deal, economically but also symbolically, as cultural goods. But they don't contribute to cities in the same way.

Exploring numerous cities worldwide leads to an almost instinctive understanding of this, but recent research from the US indicates that between 54 and 58 cents of every dollar spent at a locally-owned retailer stays in that local environment, as they tend to employ a local accountant, a local delivery service, local web designer, local graphic designer and signwriter, local architect, advertise in the local paper, and so on. A national store contributes only 15 cents to the local environment, for every dollar spent, as they tend to centralise those same functions in order to induce greater efficiency. (The research was cited by Stacy Mitchell, author of The Hometown Advantage, on the excellent Smart Cities radio show/podcast, in a show marking the 25th anniversary of Miami's Books & Books store.)

But it's not a simple economic value. They are also nodes in the tight networks of weak ties that form local communities. Further, the grain, vitality and appearance of the street is nourished and enlivened by the local independent retailer - whether a grocer, a kids' shop, a paper shop or my own area of fervent interest, the book store or record store.

When I arrived in Sydney from London, I managed to sniff out Published Art bookshop and TITLE Film + Music within the first week. I knew everything would be fine after that. Published Art is truly a world class design, architecture and art/photography bookshop, tucked into the city end of Surry Hills. Curating with some discernment, only single copies of books are stocked and thus don't remain on shelves for long. This means that titles can be displayed cover outwards, as intended, and the store always has (too many) books and magazines of interest every single visit.

TITLE is also a world class music and film store, located amidst the urban greenery of Crown Street, also in Surry Hills. The cinema is catered for through a near-perfect selection of DVDs, heavy on the Criterion Collection specials, quality boxsets, art-house movies from around the world, and with a peppering of curios and cult classics.

The music selection is equally wide-ranging, with what must be the densest concentration of ECM in the southern hemisphere alongside the best of the world's avant garde labels and non-mainstream music from reggae to classical, all threaded through more accessible product to hook the half-interested. A global view, combined with a strong representation of local antipodean product, sidesteps any lazy notion of 'world music'. It's just a great selection, curated by staff who know their onions and who also provide excellent service. Not everything works and not everything is to my personal taste, but that's the point. In curating, you take a stance, make an editorial decision. Again, it's clearly more than 'just a business'.

Not long after discovering it, I wrote a short piece on TITLE for Monocle's regular record store column, but I thought readers here might be interested in a longer, near un-edited cut of the interview I did with owner Steve Kulak. To me, Kulak's work indicates the value of the local independent retailer to the community, particularly when selling cultural products. It also shows the value of cultural businesses - local and global at the same time, hooked into local networks of producers and consumers as intermediaries, vibrant and challenging, emanating from the specific cultural milieu of the city, and making money and making streets at the same time. 

Arup

Another bit of admin. After a couple of weeks of rapid-fire consultancy directly post-Monocle, I joined Arup as a senior consultant in their urban planning business across the Australasian region. A month in, and I'm enjoying it hugely. I'm particularly proud to be working for Arup, a company I've long admired for both their work and their approach to work.

For those that don't know, Arup are one of the world's largest multidisciplinary design firms: 10,000 strong across nearly 90 offices worldwide, comprising designers, engineers, planners, business consultants etc. Multidisciplinary working is at the heart of the firm, and the strong philosophical foundations are derived originally from the founder, Danish engineer and philosopher Ove Arup.

Their roll-call of buildings and built infrastructure is almost the stuff of legend. It's really impossible to list the projects - but a few personal highlights would be: Highpoint 1, Spa Green Estate, Tate Modern and Millennium Bridge in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Seattle Public Library, Casa da Musica in Porto, CCTV and National Aquatic Centre in Beijing, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, the Oresund Bridge, the Dongtan project outside Shanghai ... and many projects here in Sydney, from the small but perfectly formed Andrew Boy Charlton Pool to perhaps the greatest building of the 20th century, the Sydney Opera House.

I sit within the urban planning business here, and in a nutshell I'm responsible for figuring out how information and communications technologies (ICT) will shape future cities. That means a lot of things to a lot of people, but would include urban informatics and pervasive or ubiquitous computing, how to shape or 'landscape' informational services and products within the context of both masterplanning and urban design, the various relationships between data and built fabric, information visualisation and urban design, building new platforms and interfaces for urban design, changing design processes and the knock-on onto organisations (including our own), exploring how we can engender sustainable behaviour via feedback on behaviour, advising on urban policy for innovation and ICT, urban renewal via creative industries etc. etc.

I'm currently exploring a few ideas in particular, such as extrapolating and aggregating Building Information Modelling (BIM) techniques up to the city level - to form a kind of 'City Information Modelling' (CIM). Taken with the feedback from urban informatics, this could then extend the design process out over the true life-cycle of the project, including inhabited and adapted, which would mean a four-dimensional modelling process taking into account the living city, or a '4D Urbanism'. You'll note these concepts are still a bit slippery, to say the least.

Best of all, I get to try to do this in the context of real live urban development projects - which is a true test, with very real constraints, but the opportunity to really make a difference. (For a small portion of my time, I'm also working across some of our Foresight, Innovation and Incubation work with colleagues in London, particularly the Drivers of Change programme. No doubt, I'll also be doing some knowledge management and comms work from time-to-time, too.)

I'm hugely excited by the promise of all this. About 13 years after I started exploring the impact of ICT on cities and vice versa - with the Northern Quarter Network in Manchester, UK - I've come full circle. As ever, I'll try to share what I can here, in this semi-public sketchbook or journal, and now the dust is settling a bit I'll attempt to publish a little more regularly again. OK! Enough admin.

Recent and forthcoming

Spot of admin, forgive me. I'm doing a presentation at Creative Social tomorrow night (Thursday 14th May 2008), here in Sydney. This particular edition of Creative Social is organised by my friend Tim Buesing, and forms part of a wider global network of workshop-style sessions and presentations aimed at creative directors. I'll be doing something around these themes of urban informatics, or how information and communications technologies are re-shaping all things urban: form, everyday life, planning, wayfinding, architecture, public space and so on. Keynote is glaring at me from the dock, below, so I'd better get to it shortly.

I gave a precursor of the talk at a public lecture organised by University of Technology Sydney, a couple of months ago. I was invited by Adrian Lahoud, and it formed part of an excellent series of public lectures around architecture and urbanism. If you're at a loose end in Sydney tomorrow evening and would prefer an alternative to my talk, you could do worse than go and see the next installment in the lecture series, delivered by none other than the Lord Mayor of City of Sydney, Clover Moore MP. She'll no doubt be majoring on their recently launched Sustainable Sydney 2030 strategy, much inspired by Jan Gehl's recent report for the City of Sydney. I'll post my own thoughts on all that soon enough.

For my lecture, I essentially 'performed' my Street as Platform piece, augmented with candid pics from a recent trip to Melbourne. I think it worked well, as a kind of freeze-framed narrative, in terms of conveying how much the street weighs these days, as Bucky might say, when you take into account the largely unseen digital communications. I called it The Not-So-Quiet City this time, as a nod to Aaron Copland's lovely 'Quiet City' piece of 1941, and to play up the sensory design aspects. This was partly due to it being a roundtable on 'Atmospheric Urbanism', where I was presenting alongside the excellent Nadia Wagner, a researcher in 'urban olfactics'. Her work is absolutely fascinating, and most Pallasmaa. The reason I think the two lectures worked well is that we got some absolute corkers in terms of questions afterwards, many of which have been percolating through my mind ever since. And I'm still not sure I have particularly concrete thoughts on them. "What is the creative challenge for architecture, in response to all this?" was one intriguing question in particular, a googly bowled by the ever-thoughtful Lahoud. (He's organised a follow-up roundtable too.)

Next week, Duncan Wilson and I are attending the Pervasive 08 conference here in Sydney. Our position paper was accepted by the workshop on Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability and so Duncan and I will be taking part in that, alongside a bunch of international researchers and practitioners in this area, such as the likes of Eric Paulos, Paul Dourish, Tom Igoe et al. I'm looking forward to the whole conference hugely and hope to post our paper shortly, including reflections on the workshop.

One of the workshop organisers is Marcus Foth of QUT (previously, here), and in June I hope to be attending a related conference at QUT, organised by their Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI). Called Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons, the workshops on 'Broadband innovations and the creative economy' and 'Creative Industry development agendas: design as value-add' look great. Richard Allen of Cisco is a particularly good addition to the cast of speakers (see also Henry Jenkins.)

Finally, in July, I'm speaking at Design Capital, part of the State of Design festival in Melbourne, as part of the 'Convergent World' session on day 3. It'll be great to hook up with friends like Allan Chochinov of Core77 and Michael Trudgeon of Crowd, and to meet a few new people too.  Also happy to say I'm a judge in the 2008 Premier's Design Awards there too.

Do get in touch if you're in town at the same time, or want more info on any of the events.  More news to follow, and then a return to your usual programming.

"How much?" A question about imageability and seams in transport fare systems

(Something of a follow-up post to the recent transport informatics survey.) A recent conversation with Jarrett Walker, a consultant based here in Sydney, popped up the following thought. Jarrett, experienced in metropolitan transit systems, was thinking through ideas around fare pricing given the new possibilities enabled by fully automated systems.

Design of fare structures have been fundamental to transit planning for years, attempting to define charges for journeys in equitable yet efficient fashion. Balancing those last two factors mean that the basic problem is often shot through with tensions - e,g, richer suburbs paying less than poorer, due to zoning often based on radial principles emanating from a central core, and so on. Jarrett knows more about that than I. Whatever, existing systems based around zones etc. do at least usually have a stated, consistent pricing for journeys that can be easily communicated, even if not necessarily agreed with.

However, Jarrett was wondering about some emerging thinking he'd heard around the possibilities of new smart card-based, integrated ticketing systems, and the sense that varying prices could be generated in real-time, based on variables like distance, time of day, number of passengers on board, overall running costs of the system at that point, demand etc. That you wouldn't know the actual price you'd been charged for that particular journey and that actually, you needn't. You just swipe the card and conduct your journey, in the knowledge you'll have pre-paid to a certain amount, or pay a monthly bill subsequently. You'll trust the system will charge you fairly, of course, and you could see the breakdown of costs at the end of the month, or when your pre-pay card needs topping up, and so on.

(As an analogy, you'd contend that few people really know/care the exact cost of each one of their phone calls, for instance. The payment is represented by sometimes complex monthly plans, based around a number of free minutes/texts that are bundled, a certain number free within a network and so on. Obviously, some do know what they pay each time, but hasn't the general tendency has been towards bundling into monthly packages, abstracting away from pricing the actual individual calls at time of connection? With a pay-as-you-go model for those without financial security.)

So the drift towards an ongoing service model of variable pricing bundled into pre-paid or direct-debited packages seems an option. With an increasing deployment of GPS devices in all vehicles and RFID-based tracking of passenger entry/egress, it seems likely that some transit systems will try this out, in effect neatly hiding the complexity of pricing from the citizen.

This is partly also due to the sheer complexity of pricing systems e.g. Sydney's train system alone has over 120 'fare products', apparently. Multiply that by ferry, bus and light rail. This fare complexity is largely a result of attempting to be equitable, and at the moment the complexity is shared by both system operator and customers.

However, Jarrett wondered whether citizens might actually want to understand, or engage with, their public transport system a little more deeply. That pricing is one way of perceiving the structure of the transport system, and that's something that customers might innately want to do. He thought that it might be important to perceive how the system works, at least as expressed in fare structures. It's a map of the city, in a sense. In a city like London, the topography is overlaid with a mental model of the zones, which take on a kind of meaning over and above fare products (I proudly lived in zone 1, would more or less travel to zone 2, and so on.)

When he asked me the question about whether perceiving the sysetm was important, I immediately thought of the importance of seams and imageability.

Seamfulness, some long time readers will know, is a particular interest here (and of others, like Anne Galloway and Adam Greenfield.) It holds that a desire to hide complexity via an apparently perfect, hermetically-sealed product can actually mitigate against a successful informational system.

A classic example here is the iPod, which given its undoubted success also indicates how complex the argument is. That success is down to its carefully linked system architecture with iTunes as well as its rigorously reduced interface and seductive aesthetic. And yet its alleged undoing is also to do with its 'perfect' design, in that batteries are difficult to replace (meaning most people don't) and that it's a music experience that can't be tweaked or modified much. You could argue that if the iPod showed its seams a little more, it would be more malleable as a device, and even more engaging as a product experience. Doing that without damaging its seductive sheen and usability would be tricky but potentially rewarding. That old "beautiful seams" ambition.

The other reference is of Kevin Lynch's concept of imageablity, from his pivotal book The Image of the City, which I've always thought should apply to system design - the ability to perceive the system around you (visually, spatially, intellectually) and be left with a strong 'image' of its structure. Also known as legibility. A few years ago Peter Lindberg developed the idea specifically around software architecture, and I've subsequently thought it an essential feature of good system design (whether the system is a building, a music-playing device, a transport system or indeed Grand Theft Auto.)

So it seems to me that the ability to show/hide structural detail is fundamentally important element of a system. It enables the legibility of the system. And that showing a bit more detail, if carefully and sensitively articulated, can only engage the user further. Not necessarily exposing minute technical detail - though a handful will always want that - but enabling perception of the basic ambit, structure, joints, seams, influences, and so on. It certainly enables that form of engagement known as adaptation or even hacking - not in the pejorative sense of the word - but in the sense of building upon systems and extending them - as we've seen with transit systems that do begin to expose their behaviour.

And of course, as these and similar pervasive systems migrate into many spheres of life, deciding how visible to make parameters, motives and controls becomes even more important. Will hiding such intricacies reduce civic engagement in urban information systems? Or conversely, will its seamless design lead to increased take-up of services like public transport and thereby greater civic engagement?

What do you think? I'm aware that I'm posing the question to a particular audience, but do you think that, in this case, a transport system that has a choice to hide the potential complexity of a fare system should do that? Or should it reveal its complexity either through having set fares or by displaying the calculated fare on the spot? Does convenience trump legibility?