Project Overview : Login 2030

Key Concepts

 

When Clover Moore introduced the Sustainable Sydney vision last week at the City Talk event she stated that the Sydney of the future would be ‘a city for people not for machines’.

 

While this statement no doubt refered primarily to the binary of pedestrians vs vehicles it none-the-less establishes an uneasy vision about technology and the future city.  Again and again the focus of ‘Sustainable Sydney’ is on the physical.  Physical spaces for people, physical connections to and around the city, even the ‘urban villages’ strategy is about defining a place in which a ‘community spirit’ will be physically manifested. A space where a resident’s needs will be totally catered for.  People will be able to live, work, be entertained and socialise in the defined space of their ‘village’. But does this really account for the way in which we have grown accustomed to living?  Is our sense of connection and community also now forged in virtual space?

 

Sydney 2030 will not just be a physical place connected by roadways, boulevardes and parks.  It will be overlaid with other networks, digital networks, enabling other connectons and defined by other sets of protocols.  Our project could look at the language of networks and how that effects our experiences and perceptions of the spaces in which we live.

 

Presentation form

Perhaps the presentation of our ‘protocological city’ is in the form of a web-site that navigates (pans) across the city highlighting activation points that zoom in to deliver a ‘narrative’ of life in 2030.  The objective is to place physical sydney in the realm of the digital life of the city and it’s citizens. Some zooms could be close up and abstract, others could be newsbulletin style, some could be webcam views or CCTV views, some could be over-run by a glitch.  Some could be funny, some serious, some scary, some sad, some absurd.

 

The platform could take the form of the detached style of the google earth interface that in 2030 is imagined overlaid by more personal information Eg google earth meets youtube / facebook. Given the co-option of military technologies as devices for social interaction, this is quite plausible.

 

A supporting diagram showing the protocols managing the digitial life of the city could be exhibited alongside the web-site.  Thereby relating the experience of digitally surfing the city to a network managed by points of control and hopefully glitch.

 

This approach to our project would allow us to focus on the structure (or diagram) -  the series of ‘protocols’ -  immediately and leave room for the creation of scenarios or stories that slot into this infrastructure, as a second phase to the design.

 

 

 

This approach also allows us to link issues of place or site with experience and narrative.  It allows us to deal with a proposition of the future that is realised at varying  scales too.  The diagram/network acts on a visionary scale, the narratives could be explored on a community scale (news-story) down to an intimate scale (story of an individual experience).