Learning From Collaborative Networks

Chicago’s home page “cityofchicago.org went down recently, apparently due to a cyber-attack by local protesters. The protesters were directed by hackers, who asked them to “fire on” the city's web site as much as possible, to bring it down. Their efforts to bring down several other sites were not so successful.

In our rapidly evolving high-tech culture, we find that almost everyone is equipped with a communication device that can access real time information and respond to emerging conditions in real time. We are already using real time traffic information to make decisions about which roads to take and which ones to avoid. We use location specific information about cultural events and entertainment venues. We get up to the minute flight data or subway train location or the next arriving bus so we can coordinate our activities. Such democratization of access to real time information is changing the way we live.

The “Occupy” movement and the “Arab Spring” showed us how such real time information and connected networks can usurp the top down centralized models of governance. New information based ventures such as Wikipedia have shown how crowd-sourcing platforms can outperform centralized top down structures of the old-world companies.

The collaborative networks can also provide a platform for people to receive, evaluate and critique a design for the city they live in. The coming years will see a resurgence of bottom up paradigms in how cities are planned, conceived, built, inhabited, managed and restored.

Here is a video on SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT



References: 
Nabian, Nashid and Carlo Ratti, A collaborative approach to architecture, MIT SENSEable City Lab, 2012.
Dardick, Hal, Hackers take down Chicago website, The Chicago Tribune, May 21, 2012

Related Posts:

Boston to Share Data with Six Cities

Smater Cities

Dealing with "firetrap" apartments