Vernacular cities are often described as emergent self organizing systems, where no planning of any sort has determent and self created the complex layout of their elements.
Until today our cities continue their growth, layer upon layer, of different uses, materials, and forms, where Different moments in historic development coming together into a bigger story, into which we can easily enter by just opening our window and take a look out side.
It’s hard and maybe impossible to point out, what exactly make our cities what they are, what gives them their character or what different them from one another.
Their complexity and unexpected behaviour is the outcome of hundreds of years of creation and destruction, allowing them to act as the largest museum of humanity’s creations.
The time factor in city’s development is of a great significant as it takes the role of the only true judge of any contemporary interaction.
In a contrast to a city’s life which due to its length makes it impossible to trace its single elements, we as the first generation to use the internet can witness one of the largest, fastest growing self organising system in the history of humanity.
The rapid development of the internet and its massive spread around the world allow us to fallow closely its emergence, and to experience ‘live’ its transformation into an untraceable complex system which slowly exceeds its parts.
And as Eric Schmidt (chief executive officer of Google Inc.) once said;
“The Internet is the first thing humanity has build that humanity doesn’t understand,
The largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had”
In the last few years, the internet goes trough some contextual changes which, if will continuo their current path of development, will change the ways of our communication.
With the start of the so called web 2.0 applications, such as wikipedia, u tube, blogs, or any other community based, user generated internet context, we are slowly getting into a new phase in which the ‘user’ of the media is not longer a ‘user’ in the past known form of the word, but becomes more an interactive integrated part of the system.
In most former forms of media like television, cinemas, radio or newspaper, the user plays the role of a plain receiver. The context of these medias is decided for him, he cannot change it or effect it in any way, he’s only control is the power he was given by he’s remote control. He can change the channel, but he does not control the broadcasted information, so that his options of receiving information is limited to a certain number of channels, as large as this might be.
The internet changes this one way street communication into a 2 directional system, in which the user is no longer a user but an interactive part of the system. He can create context, react, and replay a given context, or even edit, change or delete information published on the web.
There are many examples of such ‘user’ generated context web applications.
Wikipedia for exampleis is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference Web sites attracting at least 684 million visitors yearly by 2008. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 250 languages.
This vast web based encyclopaedia could only be created by letting the users them selves to enter the data published on the site.
Unlike traditional encyclopaedias like the British Britannica or the German lexicon, which produce edit and publish all their material internally, Wikipedia is not limited to the amount of context it can produce and publish, enables its ‘users’ to create the largest encyclopaedia ever created.
In the Architecture profession, one can barly imagine such a change in direction.
Although there are some examples of such interventions done by architects, in which for example a building’s design only construct the general structure for the inhabitants to build upon, still most of the architecture built today, is a definite one way street, in which the architect is obligated to produce and deliver a complete and finished product.
In urban design we can actually find much more examples for such, so called, Architectural 2.0 environments.
Actually most of our cities were built as a ‘user generated’ settlements in which trough out hundreds of years the citizens them selves have created, changed, edited, deleted and re-created the city’s space, making it with or without the help of professional Architects into the urbanisation as we know today.
Other examples for such user generated architectural creations might again be found in vernacular or any other sort of regional effected Architecture, which tends to evolve over time to reflect the environmental, cultural and historical context in which it exists.
Doing so without the knowledge of the professional architect, based on calculations, geometry and physics, but trough local traditional knowledge achieved usually by a trial and error process carried out from generation to generation.
Nowadays, after the age of modernism, where the “professional” knowledge was worshiped and any other form of “uneducated”, “non-scientific” way of thinking was disrespected,
Going back to such a “primitive” form of city planning, would usually be treated as an unthinkable destructive form of development.
As the examples of the web 2.0 applications show us, as well the slowly growing acknowledgment of such regional “unplanned” architectural environments teaches us, an integration of the ‘user’ as an interactive part of the planning and building process, within a well thought given structure, can create complex emergent patterns that couldn’t be deterministically planned in advance, and may even help us create again a sensible sustainable and a more aware environmental urban surroundings.
the Film, "Open is King, Future of Media", which inspired this Articel, can be viewed under:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8394408463540033421
The film is a lecture by Leonard Gerg, given in Amsterdam in Jan.08.the lecture, Called ‘Open is King’ describes the benefits of open systems, viewing the web 2.0 application case study in order to try and forecasts the future of communication systems leaded by concepts of user based creations.
“Gerd Leonhard (‘61) is an futurist, visionary, blogger, digerati, writer, speaker and advisor. He has spent over twenty-five years in the technology and entertainment industries, both in the U.S. as well as in Europe, and recently in Asia. Gerd is involved in the dramatic changes that are impacting ‘content’ and media companies as the consequences of the new, disruptive technologies, and of convergence”.(Wikipedia)
References:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8394408463540033421
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernacular_architecture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerd_Leonhard
http://www.mediafuturist.com/
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