- welcome to thispanel, which is called ways of knowing the city. and we have three speakers. i'll tell you a bitabout them in a moment. and we have a dynamic format,which i'll also explain.
Ang Mo Kio Town Garden West, but first, a little bitabout the topic, affect and experience and a richarray of sensory information will always be essentialparts of knowing a city. modern media and the cityare closely intertwined.
film is like thekinetics of experience in the city with its newforms of modern transport. photography is like a glimpse,a vignette, a framed moment. in the 19th century, frenchpoet charles baudelaire imagined the persona of a[non-english speech], a stroller, or someone whowalked the city in order to experience it and to take infleeting expressions and to be simultaneously part ofand apart from the crowd. and these observations wouldbe social and aesthetic.
so baudelaire's[non-english speech] has had a long after-life as a figurefor urban life and even for modernity itself. and the [non-english speech]anticipates street photography and even tourism. cities function as keepers ofcultural and historical memory as well. scholar andreashuyssen posits cities as palimpsests of history,incarnation of time in stone,
sites of memory extendingboth in time and space. and italo calvino, inhis novel from 1972, invisible citieswrote that quote, "the city doesnot tell its past, but contains it like thelines of a hand written in the corners of the streets,the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, theantennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags,every segment marked in turn with scratches,indentations, and scrolls."
our understandingof city environments will always be intertwined withthe development of literature, film, photography, and newermedia as artistic modes. today, in thisfirst panel, we will ask how we can connect thesenuanced humanistic perspectives and their documentof human experience with new forms ofmedia and big data that investigate the modernurban experience and produce newforms of knowledge
using powerful new toolsand conceptual paradigms. how do the non-humanand the human intersect in urbanenvironments today? collectively, we'll tryto make some headway on this topic in panel one. this panel lasts in totalfor an hour and a half. first, we'll have presentationsabout 15 minutes each from our three speakers who arein the order in which they'll present, heidi ewingwho is a filmmaker
and co-director of the emmyawarding film detropia, a documentary aboutthe contemporary state of her hometown, detroit,which premiered at the sundance festival in 2012. mark shepard, professor ofarchitecture and media studies from the university of buffalo,a practitioner and a theorist who explores in hiswork the complex notion of the sentient city. we tend to think ofpeople as being sentient,
but in fact cities can be. and finally, sooni taraporevela,the photographer, screenwriter, and director. and her photographyexhibition home in the city, bombay1976 to mumbai 2016 is currently showing atthe whitworth gallery in manchester,england and has been listed as one of the top fiveart exhibitions in the united kingdom by the guardian.
so after the panelists havecompleted their presentations, i will moderate a shortdiscussion among them for about 15 minutes. and then we'llhave a q&a session where members ofthe audience can come to the mic that willbe in the central aisle and ask questions of thepresenters themselves. so with no further ado, isuggest that we get started. and i invite heidiewing to the podium
to give her presentation. thank you. [applause] - thank you very much. well, thank you toliz, and to radcliffe, and everyone here fortaking an interest in cities and urbanism. i think it's funnythat angela mentioned the need for confessionswhen we talk about cities.
it's very true about detroit. so my confession, i actuallygrew up 20 minutes north of detroit. it's very important. and my father was a detroiter. and my parents were part ofthe so-called white flight out of detroit after theuprisings, riots, however you'd liketo call it, in 1967. my granny, from thenorth side of detroit,
refused to leave tillshe couldn't get up her stairs at the end. her body gave out. she used to proudly callherself the last white lady on the block. that's my confession. so has a documentary director,i make a living following the stories of real peopleand, with my camera, capturing the change.
and, well, you hopethere's going to change and evolutions overa period of time. and what i've learnedin my career so far is that narratives arevery, very powerful. a narrative is a powerful tool. in the film detropia, whichis one of my films from 2012, i had the chance tochronicle the narrative of an entire place orattempt to chronicle the narrative of anentire place, which
would be the city of detroit. and during theproduction of this film, something unexpected happened. before my eyes, theconversation about detroit completely changed. from the time i beganshooting the film in 2009 to its theatricalrelease in 2012, the local narrative,meaning the story that the detroit residentsthemselves told themselves
about their city, began to clashwith the national narrative, which by that i mean the way inwhich outsiders and the media chose to see the city. and this sort of happened,i guess, by coincidence while we were making the film. so i'd like to start withthe time magazine cover. so this was 2009. this was when ibegan to detropia. soon after this, time magazinepublished the cover story,
"the tragedy of detroit." the article describeddetroit as a place that looked as if it had quote,"been savaged by a hurricane or submerged by aravenous flood," unquote. why hadn't the worldnoticed, the article asked. to me, who grew up inthe detroit metro area, time was simplymimicking what we had been shouting for years,what we knew all along. segregation, racialinequality, subpar education,
massive governmental corruptionat the local level, an auto industry that had refused tochange, a city that refused to diversify, crime waswild, jobs had vanished, we knew these things already. the article was not a shock. but the nation seemed shockedas this got a lot of attention. this time magazine cover, therewas a lot of recoverage on it. but the interestingthing is we locals, we detroiters andmetro detroiters--
my father was in manufacturing,so was very close to our hearts, what washappening to detroit-- we had another narrative, acounter-narrative perhaps, that we told about our own city. and that was one veryclose to our hearts. and it was a story of deep pridein detroit's place in history. to us, in symbolicterms at the very least, detroit was the mostimportant place in america. and when i startedshooting detropia,
i found that thatnarrative was still alive. and so i'd like to showyou a clip from the film. this is one of mysubjects, george mcgregor, president of unitedauto workers local 22. [video playback] - during world warii, america was like, wow, we built warmachines for the world, right? right over here, where[inaudible] in fleetwood, they turned that froman automobile factory
to building airplanesright there on 4th street. we built everything. we put them on aship and shipped them to england and everywhere. y'all know what we did. keep up with that history. now, we can't evenbuy american made washing machine or an iron. so where did ourmanufacturing base go?
where did it all go? because we built everything. we built everything,everything, america did. we have a standardof living in america that the working guy provideda standard of living, which is eroding now. but it's a standard ofliving that the working guy, and it started righthere in detroit. right here in detroit, a middleclass started right here.
everybody knows. we just got to faceup to it, so we're able to send our kids to school. we're able to set upa little bit of money. some of our guyswere able enough to get a little placeof north or whatever. it's middle class, got a boat. you understand what i'm saying? middle class.
leave it to beaver, the whitehouse, the picket fence. leave it to beaver, wasn'tthat the middle class? come on now. we're looking atit on tv, right? weren't we? do then we see itcome into our lives. there it is, the middle class. [end video playback] - i love that guy,george mcgregor.
what a way to synthesize thefeelings that a lot of us have and a lot ofdetroiters still have about the place andthe importance of detroit. you know, hearkeningback to angela's talk, you know, he is a productof the great migration. his family was fromthe south and came up to work in thefactories, he included. and the black middleclass, he's evidence of it. anyway, my parentsand grandparents
all sounded like george. detroit's role in the creationof the middle class lifestyle should be honored and cherished. this narrative acted as a typeof urban institutional memory shared by natives of the city. but what i found mostsurprising while making detropia is that this strong connectionto history, which we don't find that very often in20-somethings right now, but this strongconnection to history
was still prevalent evenamong the youngest detroiters i met who had neverexperienced not even a moment of this heydaythat we always, always heard about. even for them, detroitremained thick with nostalgia for the elusive past. and i'd never seen peoplein their 20s feel so old and talk so old and have such agrasp and nostalgia for an era that they never lived.
and that i found over andover while making detropia. and that brings us tocrystal and how she interacted with her own city. she was in her mid20s when we met her. she was born andraised in detroit. she was one of the residentsthat could easily have left, but had chosen to stay. and all the charactersin the film detropia could have left, that wefocus on, and chose to stay.
and that's very significant. but the city had toomuch of a grip on her. and the past had too much of agrip on her for her to leave. and she used to go whenshe wasn't waiting tables, she would do urban explorations. and she would breakinto old buildings and try to figureout who lived there and what life had been like. so i'd like to show crystal[inaudible] from detropia.
- july 4, 2010,independence day. i'm going real revolutionary. we're in a beautiful building. history is just one of mythings even since grade school. that's a passion. what was there? who was there? these hallways, though-- i mean,i'm picturing this place clean and there being-- youknow, people walking around
and shit happening. bring that shiton up here, girl. wow. it's amazing where you see wherethey just ripped out the wall. because there's copperpiping right there. can you imagine like havingbreakfast right here? you know what i mean? like, look at your view. look at your viewin the morning.
like, yeah, i'm goingto go out and conquer the world, because i can damnnear see it from right here. motown right up the street. we can't leave, man,can't fucking leave. i feel like i was maybehere a little while back, or i'm older than ireally am, but i just have this young bodyand spirit and mind. but i have the memory of thisplace when it was banging. that's how i feel.
so so i found peoplelike crystal over and over again whilemaking detropia that were haunted bythe past, something i didn't expect to findwhen making the film. crystal had everyreason to believe that she was the lastperson on earth that was interested in all theseempty blocks of her city, but that assumptionwas very wrong. as we know, the2008 market crash
landed plenty ofyoung college grads back in their parentsbasements, maybe in some of your basements. but rumors of $500 houses,large lofts for artists, and quasi-lawless cityin search of residents sounded pretty appealingto some people. the newcomers, who are mostlyyoung single and white, came with no malice to detroit.
yet, they also came withlittle to no appreciation or understandingof detroit's past, including its verycharged racial past. they preferred to talkabout the new trendy ideas like large scale urban farming,which was a major idea being floated in detroit orto start microbreweries or graphic design firms. they were notinterested in pondering all that had been lost before.
they were not hauntedby the past of detroit. detroit gained 14,000white residents between 2010 and 2014. it was the first upticklike that in 60 years. this attitude thata lot of them had, which was that detroit was ablank slate or an empty canvas, this idea crept in. detroit was almosttheir petri dish for experimentationof all kinds.
the new narrativewas that detroit could be almost aplayground for young whites. and they could livecheaply and well. and here's an example of that. these are twoartists that we met that are in the film detropia,steve and dorota coy. this is sort of just after theymoved into the city, the coy's detropia, please. - dorota and i met in hawaii.
we knew we weren'tgoing to stay in hawaii. and so we were justtossing around places. we wanted to be somewhereurban, of course. we had a projectthat we wanted to do, like street art,public installation. and so we juststarted evaluating. we looked at baltimore. we were lookinginto new york city. and detroit came up.
and i knew that'sone thing detroit had an abundance of wasspace and old warehouses. i feel like we've assimilatedinto that community of artists that are moving hereand coming here. that's pretty sweet. i've never hadappliances this nice, so i feel like i shouldbe taking care of them. yeah. we bought just acouple of weeks ago.
and we're able to keep ourstudio, because everything is so affordable. detroit is constantlyamazing me. i feel like it's redefiningwhat the value of things are. you know, $25,000for an amazing loft? i don't know. that just makes itaccessible to people like me. i would never be able to affordto own a home as an artist. and here i am with astudio and an apartment
in a major city functioningfor like $700 or less a month. we can experiment here. because if we fail, we haven'treally fallen anywhere. - so you see thedifference in the newcomers and the old timers there. you know, at first,detroiters reacted with curiosity andskepticism at the newcomers and their embrace of this newdetroit that they could see. and there was somehumorous headlines.
my favorite headline wasfrom the detroit metro times that was reactingto these carpetbaggers. and it said, "major citiesunloading undesirable hipsters in detroit." can i see the billboardbushwick, please? and you know, this was sortof a little advertising. this is in bushwick,new york in brooklyn. it's like, you'regoing to be a hipster and have a hipster's life?
you can live cheaper andbetter if you come to detroit. there was also this graffiticampaign "move to detroit," which you wouldsee on the bridges. this was not a massive campaign. but it goes to show sortof this looking at detroit in a completely different way. and suddenly, it sortof had a street cred. a lot of new york timesarticles and the like were obsessed with theseyoung white newcomers,
endless articles about them. and what were they doing there? and would theyhelp save the city, and all of that sort of thing. so there's thiscomeback narrative of detroit started to arise. and it's really interesting,because the corporations really soon followed allof this coverage. in 2011, just as detroitentered bankruptcy proceedings,
shinola, the fancywatch and bike company, set up shop in the city. their pitch was thatby purchasing a $550 watch or a $3,000bicycle, hip consumers could buy into the revivalof one of america's great industrial cities. so corporations and investorsreally heard the call. dan gilbert, the owner of thecleveland cavaliers and quicken loans, began to scoop up alot of these skyscrapers that
had been long emptied andfilled them with luxury lofts. in 2013, wholefoods came to town and was greeted witha full-fledged frenzy. the city had arrived. whole foods was there. so the rebranding ofdetroit's national narrative had been sort of complete. but had the city actuallyimprove, and for whom? and who does thisrevitalization benefit?
well, here are the facts,just facts, just numbers. detroit has beennumber one on forbes most dangerous cities listnow for four years in a row. detroit only has enoughjobs to employ roughly 37% of the population. the public schoolremains in a disgrace. on the whole, blackresidents which make up over 80% ofthe city have not benefited from this new detroit.
a very small area calledmidtown in the downtown area, you see restaurants,you see galleries, you see more tourists. you do see an economycoming through here. but the rest of the140 square miles remains exactly as i'vealways remembered it since i was a child. detroit declaredbankruptcy in 2013. today, still the populationcontinues to decline.
however, they think thatby 2018 the population, the endless decline,might actually bottom out. and that is significant. it's not insignificant. but narratives are powerful. when i started todetropia, people would ask what i wasworking on, i'd say, i'm spending a lotof time in detroit. and they would always answer,i'm sorry to hear that.
a snide remark, oh, detroiletand things like that. now, when i say i'm going backto detroit for the weekend, they say, oh, my god, cool. i heard it's back now. and i'm dying togo check it out. and maybe that narrative,the detroit phoenix rising from the ashes, willsomeday become a reality. perhaps, detroit'saffordability and strange allure will continue to bring morepeople to the city, people
like yourselves, withgood ideas of how a greater number ofdetroiters can actually benefit from this new interestand investment in the city. we're far off from this, i feel. but the fascination withdetroit continues to grow. and somehow the cityhas a hold on us. in fact, writerdrew philips likes to say detroit is the mostinteresting city on the planet. because when youscratch the surface,
you only find a mirror. there's just something aboutthis city, about this story, we cannot shake. so i hope you continueto explore it. thank you so much for having me. - so thank you first, ofcourse, to the organizers, to eve, to julie, to erik,and naturally to dean cohen supporting forconsistently supporting what seems to have beenan incredible run here
in the radcliffe institute. i'd like to especiallythank you eve blau, who was the protagonistin bringing me here last year to this workshopon urban intermedia, which provided an impetusfor me to organize my thoughts around this issue ofhow what we know about the city is conditioned through thelens with which we see it and, subsequently, how thatlens in turn conditions us. you
it's fortuitous to followheidi, i think, in the sense that what i'm going totalk about is in a sense the other side of whatmight be described as the power of personalnarrative to articulate a place and how we read acity through people. and i think we, inthe keynote, heard quite a bit about thisnotion that people define cities, which thenin turn define people. so it's this relationshipthat i'm interested in.
and i'm interestedin looking forward in terms of contemporarymodes of observing the city, in particular therole of big data, algorithms, and so-called intelligenturban infrastructure are shaping what we knowabout the city today and how, in turn, it'sbeginning to shape us. and my interest herelies in questioning how this reciprocal relationshipbetween the methods and objects of urban research changeswhen we shift from employing
representational tools bywhich the present city is observed to methods involvingdata mining and analysis that aim to derive observationsand make predictions about future situations. so this is primarily astory about shifting focus from deploying representationaltools, such as the film camera as instrumentsfor recording or for urban observation,to instrumenting physical environmentsthemselves,
and ultimately the peoplethat inhabit them with sensors and software systems to quantifyurban life in ways that claim to lead to ever moreoptimized, efficient, and sustainable cities. now, devices forobserving the world have been around for a while. much has been said aboutthe camera obscura, for instance, and its rolein recording geometrically accurate views of the city.
these are four drawingsby canaletto representing the campa san giovanni epaolo in venice, produced with the aid of acamera obscura resulting in studies for this painting. and as historian[inaudible] has noted, the camera obscuracan be understood not only as aperformative device, which is to say a toolfor representing an urban space, forexample, but also
as an epistemologicalmodel that articulates a relationship between anobserver and the world. here, we find the constructionof a monocular subject isolated and ensconced withina dark room to which the world has gathered its imagethrough a pinhole or oculus and projected ontoan interior wall of an observational device. now, if we compare this devicewith that of the stereoscope, a different story and adifferent observing subject
emerges. as a byproduct of early19th century advances in physiologicaloptics, the stereoscope capitalized on the discoverythat with binocular vision, each eye sees somethingslightly differently due to the angular disparityexisting between them. the production of depthin sight was subsequently understood to be in some wayrelated to the mind's ability to unite and reconciletwo dissimilar images.
within this context,the stereoscope was developed to reproducethis optical experience mechanically. now, significantly, thedevice marks an intent not just to representa given space, but actually tosimulate its presence. what is sought is notmerely a likeness, but a lucid tangibility. with the stereoscope,one is confronted
not with the view of the worldthrough an aperture or a frame, but rather with thetechnical reconstitution of an already reproducedworld fragmented into two non-identical models. through the incorporationof an observing subject into the mechanicsof the device, the stereoscopic imageis subsequently produced. now, the body is immobilized andintegrated with the apparatus. the subject becomesa participant
in the productionof a verisimilitude through a process of unifyingand reconciling the experience of difference. this junk disjunction betweenan experience and its cause is rarified, the realconflated with the optical. absent is the notion of a pointof view in a cartesian sense as might be characterizedby the camera obscura. there is, in the end,nothing out there. so the radical differencesbetween these pre-cinematic
devices highlight the role ofthe apparatus in constituting not only the parameters ofwhat we know about the world, but also how we conceiveour relationship to it, and ultimately howwe know the world and locate our agencyto act within it. now, fast forward to late 20thcentury urban observations and the work of william whyteand his street life project, which aimed to study howpeople behave and interact within urban environmentsand with urban environments
through a structuredresearch protocol that aspired to empiricalobservations, in this case, involving timelapse photography. this is a photograph of theapparatus in question, a super 8 film camera and a clock whichwas persistently in the frame. now, i'd like to play for youa short excerpt from his film, the social life of smallurban spaces, which documents the project anddistills a few observations from the results.
- this is the plaza of this[inaudible] building in new york, late morning. with a time lapse camera, wewere testing a hypothesis. the sun, we werepretty sure, would be the chief factorin determining where people would sit or not sit. now, just after 12:00 they beginto sit right where the sun is. i was enormously pleased. what a perfectlysplendid correlation.
it was quite misleading,as we were to see later. but it was a veryencouraging way to start. - so this notion,i want you to hold on to this notion ofmisleading correlations. what's important hereis that the project departs from a set of hypothesesabout how people interact and behave in smallerspaces and deploys the filmic apparatusin a structured way to test these hypotheses.
this is what we mightcharacterize today as a small data study, which is to saysmall data being characterized by their generallylimited volume, their non-continuous collection,their narrow . variety, and usually generated toanswer very specific questions. you start with aquestion about a space, what people are doing there. now, i'd like you to comparewhyte's apparatus with this. these are two smartphonesaffixed to windows recording
activity happening on astreet outside, in this case, in manhattan as well. and this is a demo clip froma startup called placemeter. placemeter is a service thatdeploys crowdsource smartphones as video sensors formonitoring activity on city sidewalksand public spaces in cities around the world. these video feeds areanalyzed in real time based on computervision algorithms.
and they process activityin the video frame based on a set of predefinedclassifiers established through ai andmachine-learning algorithms. here's how a placemeterpresents itself. - if you couldmeasure urban areas the same way you do withpage views on the web, you'd have enough datato make better decisions about your community, meaningstronger businesses, better neighborhoods, andmore livable cities.
placemeter does just that. it's an urbanintelligence platform. it processes videos from itsown easy-to-install sensor, existing camera systems,or even prerecorded video. it analyzes pedestrianand vehicular movements and turns them into meaningfuldata for municipalities and businesses worldwide. this way, retailers can optimizestorefronts and operations for physical stores.
commercial realtorscan provide clients with solid proof and analysisof foot traffic potential. and municipalitiescan make smarter decisions with public money,delivering better services and safer streets to all. start quantifying your worldtoday at least placemeter.com. - quantify your worldtoday for free-- at least the demo. so in contrast towhyte's method, which
deploys time lapsephotography in attempt to test the set of hypothesesabout how people inhabit urban space, placemeteremploys big data analytics in an attempt to makediscoveries and derive hypotheses from patternsof movement and activity, quantifying the lifeof the street in terms of a set of pre-establishedclassifiers. former editor in chief ofwired magazine chris anderson has described this newera of big data analytics
as, "a new era ofknowledge production characterized bythe end of theory." in other words,big data analytics enables an entirely newepistemological approach for making sense of the world. rather than testinga theory by gathering and analyzing relevantdata as whyte did, big data analyticsseems to gain insights that are born from the data.
ok. but what are big data? rob kitchin, in his bookthe data revolution, identifies a seriesof characteristics which help frame it. big data are huge in volume. they are high in velocity. they are diverse ina variety of type. they are exhaustive in scope.
in other words,you're not dealing with a sample size of a subset. but you're actually attemptingto get the entire population as your data set. they are fine grainedin resolution. they are relational in nature. and they are flexible, holdingthe traits of extensionality and scalability. now, currently, place labis being deployed in paris
to study urban design proposalsfor renovating urban traffic services. and traffic circles into morepedestrian friendly zones in the city. they do things likestudy how these park benches are used ornot used, bike paths widths, and so forth. but this trend here istoward instrumenting physical environmentswith sensors
and employing big data analyticsto quantify urban life in ways that are characteristics ofmany, many so-called smart city initiatives, which we'reseeing pop up around the world. from this songdo internationalbusiness district in south korea, alsoknown as new songdo, which is a new city builtfrom scratch by a partnership between new york baseddeveloper gale international and the new york officeof kohn pederson fox, as well as cisco systems, thedigital plumbers so to speak.
to masdar city in theunited arab emirates developed by the mubadaladevelopment company in association withbritish architecture firm foster and partners. to hudson yards in newyork, a partnership between related companies oxfordproperties and the new york office of kohn pederson fox. i'd like to talk a littlebit about hudson yards. when completed, this$20 billion project
will span seven city blockson the west side of manhattan. it's literally the largestreal estate development project ever undertaken in the us. it will incorporate morethan 18 million square feet of commercial andresidential space, including 100 retail shops,4,000 residences, and 14 acres of parks and public plazas. this massive developmenteffort promises to showcase the latest smartcity technologies promising
the world's first connected,responsive, clean, responsible, reliable, andefficient neighborhood. who wouldn't want that? who would want tolive in a dumb city? the project also pretendsto be the world's first quantified community, aliteral testbed for experiments in urban data science ledby nyu's center for science and urban progress, or cusp. constantine kontokosta,cusp's project leader,
describes thequantified community as a fully instrumentedurban neighborhood that uses an integratedexpandable sensor network to support themeasurement integration and analysis of neighborhoodconditions, activity, and outcome. so they're doing thingslike measuring, modeling, and predicting pedestrianflows, gauging air quality both within buildingsand across open spaces,
measuring and modelingenergy production and usage throughout the project,measuring health and activity levels of residents andworkers using a custom designed opt-in mobile application. now, how manypeople in this room are familiar with thequantified self movement? not many. ok, few, few. so the notion of aquantified community
stems from the idea of thequantified self, which simply involves peoplelogging personal data about their daily activitiesusing wearable sensors. you might have heard thedevice, a fitbit, for example. apps such as fitness activitytrackers, for example, monitor a rangeof health factors, heart rate, steps taken, floorsclimbed, calories burned, even sleep quality, and producerepresentations of our progress toward self-identified goalsthat are shared and aggregated
through online portals. here, the notion is that throughthe continuous self-monitoring of physiologicalcondition, we can bring about personalbehavioral change. we can change ourbehavior if we just know enough in quantifiableterms about what the data is. now, scaling this paradigmto the neighborhood, the quantified communitythen is the idea that continuousmonitoring of the built
environment, the statusof its technical systems, and human activity all can befed back into that environment to alter its futureperformance and ultimately the behavior of its inhabitants. here, people engagedwith their neighborhood not only by consumingits services and administeringits systems, but also by serving as sources ofmeasurable behavioral data. people in this contextbecome censors.
they become,themselves, censors. and shannon mattern hasdone some interesting work on this, articlein places journal online recently,actually about a year ago now, where she identifiessome of the key problems here. yet, if we were to measurethe behavior of these citizen sensors as an index of theengagement with the city, we find that theiractions, in fact, are limited by theinstruments that
render those actions visibleand worth accounting for. she referenceshannah arendt here in saying the troublewith modern theories of behavioralism--" this isarendt in 1958 in her book the human condition-- "isnot that they are wrong but that they could become true,that the very instruments used to measure behaviorare indicative of and constitutive ofsocieties of automatism and sterile passivity."
so the data thatwe generate based on determinist assumptionsand faulty methodologies in some cases couldend up shaping populations and buildingworlds in their own image. so the quantifiedcommunity at hudson yards thus can be seen as a testbed for future urban life where urban intelligence,the so-called smartness of the smart city, is renderednot as conscious liberal or objective, butrather as performative.
in the shift from observationaltools to environments that observe, both thecity and its citizens converge into populations ofhuman and non-human actors and actants that comprisenot individual bodies and personal experiences,but rather patterns of activity and behavioriteratively mined and interpreted byalgorithmic processes. now, this testbedworld of big data, a world where correlationsupersedes causation,
is a probabilistic one where fewthings are certain and most are only probable, such as therelationship between cheese consumption and thenumber of people being tangled in their bedsheets. it presents anurban epistemology that is not concernedwith documented facts representing spaces ormaking representative models of our world, but rathercreating models that are in and of themselves territories.
so the questionis what questions do we need to be askingabout these new territories? dalton and thatcher haveargued for a new field of critical data studies thatsituates these territories in broader social, cultural,and political contexts and that address the technical, ethical,political, and economic, temporal, spatial, andphilosophical implications of this shift fromobservational tools to observing environments.
and in closing, i'd like totranspose their so-called five questions at theend of that essay. to urban environments. and in doing, so we might askwhat historical conditions have led to the instrumentation ofcities with big data systems and infrastructures? how is big data beingdeployed or employed in the production of urbanspace and infrastructure? who controls the productionand analysis of big data
in urban environments? what implicit andexplicit biases, motives, and imperativesdrive their work? who are the urbansubjects of big data? and what new forms ofknowledge are they producing? and ultimately, whatproductive insights can urban big data offer after all? what other forms of knowledgecould it help to produce? - thank you so much for invitingme, liz and becky and everyone
at the radcliffe institute. i'm so happy to beback at radcliffe as an undergraduate in the '70s. and i'm going to be speakingabout a subject that is dear to my heart, the maximumcity i call home, bombay, the mega city that wasrenamed mumbai in 1995 by the right-wing party,hindu party, shiv sena. it's for that reasonthat i'm going to refer to it in my talkas bombay and not mumbai.
it's a city which has a densityof more than 44,000 people per kilometer and a populationof over 18 million, all of them jammed-- all of usjammed-- into an area that is only 233 square miles. they have writtenscreenplays set in the city and directed two films,a feature and a vr short, where the city isvery much a character. the way i've come toknow bombay is not through my screenplaysor my films,
but primarily throughthe act of photography, just me and my one camera. i began shootingthe city in 1976. and i haven'tstopped since then. my photographicjourney began here in cambridge in 1976 with aloan of $220 from my roommate cathy dement, godbless her always, to buy my first camera, anikkormat with a 50 millimeter lens.
i worked with steve geovanisin the music library. he was a junior and astringer for the boston globe. he taught me the basics of howto shoot and develop and print. shortly after i gotmy camera and lenses and got my lessons fromsteve and prepared cathy, i took a leave of absence fora semester and returned home. ostensibly, to spend asemester photographing bombay, but in reality because i wasjust desperately homesick. my talk is going to bemore showing than telling,
because i believe thatthe act of looking is as good a way of knowinga city as any other. this was one of the photos itook on that first trip home. it's the gateway of india fromthe sea lounge of the taj mahal hotel 32 years beforeterrorists held it hostage for fiveextremely bloody brutal days. now, of course, therecan be no open windows, because of security. no matter how modernan indian city is,
there are never any boundariesbetween inside and outside. these horse carriages usedto be symbolic of the city. now, they are banned,except for a few who take tourists on rides,much like new york city. the lifeline of thecity, its local trains. though this was taken in 1976,the tracks remain the same. this building still existsnext to a train station. our neighborhood bar servingmoonshine, that is long gone. in its place as a 35 storybuilding empty of residence,
like most of thesenew buildings are that are bought for investments. nobody lives in them. though this was takenin 1976, many wells still exist in the city. water is always a valuableand scarce resource everywhere in india. this photographis the equivalent of two kids riding acamel down mass ave. they
are on one of the city's mainarterial roads, marine drive. so when i returnedhome, i also started photographing my family, mygrandmother, my grandfather, on his favorite trip, to gethis fountain pen repaired. he always left a tip. my neighbor across the way,[? yasmin ?] [? irani ?] studying on her balcony. i call this photo,evenings at cozy building. this was where i grewup in an extended family
and my parents still live. this was a typical sceneat home every evening. i call this photostreetside services. and this was actuallytaken only last year. this is a typist typingout something for someone on an actual manual typewriter. and this is streetsideservices from 1976. a palmist reads someone's hand. and behind him, a lawyer is inhis open-air office consulting.
again, but this time morerecently, bombay's famous road marine drive lined withart deco buildings. and this was at apublic air show. these were innocent timeswhen this gentleman could be a security guardat the airport and i, as a skinny19-year-old, could be a security guard atharvard guarding the chemistry labs at night. bombay is a city ofinfinite variety of worlds
within worlds ofdifferent classes, communities, religions, rituals. i grew up with girls who arechristians, jews, hindus, muslims, jains. i was a parsizoroastrianism myself. this is sean ma, the son andmy husband's college friend [? lang ?] ma. they live opposite thechinese temple of bombay. and we visit their home and thetemple every chinese new year.
though i come from anextremely collective society, in my creative work,i've always been interested in the individualwithin the collective, like in this photo. the women of the red lightdistrict, kamathipura. the celebration thecity is most known for, the ganapati festival of themuch-beloved hindu god ganesh, who is immersed in the sea. then in 1986, ibegan my film journey
with my first screenplay iever wrote for the film salaam bombay!, a collaborationwith my friend also from radcliffe, mira nair. the film was about streetchildren in bombay. and i'm very proud of myunique credit on that film, screenwriter slashstill photographer. this was taken atan actor's workshop we held before filming began. this is bernad,a street kid, who
was then adopted by acinematographer sandi sissel. bernad moved to los angeles in1992 and began living there. he is married to awonderful chinese lady. and they have a13-year-old daughter who is a national levelcompetitive ice skater. and bernad has been living inhollywood for the past so many years since 1992. and he's been workingat, appropriately enough, panavision.
time pass, a uniqueindian concept. all these hundreds ofpeople have so much time to pass that theyare all staring up at us shooting on thesecond floor of a building, except there's nothing to see. because the set was boardedup to keep sound out. this is our sound man nealon location hard at work. the gang of streetkids we hung out with before wrotethe screenplay,
the boy on the rightlooks like such a toughie. but once his cap was off,it was another story. the boy touchinghis bald head is who inspired the maincharacter of the film. he's the real[non-english], the tea boy. the bombay filmindustry was always known for its elaboratehand-painted [inaudible]. they don't exist anymore. a famous artist m.f.hussain began his career
as a painter ofthese [inaudible]. two thespians enjoying awell-deserved cup of tea after a bout of artificial red. naseeruddin shah andstellan skarsgard shooting for the film perfectmurder on the streets. bombay used to have glamorousmovie premieres in gorgeous art deco movie theaters. this was one of the last ofthe grand premieres in the '80s with a navy band playing.
the star of thefilm, [inaudible]. and the red carpet ofthose days, where you could be much closer to the action. ever since i was a waitressat the hong kong bar and restaurant here on massave, i've always paid attention to waiters and waitresses. this photo and the next one,taken more recently last year, this was taken ata film festival after party in one of thecity's richest residences.
i imagine themistress of the house instructed her staff to cleanup immediately any of her guests dropped anything, even if itwas in the middle of the party. a new year's evedance in the '80s, again, bombay's mosaic ofchristians, paris, sikhs, all rocking and rolling. unfortunately, its cosmopolitancharacter has since eroded. of all indian cities, womenof freer and safer in bombay as you can see in this photo.
and the classic tropeall over the world and particularly in india,the loose women parting with the cigarette andsmoking versus the goddess. bombay always been knownas the city by the sea. countless generationsof citizens, regardless of cost, class, and communityhave enjoyed the many sea fronts that line our coasts. even if one livesin the interiors in the most overcrowdedof localities,
there's always thesea to give relief. this is about tochange forever thanks to a misguided mega-projectto build a 12 lane coastal road using publicfunds that will only benefit a small percentage of carowners, a road that will damage the environment and make the seaa distant dream that once was. my favorite bird, the smartestas well, a bombay crow. rear window in bombay. so that was bombay then.
and i'm going toshow you mumbai now. i'm not going to speak, becausei'd like you to just look. and i could we dimthe lights, please? that's it thank you so much. - so thank you to allthree of our presenters for their provocative and alsovery compelling presentations. and now, we'll try topull things together just for a few minutes before we openup the floor to your questions. and it's actually not veryeasy to pull things together.
because on the one hand,we have heidi's work and sooni's, bothof which come out of a very long relationshipwith a particular place and also using different media. and not exclusivelyfor artistic purposes, but certainly thoseare among the purposes. and then we havemark's work, which shows how we can use thesame media or similar newer media not inrepresentational modes,
but in modes that allowus to mine data from them. and mark also observesthat what we see is conditioned bythe lens that we use, which in turn affects us. so without gettingtoo tangled up in the idea of newtechnologies, i wonder if we can somehow putthe two approaches together in terms of what they yield. so i would like to askeach of our three speakers
to comment on the kinds ofknowledge and understanding about urbanism today thatare produced by their work and through whatartistic strategies the particular power of yourmedium shows change over time. so that's my questionto each of you in turn. and i don't know,perhaps, you'd like to-- - well, i haven't reallythought about it in those terms. i think that the differencebetween, i think, the work actually that i'mshowing versus what you were
showing and also to a lesserextent-- we have more in common with what we're doing. but i think thatit's interesting that the data can showmaybe where these people go and what spaces they inhabit. whereas, i'm interested inhow an individual relates to and feels about theirenvironment and what kind of personalstories that they create around a tactile space.
and it's funny, becausein detroit, for example, people always talk about theemptiness, the empty spaces. and we were sure in our filmto very rarely show just an empty building on a street. there was always aperson scurrying by or someone in the window. we even have a shot in the filmwhere a crane is taking down all these houses as part ofthe mayor's oath to the people to tear down like 60,000houses, unoccupied houses.
and we would be shooting that. and then just onestreet behind there would be a little kid in thewindow, maybe the last family and so there wasthis push to shrink the city while we were filming. it was when mayor bingwas the mayor of detroit. and it was all aboutshrinking the city and turning off streetlights and turning off water and saving money.
and if there was only one personon the block, they should move. they should just move. and that would bemore practical. but there wasn't moneyto give them to move. and so it was like, whatmakes a neighborhood? i mean, there'sbirds, and trees, and grass, and stray dogs,and maybe one old lady and what is her value? and if there's onlyone person interacting
with a space that wasmade for multitudes, does the value ofthat space change? and in the eyes ofthe lady on the block, it's her whole world. it's her memories. it's her life. it's the smells andsounds of her kids who used to live there. and so for her, it's ahypertacile, real, living
thing. it's her memory. and to the city,it's just a nuisance. because it wasn'tmade just for her. so these were the kindof conversations that were happening in the city. and we tried to capturein the way we could through our lens, whichdoesn't answer your question, but it's an answer.
- yeah. well, i'll take a crackat trying to approach it. i think the intention inpresenting the kind of talk that i presented inthis milieu is really to try to push back to someof the overarching claims that people working in thisfield of, let's call it, smart city developmentmake about what not only the aspirationsare, but what are some of the potentialcapabilities are.
and i think that one of thethings that we are witnessing as some of theseproposals, projects, are moving from therealm of speculation to being built or enacted isthat the kind of territory is shrinking in termsof there's a kind of gap between what something is beingprojected to be capable of and in fact what is being reallyused for or is useful for. and i think one of the thingsthat people are coming around to is just this notion thatspecifically this type of work,
this so-called small data,is extremely valuable to understand thequalitative components or the qualitative aspectsof an urban environment. in looking at correlationsnot caring about causation, the idea is that youwould make discoveries, that you would operate on-- i was having aconversation last night about people working withthe new york public library's digital collection of menusacross hundreds of years.
or, 100, 150 years,i'm not quite sure. but being able to lookand try to correlate the presence of grapefruiton a menu with, let's say, droughts in californiaor supply chain shifts is the kind of questionthat big data enables. the problem is thatmuch like 20th century kind of techno-determinism inurban design in particular, higher in design, there isthe drive that this empiricism becomes totalizing.
and so in thiscontext, i think it's important to be able to notjust look away or say this is only quantitative information. cities are far morecomplex and diverse. they are filled withnon-addressable spaces, spaces which aren't easilyquantifiable. and within this context,it's important to be able to point toexamples where knowledge of ways of knowingthe city exceed
the ability of any one media ormedium and any one discourse. and so it's, in a sense,what kinds of questions do we need to ask from theperspective of the humanities to be able to engagewith what's ultimately a fairly powerful forceand, to a certain extent, beginning to drive decisions. for example, in detroitabout what parts of the city do we reconfigure urbanservices, street lights, for example, water, electricity.
how can we input into thispolicy-making, decision-making process in ways which canmake qualitative difference? - i've always found photographyas an ideal medium to document change and preserve memories by[inaudible] of things that are disappearing. and that's alwaysbeen my personal, kind of, motivator tophotograph the city as well as the community i belong to,both of which are disappearing. the city that i knew isdisappearing and the community
i belong to as well. i was struck by theimages of detroit. and it's funny that it wouldnever happen in my city that there would be spaces thatare kind of derelict and empty, because it just doesn't happen. there's not an inch ofempty space in bombay. and probably inother indian cities as well, it's alwaysbroken down to be built up. nobody leaves anythingderelict ever.
and so there's a lotof churning going on in indian city,especially bombay. bombay is full of change now. it's full of the megadevelopment projects. they all involve corruption,including public works. and there are a lotof active citizens who are trying tooppose it to, i'm sorry to say,little or no avail. - we're almost at ourdiscussion period.
but i'm just going to takethe moderators prerogative to ask sooni onemore question, which is that the beautifulphotographs that she showed us were divided into two series,as she herself specified, a first earlier seriesin black and white and a second morecontemporary series filled with the drama of color andalso with all kinds of contrasts that speak to thecontemporary moment. so i wanted to ask aboutyour different strategies
and whether youconsider it all one body of work or several body. - i don't know aboutconsidering it one body work. i think they'retwo bodies of work. the color is actuallya result of technology. most of these werecamera phone pictures. and though i'm a purist,i love the camera phone. because i alwayshave it with me. and i always usedto resolve to carry
a camera with me every day,but i never managed to. and now, i alwayshave it with me. and the other thing is i'ma very avid instagrammer. because when istarted photography, there was of very fewavenues to share your work. and when instagramcame out and i could share my work withfriends across the globe, i completely dived into it. i have some 3,000 plusphotos on instagram,
including a lot of these. so it's a questionof technology that made the second body of work. - thank you. all right. so we'd like to giveyou all a chance to ask questions of our presenters. as you can see, there's a mic inthe center of the aisle there. and if you'd liketo ask a question,
please just come up to the mic. if there are several ofyou, you can stand in line. and when it's your turn,please identify yourself. and please ask a questionalong with making any comments. so i know it's hardto be the first one, but i can't imaginethat some of you don't have questions forthese amazing speakers. - can i go right ahead? - go for it.
- well, this is a commentand a question for sooni. when i was 12 or 13,i was lucky enough to capture or just flick thechannel and see salaam bombay! and besides the commercialsthere always were, i was struck by your movie. and it's been aninspiration for me since then to study citiesas a political science major, to look at cities as a civicspace that's continuously transforming.
and i thank you somuch for your art. - thank you so much. - and i'm definitely goingto look for your instagram. because i loved your writingand your storytelling and your photography. and i want to continue that. my question to youis i'm bangladeshi. - sorry? - i'm bangladeshi.
- so three or fouryears ago, i was working with an ngo called bracon water policy in bangladesh. and dhaka has beena city that has changed within 10 to20 years, 10 of which i've never been back. i was born in this country. i consider myself an american. but i have history androots that obviously go back to being bengali.
so i wonder when i was passingthrough the city corporation and seeing this tallbuilding, how people-- when growing up incambridge and continuing to live in cambridge wheni can walk up to my city councilor and say, can imake officer hours with you? can i talk about a cityordinance with you? how do we bring thatwith keeping in mind the differences betweenand the stereotypes that are associated withdemocracy and westernization?
how do we bring thatkind of openness? how do we bring that civicconversation back to our people and integrate our valuesand culture and history into what we can transform ourcities and our way of life? - that's a good question. i wish i had the answer. - i just tryingto figure it out. - i would love to knowthe answer to that. because we had oneavenue in india
called the rti act, whichis right to information. and now, the current governmentwants to repeal that as well. so nothing is public. in my city, bombay, theywill have a development act. and they will doit, and then they will make it public for fivedays of public comments. and the act will have suchfar reaching consequences. and it would never happenin any western city, but it happensconstantly in india.
because there'sno accountability. there's no feeling that theyare accountable to the public. politicians feel that theyare almost like royalty. nobody can question them. and there's a hugeamount of corruption involved in all these projectsand all these public projects. so i'm sorry to be sopessimistic about it, but realisticallyspeaking i don't know when it's going to change really.
and what i talked about,this coastal road, we tried very hard, butwe didn't get anywhere unfortunately. - well, thank you anyway. - and thank you for your kindwords about salaam bombay! - of course. i have a querybeginning with mark. in your comment aboutempiricism becoming totalizing and, i think in yourengagement, there
is a deep yearning forthe non-totalitarian and the creative. so it is in that spirit, thediscourse of this smart city, how does it cultivate the reasonand practice of soul city? and i'm here reminded of thegreat work of anthropologist ulf hannerz who nearly50 years ago wrote a book called the soulside. so how do we think of the[inaudible] space, this sphere of this soul sphere as well?
my connected query toboth heidi and sooni is-- thank you so much-- among your manyimportant engagement, one dimension is the engagementwith loss and disappearance, and therefore waysof knowing the city, especially when sooni,you make the comment, "seeing is a way of knowing." but that act of seeing,does it also involve an act of weeping or crying?
therefore, i thinkwith the theme of loss anddisappearance, how do we bring weeping as a way ofknowing which then becomes a companion to solidarity. therefore, thequestion would be that what is this base ofhope in this context? and how do we thinkof the city space in terms of poetics of space,but also the emergent spaces of hope?
- if i can just takethe first question-- can you just repeat the author? i'm not sure i'mfamiliar with this text. - he's an anthropologist. his name ulf hannerz,originally from sweden who did fieldwork with, i think,an afro-american community in washington dc. but i am just remindedof the title soulside. - soulside.
- just to bring the connectionof this soul sphere, because in my work,i'm also trying to-- i'm coming from india with ofkind of, as sunni mentioned, the regal discourseof the smart city. so we need to bring adiscourse of the soul city. - sure. that's a great question. there's a couple of waysone can respond to that or people haveresponded to that.
one is to say simply thatthis soul side of the city is a non-addressable space. at least, it's notaddressable in the sense that it doesn'thave an ip address. the soul doesn't havean ip address, right? and to a certain extent,one finds that response unsatisfying. another way of approaching,responding to that, is to suggest in a similarway that we were talking about
this morning wherepeople moved to the city, and it changes them. their attitudes change. their values changein some respects or at least grow and develop. and i think back tomartin heidegger's essay on "the age of theworld picture." and he's talking aboutthis quantification. in the age of the world picture,the certain move or shift
toward a degree of,shall i say, bigness moves over from thequantitative to begin to have a qualitative component to it. it has a quality to it, right? and he describes this asa kind of modern condition and as a resultfrom a whole range of technological developments. similar claims arebeing made about how-- and this is the kind ofdarker side in a sense of some
of the propositions-- chris anderson'sclaim of the end of theory, where correlationsupersedes causation. we're talkingabout a different-- in the sciences, inthe hard sciences, it's not such a leapto say we don't really care why this is happening. but we can show youevidentiary data that prove this correlation exists.
when we're talkingabout the soul side, it's a question of hasthat quality, which comes from a quantitativecondition being pushed to a certain scale,already become part of us? and i think that'sthe challenge. that's what we're looking at. - i think it's soevocative, the concept of weeping and acknowledgingthe loss of what was no longer comingback and that there
is a crying and aweeping that i think you could feel in some of theclips that i showed today. you know, spaces matter. and neighborhoods matter. and where thingstake place matters, especially in a citylike detroit, which not unlike what angela wasmentioning about los angeles, the highways, the freeways, theway they were built in detroit also completely segregatedblacks from whites in detroit.
it was intentional. it was done. the concept in mind was tojust keep everyone apart. and it's very, very hard toundo an infrastructure like that even with good intentions. the city planning wasdone a certain way. and that has not been resolved. so when we talk about allthe development happening in this one area,now they call it
midtown, that is easilyaccessible by suburban people. so they come in to thetigers games on the weekends. they'll come to the opera. they'll go to the detroitinstitute of arts. they'll go to these places. it's easy to get there. there's parking. and for a lot ofblack residents who live in the greaterdetroit city, which
is a huge massive place,it's not convenient. it's expensive. they don't feel comfortable. all the development andall of the new residents are mostly white. so in a way, it'slike recreating the problem that was neversolved the first time around. and so i think that in orderto help bridge this divide, they should start with thespaces that events are held in.
there is a lot of foundationsright now in detroit, sort of ngo-type moneyflowing into the city. and always, when you'reinvited to an event, it happens at thedetroit institute of art or it happens at the masonictemple or a known space in this midtownarea, because they think it's going to beconvenient to those people interested. if they move thoseevents and said
i'm doing it at baker'skeyboard lounge, completely the other side oftown, or i'm doing it at the raven on the eastside on chene street and you partnered with theseolder black local businesses that have credibilitywith their neighborhoods, if they work togetherto get the word out that there's going to bemeetings in unexpected places and vice versa, i think thatthat would go a long way to the longtime residentsfeeling left out
of this new detroit andcut out and forgotten. it makes people feeluseless and disrespected. and also, there'sthis sense of history that this racial divide isjust being recreated again. so i actually really thinksome of these changes have to happen with whereevents and invitations are made in detroit. it's that simple. and that has not even been done.
i mean, that's howbasic we're talking. - i'm going to answeryour question about hope. there's certainly nohope for the politicians. but i have a lotof hope, because of what i've seen with thepeople of the city, of my city, when there are disasters likefloods, how people react. you know, you must haveseen in these photographs a woman who has no home whohas everything outdoors, and she's still smiling.
that's what gives me hope. it gives me hope thatpeople who have nothing still continue to smile andstill continue to have hope. and that's an amazing thing. and that exists in the city. and that, i think,nobody can destroy. and the other hopeof the city is people are constantly comingto the city, because for them the city representshope as opposed
to villages wherethey are starving. and they say that nobodystarves in the city. i'm not sure how true that is. but that's what they say. - hi, my name is [? palavi ?][? mondi. ?] i'm a loeb fellow at the graduate schoolof design this year. otherwise, i reside in theworld of cities and water, be it climate changeor restoration or [inaudible] systems.
so having followsome of your work-- sooni, i've obviouslyseen the film-- i'm very intrigued by thedystropic view of detroit. and i've only anecdotallyheard a lot around water infrastructure andhow that intersects with issues of peopleliving and the community. the real estateinterests sort of giving this brand of the renaissanceand the white flight into detroit and reallyissues around accountability
and how we actually ensurethat what happened in flint doesn't become a phenomenonthat a lot of cities in the us are just waiting to witness. so my questionreally is if i ground this discourse in thefield of resilience-- which is also becoming avery hot discourse area and how it intersectswith urbanism. sooni, since you mentionedmumbai and the opportunities even though there's no physicalspace for these opportunities
to play out in a conventionalsort of design, architecture, or urbanism standpoint, iwonder how we as a community, looking at cities from differentexpertise or disciplines, how we want to acknowledgethe opportunity to tell the storiesthat need to be told, sort of representrealities in ways that are not convenient or evenfor that matter constructive? and i really want toopen it up to whoever wants to take a pass at howcan we tell the stories.
not to just sort of make theworld be aware of realities, but address it in a waythat's universally applicable, but also challenging forthis discourse to inform us in how we want to move forward. - well, if iunderstood correctly, it's always adocumentary's-- you know, we're often asked to be alsoactivists and to use our work for a specific purpose. and we've always sort ofevaded sort of the agenda film
and tying our moviesin a bow at the end. there's a whole trend ofdocumentary filmmaking where at the endit's like, if you want to help, turn off yourfaucet and turn off your light. these are the things you can do. go to this website,and you can-- and i think that's great. our work's never fitinto those boxes. so sometimes we do revealinconvenient truths
and don't offer solutions,which can frustrate people. but what i think isreally important, at least in mymedium, is to partner with organizations that havethe will and the resources to make a curriculum. for example, severalof my films are taught in schools and universities. and we helped make a curriculumor made it easy for people to make a curriculum incanada and elsewhere.
how do we teach this film? how do we make yourfilm or your photograph into a tool for other peoplewho do have ideas, solutions, and agendas? so, for example, i made afilm called 12 & delaware about the abortion battle-- it's on hbo this film-- raging on a street cornerin fort pierce, florida. so on one side of the street,there's an abortion clinic.
on the other sideof the street, there is a crisis pregnancycenter, which is basically a fake abortion clinic. women think they'rein an abortion clinic, because they're gettinga free pregnancy test. but it's actuallya pro-life front where they will give anultrasound to the girl and tell her she'll get breastcancer if she has an abortion or tell her that she's notas far along as she is.
so by the time shefigures it out, it's too late to get anabortion in her state. so we got inside this crisispregnancy center and filmed. and then we got insidethe abortion clinic. and it's a character-driven filmabout this one street corner and the battle, theabortion battle. now, what we've done with thatfilm is when we were finished with it, we've allowednaral and planned parenthood to use it for other events.
and as long as we don'thave great disagreements with what they're doing with thefilm, we happily hand it over. so i think that that is reallyhow we can get our messages out and also interpretedby different people in different ways, so that youcan actually reach more people and start using our workfor more concrete solutions. - as one filmmaker said, ifyou want to send a message, go to ups or fedex. and so i kind of agree withthat and kind of don't.
because after wemade salaam bombay!, we started an organizationfor street kids called salaam trust thatis still very active i don't know howmany years later. i think film is an easierway to be an activist than a still photographer. there have beenstill photographers who have been activists andwho've been working for change. but i don't think thatis my primary goal when
i take photographs. i take photographs, because i'mjust obsessive about putting frames around reality. i don't know why. i think i was born like that. but in the filmsthat i make, there's definitely some foodfor thought and hope that things will change. - so we have one minute left.
but these two people have beenvery patiently standing online. is there is there a wayfor you to very quickly ask your question? - i mean, i can askit as fast as i can. - yeah, as fast asyou possibly can. hi, thank you so muchfor sharing your work. my question is about nostalgia. i think in the films, it's veryclear when nostalgia comes up. i think with data,it's less clear.
i'm interested in how datatalks about nostalgia. does data talk about nostalgia? and i'm also curiouswhen we change cities, when we tryto be purposeful about change, how do we use nostalgia? is it useful? and whose nostalgia do we use? - in one minute. well, that's a great question.
it's characteristic of the kindsof more interesting questions that are being askedabout data today. and i guess the onething i could say is that nostalgiais being looked at. but it's more how candata and analytics operate on the objects of nostalgia? so it would be aboutarchives, looking at archives. and to what extent can itreveal something or discover correlations or relationshipswhich we don't already
know about nostalgia-- in one minute. - ok. were you-- did youhave more to say? - no. i was not-- - if you can quantify nostalgiawith data, i mean, call me. i'd love to see that. i mean, i thought itwas interesting actually
looking at angela's streetcarmap versus the subway map. something aboutthat, seeing them next to each other and allthat was lost when the street cars were removed fromthose black neighborhoods, i actually surprisinglyfound that effective. and that was just a graph. so, actually, ithink it's intriguing the idea that you can movepeople emotionally with data. i think that's aninteresting area
- but i would also like toconclude with an argument for a very small data. because humanists are verygood at close reading. and so heidi and i werespeaking about the title of her film, detropia. and for me, there areall these associations that come out of just that oneterm, like utopia, dystopia, cornucopia, detritus,deteriorate, -opia, hope, and i supposenostalgia as well.
but so it feels asthough somehow our task is to balance vast sort of evenunimaginable quantities of data along with the incredibleimportance of very small things. so let's conclude on that. thank you to ourthree presenters for their wonderful talks. and thank you to youfor your attention.
- welcome to thispanel, which is called ways of knowing the city. and we have three speakers. i'll tell you a bitabout them in a moment. and we have a dynamic format,which i'll also explain.
Ang Mo Kio Town Garden West, but first, a little bitabout the topic, affect and experience and a richarray of sensory information will always be essentialparts of knowing a city. modern media and the cityare closely intertwined.
film is like thekinetics of experience in the city with its newforms of modern transport. photography is like a glimpse,a vignette, a framed moment. in the 19th century, frenchpoet charles baudelaire imagined the persona of a[non-english speech], a stroller, or someone whowalked the city in order to experience it and to take infleeting expressions and to be simultaneously part ofand apart from the crowd. and these observations wouldbe social and aesthetic.
so baudelaire's[non-english speech] has had a long after-life as a figurefor urban life and even for modernity itself. and the [non-english speech]anticipates street photography and even tourism. cities function as keepers ofcultural and historical memory as well. scholar andreashuyssen posits cities as palimpsests of history,incarnation of time in stone,
sites of memory extendingboth in time and space. and italo calvino, inhis novel from 1972, invisible citieswrote that quote, "the city doesnot tell its past, but contains it like thelines of a hand written in the corners of the streets,the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, theantennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags,every segment marked in turn with scratches,indentations, and scrolls."
our understandingof city environments will always be intertwined withthe development of literature, film, photography, and newermedia as artistic modes. today, in thisfirst panel, we will ask how we can connect thesenuanced humanistic perspectives and their documentof human experience with new forms ofmedia and big data that investigate the modernurban experience and produce newforms of knowledge
using powerful new toolsand conceptual paradigms. how do the non-humanand the human intersect in urbanenvironments today? collectively, we'll tryto make some headway on this topic in panel one. this panel lasts in totalfor an hour and a half. first, we'll have presentationsabout 15 minutes each from our three speakers who arein the order in which they'll present, heidi ewingwho is a filmmaker
and co-director of the emmyawarding film detropia, a documentary aboutthe contemporary state of her hometown, detroit,which premiered at the sundance festival in 2012. mark shepard, professor ofarchitecture and media studies from the university of buffalo,a practitioner and a theorist who explores in hiswork the complex notion of the sentient city. we tend to think ofpeople as being sentient,
but in fact cities can be. and finally, sooni taraporevela,the photographer, screenwriter, and director. and her photographyexhibition home in the city, bombay1976 to mumbai 2016 is currently showing atthe whitworth gallery in manchester,england and has been listed as one of the top fiveart exhibitions in the united kingdom by the guardian.
so after the panelists havecompleted their presentations, i will moderate a shortdiscussion among them for about 15 minutes. and then we'llhave a q&a session where members ofthe audience can come to the mic that willbe in the central aisle and ask questions of thepresenters themselves. so with no further ado, isuggest that we get started. and i invite heidiewing to the podium
to give her presentation. thank you. [applause] - thank you very much. well, thank you toliz, and to radcliffe, and everyone here fortaking an interest in cities and urbanism. i think it's funnythat angela mentioned the need for confessionswhen we talk about cities.
it's very true about detroit. so my confession, i actuallygrew up 20 minutes north of detroit. it's very important. and my father was a detroiter. and my parents were part ofthe so-called white flight out of detroit after theuprisings, riots, however you'd liketo call it, in 1967. my granny, from thenorth side of detroit,
refused to leave tillshe couldn't get up her stairs at the end. her body gave out. she used to proudly callherself the last white lady on the block. that's my confession. so has a documentary director,i make a living following the stories of real peopleand, with my camera, capturing the change.
and, well, you hopethere's going to change and evolutions overa period of time. and what i've learnedin my career so far is that narratives arevery, very powerful. a narrative is a powerful tool. in the film detropia, whichis one of my films from 2012, i had the chance tochronicle the narrative of an entire place orattempt to chronicle the narrative of anentire place, which
would be the city of detroit. and during theproduction of this film, something unexpected happened. before my eyes, theconversation about detroit completely changed. from the time i beganshooting the film in 2009 to its theatricalrelease in 2012, the local narrative,meaning the story that the detroit residentsthemselves told themselves
about their city, began to clashwith the national narrative, which by that i mean the way inwhich outsiders and the media chose to see the city. and this sort of happened,i guess, by coincidence while we were making the film. so i'd like to start withthe time magazine cover. so this was 2009. this was when ibegan to detropia. soon after this, time magazinepublished the cover story,
"the tragedy of detroit." the article describeddetroit as a place that looked as if it had quote,"been savaged by a hurricane or submerged by aravenous flood," unquote. why hadn't the worldnoticed, the article asked. to me, who grew up inthe detroit metro area, time was simplymimicking what we had been shouting for years,what we knew all along. segregation, racialinequality, subpar education,
massive governmental corruptionat the local level, an auto industry that had refused tochange, a city that refused to diversify, crime waswild, jobs had vanished, we knew these things already. the article was not a shock. but the nation seemed shockedas this got a lot of attention. this time magazine cover, therewas a lot of recoverage on it. but the interestingthing is we locals, we detroiters andmetro detroiters--
my father was in manufacturing,so was very close to our hearts, what washappening to detroit-- we had another narrative, acounter-narrative perhaps, that we told about our own city. and that was one veryclose to our hearts. and it was a story of deep pridein detroit's place in history. to us, in symbolicterms at the very least, detroit was the mostimportant place in america. and when i startedshooting detropia,
i found that thatnarrative was still alive. and so i'd like to showyou a clip from the film. this is one of mysubjects, george mcgregor, president of unitedauto workers local 22. [video playback] - during world warii, america was like, wow, we built warmachines for the world, right? right over here, where[inaudible] in fleetwood, they turned that froman automobile factory
to building airplanesright there on 4th street. we built everything. we put them on aship and shipped them to england and everywhere. y'all know what we did. keep up with that history. now, we can't evenbuy american made washing machine or an iron. so where did ourmanufacturing base go?
where did it all go? because we built everything. we built everything,everything, america did. we have a standardof living in america that the working guy provideda standard of living, which is eroding now. but it's a standard ofliving that the working guy, and it started righthere in detroit. right here in detroit, a middleclass started right here.
everybody knows. we just got to faceup to it, so we're able to send our kids to school. we're able to set upa little bit of money. some of our guyswere able enough to get a little placeof north or whatever. it's middle class, got a boat. you understand what i'm saying? middle class.
leave it to beaver, the whitehouse, the picket fence. leave it to beaver, wasn'tthat the middle class? come on now. we're looking atit on tv, right? weren't we? do then we see itcome into our lives. there it is, the middle class. [end video playback] - i love that guy,george mcgregor.
what a way to synthesize thefeelings that a lot of us have and a lot ofdetroiters still have about the place andthe importance of detroit. you know, hearkeningback to angela's talk, you know, he is a productof the great migration. his family was fromthe south and came up to work in thefactories, he included. and the black middleclass, he's evidence of it. anyway, my parentsand grandparents
all sounded like george. detroit's role in the creationof the middle class lifestyle should be honored and cherished. this narrative acted as a typeof urban institutional memory shared by natives of the city. but what i found mostsurprising while making detropia is that this strong connectionto history, which we don't find that very often in20-somethings right now, but this strongconnection to history
was still prevalent evenamong the youngest detroiters i met who had neverexperienced not even a moment of this heydaythat we always, always heard about. even for them, detroitremained thick with nostalgia for the elusive past. and i'd never seen peoplein their 20s feel so old and talk so old and have such agrasp and nostalgia for an era that they never lived.
and that i found over andover while making detropia. and that brings us tocrystal and how she interacted with her own city. she was in her mid20s when we met her. she was born andraised in detroit. she was one of the residentsthat could easily have left, but had chosen to stay. and all the charactersin the film detropia could have left, that wefocus on, and chose to stay.
and that's very significant. but the city had toomuch of a grip on her. and the past had too much of agrip on her for her to leave. and she used to go whenshe wasn't waiting tables, she would do urban explorations. and she would breakinto old buildings and try to figureout who lived there and what life had been like. so i'd like to show crystal[inaudible] from detropia.
- july 4, 2010,independence day. i'm going real revolutionary. we're in a beautiful building. history is just one of mythings even since grade school. that's a passion. what was there? who was there? these hallways, though-- i mean,i'm picturing this place clean and there being-- youknow, people walking around
and shit happening. bring that shiton up here, girl. wow. it's amazing where you see wherethey just ripped out the wall. because there's copperpiping right there. can you imagine like havingbreakfast right here? you know what i mean? like, look at your view. look at your viewin the morning.
like, yeah, i'm goingto go out and conquer the world, because i can damnnear see it from right here. motown right up the street. we can't leave, man,can't fucking leave. i feel like i was maybehere a little while back, or i'm older than ireally am, but i just have this young bodyand spirit and mind. but i have the memory of thisplace when it was banging. that's how i feel.
so so i found peoplelike crystal over and over again whilemaking detropia that were haunted bythe past, something i didn't expect to findwhen making the film. crystal had everyreason to believe that she was the lastperson on earth that was interested in all theseempty blocks of her city, but that assumptionwas very wrong. as we know, the2008 market crash
landed plenty ofyoung college grads back in their parentsbasements, maybe in some of your basements. but rumors of $500 houses,large lofts for artists, and quasi-lawless cityin search of residents sounded pretty appealingto some people. the newcomers, who are mostlyyoung single and white, came with no malice to detroit.
yet, they also came withlittle to no appreciation or understandingof detroit's past, including its verycharged racial past. they preferred to talkabout the new trendy ideas like large scale urban farming,which was a major idea being floated in detroit orto start microbreweries or graphic design firms. they were notinterested in pondering all that had been lost before.
they were not hauntedby the past of detroit. detroit gained 14,000white residents between 2010 and 2014. it was the first upticklike that in 60 years. this attitude thata lot of them had, which was that detroit was ablank slate or an empty canvas, this idea crept in. detroit was almosttheir petri dish for experimentationof all kinds.
the new narrativewas that detroit could be almost aplayground for young whites. and they could livecheaply and well. and here's an example of that. these are twoartists that we met that are in the film detropia,steve and dorota coy. this is sort of just after theymoved into the city, the coy's detropia, please. - dorota and i met in hawaii.
we knew we weren'tgoing to stay in hawaii. and so we were justtossing around places. we wanted to be somewhereurban, of course. we had a projectthat we wanted to do, like street art,public installation. and so we juststarted evaluating. we looked at baltimore. we were lookinginto new york city. and detroit came up.
and i knew that'sone thing detroit had an abundance of wasspace and old warehouses. i feel like we've assimilatedinto that community of artists that are moving hereand coming here. that's pretty sweet. i've never hadappliances this nice, so i feel like i shouldbe taking care of them. yeah. we bought just acouple of weeks ago.
and we're able to keep ourstudio, because everything is so affordable. detroit is constantlyamazing me. i feel like it's redefiningwhat the value of things are. you know, $25,000for an amazing loft? i don't know. that just makes itaccessible to people like me. i would never be able to affordto own a home as an artist. and here i am with astudio and an apartment
in a major city functioningfor like $700 or less a month. we can experiment here. because if we fail, we haven'treally fallen anywhere. - so you see thedifference in the newcomers and the old timers there. you know, at first,detroiters reacted with curiosity andskepticism at the newcomers and their embrace of this newdetroit that they could see. and there was somehumorous headlines.
my favorite headline wasfrom the detroit metro times that was reactingto these carpetbaggers. and it said, "major citiesunloading undesirable hipsters in detroit." can i see the billboardbushwick, please? and you know, this was sortof a little advertising. this is in bushwick,new york in brooklyn. it's like, you'regoing to be a hipster and have a hipster's life?
you can live cheaper andbetter if you come to detroit. there was also this graffiticampaign "move to detroit," which you wouldsee on the bridges. this was not a massive campaign. but it goes to show sortof this looking at detroit in a completely different way. and suddenly, it sortof had a street cred. a lot of new york timesarticles and the like were obsessed with theseyoung white newcomers,
endless articles about them. and what were they doing there? and would theyhelp save the city, and all of that sort of thing. so there's thiscomeback narrative of detroit started to arise. and it's really interesting,because the corporations really soon followed allof this coverage. in 2011, just as detroitentered bankruptcy proceedings,
shinola, the fancywatch and bike company, set up shop in the city. their pitch was thatby purchasing a $550 watch or a $3,000bicycle, hip consumers could buy into the revivalof one of america's great industrial cities. so corporations and investorsreally heard the call. dan gilbert, the owner of thecleveland cavaliers and quicken loans, began to scoop up alot of these skyscrapers that
had been long emptied andfilled them with luxury lofts. in 2013, wholefoods came to town and was greeted witha full-fledged frenzy. the city had arrived. whole foods was there. so the rebranding ofdetroit's national narrative had been sort of complete. but had the city actuallyimprove, and for whom? and who does thisrevitalization benefit?
well, here are the facts,just facts, just numbers. detroit has beennumber one on forbes most dangerous cities listnow for four years in a row. detroit only has enoughjobs to employ roughly 37% of the population. the public schoolremains in a disgrace. on the whole, blackresidents which make up over 80% ofthe city have not benefited from this new detroit.
a very small area calledmidtown in the downtown area, you see restaurants,you see galleries, you see more tourists. you do see an economycoming through here. but the rest of the140 square miles remains exactly as i'vealways remembered it since i was a child. detroit declaredbankruptcy in 2013. today, still the populationcontinues to decline.
however, they think thatby 2018 the population, the endless decline,might actually bottom out. and that is significant. it's not insignificant. but narratives are powerful. when i started todetropia, people would ask what i wasworking on, i'd say, i'm spending a lotof time in detroit. and they would always answer,i'm sorry to hear that.
a snide remark, oh, detroiletand things like that. now, when i say i'm going backto detroit for the weekend, they say, oh, my god, cool. i heard it's back now. and i'm dying togo check it out. and maybe that narrative,the detroit phoenix rising from the ashes, willsomeday become a reality. perhaps, detroit'saffordability and strange allure will continue to bring morepeople to the city, people
like yourselves, withgood ideas of how a greater number ofdetroiters can actually benefit from this new interestand investment in the city. we're far off from this, i feel. but the fascination withdetroit continues to grow. and somehow the cityhas a hold on us. in fact, writerdrew philips likes to say detroit is the mostinteresting city on the planet. because when youscratch the surface,
you only find a mirror. there's just something aboutthis city, about this story, we cannot shake. so i hope you continueto explore it. thank you so much for having me. - so thank you first, ofcourse, to the organizers, to eve, to julie, to erik,and naturally to dean cohen supporting forconsistently supporting what seems to have beenan incredible run here
in the radcliffe institute. i'd like to especiallythank you eve blau, who was the protagonistin bringing me here last year to this workshopon urban intermedia, which provided an impetusfor me to organize my thoughts around this issue ofhow what we know about the city is conditioned through thelens with which we see it and, subsequently, how thatlens in turn conditions us. you
it's fortuitous to followheidi, i think, in the sense that what i'm going totalk about is in a sense the other side of whatmight be described as the power of personalnarrative to articulate a place and how we read acity through people. and i think we, inthe keynote, heard quite a bit about thisnotion that people define cities, which thenin turn define people. so it's this relationshipthat i'm interested in.
and i'm interestedin looking forward in terms of contemporarymodes of observing the city, in particular therole of big data, algorithms, and so-called intelligenturban infrastructure are shaping what we knowabout the city today and how, in turn, it'sbeginning to shape us. and my interest herelies in questioning how this reciprocal relationshipbetween the methods and objects of urban research changeswhen we shift from employing
representational tools bywhich the present city is observed to methods involvingdata mining and analysis that aim to derive observationsand make predictions about future situations. so this is primarily astory about shifting focus from deploying representationaltools, such as the film camera as instrumentsfor recording or for urban observation,to instrumenting physical environmentsthemselves,
and ultimately the peoplethat inhabit them with sensors and software systems to quantifyurban life in ways that claim to lead to ever moreoptimized, efficient, and sustainable cities. now, devices forobserving the world have been around for a while. much has been said aboutthe camera obscura, for instance, and its rolein recording geometrically accurate views of the city.
these are four drawingsby canaletto representing the campa san giovanni epaolo in venice, produced with the aid of acamera obscura resulting in studies for this painting. and as historian[inaudible] has noted, the camera obscuracan be understood not only as aperformative device, which is to say a toolfor representing an urban space, forexample, but also
as an epistemologicalmodel that articulates a relationship between anobserver and the world. here, we find the constructionof a monocular subject isolated and ensconced withina dark room to which the world has gathered its imagethrough a pinhole or oculus and projected ontoan interior wall of an observational device. now, if we compare this devicewith that of the stereoscope, a different story and adifferent observing subject
emerges. as a byproduct of early19th century advances in physiologicaloptics, the stereoscope capitalized on the discoverythat with binocular vision, each eye sees somethingslightly differently due to the angular disparityexisting between them. the production of depthin sight was subsequently understood to be in some wayrelated to the mind's ability to unite and reconciletwo dissimilar images.
within this context,the stereoscope was developed to reproducethis optical experience mechanically. now, significantly, thedevice marks an intent not just to representa given space, but actually tosimulate its presence. what is sought is notmerely a likeness, but a lucid tangibility. with the stereoscope,one is confronted
not with the view of the worldthrough an aperture or a frame, but rather with thetechnical reconstitution of an already reproducedworld fragmented into two non-identical models. through the incorporationof an observing subject into the mechanicsof the device, the stereoscopic imageis subsequently produced. now, the body is immobilized andintegrated with the apparatus. the subject becomesa participant
in the productionof a verisimilitude through a process of unifyingand reconciling the experience of difference. this junk disjunction betweenan experience and its cause is rarified, the realconflated with the optical. absent is the notion of a pointof view in a cartesian sense as might be characterizedby the camera obscura. there is, in the end,nothing out there. so the radical differencesbetween these pre-cinematic
devices highlight the role ofthe apparatus in constituting not only the parameters ofwhat we know about the world, but also how we conceiveour relationship to it, and ultimately howwe know the world and locate our agencyto act within it. now, fast forward to late 20thcentury urban observations and the work of william whyteand his street life project, which aimed to study howpeople behave and interact within urban environmentsand with urban environments
through a structuredresearch protocol that aspired to empiricalobservations, in this case, involving timelapse photography. this is a photograph of theapparatus in question, a super 8 film camera and a clock whichwas persistently in the frame. now, i'd like to play for youa short excerpt from his film, the social life of smallurban spaces, which documents the project anddistills a few observations from the results.
- this is the plaza of this[inaudible] building in new york, late morning. with a time lapse camera, wewere testing a hypothesis. the sun, we werepretty sure, would be the chief factorin determining where people would sit or not sit. now, just after 12:00 they beginto sit right where the sun is. i was enormously pleased. what a perfectlysplendid correlation.
it was quite misleading,as we were to see later. but it was a veryencouraging way to start. - so this notion,i want you to hold on to this notion ofmisleading correlations. what's important hereis that the project departs from a set of hypothesesabout how people interact and behave in smallerspaces and deploys the filmic apparatusin a structured way to test these hypotheses.
this is what we mightcharacterize today as a small data study, which is to saysmall data being characterized by their generallylimited volume, their non-continuous collection,their narrow . variety, and usually generated toanswer very specific questions. you start with aquestion about a space, what people are doing there. now, i'd like you to comparewhyte's apparatus with this. these are two smartphonesaffixed to windows recording
activity happening on astreet outside, in this case, in manhattan as well. and this is a demo clip froma startup called placemeter. placemeter is a service thatdeploys crowdsource smartphones as video sensors formonitoring activity on city sidewalksand public spaces in cities around the world. these video feeds areanalyzed in real time based on computervision algorithms.
and they process activityin the video frame based on a set of predefinedclassifiers established through ai andmachine-learning algorithms. here's how a placemeterpresents itself. - if you couldmeasure urban areas the same way you do withpage views on the web, you'd have enough datato make better decisions about your community, meaningstronger businesses, better neighborhoods, andmore livable cities.
placemeter does just that. it's an urbanintelligence platform. it processes videos from itsown easy-to-install sensor, existing camera systems,or even prerecorded video. it analyzes pedestrianand vehicular movements and turns them into meaningfuldata for municipalities and businesses worldwide. this way, retailers can optimizestorefronts and operations for physical stores.
commercial realtorscan provide clients with solid proof and analysisof foot traffic potential. and municipalitiescan make smarter decisions with public money,delivering better services and safer streets to all. start quantifying your worldtoday at least placemeter.com. - quantify your worldtoday for free-- at least the demo. so in contrast towhyte's method, which
deploys time lapsephotography in attempt to test the set of hypothesesabout how people inhabit urban space, placemeteremploys big data analytics in an attempt to makediscoveries and derive hypotheses from patternsof movement and activity, quantifying the lifeof the street in terms of a set of pre-establishedclassifiers. former editor in chief ofwired magazine chris anderson has described this newera of big data analytics
as, "a new era ofknowledge production characterized bythe end of theory." in other words,big data analytics enables an entirely newepistemological approach for making sense of the world. rather than testinga theory by gathering and analyzing relevantdata as whyte did, big data analyticsseems to gain insights that are born from the data.
ok. but what are big data? rob kitchin, in his bookthe data revolution, identifies a seriesof characteristics which help frame it. big data are huge in volume. they are high in velocity. they are diverse ina variety of type. they are exhaustive in scope.
in other words,you're not dealing with a sample size of a subset. but you're actually attemptingto get the entire population as your data set. they are fine grainedin resolution. they are relational in nature. and they are flexible, holdingthe traits of extensionality and scalability. now, currently, place labis being deployed in paris
to study urban design proposalsfor renovating urban traffic services. and traffic circles into morepedestrian friendly zones in the city. they do things likestudy how these park benches are used ornot used, bike paths widths, and so forth. but this trend here istoward instrumenting physical environmentswith sensors
and employing big data analyticsto quantify urban life in ways that are characteristics ofmany, many so-called smart city initiatives, which we'reseeing pop up around the world. from this songdo internationalbusiness district in south korea, alsoknown as new songdo, which is a new city builtfrom scratch by a partnership between new york baseddeveloper gale international and the new york officeof kohn pederson fox, as well as cisco systems, thedigital plumbers so to speak.
to masdar city in theunited arab emirates developed by the mubadaladevelopment company in association withbritish architecture firm foster and partners. to hudson yards in newyork, a partnership between related companies oxfordproperties and the new york office of kohn pederson fox. i'd like to talk a littlebit about hudson yards. when completed, this$20 billion project
will span seven city blockson the west side of manhattan. it's literally the largestreal estate development project ever undertaken in the us. it will incorporate morethan 18 million square feet of commercial andresidential space, including 100 retail shops,4,000 residences, and 14 acres of parks and public plazas. this massive developmenteffort promises to showcase the latest smartcity technologies promising
the world's first connected,responsive, clean, responsible, reliable, andefficient neighborhood. who wouldn't want that? who would want tolive in a dumb city? the project also pretendsto be the world's first quantified community, aliteral testbed for experiments in urban data science ledby nyu's center for science and urban progress, or cusp. constantine kontokosta,cusp's project leader,
describes thequantified community as a fully instrumentedurban neighborhood that uses an integratedexpandable sensor network to support themeasurement integration and analysis of neighborhoodconditions, activity, and outcome. so they're doing thingslike measuring, modeling, and predicting pedestrianflows, gauging air quality both within buildingsand across open spaces,
measuring and modelingenergy production and usage throughout the project,measuring health and activity levels of residents andworkers using a custom designed opt-in mobile application. now, how manypeople in this room are familiar with thequantified self movement? not many. ok, few, few. so the notion of aquantified community
stems from the idea of thequantified self, which simply involves peoplelogging personal data about their daily activitiesusing wearable sensors. you might have heard thedevice, a fitbit, for example. apps such as fitness activitytrackers, for example, monitor a rangeof health factors, heart rate, steps taken, floorsclimbed, calories burned, even sleep quality, and producerepresentations of our progress toward self-identified goalsthat are shared and aggregated
through online portals. here, the notion is that throughthe continuous self-monitoring of physiologicalcondition, we can bring about personalbehavioral change. we can change ourbehavior if we just know enough in quantifiableterms about what the data is. now, scaling this paradigmto the neighborhood, the quantified communitythen is the idea that continuousmonitoring of the built
environment, the statusof its technical systems, and human activity all can befed back into that environment to alter its futureperformance and ultimately the behavior of its inhabitants. here, people engagedwith their neighborhood not only by consumingits services and administeringits systems, but also by serving as sources ofmeasurable behavioral data. people in this contextbecome censors.
they become,themselves, censors. and shannon mattern hasdone some interesting work on this, articlein places journal online recently,actually about a year ago now, where she identifiessome of the key problems here. yet, if we were to measurethe behavior of these citizen sensors as an index of theengagement with the city, we find that theiractions, in fact, are limited by theinstruments that
render those actions visibleand worth accounting for. she referenceshannah arendt here in saying the troublewith modern theories of behavioralism--" this isarendt in 1958 in her book the human condition-- "isnot that they are wrong but that they could become true,that the very instruments used to measure behaviorare indicative of and constitutive ofsocieties of automatism and sterile passivity."
so the data thatwe generate based on determinist assumptionsand faulty methodologies in some cases couldend up shaping populations and buildingworlds in their own image. so the quantifiedcommunity at hudson yards thus can be seen as a testbed for future urban life where urban intelligence,the so-called smartness of the smart city, is renderednot as conscious liberal or objective, butrather as performative.
in the shift from observationaltools to environments that observe, both thecity and its citizens converge into populations ofhuman and non-human actors and actants that comprisenot individual bodies and personal experiences,but rather patterns of activity and behavioriteratively mined and interpreted byalgorithmic processes. now, this testbedworld of big data, a world where correlationsupersedes causation,
is a probabilistic one where fewthings are certain and most are only probable, such as therelationship between cheese consumption and thenumber of people being tangled in their bedsheets. it presents anurban epistemology that is not concernedwith documented facts representing spaces ormaking representative models of our world, but rathercreating models that are in and of themselves territories.
so the questionis what questions do we need to be askingabout these new territories? dalton and thatcher haveargued for a new field of critical data studies thatsituates these territories in broader social, cultural,and political contexts and that address the technical, ethical,political, and economic, temporal, spatial, andphilosophical implications of this shift fromobservational tools to observing environments.
and in closing, i'd like totranspose their so-called five questions at theend of that essay. to urban environments. and in doing, so we might askwhat historical conditions have led to the instrumentation ofcities with big data systems and infrastructures? how is big data beingdeployed or employed in the production of urbanspace and infrastructure? who controls the productionand analysis of big data
in urban environments? what implicit andexplicit biases, motives, and imperativesdrive their work? who are the urbansubjects of big data? and what new forms ofknowledge are they producing? and ultimately, whatproductive insights can urban big data offer after all? what other forms of knowledgecould it help to produce? - thank you so much for invitingme, liz and becky and everyone
at the radcliffe institute. i'm so happy to beback at radcliffe as an undergraduate in the '70s. and i'm going to be speakingabout a subject that is dear to my heart, the maximumcity i call home, bombay, the mega city that wasrenamed mumbai in 1995 by the right-wing party,hindu party, shiv sena. it's for that reasonthat i'm going to refer to it in my talkas bombay and not mumbai.
it's a city which has a densityof more than 44,000 people per kilometer and a populationof over 18 million, all of them jammed-- all of usjammed-- into an area that is only 233 square miles. they have writtenscreenplays set in the city and directed two films,a feature and a vr short, where the city isvery much a character. the way i've come toknow bombay is not through my screenplaysor my films,
but primarily throughthe act of photography, just me and my one camera. i began shootingthe city in 1976. and i haven'tstopped since then. my photographicjourney began here in cambridge in 1976 with aloan of $220 from my roommate cathy dement, godbless her always, to buy my first camera, anikkormat with a 50 millimeter lens.
i worked with steve geovanisin the music library. he was a junior and astringer for the boston globe. he taught me the basics of howto shoot and develop and print. shortly after i gotmy camera and lenses and got my lessons fromsteve and prepared cathy, i took a leave of absence fora semester and returned home. ostensibly, to spend asemester photographing bombay, but in reality because i wasjust desperately homesick. my talk is going to bemore showing than telling,
because i believe thatthe act of looking is as good a way of knowinga city as any other. this was one of the photos itook on that first trip home. it's the gateway of india fromthe sea lounge of the taj mahal hotel 32 years beforeterrorists held it hostage for fiveextremely bloody brutal days. now, of course, therecan be no open windows, because of security. no matter how modernan indian city is,
there are never any boundariesbetween inside and outside. these horse carriages usedto be symbolic of the city. now, they are banned,except for a few who take tourists on rides,much like new york city. the lifeline of thecity, its local trains. though this was taken in 1976,the tracks remain the same. this building still existsnext to a train station. our neighborhood bar servingmoonshine, that is long gone. in its place as a 35 storybuilding empty of residence,
like most of thesenew buildings are that are bought for investments. nobody lives in them. though this was takenin 1976, many wells still exist in the city. water is always a valuableand scarce resource everywhere in india. this photographis the equivalent of two kids riding acamel down mass ave. they
are on one of the city's mainarterial roads, marine drive. so when i returnedhome, i also started photographing my family, mygrandmother, my grandfather, on his favorite trip, to gethis fountain pen repaired. he always left a tip. my neighbor across the way,[? yasmin ?] [? irani ?] studying on her balcony. i call this photo,evenings at cozy building. this was where i grewup in an extended family
and my parents still live. this was a typical sceneat home every evening. i call this photostreetside services. and this was actuallytaken only last year. this is a typist typingout something for someone on an actual manual typewriter. and this is streetsideservices from 1976. a palmist reads someone's hand. and behind him, a lawyer is inhis open-air office consulting.
again, but this time morerecently, bombay's famous road marine drive lined withart deco buildings. and this was at apublic air show. these were innocent timeswhen this gentleman could be a security guardat the airport and i, as a skinny19-year-old, could be a security guard atharvard guarding the chemistry labs at night. bombay is a city ofinfinite variety of worlds
within worlds ofdifferent classes, communities, religions, rituals. i grew up with girls who arechristians, jews, hindus, muslims, jains. i was a parsizoroastrianism myself. this is sean ma, the son andmy husband's college friend [? lang ?] ma. they live opposite thechinese temple of bombay. and we visit their home and thetemple every chinese new year.
though i come from anextremely collective society, in my creative work,i've always been interested in the individualwithin the collective, like in this photo. the women of the red lightdistrict, kamathipura. the celebration thecity is most known for, the ganapati festival of themuch-beloved hindu god ganesh, who is immersed in the sea. then in 1986, ibegan my film journey
with my first screenplay iever wrote for the film salaam bombay!, a collaborationwith my friend also from radcliffe, mira nair. the film was about streetchildren in bombay. and i'm very proud of myunique credit on that film, screenwriter slashstill photographer. this was taken atan actor's workshop we held before filming began. this is bernad,a street kid, who
was then adopted by acinematographer sandi sissel. bernad moved to los angeles in1992 and began living there. he is married to awonderful chinese lady. and they have a13-year-old daughter who is a national levelcompetitive ice skater. and bernad has been living inhollywood for the past so many years since 1992. and he's been workingat, appropriately enough, panavision.
time pass, a uniqueindian concept. all these hundreds ofpeople have so much time to pass that theyare all staring up at us shooting on thesecond floor of a building, except there's nothing to see. because the set was boardedup to keep sound out. this is our sound man nealon location hard at work. the gang of streetkids we hung out with before wrotethe screenplay,
the boy on the rightlooks like such a toughie. but once his cap was off,it was another story. the boy touchinghis bald head is who inspired the maincharacter of the film. he's the real[non-english], the tea boy. the bombay filmindustry was always known for its elaboratehand-painted [inaudible]. they don't exist anymore. a famous artist m.f.hussain began his career
as a painter ofthese [inaudible]. two thespians enjoying awell-deserved cup of tea after a bout of artificial red. naseeruddin shah andstellan skarsgard shooting for the film perfectmurder on the streets. bombay used to have glamorousmovie premieres in gorgeous art deco movie theaters. this was one of the last ofthe grand premieres in the '80s with a navy band playing.
the star of thefilm, [inaudible]. and the red carpet ofthose days, where you could be much closer to the action. ever since i was a waitressat the hong kong bar and restaurant here on massave, i've always paid attention to waiters and waitresses. this photo and the next one,taken more recently last year, this was taken ata film festival after party in one of thecity's richest residences.
i imagine themistress of the house instructed her staff to cleanup immediately any of her guests dropped anything, even if itwas in the middle of the party. a new year's evedance in the '80s, again, bombay's mosaic ofchristians, paris, sikhs, all rocking and rolling. unfortunately, its cosmopolitancharacter has since eroded. of all indian cities, womenof freer and safer in bombay as you can see in this photo.
and the classic tropeall over the world and particularly in india,the loose women parting with the cigarette andsmoking versus the goddess. bombay always been knownas the city by the sea. countless generationsof citizens, regardless of cost, class, and communityhave enjoyed the many sea fronts that line our coasts. even if one livesin the interiors in the most overcrowdedof localities,
there's always thesea to give relief. this is about tochange forever thanks to a misguided mega-projectto build a 12 lane coastal road using publicfunds that will only benefit a small percentage of carowners, a road that will damage the environment and make the seaa distant dream that once was. my favorite bird, the smartestas well, a bombay crow. rear window in bombay. so that was bombay then.
and i'm going toshow you mumbai now. i'm not going to speak, becausei'd like you to just look. and i could we dimthe lights, please? that's it thank you so much. - so thank you to allthree of our presenters for their provocative and alsovery compelling presentations. and now, we'll try topull things together just for a few minutes before we openup the floor to your questions. and it's actually not veryeasy to pull things together.
because on the one hand,we have heidi's work and sooni's, bothof which come out of a very long relationshipwith a particular place and also using different media. and not exclusivelyfor artistic purposes, but certainly thoseare among the purposes. and then we havemark's work, which shows how we can use thesame media or similar newer media not inrepresentational modes,
but in modes that allowus to mine data from them. and mark also observesthat what we see is conditioned bythe lens that we use, which in turn affects us. so without gettingtoo tangled up in the idea of newtechnologies, i wonder if we can somehow putthe two approaches together in terms of what they yield. so i would like to askeach of our three speakers
to comment on the kinds ofknowledge and understanding about urbanism today thatare produced by their work and through whatartistic strategies the particular power of yourmedium shows change over time. so that's my questionto each of you in turn. and i don't know,perhaps, you'd like to-- - well, i haven't reallythought about it in those terms. i think that the differencebetween, i think, the work actually that i'mshowing versus what you were
showing and also to a lesserextent-- we have more in common with what we're doing. but i think thatit's interesting that the data can showmaybe where these people go and what spaces they inhabit. whereas, i'm interested inhow an individual relates to and feels about theirenvironment and what kind of personalstories that they create around a tactile space.
and it's funny, becausein detroit, for example, people always talk about theemptiness, the empty spaces. and we were sure in our filmto very rarely show just an empty building on a street. there was always aperson scurrying by or someone in the window. we even have a shot in the filmwhere a crane is taking down all these houses as part ofthe mayor's oath to the people to tear down like 60,000houses, unoccupied houses.
and we would be shooting that. and then just onestreet behind there would be a little kid in thewindow, maybe the last family and so there wasthis push to shrink the city while we were filming. it was when mayor bingwas the mayor of detroit. and it was all aboutshrinking the city and turning off streetlights and turning off water and saving money.
and if there was only one personon the block, they should move. they should just move. and that would bemore practical. but there wasn't moneyto give them to move. and so it was like, whatmakes a neighborhood? i mean, there'sbirds, and trees, and grass, and stray dogs,and maybe one old lady and what is her value? and if there's onlyone person interacting
with a space that wasmade for multitudes, does the value ofthat space change? and in the eyes ofthe lady on the block, it's her whole world. it's her memories. it's her life. it's the smells andsounds of her kids who used to live there. and so for her, it's ahypertacile, real, living
thing. it's her memory. and to the city,it's just a nuisance. because it wasn'tmade just for her. so these were the kindof conversations that were happening in the city. and we tried to capturein the way we could through our lens, whichdoesn't answer your question, but it's an answer.
- yeah. well, i'll take a crackat trying to approach it. i think the intention inpresenting the kind of talk that i presented inthis milieu is really to try to push back to someof the overarching claims that people working in thisfield of, let's call it, smart city developmentmake about what not only the aspirationsare, but what are some of the potentialcapabilities are.
and i think that one of thethings that we are witnessing as some of theseproposals, projects, are moving from therealm of speculation to being built or enacted isthat the kind of territory is shrinking in termsof there's a kind of gap between what something is beingprojected to be capable of and in fact what is being reallyused for or is useful for. and i think one of the thingsthat people are coming around to is just this notion thatspecifically this type of work,
this so-called small data,is extremely valuable to understand thequalitative components or the qualitative aspectsof an urban environment. in looking at correlationsnot caring about causation, the idea is that youwould make discoveries, that you would operate on-- i was having aconversation last night about people working withthe new york public library's digital collection of menusacross hundreds of years.
or, 100, 150 years,i'm not quite sure. but being able to lookand try to correlate the presence of grapefruiton a menu with, let's say, droughts in californiaor supply chain shifts is the kind of questionthat big data enables. the problem is thatmuch like 20th century kind of techno-determinism inurban design in particular, higher in design, there isthe drive that this empiricism becomes totalizing.
and so in thiscontext, i think it's important to be able to notjust look away or say this is only quantitative information. cities are far morecomplex and diverse. they are filled withnon-addressable spaces, spaces which aren't easilyquantifiable. and within this context,it's important to be able to point toexamples where knowledge of ways of knowingthe city exceed
the ability of any one media ormedium and any one discourse. and so it's, in a sense,what kinds of questions do we need to ask from theperspective of the humanities to be able to engagewith what's ultimately a fairly powerful forceand, to a certain extent, beginning to drive decisions. for example, in detroitabout what parts of the city do we reconfigure urbanservices, street lights, for example, water, electricity.
how can we input into thispolicy-making, decision-making process in ways which canmake qualitative difference? - i've always found photographyas an ideal medium to document change and preserve memories by[inaudible] of things that are disappearing. and that's alwaysbeen my personal, kind of, motivator tophotograph the city as well as the community i belong to,both of which are disappearing. the city that i knew isdisappearing and the community
i belong to as well. i was struck by theimages of detroit. and it's funny that it wouldnever happen in my city that there would be spaces thatare kind of derelict and empty, because it just doesn't happen. there's not an inch ofempty space in bombay. and probably inother indian cities as well, it's alwaysbroken down to be built up. nobody leaves anythingderelict ever.
and so there's a lotof churning going on in indian city,especially bombay. bombay is full of change now. it's full of the megadevelopment projects. they all involve corruption,including public works. and there are a lotof active citizens who are trying tooppose it to, i'm sorry to say,little or no avail. - we're almost at ourdiscussion period.
but i'm just going to takethe moderators prerogative to ask sooni onemore question, which is that the beautifulphotographs that she showed us were divided into two series,as she herself specified, a first earlier seriesin black and white and a second morecontemporary series filled with the drama of color andalso with all kinds of contrasts that speak to thecontemporary moment. so i wanted to ask aboutyour different strategies
and whether youconsider it all one body of work or several body. - i don't know aboutconsidering it one body work. i think they'retwo bodies of work. the color is actuallya result of technology. most of these werecamera phone pictures. and though i'm a purist,i love the camera phone. because i alwayshave it with me. and i always usedto resolve to carry
a camera with me every day,but i never managed to. and now, i alwayshave it with me. and the other thing is i'ma very avid instagrammer. because when istarted photography, there was of very fewavenues to share your work. and when instagramcame out and i could share my work withfriends across the globe, i completely dived into it. i have some 3,000 plusphotos on instagram,
including a lot of these. so it's a questionof technology that made the second body of work. - thank you. all right. so we'd like to giveyou all a chance to ask questions of our presenters. as you can see, there's a mic inthe center of the aisle there. and if you'd liketo ask a question,
please just come up to the mic. if there are several ofyou, you can stand in line. and when it's your turn,please identify yourself. and please ask a questionalong with making any comments. so i know it's hardto be the first one, but i can't imaginethat some of you don't have questions forthese amazing speakers. - can i go right ahead? - go for it.
- well, this is a commentand a question for sooni. when i was 12 or 13,i was lucky enough to capture or just flick thechannel and see salaam bombay! and besides the commercialsthere always were, i was struck by your movie. and it's been aninspiration for me since then to study citiesas a political science major, to look at cities as a civicspace that's continuously transforming.
and i thank you somuch for your art. - thank you so much. - and i'm definitely goingto look for your instagram. because i loved your writingand your storytelling and your photography. and i want to continue that. my question to youis i'm bangladeshi. - sorry? - i'm bangladeshi.
- so three or fouryears ago, i was working with an ngo called bracon water policy in bangladesh. and dhaka has beena city that has changed within 10 to20 years, 10 of which i've never been back. i was born in this country. i consider myself an american. but i have history androots that obviously go back to being bengali.
so i wonder when i was passingthrough the city corporation and seeing this tallbuilding, how people-- when growing up incambridge and continuing to live in cambridge wheni can walk up to my city councilor and say, can imake officer hours with you? can i talk about a cityordinance with you? how do we bring thatwith keeping in mind the differences betweenand the stereotypes that are associated withdemocracy and westernization?
how do we bring thatkind of openness? how do we bring that civicconversation back to our people and integrate our valuesand culture and history into what we can transform ourcities and our way of life? - that's a good question. i wish i had the answer. - i just tryingto figure it out. - i would love to knowthe answer to that. because we had oneavenue in india
called the rti act, whichis right to information. and now, the current governmentwants to repeal that as well. so nothing is public. in my city, bombay, theywill have a development act. and they will doit, and then they will make it public for fivedays of public comments. and the act will have suchfar reaching consequences. and it would never happenin any western city, but it happensconstantly in india.
because there'sno accountability. there's no feeling that theyare accountable to the public. politicians feel that theyare almost like royalty. nobody can question them. and there's a hugeamount of corruption involved in all these projectsand all these public projects. so i'm sorry to be sopessimistic about it, but realisticallyspeaking i don't know when it's going to change really.
and what i talked about,this coastal road, we tried very hard, butwe didn't get anywhere unfortunately. - well, thank you anyway. - and thank you for your kindwords about salaam bombay! - of course. i have a querybeginning with mark. in your comment aboutempiricism becoming totalizing and, i think in yourengagement, there
is a deep yearning forthe non-totalitarian and the creative. so it is in that spirit, thediscourse of this smart city, how does it cultivate the reasonand practice of soul city? and i'm here reminded of thegreat work of anthropologist ulf hannerz who nearly50 years ago wrote a book called the soulside. so how do we think of the[inaudible] space, this sphere of this soul sphere as well?
my connected query toboth heidi and sooni is-- thank you so much-- among your manyimportant engagement, one dimension is the engagementwith loss and disappearance, and therefore waysof knowing the city, especially when sooni,you make the comment, "seeing is a way of knowing." but that act of seeing,does it also involve an act of weeping or crying?
therefore, i thinkwith the theme of loss anddisappearance, how do we bring weeping as a way ofknowing which then becomes a companion to solidarity. therefore, thequestion would be that what is this base ofhope in this context? and how do we thinkof the city space in terms of poetics of space,but also the emergent spaces of hope?
- if i can just takethe first question-- can you just repeat the author? i'm not sure i'mfamiliar with this text. - he's an anthropologist. his name ulf hannerz,originally from sweden who did fieldwork with, i think,an afro-american community in washington dc. but i am just remindedof the title soulside. - soulside.
- just to bring the connectionof this soul sphere, because in my work,i'm also trying to-- i'm coming from india with ofkind of, as sunni mentioned, the regal discourseof the smart city. so we need to bring adiscourse of the soul city. - sure. that's a great question. there's a couple of waysone can respond to that or people haveresponded to that.
one is to say simply thatthis soul side of the city is a non-addressable space. at least, it's notaddressable in the sense that it doesn'thave an ip address. the soul doesn't havean ip address, right? and to a certain extent,one finds that response unsatisfying. another way of approaching,responding to that, is to suggest in a similarway that we were talking about
this morning wherepeople moved to the city, and it changes them. their attitudes change. their values changein some respects or at least grow and develop. and i think back tomartin heidegger's essay on "the age of theworld picture." and he's talking aboutthis quantification. in the age of the world picture,the certain move or shift
toward a degree of,shall i say, bigness moves over from thequantitative to begin to have a qualitative component to it. it has a quality to it, right? and he describes this asa kind of modern condition and as a resultfrom a whole range of technological developments. similar claims arebeing made about how-- and this is the kind ofdarker side in a sense of some
of the propositions-- chris anderson'sclaim of the end of theory, where correlationsupersedes causation. we're talkingabout a different-- in the sciences, inthe hard sciences, it's not such a leapto say we don't really care why this is happening. but we can show youevidentiary data that prove this correlation exists.
when we're talkingabout the soul side, it's a question of hasthat quality, which comes from a quantitativecondition being pushed to a certain scale,already become part of us? and i think that'sthe challenge. that's what we're looking at. - i think it's soevocative, the concept of weeping and acknowledgingthe loss of what was no longer comingback and that there
is a crying and aweeping that i think you could feel in some of theclips that i showed today. you know, spaces matter. and neighborhoods matter. and where thingstake place matters, especially in a citylike detroit, which not unlike what angela wasmentioning about los angeles, the highways, the freeways, theway they were built in detroit also completely segregatedblacks from whites in detroit.
it was intentional. it was done. the concept in mind was tojust keep everyone apart. and it's very, very hard toundo an infrastructure like that even with good intentions. the city planning wasdone a certain way. and that has not been resolved. so when we talk about allthe development happening in this one area,now they call it
midtown, that is easilyaccessible by suburban people. so they come in to thetigers games on the weekends. they'll come to the opera. they'll go to the detroitinstitute of arts. they'll go to these places. it's easy to get there. there's parking. and for a lot ofblack residents who live in the greaterdetroit city, which
is a huge massive place,it's not convenient. it's expensive. they don't feel comfortable. all the development andall of the new residents are mostly white. so in a way, it'slike recreating the problem that was neversolved the first time around. and so i think that in orderto help bridge this divide, they should start with thespaces that events are held in.
there is a lot of foundationsright now in detroit, sort of ngo-type moneyflowing into the city. and always, when you'reinvited to an event, it happens at thedetroit institute of art or it happens at the masonictemple or a known space in this midtownarea, because they think it's going to beconvenient to those people interested. if they move thoseevents and said
i'm doing it at baker'skeyboard lounge, completely the other side oftown, or i'm doing it at the raven on the eastside on chene street and you partnered with theseolder black local businesses that have credibilitywith their neighborhoods, if they work togetherto get the word out that there's going to bemeetings in unexpected places and vice versa, i think thatthat would go a long way to the longtime residentsfeeling left out
of this new detroit andcut out and forgotten. it makes people feeluseless and disrespected. and also, there'sthis sense of history that this racial divide isjust being recreated again. so i actually really thinksome of these changes have to happen with whereevents and invitations are made in detroit. it's that simple. and that has not even been done.
i mean, that's howbasic we're talking. - i'm going to answeryour question about hope. there's certainly nohope for the politicians. but i have a lotof hope, because of what i've seen with thepeople of the city, of my city, when there are disasters likefloods, how people react. you know, you must haveseen in these photographs a woman who has no home whohas everything outdoors, and she's still smiling.
that's what gives me hope. it gives me hope thatpeople who have nothing still continue to smile andstill continue to have hope. and that's an amazing thing. and that exists in the city. and that, i think,nobody can destroy. and the other hopeof the city is people are constantly comingto the city, because for them the city representshope as opposed
to villages wherethey are starving. and they say that nobodystarves in the city. i'm not sure how true that is. but that's what they say. - hi, my name is [? palavi ?][? mondi. ?] i'm a loeb fellow at the graduate schoolof design this year. otherwise, i reside in theworld of cities and water, be it climate changeor restoration or [inaudible] systems.
so having followsome of your work-- sooni, i've obviouslyseen the film-- i'm very intrigued by thedystropic view of detroit. and i've only anecdotallyheard a lot around water infrastructure andhow that intersects with issues of peopleliving and the community. the real estateinterests sort of giving this brand of the renaissanceand the white flight into detroit and reallyissues around accountability
and how we actually ensurethat what happened in flint doesn't become a phenomenonthat a lot of cities in the us are just waiting to witness. so my questionreally is if i ground this discourse in thefield of resilience-- which is also becoming avery hot discourse area and how it intersectswith urbanism. sooni, since you mentionedmumbai and the opportunities even though there's no physicalspace for these opportunities
to play out in a conventionalsort of design, architecture, or urbanism standpoint, iwonder how we as a community, looking at cities from differentexpertise or disciplines, how we want to acknowledgethe opportunity to tell the storiesthat need to be told, sort of representrealities in ways that are not convenient or evenfor that matter constructive? and i really want toopen it up to whoever wants to take a pass at howcan we tell the stories.
not to just sort of make theworld be aware of realities, but address it in a waythat's universally applicable, but also challenging forthis discourse to inform us in how we want to move forward. - well, if iunderstood correctly, it's always adocumentary's-- you know, we're often asked to be alsoactivists and to use our work for a specific purpose. and we've always sort ofevaded sort of the agenda film
and tying our moviesin a bow at the end. there's a whole trend ofdocumentary filmmaking where at the endit's like, if you want to help, turn off yourfaucet and turn off your light. these are the things you can do. go to this website,and you can-- and i think that's great. our work's never fitinto those boxes. so sometimes we do revealinconvenient truths
and don't offer solutions,which can frustrate people. but what i think isreally important, at least in mymedium, is to partner with organizations that havethe will and the resources to make a curriculum. for example, severalof my films are taught in schools and universities. and we helped make a curriculumor made it easy for people to make a curriculum incanada and elsewhere.
how do we teach this film? how do we make yourfilm or your photograph into a tool for other peoplewho do have ideas, solutions, and agendas? so, for example, i made afilm called 12 & delaware about the abortion battle-- it's on hbo this film-- raging on a street cornerin fort pierce, florida. so on one side of the street,there's an abortion clinic.
on the other sideof the street, there is a crisis pregnancycenter, which is basically a fake abortion clinic. women think they'rein an abortion clinic, because they're gettinga free pregnancy test. but it's actuallya pro-life front where they will give anultrasound to the girl and tell her she'll get breastcancer if she has an abortion or tell her that she's notas far along as she is.
so by the time shefigures it out, it's too late to get anabortion in her state. so we got inside this crisispregnancy center and filmed. and then we got insidethe abortion clinic. and it's a character-driven filmabout this one street corner and the battle, theabortion battle. now, what we've done with thatfilm is when we were finished with it, we've allowednaral and planned parenthood to use it for other events.
and as long as we don'thave great disagreements with what they're doing with thefilm, we happily hand it over. so i think that that is reallyhow we can get our messages out and also interpretedby different people in different ways, so that youcan actually reach more people and start using our workfor more concrete solutions. - as one filmmaker said, ifyou want to send a message, go to ups or fedex. and so i kind of agree withthat and kind of don't.
because after wemade salaam bombay!, we started an organizationfor street kids called salaam trust thatis still very active i don't know howmany years later. i think film is an easierway to be an activist than a still photographer. there have beenstill photographers who have been activists andwho've been working for change. but i don't think thatis my primary goal when
i take photographs. i take photographs, because i'mjust obsessive about putting frames around reality. i don't know why. i think i was born like that. but in the filmsthat i make, there's definitely some foodfor thought and hope that things will change. - so we have one minute left.
but these two people have beenvery patiently standing online. is there is there a wayfor you to very quickly ask your question? - i mean, i can askit as fast as i can. - yeah, as fast asyou possibly can. hi, thank you so muchfor sharing your work. my question is about nostalgia. i think in the films, it's veryclear when nostalgia comes up. i think with data,it's less clear.
i'm interested in how datatalks about nostalgia. does data talk about nostalgia? and i'm also curiouswhen we change cities, when we tryto be purposeful about change, how do we use nostalgia? is it useful? and whose nostalgia do we use? - in one minute. well, that's a great question.
it's characteristic of the kindsof more interesting questions that are being askedabout data today. and i guess the onething i could say is that nostalgiais being looked at. but it's more how candata and analytics operate on the objects of nostalgia? so it would be aboutarchives, looking at archives. and to what extent can itreveal something or discover correlations or relationshipswhich we don't already
know about nostalgia-- in one minute. - ok. were you-- did youhave more to say? - no. i was not-- - if you can quantify nostalgiawith data, i mean, call me. i'd love to see that. i mean, i thought itwas interesting actually
looking at angela's streetcarmap versus the subway map. something aboutthat, seeing them next to each other and allthat was lost when the street cars were removed fromthose black neighborhoods, i actually surprisinglyfound that effective. and that was just a graph. so, actually, ithink it's intriguing the idea that you can movepeople emotionally with data. i think that's aninteresting area
- but i would also like toconclude with an argument for a very small data. because humanists are verygood at close reading. and so heidi and i werespeaking about the title of her film, detropia. and for me, there areall these associations that come out of just that oneterm, like utopia, dystopia, cornucopia, detritus,deteriorate, -opia, hope, and i supposenostalgia as well.
but so it feels asthough somehow our task is to balance vast sort of evenunimaginable quantities of data along with the incredibleimportance of very small things. so let's conclude on that. thank you to ourthree presenters for their wonderful talks. and thank you to youfor your attention.