Texts
[Storefront in an urban context]
From sidewalk to private spaces, storefronts serve as the buffer and threshold to define boundaries in urban properties. Bustling storefronts have long been a fixture of vibrant urban spaces. A storefront is often more than just a storefront. Neighborhood institutions like bodegas, barbershops, cafés and the like serve as places for social interaction and civic engagement. Coffee-shops and restaurants have become makeshift co-working spaces reflecting the present and the future of work. Shop windows serve to entice customers but also as canvases for artists to inspire and provoke, or a site for marketers to display their latest interactive experiences. Even as online shopping gains more and more market-share, online-first retailers are recognizing the importance of brick and mortar shops as showrooms and brand showcases.
With real estate prices of commercial storefronts in major cities rising to unprecedented levels, landlords hold out storefronts to be vacant waiting for the next Starbucks, regional banks, or chain store. These idle properties become opportunities to intervene and reconceive new types of use, or probable prototypes of the future of real estate that are conceived as a result of collective co-creation.
[The production of commons]
“The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values (social practice) employed for a governance mechanism.”
- Wikipedia
While shared natural resources like air is a form of commons, it is the cultural commons that are managed by groups of people for collective benefit that we are examining here. The production of commons is the intentional cultivation of pools of untapped resources that are opened and shared by many. A more nuanced definition of the commons is given by Hardt and Negri:
‘The common does not refer to traditional notions of either the community or the public; it is based on the communication among singularities and emerges through the collaborative social processes of production. Whereas the individual dissolves in the unity of the community, singularities are not diminished but expresses themselves freely in the common.’
- Multitude, War, and Democracy in the age of the empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
In our connected digital global society, the ‘singularities’ are communicated freely anywhere, anytime using multiple mediums of text, images, videos across a wide spectrum of audience. These ‘Networked Publics’, as described by Kazys Varnelis, are ‘communicating more and more through complex networks that are bottom-up, top-down, as well as side-to-side’ in real-time, and heightens the production of commons in a new manner. The exponentially heightened communicative and organizing abilities become a powerful tool to organize economic productions and redistribution of resources beyond singular locale, as illustrated by the network effects of collaborative consumption, crowd-funding, crowd-equity: the sharing economy movement.
It has been argued by Bradley and Pargman that contemporary commons situated in a globalized, urbanized and digitized societal context takes the form of the sharing economy. Meelen and Frenken defined the sharing economy as the interactions of people temporarily letting other people use their under-utilized resources, with or without monetary exchange. This is further enhanced when digital commons allow the sharing of resources to be extremely affordable and accessible such as Wikipedia. Commons has thus become ubiquitous manifested both physically and digitally.
Given this pretext, how do we dissect and understand commons given their variation of scale, locale, reach, and form? The key to understanding the different forms of commons rest in understanding the underlying intent based on three layers and the spectrum that they lie within each:
1. How is it tapping into the resource in scarcity [from new origin of resources to existing resource] and what relevance does it have to our society [from most relevant to least relevant]
2. Who is permitted to access such shared resource [from many to few], and what is the price in exchange of the shared access [from expensive to free]
3. What is the mechanism of governing [open to closed], and who [from many to few] is permitted to (re)define the process
The first layer lies in identifying a resource needed by many that is has demand and is currently bottlenecked by price, convenience, or quality. Finding its relevance to society is key. This is actually economics 101, most businesses thrive based on this. The raw resource might be tapped as is, improved on convenience and/or quality to serve market needs and standards. In some cases, such resources are created fresh to be shared (e.g. a new open-source digital coding language); in most cases, these are existing pool of resources that are made available to tap by many.
The second layer determines how accessible the commons is. For example, if this is a membership structure, is the membership available for the few (expensive) or the many (free or affordable)? This spectrum can create commons that are venture-backable startups (e.g. premium co-working network) to commons that localized community organizations (e.g. neighborhood community garden).
The third layer determines whether the participation and decision of the commons’ governing structure is open or closed. This is probably the most challenging aspect of the three. Most commons have a closed or semi-closed structure with decisions made by the few. It would be logistically very difficult to maintain a truly open governing system involving every commoner that adapts and changes over time based on the pool of commoners. However, this could be done when the rules of engagement are simple (e.g. open-source coding) or if community size is small (e.g. a residential co-op board). This third layer touches on the process of “commoning”, as defined by Stavros Stavrides in “The City as Commons”, is a reiterative process where commoners constantly redraw the boundary of the commons to allow new participants to be included in the process.
‘Worlds of commoning are not simply worlds of shared beliefs and habits but are strongly connected to ways of sharing that open circle of belonging and develop forms of active participation in the shaping of the rules that sustain them. Worlds of commoning are worlds in movement… Institutions of expanding communing establish the common ground on which such encounters may take place. They are not simply forms of openness to contingency; they are mechanisms which give shape to the potential transformations by ensuring that commoning will continue to be a set of practices of sharing that treat commoners as equals but different.”
- Stavros Stavrides, The City as Commons
This democratic process of constant inclusion of commoners into the commons, is stepping away from the traditional notion of “deliberative democracy”, where consensus of the majority becomes the decision- making mechanism. Instead, it is migrating towards what Chantal Mouffe stated as “agonistic pluralism”. In this world, the objective is to generate and gather a collective pool of ideas that each individual one, given the right circumstances, could flourish. No one idea is better or worse than another, and because each can be chosen and used to adapt for different circumstances. There is no singular authoritative figure to decide which idea trumps others, only a series of debates and comments that naturally follows. This expands into what Hardt and Negri mentioned in Commonwealth as ‘expansive circuits of encounter’. Where the open encounter results in a new production of the commons while heterogeneous bodies of thoughts, culture, knowledge intersects to form cooperatively something entirely new.
These porous encounters in the commons result in exciting new forms of production that transcend the singular capability of any individual commoner. The paradoxical tensions between efficiency (decision or participation by few) and inclusiveness (decision or participation by many), financial viability (for-profit and quickly scalable) and heterogenous authorship (slow cultivation with many deep localized relationships) are all in play with different kinds of commons.
The interrelationship of our capitalistic society with the three layers of commons (from tapping, sharing to governing) is what this project starts to explore: from the size of commoners as individuals to cross-sector organizations, to the scale of the commons in terms of property size, to how deep are commons forming relationships to build trust between communities.
[Architectural Predicaments: Rent, Program & Design]
The process of design is often mysterious and behind closed doors. Client defines the function and hands down to the designers or architects for a solution. The Storefront for the Commons exposes new ways to conceive of a design brief: one that is based on collective observations, interviews, data, and cultural trends to expose new methods of working and designing.
The project has honed in on rent, program, and design as fundamental elements for participant and stakeholders to rethink: the mechanism a storefront relate to the real estate market and provides a means to sustain itself; the means a storefront relate to its audience via its program to reflect what is really necessary; the ways a storefront relate to the use of the space and the appearance of the space through rethinking of its design encompassing a variety of functions and needs.
Capitalism has turned real estate into effective machines to generate more speculation and financial capital for the ones that holds the resources. It is tremendously effective and but at the same time generates more disparity in the world. Storefront for the Commons creates an opportunity to rethink where and how capitalism and the commons overlap, or if there are fissures and cracks between the two that can be turned into positive catalyst for our urban environments.
RENT
It all started with the privatization of the commons, land that are shared by all on our planet that somehow was claimed to be owned by few. The rise of capitalism and rent goes hand in hand, “the basic elements of capitalist society – the power of property concentrated in the hands of the few, the need for the majority to sell their labor-power to maintain themselves”. According to a recent report conducted by Streeteasy, New York City households are spending an average two-third of their income on rent. That is, two-third of the labor-power of New Yorkers are contributed to the hands of few property owners through rent as the manifestation of this disparity, “the exploitation of labor-power and the accumulation of surplus value should be understood in terms of not profit but capitalist rent”.
The renters are the property-less. Hardt and Negri argued in Commonwealth that “since the dominate form of the republic is defined by property, the multitude, insofar as it is characterized by poverty, stands opposed to it… Private property creates subjectivities that are at once individual (in their competition with one another) and unified as a class to preserve their property (against the poor)… The poverty of the multitude, then, seen from this perspective, does not refer to its misery or deprivation or even its lack, but instead names a production of social subjectivity that results in a radically plural and open body politic, opposed to both the individualism and the exclusive, unified social body of property. The poor, in other words, refers not to those who have nothing, but to the wide multiplicity of all who are inserted in the mechanisms of social production regardless of social order of property.”
The renters are thus unified as the heterogenous others, but they also rely on the property owners to participate in the system. In this context, it is easy to create the commons outside of the purview of the property-owners, but are there productive outcomes that conceive of the property owners as a commoner, or innovative propositions of reinventing relationship between property owners, renters, or the intermediary involving the commons? Who is ultimately the decision maker(s) in this process and is there a way for the many to design rather than the few?
PROGRAM
Program, or sometimes known as brief, is usually the instrument for clients to set the parameters for designers or architects in our built environment. It could also be a way to describe the functional parts of the building according to occupancy use.
Program can be top-down and didactic derived from an agenda, but it can also arise bottom-up naturally by through emergence. While the program for a museum is straight-forward and direct, showing a clear role of the patron directing the function and intent of the building; the program that results in years of adaptation in an informal settlement would likely be dynamic with its own rules of engagement set by multiple participants. Program is more contested and harder to define when there is scarcity of space, an unclear client-designer relationship, or incremental capital improvements that comes from various sources over time.
In 19th century New York City, two-thirds all population of about 2.3 million people lived in tenement buildings. These buildings are typically 25 feet by 100 feet of about five to seven stories. But because most of the population were recent immigrants, they were often over-crowded and without much ventilation, some tenement buildings housed more than thousands at a time. Families lived back-to-back, sharing access, cooking, recreational spaces. The notion of program were mixed, interchanged, and blurred: living room, bedroom, kitchen, production space were all overlapped together within the same quarters to save cost by necessity, program also changes according to the time of the day depending on who needs it the most at the human-scale level.
Sometimes programs are informally driven or naturally occur in unexpected ways through necessity but at the building-scale. In “Made in Tokyo” by Atelier Bow-wow, seventy mundane buildings are documented, where their programmatic innovation is unexpected: highway doubled as department store, retaining wall serving as apartment buildings, golf course doubling as taxi service center, and many more. These so called ‘B-grade’ building types, such as car park, industrial buildings, infrastructure convey hybridized functions in the most economical and efficient way without architects’ input. The economic forces playout in its most minimal and whimsical way.
We are also seeing a rise of program as a new paradigm as a creative endeavor or an instrument of critique, not from the patron, but from the designers and architects as the agent of change. Rem Koolhaas has stated that program for him ‘began as a desire to pursue different means of expression that were similar to writing screenplays’, he added that ‘program increasingly has another connotation for me, which is closer to agenda. I have been trying to find ways that we could circumvent or avoid the architect’s passivity and by this I mean his or her dependence on the initiative of others.’ Bernard Tschumi also has a similar sentiment towards the agency of program by architects, ‘what struck me early on was that most architects are unbelievably passive towards program. They accept them in a completely uncritical way, dress them up with forms, and thereby miss major opportunities.’
In a recent panel held at Google’s Sidewalk Labs exploring the street life after retail, designer-in-residence Eric Baczuk painted five scenarios of the futures of urban streetscapes. Google as a corporation is acting as a design-agent casting an agenda that is neither didactic nor based on emergence, but setting to tone for them to be the anticipatory thought leader, “The sidewalk is where people converge, converse, and exchange — not just goods and services but ideas and opinions. In an age when digital echo chambers threaten to undermine our openness, finding ways to enhance social cohesion and personal interaction on city streets has never been more vital.”
The agency of program becomes the key, what ways to we ‘allocate’ program and in what ways to we ‘observe’ and let the natural forces shape program an emergence? And how does human versus building scale factor into this?
DESIGN
In a metropolis of a pluralistic nature, changing needs for different kinds of uses and audience is an everyday occurrence. Even in a coffee shop, a morning crowd is different from an afternoon crowd. The former aiming for expedience: getting caffeinated; the other may linger for conversations or getting some work done on their laptop. In a traditional architectural context, program does not reflect nuances in changes like this, the ‘café’ can accommodate all kinds of audience. In our world of diverse needs, agenda, and customization, it actually coincidentally synchronize with the values of the commons, where a multiplicity of individuals can express their ideas freely and yet be part of the heterogenous whole.
Again borrowing Eric Baczuks five scenarios for the future of streetscapes, two particular scenarios are of relevance here:
Scenario 1: Mutable Markets
“In one future scenario, pop-ups are no longer the exception but the norm. Short-term leases need not require months. Thanks to transformable robotic furniture, retail operations pop up and down in a matter of minutes, if need be, changing a space from clothing store by day to yoga studio by evening to bar by night. Radically different spaces can also coexist; picture taco vendors next to handbags next to a bookshop-café. Each can take up more or less prominence according to customer demand.”
Scenario 5: Community Commons
“In the digital economy, work can be done from anywhere — and often is. At the same time, private and public realms are melding. Coffee shops now resemble living rooms; restaurants feel like home kitchens; co-working spaces have replaced the home office. The café is increasingly an everything space, where one can go to drink, eat, socialize, or even work. As rising rents force city residents into smaller living spaces, amenities that once characterized the private sphere must increasingly be shared. In this scenario, a legislated tax-penalty for street-level vacancies encourages the leasing of spaces once devoted to ground-floor retail to community organizations, which may or may not use that space to sell anything at all. Renters band together to turn the ground floors of their apartment buildings into a string of common spaces; once-vacant storefronts now host a daycare, a senior health center, a space for receiving or returning online purchases, or anything else the neighborhood needs. The street becomes a vehicle for grassroots collaboration, potentially enhanced by digital social networking tools. Call it the anti-retail movement.”
In our society where the gig-economy is on the rise, individuals are looking to start their own business, work on their side-hustles, looking for ways to create value outside of their corporate jobs. They strive to create their flexible work-life balance because working remotely on laptops is now an acceptable mode of work, or renting flexible office space through co-working is commonplace. And technology is accessible enough to organize from working for a few hours at a bar during off-hours, to video conferencing your client across the globe instantly, and co-creating content on a cloud document.
This is a similar socio-economic condition that arose in the 1960s Britain that gave rise to architect Cedric Price and theater director Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace.
“Price and Littlewood regarded the Fun Palace as a creative and educational outlet for leisure time. Post-war projections had indicated that the current trend towards shorter working hours would continue, and that workplace automation would soon lead to a predominately leisure-based economy for Britain… Price argued that work and enjoyment need not be mutually exclusive, stating that it is ‘essential to eliminate the unreal division between leisure and work time’…that in the Fun Palace ‘there were leisure skills, cooking and all that, but there was new learning as a leisure activity. We didn’t know which way it would categorized, we didn’t care. We couldn’t predict. Price expressed the transformation in terms of a dissolution of the old leisure/work time dichotomy, and proposed a new synthesis or unification of the two.”
- From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price, Stanley Mathews
The agency apparent here, where Price and Littlewood, both frustrated with their own professions, architecture and theater, join forces to rethink how to create a project that embodies the socio-economic zeitgeist of the time. The collaborative aspect of the project is worth noting too, where technology is a key component of the project in the form of cybernetics through a specialist Gordon Pask. “To Pask, the central theme of cybernetics was the study of the ways in which complex biological, social, or mechanical systems organize, regulate and reproduce themselves, evolve, and learn. He regarded cybernetics not as a unilateral system of one way reactivity, but as a two way ’conversation’ between entities. Architecture, argued Pask, is only meaningful as a human environment. It perpetually interacts with its inhabitants, on the one hand serving them and on the other hand controlling their behavior…Pask believed that through cybernetic design, the architect could assume the role of social engineer.”
Whether social behavior can be ‘controlled or designed’ is up for debate. But what is visionary on this line of thinking is that data and behavior can definitely be understood and affect the way we design as a feedback loop. WeWork is an exemplary example of using data to design. With over 200 co-working locations globally to date, WeWork is meticulous in gathering how WeWork members use their conference rooms and workspaces. These data in turn inform future WeWork buildouts. The closed system within WeWork allow for efficient roll-out of learnings and maximize performance based on usage data and behavior pattern within their properties. These knowledge-based learning of co-worker behaviors are then also capitalized on designing for other corporates offices through their “Powered by We” product offering.
The contemporary version in the case of WeWork of how we understand user behavior is a less authoritarian way of looking at social engineering. More closely aligned with ‘customer development’ framework crystalized by serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, and ‘lean startup’ approach coined by Eric Ries.
This design-thinking process, or if more rigorously conducted, a lean startup process of understanding user behavior look at qualitative and quantitative data, generate insights of the target audience, and create prototype solutions to affirm assumptions. Once these assumptions are verified, incremental updates are generated to differentiate the solution from competitors. If enough traction is generated, then ripe for scale for more impact, whether it is to solve for a real painpoint and need, or for financial gains. The process can take in as many input and feedback as they can, but the key decision still are fundamentally closed, limited to the executive team or the board of directors, and if it is a venture-backed startup, the needs and wants of investors and shareholders are heavily factored.
If we go back to our Fun Palace precedent for a second, authorship has an interesting take there:
“Authorship of the Fun Palace was dispersed across the many designers, contributors, collaborators, and consultants, such that the final design amounted to an architectural cadaver exquise which resented something different to each member of the Fun Palace design team. In the end, the project was so collaborative that it is difficult to say exactly who designed what, its very authorship was as fluid and indeterminate as the design itself.”
Because of the indeterminate nature of the design and the authorship, it results in an unusual solution, where “virtually every part of the structure was to be variable, with the overall structural frame being the fixed element”.
The process of design is thus hand-in-hand with the design itself, and sometimes gives emergence to the form of the design. Could predicated decisions made for the commons by a few aligned commoners better for the whole for effectiveness and efficiency? Or does the process need to be designed to incorporate all of the commoners involved? Or allowed for anticipation and change by additional commoners that join later in the process? Is it the design process that is at stake here for the commons? Or the actual design?
[Fast Architecture for Disruption]
Architecture is by definition slow. From initial conception, designing, budgeting, coordinating, to the final construction and everything in between, an architectural project could take years to complete. With that in mind, “Fast Architecture” may appear to be an oxymoron. It is not the kind of architecture that you encounter on a regular basis, if it is to be considered as architecture. It is fundamentally experimental. Projects of this sort may fall short when stacked against the rigor or the material richness of traditional architecture – they may even look minimal by comparison. But it is Fast Architecture that can truly rethink and react in ways that allow it to keep up with other forms of innovation and disruption; its speed allows it to keep up with other forms of innovation and disruption, and allows it to break through the barriers that are inherent in the traditional world of architecture. With lower budgets, perhaps even outside the scope of building codes, Fast Architecture by-passes the traditional patron-craftsman or developer-designer relationships that usually shape how projects are funded and thus the agenda behind the project. Architects assume the upper hand in Fast Architecture as they rewrite the brief of the project, and through this, has an opportunity to empower and respond to the needs of the society more directly.
It is worth distinguishing between ‘Fast Architecture’ and ‘Fast Construction’, which refers to the hyper-accelerated construction of buildings. Fast Architecture is not about how quickly we can construct the next skyscraper, rather it is about the pace in which we can build and iterate architectural ideas to disrupt systems.
Fast Architecture tackles the systemic and strategic position of architecture by innovating on how best to position it within the system that it is created. It does this by identifying a gap in the market wherein designs and architects can assume roles that directly solve a pain-point or need. Rather than waiting for a brief or a client to come to them, architects can leverage their unique perspective as designers to identify gaps and opportunities themselves, and assume proactive roles to tackle problems through design and architecture. Parklets and Parking Day are great example of this: designers take charge of parking spots and creatively convert each into a different type of park. Working within the spatial limits of a parking spot and having only one day to set-up and operate, the parklets work within the system of parking in a city through a temporary intervention that reinterprets the system: a new system emerges.
Fast Architecture, when successful, meets three key criteria:
1. It is more affordable relative to traditional forms of architecture
2. It is transformable and easy to change, customize, and adapt according to different conditions
3. It is used as prototyping tools to instigate longer term changes to more traditional forms of architecture
Fast Architecture, while involving architectural and spatial design skills, often does not require the construction and complexity of an entirely new building. This becomes a perfect approach to reuse and adapt existing structure or open spaces that are available. Pop-ups, modular and flexible furnishing, becomes new set of tools to respond to programming of architecture in a much more agile, flexible and creative manner involving a bottom-up, user-defined scenarios of creating programs such as workspaces, classrooms, retail shops, library, café, gallery, wellness studios and many more possibilities.
To embrace this alternative mode of thinking about architecture is not to denounce traditional architecture or to say that Fast Architecture will replace our age-old way of building. Rather, it gives us a way to look at architecture as something that can be prototyped and experimented with, as programming that could be more aligned with users, and as a practice that can share an open working relationship with diverse sectors of the society that architects in an everyday context.
[Prototyping for an Ubiquitous Urban Commons]
“A model for global urbanization, No-Stop City is a theoretical project published for the first time in Casabella magazine in 1970 under the title: “City, assembly line of social issues, ideology and theory of the metropolis.” It implemented “the idea of the disappearance of architecture within the metropolis.” For Andrea Branzi, No-Stop City is a critical utopia founded on a realistic vision of the world, where design is intended to be the fundamental conceptual tool for modifying lifestyles and territory. This “endless city” has the same type of organization as a factory or a supermarket. It offers a repetitive pattern with multiple hubs, a neutral, equal and continuous structure. No-Stop City looks like a sort of car park furbished with inhabitable furniture, objects that can be utilized according to circumstance. It is a place where individuals can build their dwelling space through their own free and personal involvement. Interior spaces, equipped with artificial lighting and air conditioning, enable inhabitants to set up new dwelling typologies that are open and continuous, and therefore likely to foster new ways of association and forms of community... No-Stop City is a radical analysis of the architecture project and of design, offering a model for an immaterial city without quality, a city dedicated only to the continuous flow of information, technical networks, markets and services; where architecture disappears in a pure ‘urban semiosphere’, free of all symbolic value.”
Our contemporary coffee-shop has become one manifestation of Andrea Branzi’s No-Stop City: equipped with WIFI with the continuous flow of information, power-plugs as essential infrastructure, basic furniture that can be moved and adjusted according to group sizes, and of course completed with food and beverage services. Users bring their laptop, smartphone and can plug into these “hubs” immediately. A startup Spacious offers the same amenity with a network of restaurants during times that they are underutilized during the day, offering high speed WIFI for flexible co-working at restaurants and information of how busy each work-place is, all at the palm of the users’ smartphone with an affordable membership fee.
The contemporary trends of the gig-economy and flexible work-locations continues to fuel these multi-modal and flexible spaces in our urban environment As digital technology becomes more integrated into our physical urban environment, users will be able to explore, track, and find hubs for different kinds of activities: we now have various means to tap into network of yoga and wellness classes, flexible work-spaces, short-term living spaces all accessed easily, sometimes through membership, sometimes pay-per-use activation. Traditional programs that are dedicated at specific locations becomes much more dispersed and flexible: spaces can pop-up and change over time, programs can be activated based on time of day or week, and such information about these “pop-up commons” communicated to its audience easily in real-time.
On the other hand, while our digital profiles have already been ubiquitous thanks to a few technology corporations, physical spaces are beginning to catch-up to track where you have been and predict where you are going. Advertisers and big data mining corporations will know exactly your preferences of where in the city you prefer to hang-out, how long you dwell, and capitalize on that knowledge across the population.
Google Sidewalk Lab’s 2017 masterplan for 800 acres of land at Quayside on the east waterfront of Toronto offers a version of how a fully ubiquitous urban neighborhood may look when the biggest technology giant take a stab at urban planning.
“What has drawn the most concern and curiosity with regards to Quayside is a uniquely 21st-century feature: a data-harvesting, wifi-beaming digital layer that would underpin each proposed facet of Quayside life. According to Sidewalk Labs, this would provide “a single unified source of information about what is going on”—to an astonishing level of detail—as well as a centralized platform for efficiently managing it all. Kitchen appliances switched on too long, overflowing trash bins, and high-traffic park benches could be monitored and addressed by this digital layer. So could changes in air quality and spikes in noise. Each passing footstep and bicycle tire could be accounted for and managed. This vast ocean of data could inform urban planning, research, and new software development, including a special platform by which Quayside residents could access public services… Layering technology beneath a neighborhood may be a savvy way of extracting new value from land—which is, to say, a new way of “developing” it.”
The biggest unknown behind such undertaking is to whom this data is made available, who decides the governing of its collection, and ultimately who owns this data. While small technology startups can harvest small facets of urban data to optimize their function and performance, a technology giant like Google can leverage its access and ownership of this ‘digital urban data layer’ over governments, and everyone.
How urban commons is tapped, shared, and governed becomes exponentially important when there is an ubiquitous digital layer that tracks every component of our cities. Like any technology language, the more open-sourced and bottom-up this digital layer is, the more room for true commoner-driven innovation and inclusivity across different types and layers of the commons. Catalytic organizations that can create and sustain means of communication between urban data and urban spaces would be key, and whether such spaces can be become urban commons depends on its inclusivity and the mechanisms that drive its self or collective governing systems.
Our cities are ripe for a digital revolution that would be all encompassing, and it would require rigor, integrity, and creative ambition to drive home values for everyone involved.