iPhong City

iPhong City, written by Andrea Bettella, is an interesting and insightful article which talks about how we properly theorise the digital at the scale of the city, and the city rendered as digital media.

If the first function of the city is proximity – to people, goods, information, transportation, etc. – then the proliferation of information network as well as the smart digital handset such as iPhone condense the city into an extensible software + hardware platform, a meta – interface comprised of millions of smaller tacticle ones. Phone + City is a composite read – write medium, allowing for real time communication through multiple modes. It is the most important infrastructure of any emergent global democratic society. This is not only because it enables physical, communicative and thereby social mobility, but because it reinserts the specific location into digital space, and does so by ‘ making location gestural ’.

According to this emerging scenario the author made his suggestion to architects, as he stated:
" One half of the architects and urbanists should stop designing new buildings and new developments altogether. Instead, they should invest the historical depth and intellectual nuance of their architectural imagination into the design and programming of new software that provides for the better use of the structures and systems we already have... "

To some extent his words suggest the proper action that architecture and urbanism should take as response to our time. It is true that space, in its traditional sense, a place with reference to certain structure and material, would be eroded by a ‘ cyberspace’ in which every participant creates his own system of spatiotemporal reference. Thus the term Space may be less defined by the architectural form, but rather depicted by the computational programming you choose to construct your own itineraries and encounters in the vast mental landscape.