Urban Technology at University of Michigan week -23
Why urban technology is fundamentally transdisciplinary + 3 questions for Larissa Larsen
One of the things we’re doing this year is finalizing the design of the first year of courses we will teach in urban technology. As a field, urban technology commingles many different kinds of expertise, from engineering and urban planning to the situated wisdom of city dwellers. We’re thinking carefully about how these points of view come together and describe the program as transdisciplinary rather than multi- or inter-disciplinary. I know, it’s early in the year for such semantics, but here’s what that means to us and why it’s important.
Multidisciplinary work is like a salad—many things all mixed up on the same plate. Transdisciplinary work is more like a soup. It requires different perspectives melding together to create something new. For urban technology, 🍲 > 🥗.
The necessity of a transdisciplinary approach comes into focus when looking at just one aspect of cities: scale. We’ll unpack that below.
Hello! I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan that will welcome its first students in the 2021-2022 academic year. If you’re new here, try this 90 second video introduction. While we launch the program, we’re using this venue to explore themes and ideas related to our studies. Thanks for reading. Have questions about any of this? Hit reply and let us know.
🍲 Urban Technology: Let’s make soup
For an architect or planner, the scale of a place is measured by aspects like the number of people, how densely they share space, and the overall dimensions of things like roads, sidewalks, and spaces inside buildings. When we use the term “scale” in the context of citymaking, we’re referring to the way that quantities create new qualities.
A small city like Ann Arbor (population 121k) is different from Detroit (700k) is different from Bangkok (8 million), not just because there are home to differing numbers of people, but because a larger population and a bigger footprint also changes the way the place feels and how it works. Think about transit. In a small city, bikeshares and buses work well. As a city gets larger, the transit infrastructure often includes high-capacity lines such as subways or elevated trains, like Bangkok’s Skytrain. Now think about how long it takes to plan and execute a bikeshare vs. an elevated train line. Consider the different budgets those two projects require. They’re different beasts entirely, despite both being a means of getting people from A to B.
A larger place feels different than a smaller one, not only because there’s more of it but because the relationships and experiences in a larger city differ from those of a small city. Bangkok’s 24/7/365 anonymous vibrancy is not better than the calm quaintness of Ann Arbor, but it sure is different! And that doesn’t mean that small cities are all the same and large cities are all equal, because scale is just one of many factors that inform the character of a place. While scale is one of the things that planners and architects embrace because it makes cities unique, in the digital realm scale is more commonly seen as something to be surmounted. Flattened. Defeated.
When it comes to building digital services, a website used by 10 people and one used by 10 million people have the same goal: be available and responsive. Meeting that goal is a question of making sure that the infrastructure is in place to accept requests and process them efficiently. There’s lots of nuance in how that happens, but it’s invisible the user. When you click a button in an app, you don’t need to know anything about the fact that the provider may have thought carefully about where the servers are located, how many servers and how much computing power is available, content distribution networks, load balancing, and so on.
We design digital architectures to scale easily by using the concept of “elasticity,” which means that new server capacity can be added automatically when needed and released when no longer in use. That’s a simplification, of course, but in the digital realm scaling is generally something that’s a quantitative challenge to be overcome rather than a quality to be embraced (until you get to super massive scale like Facebook and Twitter, that is, and then qualities are deadly important as we’ve unfortunately seen recently).
No amount of discussion back and forth will convince planners to think about cities as if they were computers—that’s a bad idea. Likewise, while a fair number of computer scientists are actually quite interested in metaphors and concepts of urban planning, digital systems today regularly operate with hundreds of millions of users, and thus are required to take the challenges of scale very seriously in terms of hard challenges in computing and networking.
Urbanists are sensitive to scale as a qualitative differentiator of place, technologists consider scale a challenge to be conquered. No 🥗 (salad) can combine these fundamentally different perspectives. The only way forward is blending them together into a 🍲 (soup). The work to be done is developing a transdisciplinary approach that melds collective wisdom of traditional fields like planning and architecture and new perspectives that are digital-first.
After we’ve graduated our first students, one of the ways I will judge the quality of our program is by the extent to which our graduates are impatient with divisions between digital and physical. Rather than trying to bridge some imagined divide between those two worlds, our students will understand it as a false dichotomy to begin with.
🎙 3 Questions for Larissa Larsen
Larissa teaches Urban Planning and runs the Doctoral Program. Her research focuses on questions of sustainability including urban heat island effects, water infrastructure, and urban flooding in cities such as Detroit and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Beyond revealing the reality of these environmental challenges in existing cities, she applies her expertise to develop recommendations that will improve the status quo. This includes analyzing pollution data in Detroit to recommend new zones of trees coverage that will function as green infrastructure to increase air quality. Goes without saying but let’s make it explicit: climate is a critical question for all urban systems, including digital ones.
Q. What’s your favorite city and why?
My favorite city is Chicago (don’t tell Detroit!). I lived and worked in Chicago as a landscape architect/urban planner during Mayor Daley’s green revolution. I was fortunate to be part of six riparian restoration projects in some of the city’s most beloved parks. Through these projects, I was drawn into the city’s fascinating history. You can ask my students—I still love to talk about the history of Chicago!
Q. Can rethinking how we build cities help prevent climate disaster?
Unfortunately, it will be climate disasters (plural) and we do need to rethink every part of how we build and live in cities, big and small. I have recently been helping craft a plan for carbon neutrality for the University of Michigan. Through this, I have had a glimpse of the energy transformation that needs to rapidly occur. My own research focuses on the impacts of increasing heat extremes and flooding. Addressing the challenges requires adding capacity to our systems as well as flexibility.
Q. Can you give us an idea of who urban planners collaborate with most closely?
One of the reasons that I love urban planning is because of the need for collaboration. Who we collaborate with depends on the issues we are addressing. I regularly collaborate with people in public health, civil and environmental engineering, climate science, environmental justice, and sociology. As urban planners, we tackle place-based issues and therefore, collaboration with residents and local stakeholders is paramount.
Links
🐾 “Welcome to Explorable Explanations, a hub for learning through play! We’re a disorganized ‘movement’ of artists, coders & educators who want to reunite play and learning.” LIKE.
📷 In that vein, here’s an essay about camera and lenses that features interactive diagrams controlled by sliders. More essays with sliders, please.
🐜 “Mom, where do emojis come from?” The Unicode Consortium and its emoji proposal process, of course! Here’s an example application, this one for the venerable cockroach. Urban technology students be warned: you may be asked to design and propose new emoji!
👨🎤 David Bowie was a time traveler. Back in 1999 he saw the internet for all that it would be. Actually wild how profound this was.
🎁 Who knew packaging could be so funny? Now you do! But take note, this video is actually a lesson in disguise on taxonomies and the difficulties of information architecture. Also: I know you need a break right now, so watch the video. Srsly.
This week: Yup, still running a~u~t~o~n~o~m~o~u~s~l~y while Bryan is away. Regular updates commence next week. BTW if you’re all fired up about soup, this is a lovely one for a bright winter day. 🏃♂️