Walkshop: Elements of a Networked Urbanism with Adam Greenfield

Systems/Layers is a half-day “walkshop,” held in two parts. The first portion of the activity is dedicated to a slow and considered walk, during which we'll be looking for appearances of the networked digital in the physical, and vice versa: apertures through which the things that happen in the real world drive the “network weather,” and contexts in which that weather affects what people see, confront and are able to do.
Visions of networked urbanism tend to live in what Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell call a "proximate future," that just-over-the-horizon window of time that never actually seems to arrive. But how do networked services inform our choices and experiences in the real city that we actually inhabit at this moment? We're going to take a walk around a Toronto site and look for the appearances, manifestations and points of application where the affordances and constraints of networked informatics are already relevant to urban life. 

Participants are asked to pay particular attention to:

• Places where information is being collected by the network.
• Places where networked information is being displayed.
• Places where networked information is being acted upon, either by people directly, or by physical systems that affect the choices people have available to them

About the Facilitors:
 
Adam Greenfield is co-founder of Do Projects, and founder and managing director of NYC-based Urbanscale LLC, an urban systems design practice. He is the author of Everyware (2006) and the forthcoming The City Is Here For You To Use.
 
Nurri Kim is co-founder of Do Projects. She is interested in overlooked daily artifacts and conditions with rich social or historical meanings. Her work has been exhibited at Insa Art Space in Seoul, the Conflux festival in New York City, the Media Arts Asia Pacific festival, Australia, and the ICANOF media art show in Hachinohe, Japan, among others.