This is my introductory text to the Serendipity City Challenge, a project by FutureEverything and ImaginationLancaster responding to the festival themes of Open Data and The City Experiment.
Serendipity City Challenge invites you to discover chance encounters, the invisible and unknown, in order to hone the creative edge of the city. If there is no creativity without serendipity, how do we foster serendipity in the networked city?
Thinkers and designers in the cities participating in GloNet are invited to respond to the Serendipity City Challenge (GloNet Edition) by creating a series of statements (140 characters or less, naturally) on their own local situation, which will be published online and debated during GloNet. Adam Greenfield has curated a selection of serendipitous mobile apps for the FutureEverything 2010 exhibition. And we challenge you to create apps and interventions that foster serendipity in the networked city.
Open Data Cities
Cities are changing, they are being rewired. The opening up of public data sets and the roll out of a grid of high bandwidth connectivity can transform the public realm and the way we live and interact in urban areas. We are increasingly able to digitally search and interrogate the city. Social tools can be layered over the city, giving us real time access to information about the things and people that surround us, helping us to connect in new ways, and giving rise to a data-driven society.
FutureEverything is leading the charge to make Manchester an Open Data City. We are championing a global movement calling for the opening up of publicly held datasets in accessible formats. Cities today are vast repositories of information, endlessly collecting and archiving data. When semantically organised, the data can be exposed, shared, and interconnected. Giving people the right kind of access to this information can spark new applications and services, new ways of living, creating and being.
We want to influence the new kinds of culture that emerge, and the result is the Serendipity City Challenge.
Serendipity Cities
The joy of cities, their creativity, energy and diversity, comes from the clash of many cultures and systems in close proximity, or layered on top of one another. To live in the city is to live in the midst of every conceivable kind of person, thing, vocation and passtime. Our senses are bombarded all of the time, and we are time and again surprised by unknown things and chance encounters. This is the essence of the city: there is no creativity without serendipity.
An inspiration for the FutureEverything 2010 programme was Adam Greenfield’s observation that this diversity and edge risks being lost in the networked city of tomorrow, if social and online tools are going to replace the more haphazard ways people find things and people in the city.
In response to Greenfield’s observation, FutureEverything has proposed the Serendipity City Challenge as a rallying cry for developers and creators in the networked city, and as a call for action in our project on open data. We have invited Greenfield to curates a collection of mobile apps which support serendipity, surprise, drift and difference. We are also challenging thinkers in cities around the world to respond to this challenge in their own local setting, as a part of our GloNet event.
Online, social tools bring similar things and people closer together, matching like-to-like and creating affinity groups. The upside is you can find more things that match your preferences. The downside is that there are less surprises, less to challenge us and make us see the world differently.
Serendipity Apps
In 2003-4, many in the first wave of mobile and locative media projects, in which FutureEverything played a leading role, were inspired by Situationism and the Dérive, a strategy for exploring the city that focuses on drift, unpredictable encounters and the discovery of difference.
In the age of the iPhone and Android, the early mobile and locative media experiments can now be staged at a mass scale. But many iPhone apps produce affinity groups or enable people to find the things they already know, and dont create chance encounters with the invisible and unknown.
If we search for a restaurant online we are less likely to try somewhere local to us that is new and unknown. If we follow directions on an interactive map we do not stop to ask people the way to go. If we are staring at the screen of a mobile device we make eye contact with our neighbours less often. Technology can increase the isolation we feel in the city. It can form a barrier between us and chance encounters.
We are calling for a new generation of Serendipity Apps, ones that surprise us, and that reroute our experience of the city in mesmerising, outrageous ways. Now that data is increasingly available, and people are more connected than ever before, we want our artists and designers to create new experiences of the city, not just to make our lives more efficient.
An example of a whimsical app with a touch of serendipity, and of how open data can spark innovation, is San Francisco Trees. With SF Trees you can discover the names and types of trees in San Francisco. Just walk up to any tree, point your phone at it, and the app will tell you the Latin and the common name for that tree. On the back of this app, you can discover the name of your favourite tree, map a path through the city connecting the trees of your choice, or maybe set up a fan group for a tree in your neighbourhood. Created by a small company in London, SF Trees is based on data provided by the San Francisco Department of Public Works (SFDPW). The developers may never have been to San Francisco, and one thing we can say for sure is the people uploading the data never envisaged it being used this way.
SF Trees points the way towards apps that go beyond utility. This matters, because if we are unable to stray off the beaten path, and step outside our affinity groups, then we lose the diversity and culture clash of the city. In cities that have been rewired by networked technology, the outcome is otherwise mediocrity and the loss of a very holy cow, the creative edge of urban people.
Some people argue that the move towards Open Data will lead to a society of the lowest common denominator (Lawrence Lessig). Our challenge, to ourselves and to you, is to create spaces for serendipity in the networked city, so that our futures are at least as creative and diverse as our pasts.
View Adam Greenfield’s selection of serendipitous apps for networked cities at FutureEverything 2010 here.
Serendipity City Challenge
We invite you to be a part of the Serendipity City Challenge. You can do this by responding to the questions below; by mapping spaces of serendipity in your city, and the way these give rise to creativity, energy and diversity; or if you are a developer create a mesmerising, outrageous app to foster serendipity in the networked city.
In the Serendipity City Challenge (GloNet Edition) these are the questions we will be posing to people in Sendai, Japan; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Istanbul, Turkey; and Vancouver, Canada (the cities participating in GloNet 2010):
- Name some places of serendipity in your city, describe the nature of the serendipity.
- Is it true that the creative edge of urban people comes from serendipity, chance encounters, and creative places?
- Is serendipity in your city necessary for the creative economy?
- What other factors are essential for a thriving creative and digital sector in your city?
- How is this situation different in your city to in other cities you know around the world?
- What can you do to create more a) serendipity OR b) another of these factors?
- How can a) serendipity OR b) another of these factors be enhanced by remote collaboration (such as GloNet)?
- How can a) serendipity OR b) another of these factors be enhanced by Open Data and Free Culture?
Serendipity City Challenge Workshops
The GloNet champions will lead workshops in each of the GloNet cities responding to the Serendipity City Challenge brief by Drew Hemment. Thinkers and designers in the cities participating in GloNet are invited to respond by creating a series of statements (140 characters or less, naturally) on their own local situation, which will be published online and debated during GloNet.
Serendipity City Challenge Discussion
During a GloNet conference event at FutureEverything 2010, the GloNet champions talk us through their statements developed in the workshops, and Adam Greenfield will himself be on hand to respond to the statements:
- How do they answer the challenge of serendipity in the networked city.
- What do they tell us about the local situation in those cities.
- Do these statements reinforce or lead you to question your thesis.
- Practical steps people in those cities could take to achieve creative, diverse, serendipitous cities.
Tags: Adam Greenfield, Cities, Digital, FutureEverything, Mobile, Networked City, Open Data, Serendipity City
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