Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space

Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space examines and expands on the 2009 exhibition Toward the Sentient City, and the 2006 symposium Architecture and Situated Technologies held at The Architectural League of New York. The Sentient City project uses as a point of departure Archigram’s 1963 exhibition Living City. Mark Shepard defines the Sentient City as “one that is able to hear and feel things happening within it, yet doesn’t necessarily know anything in particular about them,” and contends that this anthropomorphism of the city is destabilizing and creates a contested site and presents a moral dilemma. Shepard calls for a reconsideration of the role of architects and the profession in relation to the continuously evolving “smart” city, where ubiquitous computing technologies produce a city capable of monitoring and reacting to its inhabitants. Shepard introduces five case studies—projects commissioned for the exhibit—and a series of critical essays which help to contextualize the case studies in longstanding and established discourses on the technological mediation of urban life and the of role architects, urban designers, and technologists. Shepard challenges architects of the twenty-first century to shift their focus from “materiality in architecture” to consider the evolving role of “software” infrastructures in shaping our experience of urban space. Revisiting Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects, Hadas Steiner introduces the issue of control, an idea that will reappear in different guises throughout the book. Steiner argues that the very essence of what is at stake is the question of what or who has control over the environment as a result of the distribution and embedding of media networks through the city. The first exhibit detailed is “Amphibious Architecture,” an exhibit by David Benjamin, Soo-in Yang, and Natalie Jeremijenko, which examined issues of control in the built environment through an analysis of sustainable flows, and asked the question: Who should control the city’s envelopes? Benjamin, Yang and Jeremijenko explored the potential of interactive design of envelopes— both built and non-built—suggesting that these surfaces could: function as a small ecosystem, be networked together, be public interfaces to information, engage and problem solve, and be porous thresholds. Their exhibit for Toward the Sentient City centered around an installation—or horizontal envelope—of a network of sensors in the East River and the Bronx River in New York City. The sensors measured the presence of fish, the health of the river, the hydrodynJournal of Urban Technology, Vol. 19, No. 3, 137–144, July 2012