The starting point of this book is what Malcolm McCullough describes as the superabundant flood of mediated information that saturates encounters with urban public spaces. Whether that information takes the form of background Muzak, billboards, TV screens, smartphones, large screens or signage, he proposes that its ubiquity poses a serious challenge to us now. We are overloaded by this constant display and flow of information, he says: it makes us distracted, stressed and inattentive. In particular, our experience of what he calls the 'ambient environment' is thereby diminished. The first few chapters of the book evidence this claim mostly by referring to the work of neurosci-entists, who, McCullough believes, have demonstrated that the human brain 'cannot be made into just anything' (p. 63). There are limits to what we can adapt to, and therefore there must also be limits to the overload of mediated information. The second part of the book then proposes a number of tactics by which urban environments can be designed in order to encourage slow, careful, textured, unmediated, pre-cognitive experiences of the materialities of the urban environment. For example, we should assert our right to silence; information should be less pervasive and more focused on specific users; and it should have scale, texture, figuration and long duration.
展开▼
