Social data in urban design - are we finally connected? Are we finally democratic?

摘要

Data are recorded, made accessible and connect us in ever increasing ways. Karl Kullman (2018) makes a valuable contribution to urban design by explaining new ways that social data may be included in systematic methods of urban design. Kullman cites the impact of similar digital technologies such as satellite imagery and GIS in the area of landscape urbanism, and presents three ways that data and information connectivity is extending observational and data collection methods introduced by environmental psychology (Appleton 1975; Lynch 1960, Whyte 1980, Gehl 1971) in the mid-twentieth century, not unlike Ian McHarg's (1969) more systematic approach to ecological design. The new methods of social data hope to finally include the spontaneous or disjunctive behaviours of people (Franck and Stevens 2006) through understanding data that measure such behaviours. Kullman's three examples of social data informed urban design include: (1) neuroscience to support and extend prior theories of prospect and refuge by Appleton or image formation by Lynch; (2) mobile technology to measure intrigue, curiosity, playfulness and awe (Carter 1993; Stevens 2007) from goal-oriented journeys to informed spontaneous urban drifts that are crowd sourced via locational data from the bottom up; and (3) drone urbanism that, from a new perspective, reinvigorates on-site fieldwork across scales of space and time, including the marginal and emergent (Sola-Morales 1995) enhanced observation in the field digitized version of hand tracing by Whyte with its limits and dangers of surveillance. The hope is for a new fluid interchange of urban dweller and urban design information.