TEDx Talk

In May 2014, Daniel Giovannini was invited to speak about SPIN Unit’s research at the TEDx conference in Tallinn, Estonia. This talk, entitled Towards Interaction-Based Urban Design, explains how, at SPIN, we believe that urban design should not only consider form, but also interaction and the ways in which people use their city’s space. When we consider a city, we shouldn’t think simply of a mapped area, but rather a shared space filled with shared experiences, one that accommodates our movements, our social structures, and our interactions. Contained within each city is a network of interactions—a flow and pulse of movements, and a type of self-organization that often supersedes the original plan for a particular space (in his talk, Daniel gives the example of traffic jams to illustrate this point). Our goal is to hack the invisible city: to explore how all of the different layers of urban space and life come together, and engineer improvements based on this new information. To understand and describe these complexities, we use an interdisciplinary approach, which is why our team consists of urban planners, architects, physicists, artists, and philosophers. Cities are constantly in flux: to tackle these changing spaces, we need a varied group of exceptional researchers who are interested in all of the different facets of this mission. This talk explained several of our methods. To assess the ‘publicness’ of public space, we use ‘space syntax’ and Georgiana Varna’s ‘star model’ (a quantitative method to assess the quality of public space and how it can be improved). According to this model, we describe sections of urban environments according to five parameters, taking into account their physical configurations, activity levels, the presence of features that might make a space more appealing to pedestrians, the level of public ownership, and the presence of surveillance (i.e. by CCTV). A low score on the star model can give us insight into why a public space is unused or underused. To provide additional insight into improving public safety and the potential offered by neglected environmental parameters, we have also created a custom-built device and an Arduino microcontroller that is driven around cities in order to map public illumination. Mapping these measurements allows us to see correlations between public lighting and accessibility levels—and perhaps, using this data, we can improve accessibility by improving the quality of public illumination. By using a hybrid approach to collecting and analysing data, we gain a stronger understanding of the ‘self-organisation’ phenomena of urban spaces. For instance, we find more value in studying the paths commonly used and reported by actual cyclist (rather than just looking at official bike routes) to get a real, ground-level, understanding of the human-urban interaction. Urban planning should be social, and planners should seek to facilitate interactions. At SPIN, our own research is fundamentally social in nature—from our methods of data collection, to the openness and accessibility of our findings. The future of urban planning, in our view, should be a bottom-up process, based on contemporary needs, and one that is aware of the evolution of urban flows and interactions.