The Network of the City

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I was thinking about Kittler's piece from this week and some of the things I've read about urban development over the past week. Ultimately the city comprises a network in itself and within a larger network of capital, cultural and people flows.

Kittler mentioned that cities originally formed from the meeting of major passage or waterways. It's no surprise that a city is either on a major waterfront or alongside some major highway. This 'place' became a stopping point, and interchange, a place of commerce. Applying computer theory, Kittler discusses the term bus. On a computer, a bus is a circuit pathway through which information can travel. Here's an example: USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. Information from a wide array of devices can travel in unified fashion on this bus to the processing components. In the city we understand a bus as a major vehicle on which we can travel through the city network with ease. Now, with cities we also need to understand there's a difference between the vehicle we travel in, and the roads on which that vehicle travels.

Computer_city

If you look at a computer's guts, it's not hard to perceive it as a mini city, the circuits forming the roadways, the capacitors and chips representing buildings. If we think of the city from a computing perspective, we can see that the intersecting roads facilitate information and goods to travel through its own network and out to others. Underground or above, there is a network of wires and pipes that carry other 'flows', forgive the pun, the former exclusively carrying information throughout. The processor and RAM forming buildings, their jobs are to deal with these information flows- calculate and order them- and to store important information, respectively.

So I was reading a little more about urban revitalization and some of the strategies involving restructuring the certain industries in the urban core- manufacturing to information- and some of the ways the streets and facade are upgraded. Ultimately the aim is to re-engineer a variety of different flows. First is capital flow. More capital is suggested to go through a city that, in this state of the economy, better facilitates more capital flow. The vast money spent on arts and entertainment and the need for brains to design new high-tech things needs a good network to flow through efficiently, hence a city designed to handle these flows efficiently!

Next there's the flow of people. A knowledge economy needs knowledge sector professionals to form the bits of information that allow its function. Of course, the flow of people needs optimization on a physical level. The constant redesign of roads to accomodate bike lanes helps facilitate the flow of people to and from work seemingly better. The installation of a rapid transit system gets these people to where they need to go, within the confines of the city and out, better. 

Computer engineers make a career out of making electronic currents flow in higher volumes, more efficiently. Drawing comparisons to a real world city, we see that there are a number of flows too that need to be upgraded to handle the flows of information, capital and people, particularly capital nowadays. The city is thus re-engineered, often in very abstract ways, with the aim of making these different flows more efficient.

 

TL;DR - Cities are like computers in terms of networked flow.

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