31st edition – Cities – Pike & Hurricane

The City Speaks, but to Whom?

Yaroslav Mikhaylov — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 11:00:24 +0000

A new and unfamiliar city can be difficult to navigate when different places have different kinds of street signs, unknown landmarks and directions in different languages. And even a city that is easy to navigate on foot can be hard to get around in a car, or vice versa. Now, ever more actors are demanding better navigation in the growing cities of the future, from airborne delivery drones to self-driving cars. The task of future urban designers is to accommodate both the automated and human inhabitants of cities and make sure neither is left behind.

This is not the first time that these two navigational priorities have clashed. In addition to their ideological differences, the two Cold War adversaries – the United States and the Soviet Union – were very different in how they organized the information they had about the physical shape of the world. The Soviets created incredibly detailed maps, while the American approach was a more high-tech, but a more familiar one as well: a system of satellites able to accurately pinpoint the location of an object called NAVSTAR, better known today as the Global Positioning System – GPS. The former was designed to be used by high-ranking military and government officials, focusing on human details like depth of ponds, width of footpaths and the kinds of weather the area could experience during different types of the year. The latter, conversely, was more focused on helping increasingly automated machines like airplanes find their way.

Today, it is mapping services like Google Maps that are at the forefront of the new navigation battles. Google itself became a successful company by adopting a machine-centered approach to searching the web compared to its rival Yahoo!, which instead sought to organize the Internet using human ‘librarians’. Google’s algorithms are far from perfect, but given the size of the modern web they could index web pages at a speed that Yahoo! couldn’t match, making it the clear winner in the search engine wars of the 2000s.

Ironically, in the battle between human and algorithm at the center of the city of the future, Google is increasingly turning to the methods of its defeated rival. While the bulk of the work of creating and improving their city maps is outsourced to algorithms that harvest satellite images, Google StreetView photos and even users’ location data, it is then error-checked by human operators to make sure that the computer correctly identified difficult-to-analyze features like one-way streets, unconventional crosswalks or oddly-angled street signs.

Google’s efforts to improve its maps place it at the epicenter of one of the major issues for cities going into the future: machines are not very good at navigating them. That means that in order to implement many of the up-and-coming technologies such as driverless cars or drone delivery systems, we need to radically redesign our cities to communicate information not just to people, but to computers as well. Some such technologies, such as traffic lights that communicate directly with cars, are already being prototyped. However, that in itself raises a new problem: machines like driverless cars see the world in a very different way than humans. That means increasingly fewer cues to help walking or cycling residents find their way in unfamiliar neighborhoods. The proliferation of GPS has already made conventional navigation more difficult, with many suburban communities entirely omitting physical street signs and homeowners passing on visible house numbers. Just like navigating the internet, we have already outsourced much of the work of finding physical locations to mechanical aides.

This has profound implications for the future of urban design. First is a degree of redundancy: humans can’t figure out their exact location from satellites, while drones can’t read street signs. That means that information needs to be delivered in both a human-readable and a machine-readable medium, with both being fully in sync, especially when important properties like street names or direction of travel are changed. This can increase both the difficulty and expense of urban planning. The distinction between human-readable and machine-readable navigation marks also has effects across socioeconomic boundaries. The difficulties that come with navigating suburbs without GPS systems already serve as a class-based filter for the residents of those communities. It is easy to imagine similar urban communities that are difficult or even impossible to access without a self-driving car, for example, creating a new form of urban segregation and perpetuating inequality.

Both of these issues are facets of the same question: what purpose do our cities serve and who are we really building them for? Are they efficient hubs of commerce or comfortable places to live? In order to be successful, our cities have to do both: deliver a good living atmosphere and serve as centers of economic growth. By making it easier for machines to identify and deal with the myriad of urban obstacles that we simply take for granted, we can make our cities cleaner and more efficient. However, it is important that we do not remove the human element from the equation completely, lest we become trapped in machines’ cities instead.

by Yaroslav Mikhaylov

Image Credit:

Cover Image: Nic McPhee, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

Image 1: JCT600 via their blog, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

Image 2: smoothgroover22, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

Image 3: jan buchholtz, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

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Atlantis Submerging – Building a Future in the Pacific

Anna Bernard — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 11:00:11 +0000

“In those histories, half tradition,

With their mythic thread of gold,

We shall find the name and story

Of thy cities fair and old.

[—]

Every heart has such a country,

Some Atlantis loved and lost;

Where upon the gleaming sand-bars

Once life’s fitful ocean tossed.

[—]

Now above this lost Atlantis

Roll the restless seas of Time.”

The Lost Atlantis, Edith Willis Linn Forbes

The impacts of climate change are revealing themselves at a varying pace around the world. The inevitable changes in the world the way we have known it will produce a multitude of responses amongst nations. We are witnessing the shaping of a new world order very different to what we have imagined. In this article I will examine the case of climate refugees in the context of the Pacific Islands, where low-lying nations are forced to consider such seemingly far-fetched adaptation strategies as buying land on foreign soil in order to secure territory for the relocation of the population when their home islands will unavoidably submerge as sea levels continue to rise. The story unfolding is that of countries loved and lost, resembling the mythical tale of Atlantis. I will specifically look at the case of Kiribati and its climate evacuation plans.

Climate refugees

According to various security experts, the risks related to unchecked climate change include extreme risks to food security, elevated risk of terrorism as states fail, and unprecedented migration that would overwhelm international assistance, among other factors compromising human and national security. In accordance, climate change has been called the greatest security threat of the 21st century.

According to worst-case scenarios, over 200 million people could easily become displaced by climate change. Numerically and geographically, South and East Asia, including the Pacific small island states are particularly vulnerable to events leading to large-scale forced migration. This is because sea level rise will have a disproportionate effect on the vast masses living in low-lying areas.

This forced migration triggered by climate events would affect development negatively in various ways. There would be an increasing pressure on urban infrastructure and services, which would undermine economic growth and increase the risk of conflict. Forced migration would result in worsened health, educational and social indicators among climate migrants themselves.

The restless seas rolling over Kiribati

The Pacific Island nation of Kiribati is one of the first countries in danger of becoming completely uninhabitable due to climate change. Kiribati is composed of 33 atolls, which are ring-shaped coral reefs encircling a lagoon. Atolls are by nature low-lying, and have a high ratio of coastline to land area, which makes them extremely vulnerable to various problems related to climate change, such as sea-level rise, shore erosion, fresh water contamination and disastrous storm surges. Kiribati has already experienced some of its islets vanishing into the Pacific. In addition, Kiribati is threatened by the rising sea temperatures which forms a severe risk to the coral reefs sustaining the atolls and their islands.

There have been several other attempts at implementing adaptation strategies, at varying, often poor, degrees of success. These strategies have included the construction of sea walls and water management plants, as well as installing rainwater-harvesting systems. However, such measures are not financially realistic for resource-poor and aid-dependent countries like Kiribati. To implement a reliable climate adaptation strategy would require consistent, long-term funding for which development aid is insufficient.

Thus, the government of Kiribati has promoted the concept of “migration with dignity”, in which residents are guided towards the option of considering moving abroad if they are equipped with employable skills. The Kiribati government has in fact launched a programme called the Education for Migration programme intended to make the Kiribati population more attractive as immigrants by focusing on enforcing their skill sets. Another novel idea has surfaced in which international refugee law is applied for climate refugees who are forced from their homes due to the consequences of climate change.

The more radical step has been in preparation for an extreme humanitarian evacuation: Kiribati bought approximately 20 km2 of land in Fiji, as a potential refuge. Fiji’s higher elevation and more stable shoreline make it less vulnerable than the islands of Kiribati. The former president of Kiribati, Anote Tong, who was in charge of the Fiji purchase, intended it to be a signal for the rest of the world in the form of a cry for attention regarding the predicament the Pacific island states are in.

A lost Utopia or climate extinction?
As the effects of climate change are revealed, nations like Kiribati are forced to prepare for the ultimate fight for survival. According to scientists’ predictions a significant portion of Kiribati will be uninhabitable within only a few decades. The question is not merely about safely relocating the biomass of the nation – its population – but there should be an existential urgency regarding the preservation of their national identity, culture and traditions. As we continue this haphazard and blasé approach towards climate change, climate migration and climate evacuation, we are possibly turning a blind eye towards the dawning era of de facto human climate extinction regarding cultures and communities. In the case of Kiribati and the other low-lying Pacific island states, only time will show if the future generations of the Pacific will have mere wistful myths and a restless sea of time rolling over their beloved countries and nations.

Anna Bernard

Photo 1: 2012. Kiribati Grunge Flag by Nicolas Raymond, Attribution 3.0 Generic (CC BY 3.0);Photo 2: 2009. Millenium atoll by The TerraMar Project, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0); Photo 3: 2011. As an extremely low-lying country, surrounded by vast oceans, Kiribati is at risk from the negative effects of climate change, such as sea-level rise and storm surges, by Erin Magee / DFAT, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

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