Senseable City Lab
About
The MIT Senseable City Lab investigates and anticipates how digital technologies are changing the way people live, and what those changes imply at the scale of the city. It was founded in 2004 by Carlo Ratti within the City Design and Development group of MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and Ratti continues to direct it.[1]
The lab's premise is that cities have become instrumented — that phones, transit cards, sensors, vehicles and networks now generate a continuous record of urban activity — and that this record can be read as a new kind of urban data, distinct from the census and the survey in being passive, continuous and fine-grained. Its output is characteristically hybrid: peer-reviewed papers alongside museum installations and visualisations designed for a general public.
Selected Projects
- Real Time Rome (2006). Presented at the Venice Biennale, this was the lab's founding project and among the first large-scale visualisations of a city's activity from anonymised mobile network data, showing crowds, buses and taxis moving through Rome during the World Cup final and a Madonna concert.
- Trash | Track (2009). Several thousand items of household waste in Seattle were tagged with location-reporting devices and followed through the disposal chain, producing a map of the "removal chain" as detailed as the supply chains normally studied — and revealing journeys of thousands of miles for objects assumed to be locally handled.[2]
- CO2GO. A mobile application that infers a traveller's mode of transport from accelerometer data and calculates carbon emissions in real time while on the move.
- Copenhagen Wheel (2009). A bicycle rear-wheel hub combining regenerative braking, electric assist and environmental sensing, later commercialised.
- Underworld / Underworlds. Sampling and sequencing of urban sewage as a public health instrument, treating the sewer as a continuous population-scale biosensor.
- Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA). A recurring research workshop convened by the lab.
Criticism
The lab's work is often grouped with the broader "smart city" programme and attracts the criticisms directed at it: that data collected from phones and cards systematically underrepresents the poorest and least connected residents; that visualisation can substitute aesthetic legibility for analysis; and that instrumenting a city raises consent questions that anonymisation does not fully settle. The lab has itself published on locational privacy and on the re-identifiability of mobility traces.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
The Senseable City Lab studies the condition in which the city and its inhabitants form a single sensing system — where the population is simultaneously the subject of urban measurement and its instrument. Trash | Track in particular is a rare piece of research that follows objects rather than people, and it makes visible the infrastructure of disposal that concepts like future runoff describe economically.
Work
- CO2GO — calculating a carbon footprint automatically and in real time while on the move
- Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA)
- Trash | Track
Related Reading
External Links
References
- ↑ MIT Senseable City Lab; see also the lab's own site.
- ↑ Trash | Track, MIT Senseable City Lab.
