Week 3: Urban Tomography and The City

This week in class we watched a movie called the “The City.” The movie started by showing a suburban community and their daily activities. From swimming in rivers to harvesting their crops, the movie portrayed this small community in a good light. Later scenes show an industrialized city, along with “dark” music. The overall vibe I got from the movie was that the producer viewed big city life and industrialization as a bad thing. Compared to the suburban scenes in the beginning of the movie, the city stood for uncleanliness, monotony, fast lifestyles, and misfortune. If this movie were to be remade today I think it would have many of the same trends. Today, pollution still poses a threat to society and there are still areas of cities that are unclean and dangerous. But, some standards have been put in to place to calm down the effect cities have on our environments. Until Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, there was not really a care in the world about the safety of our environment. So, let’s all take a moment to thank Rachel Carson. This article discusses the negative effects industrialization had on America in the 1900s http://www.fasttrackteaching.com/burns/Unit_5_Progressive/U5_Negatives_Industrialization.html.

Also, we talked about urban tomography, which Martin Krieger defined as “the application of mobile Smartphone technology, designed to enable pervasive dense documentation of city life by many Smartphone users at the same time and provide an automatically archived historical record of plans in time” (Scholar Week 3 Reading – Krieger). Krieger also says it makes use of multiple media records of city life to provide a multi-aspectual view rather than the 1 dimensional view one gets from observations on pencil and paper. Professor Sanchez then informed us of people’s desires 50 to 100 years ago to archive cities, for the sole purpose of benefiting people and urban planners in today’s world. They attempted to document cities, but their documentation was not as thorough as urban tomography is today. This source speaks of a project using cell phones to capture, transmit, and store audiovisual urban documentation:  http://research.cens.ucla.edu/urban/2009/urban12.pdf. Here is another student’s research project in which he “shows a digital portrait of the city of Graz, recorded through the method of a cross-section and displayed as a video installation in the Kunsterlhaus Graz” http://www.archiable.com/201104/110408_urban_tomography.html .

Accordingly, Urban Tomography can be conducted through a variety of methods. In the example above, the architecture student utilizes a variety of photos, sound bites, and video feeds (running all day long) to help create a 3 dimensional, rounded image of Graz, Austria. However, GPS, time logs, train tickets, Synthetic aperture radar tomography, and other methods alike can also be used. The technique most commonly incorporated into the daily lifestyles of most people is the videos and photos taken by the many residents of an area. These techniques help to spawn an image of a city unlike any single picture or video. It helps give the outside viewer an understanding of popular places, customs, demographics, etc… and it partially assists designers in creating Virtual tours of areas. Urban tomography can also be utilized for security purposes as displayed here: http://stc.ucdavis.edu/outreach/UTC-Caltrans-2011S-Sem-April.php . When Professor Sanchez brought up the topic of Urban Tomography, it was the first time I had ever even heard mention of the topic. I think through the information given in this post, you can get a broad picture of what Urban Tomography consists of.