1) The hardware:
It defines much of what a city can and cannot be. The hardware of the city –its topography, the scale of its spaces, its architecture, its patterned dense grid or its narrow laneways or its chaotic sprawl– places a hard limit on what is and isn’t possible.
2) The software:
Countless relations within a city is its software –which is often intangible, bewildering and complex– and that defines their possibilities.
Is like the "genetic load/environment" debate. But there is a point: Nowadays the budget is too limited to address almost any of the city’s real hardware problems. So you need to rewrite –or hack– the software to change not what the city is but how it behaves.
To do that it is necessary stepped back from the contentious and divisive debates about what should and shouldn’t happen in the long term.
Cities maybe are software, but the consequences of changing it are very real.
- Marcus Westbury. Cities as software
Cities also have an Operating System –a hard set of rules and constraints that are imposed and enforced by governments. Operating Systems are hard boundaries too –they are laws that forbid and allow- and there are as important to the physical city as the hardware, because laws governing mortgage payments, loans, zoning... can create, encourage, preserve or destroy a whole neighborhood.
According to this, in many respects the operating system needs to be defensive –it is vulnerable to exploitation and malicious intent. Because many who seek to use the city are attempting to do little more than run a virus –a parasite of a program– called something along the line of "Maximising_my_commercial_return.exe".
They are attempting to do little more than build the cheapest building, with the greatest amount of saleable space, in the shortest time possible. Cities have quite rightly developed a series of strategies to mitigate the virus and its impact.
| Twittear |
