IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

1960s that in designing on a large scale, ‘‘we must look at the links, the
interactions, and the patterns.’’ 19 Networks are important because they are
a means of building and enriching social capital. I discuss social capital, as
something we might design, in chapter 6, but my point here is that the living
links that connect people and localities help social capital accumulate.
Urban planners need to pay as much attention to social networks as
soft infrastructure as they do now to the hard infrastructures of roads and
railways. 20
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For networked, multicentered localities to succeed, different kinds of
territorial and social capital need to be linked by a combination of physical
and informational networks. This integration of hard and soft factors
is complex. For one thing, planners and policymakers have been joined
by a variety of new players in a game they used to play on their own.
Privatized network industries, such as railway companies, airports, electricity
suppliers, and telecommunications operators, all want a say in planning
discussions. So, too, do citizens. With growing confidence and
sophistication, citizen groups are demanding that social agendas—such
as social inclusion or environmental sustainability—be factored into planning
processes. A nonprofit technology organization called The Open Planning
Project (TOPP) argues that information about public places is as
important a public good as the physical places themselves. TOPP advocates
a free, distributed, and open geographic information infrastructure
and is developing new ways to enhance the ability of all citizens to
engage in meaningful dialogue about their environment. One of TOPP’s
projects, a collaborative weblog called DigitalEarth.org, is conceived as
a shared public online space for talking about the environmental information
infrastructure. The site includes technology and tools to help
citizens deploy geographic data, environmental models, and visualizations.
21 The spread of open planning is a profound challenge to planning
and design professionals. They are torn between the increasing complexity
of the systems they have to deal with and the demand that people be
put first.
The complexity of the new multiscalar, network-based groups of
cities, combined with constant acceleration of the factors influencing their
development, demands a more dynamic approach, and new tools, from
designers. The Dutch architecture firm MVRDV (the letters stand for the
names of its partners) has developed a family of software programs called