I was browsing through the interesting issue of Wired UK on Digital Cities. Being busy at Citilab, a place where the city intersects with citizens, innovation, and digital technology I am specially interested in getting to know other views on how innovation and digital technology impact on citizens, cities and urban design. Moreover, as we are here preparing Urbanlabs 09, I couldn't resist reading some pieces, specially as one of the writers, Adam Greenfield, will be a guest speaker at Citilab.
It was, however, an interesting piece by Carlo Ratti, the director of MIT Senseable city Lab that I want to comment here. He discusses how the new possibilities of networked cities could impact on architecture and points to a possible return to rigidity in buildings. Read the article to know why.
What grabbed my attention in Ratti's article was a reference to Fun Palace.
In 1963, the British architect Cedric Price created the idea of a Fun Palace. "Every town should have a space... where the latest discoverings of engineering and science can provide an environment for pleasure and discovery," he said. We need Fun Palaces for the post-digital era.
As you can see in this 1963 vision, in the idea of the Fun Palace there was a mix of Science or Technology Center with and Exhibiton Hall, somewhat close to an Exploratorium of Technology and Enginerring. It also put a strong emphasis on interaction and transformability. The work of architect Cedric Price and ciberneticist Gordon Pask inspired by actress and activitst Joan Littlewood resulted in a building that never got built but inspired other centers that never attained the degree of interaction and fluidity that Fun Palace championed.
So it might be helpful for me to use this comparison in the future when I am asked "What is Citilab?" or "What is the Citilab model?". The fact that "every city should have one Fun Palace" reminded me of one of our goals when we created Citilab: citilabbing. That is Citilab doesn't start and finish with the current Citilab, we are currently cooperating with other cities in defining their own citilabs. As Dr. Jordi Colobrans of the University of Barcelona will explain in his upcoming conference, "citilab is a common noun not a proper noun". That is, there will be citilabs not just a Citilab. Every city should have one citilab.
There is one point that Citilab also shared from the beginining with some of the ideas of Fun Palace: to be a place where the "latest discoveries" of digital technology "provided an environment for fun and discovery". In our case, this environment tries to foster the appropriation of technology by citizens and a strong bias towards selflearning.
We are currently exploring how to include another important aspect of this vision, namely, how to create and exhibition program to convey what is going on and learned by people at Citilab. Not the usual exhibition I guess, but stay tuned!.
