X-RAY THE

CITY!

28.5-27.11 2016
VENICE BIENNALE

UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
MELBOURNE SCHOOL OF DESIGN
FUTURE FACTORY
Gideon Aschwanden
Donald Bates
Karen Burns
Mark Burry
Kim Dovey
Philip Goad
Xiaoran Huang
Justyna Karakiewicz
Geoff Kimm
Tom Kvan
Nano Langenheim
Hannah Lewi
Elek Pafka
Alan Pert
Stanislav Roudavski
Andrew Saniga
Paul Walker
Marcus White
 02

DEDICATION Copyright National Library of Australia

Melbourne School of Design Cataloguing-in-Publication
The University of Melbourne entry
This book is dedicated
to the memory of Ernest 2016
X-Ray The City!
Fooks (born Ernest 1. Urban Design
Published by
Leslie Fuchs, 6 October Melbourne School of Design 2. Architectural History
1906 4 December The University of Melbourne 3. Architectural Design
1985) and his wife Victoria 3010 Australia 4. Urban Analytics
Noemi Fooks. www.msd.unimelb.edu.au
ISBN 978-0-7340-5258-2
All rights reserved. No part
of this publication may be
reproduced, distributed,
or transmitted in any
form or by any means,
including photocopying,
recording, or other
electronic or mechanical
methods, without the prior
written permission of the
publishers.

Printed by Brambra Press

6 Rocklea Drive
Port Melbourne 3207
Australia

Publication Design:
Sean Hogan, Trampoline
trampoline.net.au
 58

Do ing B igness

S ta nisla v
Ro ud a vski

What will architectural

design look like in a world
of ambient intelligence?

NatureTrader, a project by PocketPedal, a project by

Gwyllim Jahn, Tom Morgan Alexander Holland and
and Stanislav Roudavski; Stanislav Roudavski; other
other credits: Alexander credits: Julian Rutten.
Holland, Julian Rutten.
 59

Written as a provocation that reflects on some of the
relationships between data, habitable environment
and design, this article uses the essay called
X-Ray the City! that was written by architect and
town planner Ernest Fooks in 1946 as its starting
point.1 The discussion below compares some of
the propositions made by Fooks at that time with
two subsequent periods: the situation now, in 2016,
and near the symbolic future moment in 2046 when
Fooks essay will be 100 years old. Specifically, it
focuses on one characteristic that is comparable
between these periods: a practical attitude towards
bigness.
***
Writing in 1995, near the midpoint of the timeline
established above, a prominent architect and
architectural thinker Rem Koolhaas insisted that
[b]ecause there is no theory of Bigness, we dont
know what to do with it, we dont know where to put
it, we dont know when to use it, we dont know how
to plan it. Big mistakes are our only connection to
Bigness.2 But was he right?
Big Science
In other domains, bigness pre-existed Koolhaas, for
example in the form of big science that emerged
after the Second World War as a practice that was
distinct from the previous forms of science that were
small. Small science referred to the traditional
experimental physics that was done by individuals
with local resources, with little collaboration and with
rapid returns on personal initiatives. By contrast, big
science emerged in the US weapons laboratories
where it was conducted by large teams of physicists
and engineers, supported by huge amounts of
money and governed by hierarchical bureaucratic
processes.3 Fooks hopes to underpin design by
science are related to the spirit of such undertakings
but are modest by comparison. His site of application
is comparably large whole cities, his search for
patterns with statistical tools is also similar to the big
science approaches but his analysis is a one-man
job and his data are obtained from a limited selection
of existing sources.
The main device introduced by Fooks is the distance
grid or the diagram of population density. This
diagram has several core properties: its geometry it
is concentric; its uniformity it is made of even cells;
its universality it is meant to be applicable to any
city. The contemporary tools are allowing for greater
variety and yet, as will be discussed below, the future
tools might result in the return of the regular-pattern
superposition, the standardisation and the data
totalitarianism, even if in a new guise.
Fooks saw defects in the way statistical data was
collected and analysed and his proposal was to
sample and map the available data differently. And
yet, possibilities for such difference were limited:
on one hand, by the small number of available
typically, governmental data sources; and on the
other, by the inefficiency of manual processing.
One such defect was to do with the arbitrary
nature of urban boundaries.4 This question of
boundaries, or more generally of patterns,
remains important in the contemporary, and more
fluid, world of data. The data are influenced by
their providers, the data collection methods, the

1
Ernest Fooks, X-Ray the City!
The Density Diagram: Basis for
Urban Planning (Melbourne:
Ministry of Post-War
Reconstruction, 1946).
2
Rem Koolhaas et al., S, M,
L, XL (New York, NY: Monacelli
Press, 1995), 509, 510.
3
Andrew Pickering, The 4
Fooks, X-Ray the City!, 43.
Mangle of Practice: Time,
Agency, and Science (Chicago;
London: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), 43. Derek J. de
Solla Price, Little Science, Big
Science (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1963).
 60

NatureTrader, or where it might lead. An experience of the world where all experience is
data-dependent. All environment is mapped. All mapping units are standardised, named,
indexed. All units are sentient and can act. All units trade. Everything is commodified,
everything is one market.
Stanislav Roudavski
suitability of particular phenomena for quantification
as well as by the character of specific systems,
data streams, data owners, and so. As the city
becomes increasingly cyber, the nature of boundaries
becomes more general. Boundaries take form
of pattern discontinuities that can appear as
indices, identities, standards, database formats,
communication protocols, resolution choices,
metadata specifications and so on. It is impossible
to understand or process large volumes of data
manually and many of these boundaries come to
the fore because they are intrinsic to automation. On
the other hand, contemporary and future data-
collection techniques can overcome many traditional
boundaries such as those that are to do with
physical space or site ownership. The types of data
defects change with technology but some defects
always remain. Data continues to be highly political,
decidedly contingent, dependent on craftsmanship,
reliant on human imagination.
Big Data
Today is characterised by the potential of big-data
tools to make decisions on small-grain, local and
dynamic information, making arbitrary boundaries
still further obsolete. As reported by the big-data
narratives, historically, data have been time-
consuming and expensive to generate, analyse
and interpret.5 It provided static and, often, coarse
representations of phenomena. Consequently,
good-quality data were valuable, proprietary and
expensively traded. With the advent of networked
computing, data have retained their value, but
their production has become significantly easier
and the result is an increasingly overwhelming
flow of relational data that is finely differentiated,
timely and of high resolution. Such data come from
heterogenous sources, at multiple scales and can be
fertile for exploratory data analysis. Often, these data
are of low cost and, increasingly, openly available
5
E.g., see Rob Kitchin, The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data,
Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences (London; Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 2014).
61
and easily accessible. Availability of such data led
to the emergence of new data-analytic toolsets that
are designed to cope with the data abundance rather
than with data scarcity.
The resulting analytics can be descriptive reporting
on the past; predictive modelling the future from the
past trends; or prescriptive using models to specify
optimal actions with resulting approaches going by
the names such as data mining, predictive analytics,
data science and business intelligence. Such tools
provide new support for the design approaches
compatible with the Fooks insistence that [a] town
must be regarded as a flexible shell, able to meet
the constantly changing needs of the population.6
The relationship with data enabled by such methods
is much more active than before, however, they
still primarily focus on the understanding and
interpretation of the already-existing environments.
And yet, the reverse influence, that of data on
the environment, is becoming increasingly more
apparent, for example through such visions as
the Internet of Things. This network of objects is
predicted to link many billions of devices, some say
more than 50 billion by 2020. When every person will
have several connected devices, the whole world
will turn into a network of connected objects. Many
of the common things are already connected. Pets.
Livestock. Fridges. Tennis rackets. Most objects
that have a name already exist in versions that
can make, use and transmit data. Such connected
devices do not need independent interfaces. Smart
phones and tablets provide universal windows into
the relationships of interconnected entities and
support dashboards with which these objects can be
controlled.
That these new hybrid ecologies are more tightly
integrated with the surrounding environments is
only right, given the newly common appreciation for
the environmental concerns. Such concerns were
6
Fooks, X-Ray the City!, 32.
 62

STOP/GO BRAIN SPEED BRAIN

GO, GO YEAH! FASTER, FASTER,
FASTER!

RISK BRAIN
TOO RISKY!

TURN BRAIN
SHARP RIGHT!

HAZARD BRAIN
CAR!

THE PHONE
The virtual cycling world
is accessed through a
device familiar all.

PocketPedal, or one way to resist. An approach to design

that places stakeholders in the midst of data. All data is felt,
performed, played. Designing occurs in the magic circle. All
design is negotiated. All action is rehearsed. Every decision
is supplied with an alternative.
Stanislav Roudavski
unfamiliar to Fooks and the discourse of his time.
His essay is concerned with humans only. It is the
human scale which has to be the guiding principle.
Human beings, their collective needs, their grouping,
their distribution and redistribution, become the
primary concern of urban planning.7 Today, the
need to pay attention to or consult with nonhuman
stakeholders is becoming increasingly evident. It
is by now uncontroversial in relationship to living
ecosystems and is becoming more accepted in
regard to artificial agents.
Big Cognition
The uniformity of standardising tools such as
Fooks distance grid can miss local variations; their
simplification is necessarily lossy. Future techniques
promise substantially greater data resolution but they
also make it impossible for humans to peruse this
data; requiring some form of automation. In addition,
and more significantly, stakeholder relationships
themselves are changing under the impact of
data. For example, the role of spatial nearness
as a condition for community life a relationship
emphasised by Fooks is diminishing as new social
aggregations become possible through electronic
networks and the proximity to data and data sources
emerges as more important than the nearness to
physical locations.8 The exact nature and influence
of these new relationships is far from obvious. To
illustrate: if spatial nearness is no longer significant,
why are cities still growing so rapidly? The fact
that utility services such as water supply, garbage
disposal, drainage, sewerage, gas, electricity and
cultural institutions such as schools or kindergartens
are harder to distribute might be one of the reasons.
Fooks argues that technical achievements of
1946 were not able to diminish the importance
of SPATIAL NEARNESS for creating community
life.9 In this, his argument is compatible with more
7
Ibid., 96.
8
For nearness and
community life, see Ibid., 26.
9
Ibid., 28.
63
historically nuanced understandings of technological
development than those that are commonly
promoted by the pervasive-computing and big-data
enthusiasts.10
At the same time, the logic of Fooks method as
an all-revealing x-ray breaks down in these new
conditions. He claimed that his method can be
compared to an X-Ray of the human body, the single
maps forming parts of an anatomic atlas of the
urban entity.11 This metaphor stops to work when
tools, such as x-rays, become grown into the bodies
under study.
The situation where the amount of available data is
overwhelming, and where there is no clear distinction
between data producers and data consumers,
the environment and its users or the data and the
city motivates the introduction of new toolsets,
attitudes and behaviours. This new paradigm, first
conceptualised in the early 1990s, is termed here Big
Cognition and can also be encountered under the
names of automated analytics, ambient intelligence,
cognitive computing and deep learning.
As the number of connected entities grows, the
task of managing them becomes harder and more
expensive. The ambition of the industry is, therefore,
to define communication standards and procedures
that can support autonomous operation without
human interference. Already now, organisations are
building proof-of-concept machines that automate
aspects of decision-making. Their ambition is to
construct cognitive technologies that can support
multiple applications. The result can take form of
modular services or so-called cognitive platforms.
Such services can comprise analytics, analysis
of behaviour, visual recognition, natural-language
parsing and so. Such ambitions are seen by some
as a pervasive threat of automation while others
see this trend as a radical opportunity to construct
10
For the criticism of solutionism motivated by over- enthusiastic
embrace of networked technologies see Evgeny Morozov, To Save
Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism and the Urge to Fix
Problems that Dont Exist (New York: Public Affairs, 2013).
11
Fooks, X-Ray the City!, 95

systems that can self-improve through the running
of continuous experiments and by doing this, shift
from historical enumeration to real-time, predictive,
actionable intelligence. Many different types of
processes from shopping, to plant growth, to traffic,
to energy fluctuations can be seen, analysed and
affected as they occur, in real time; redirecting data
toolsets from accumulation to action and from
storage to value-making.
In 1995, Koolhaas claimed that [n]ot all architecture,
not all program, not all events will be swallowed by
Bigness. There are many needs too unfocused,
too weak, too unrespectable, too defiant, too secret,
too subversive, too weak, too nothing to be part of
the constellations of Bigness.12 Today, it seems that
all architecture, all program, all events or to put it
differently all matter, all processes and all life are
delectable for the bigness of Big Cognition.
In these conditions, design actions have diverging
potentials for activism. This may be illustrated by
the contrast between two radical approaches. One
of these seeks to formulate new labour demands
presuming the inevitability of automation at all levels:
in manufacturing, data production, communication
and analysis.13 The next step within this logic is to
not just accept but to demand full automation and
with it such seemingly counter-intuitive arrangements
as the right to be lazy and the guaranteed basic
minimum income. The second and contrasting
approach seeks to encourage general scepticism
for all solutionism. The solutionism believes that
network technologies can find the answer to most
of the worlds problems and optimise most of the
existing life-patterns. This scepticism towards such
beliefs rejects the fascination with the Internet along
with the presumption that the network is an eternal
entity with intrinsic and immutable properties,
deserving of the unquestioning respect.14 The logic
of this second approach is to see that imperfection,
12
Koolhaas et al., S, M, L, XL, 13
Nick Srnicek and Alex
515, 516.
Williams, Inventing the Future:
Postcapitalism and a World
without Work (London: Verso,
2015).
64
ambiguity, amorphousness, self-contradiction,
and other such phenomena are not necessarily the
problems that need fixing. Instead of being bugs,
they can function as valuable features. These
features can be valuable because they are historically
unique expressions of complexly interrelated
behaviours. Elimination of such features can lead
to severe restrictions on the operation of known
systems including, not unimportantly, the restriction
on freedoms such as the freedom to mention, the
freedom to act or the freedom to know. In this
light, characteristics that common sense interprets
negatively and Big Cognition promises to eliminate
including hypocrisy, inconsistency, ambiguity and
mendacity can be as essential to the operation
of the inclusive political processes as the similarly
unfancied inefficiency, redundancy and opportunism
are necessary for the robust operation of living
systems.
References
Fooks, Ernest. X-Ray the City! The Density Diagram: Basis for Urban
Planning. Melbourne: Ministry of Post-War Reconstruction, 1946.
Kitchin, Rob. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data
Infrastructures and Their Consequences. London; Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 2014.
Koolhaas, Rem, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, Hans Werlemann, and
Office for Metropolitan Architecture. S, M, L, XL. New York, NY:
Monacelli Press, 1995.
Morozov, Evgeny. To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology,
Solutionism and the Urge to Fix Problems that Dont Exist. New York:
Public Affairs, 2013.
Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and
Science. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Price, Derek J. de Solla. Little Science, Big Science. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1963.
Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future:
Postcapitalism and a World without Work. London: Verso, 2015.
Morozov, To Save Everything,
14
Click Here.
Stanislav Roudavski 65

YOUR GOAL
You are a cyclist riding
along St Kilda Road,
Melbourne. Can you
get to the city?
THE ROAD
St Kilda Rd lacks
proper cycling
infrastructure. On your
way to the city youll
have to negotiate a
route full of traffic.
Some vehicles pay
attention to you;
others not so much.
HEALTH
How safe is you
riding? The health
indicator reflects how
safely you ride.
Compliance with road
rules, remaining within
the bike lane, and
navigating obstacles
increases health.
Riding outside bike
lanes and colliding
with traffic decreases
it.
SCORE
You are awarded
points for every ten
metres successfully
cycled towards the
city.
You are much more
likely to end your
ride in a high score
by cycling safely
than simply riding at
breakneck speeds.

HAZARDS
Colliding with traffic
decreases your road
health per the severity
of the collision.
On low bike health,
impacting an obstacle
will cause your cyclist BIKE LANE THE PLAYER
to crash, ending the Try to stay within the bike lane! Here, your This cyclist is
game. bike health will slowly recharge. you. Youre a
hipster girl;
Sticking to the bike lane means you will a MAMIL; a
gain more points, and have enough health reckless guy in
to survive a crash or two. his twenties.
Being in the bike lane has its own Tap to pedal, tap
dangers: watch out for those opening the sides of the
cars doors! phone to turn.

PocketPedal, the game

interface and mechanics.