Tracking People, tracking Urban Space

While I was visiting this year’s Ars Electronica, there has been a very interesting panel at the Sky Media Loft. Among others (like Andrew Shoben from Greyworld and Horst Hörtner from Futurelab) Carlo Ratti, representing MIT’s senseable city lab, talked about a project that has been presented at the 10th International Architecture Biennial in Venice: Realtime Rome (pdf).

Basically it is about visualizing the „breath of the city“ in real time by tracking people’s position, cell-phone usage and the public transportation system of Rome. The data to do so comes from Telecom Italy. In the presentation he showed data-recordings of certain events, like a Madonna concert, or the soccer-match between France and Italy. To see the flow of people in the city and the ability to measure and analyze it in real time was quite impressive.

I can imagine that there is a lot of potential for all urban planners, politicians and commercial surveyors in this approach. But I am quite sure that this also drafts an image of a big surveillance technology, that can be used for unwanted purposes. Ratti admitted that this kind of data tracking could be „somehow dangerous for people’s privacy“, but he said that this threat depends on the location of filters that avoid being tracked.

If you’d ask me I am more pessimistic about this and I would bet that the average cell phone user won’t have or make use of such a choice. While I don’t share the rather grime perspective concerning technology that the Frankfurt-School introduced last century, I do think that a little bit more consciousness among “Media Artists”/Researchers would be great.

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