I wanted to point our readers to three interesting (forthcoming) publications, that have been announced lately.
- Friday July 11th Anne Galloway will defend her dissertation titled A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FUTURE OF URBAN COMPUTING AND LOCATIVE MEDIA. I am very much looking forward to reading the whole book, and Anne has been so kind to already put the introduction online.
By focussing on the roles of imagination and desire in shaping technological change, I examine how urban computing and locative media research involves persistent tensions between pasts, presents and futures, and how that makes certain practices and identities possible or probable, and others impossible or improbable. Working on the assumption that recent expectations surrounding locative
media and urban computing have more to do with present technosocial concerns than with future predictions, I look for indicators of how research is currently being organised and how relations between people, computers and everyday life are being actively reconfigured in the process. - The Architectural League of New York (together with the Center for Virtual Architecture, The Institute for Distributed Creativity) has published the second Situated Technologies Pamphlet, called Urban Versioning System 1.0, written by Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque. You can download or order it at Lulu.
What lessons can architecture learn from software development, and more specifically, from the Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement? Written in the form of a quasi-license, Urban Versioning System 1.0 posits seven constraints that, if followed, will contribute to an open source urbanism that radically challenges the conventional ways in which cities are constructed.
- Marcus Foth from the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Australia has edited the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City that will be published later this year. The preface and introduction are already available and the overview of the chapters and contributing authors looks very promising.