The Temporal City - The Agency Of Big Data

Cities are in a constant state of flux. These anomalous characteristics and behaviours are a product of its interaction with a matrix of legal and spatial codes and relationships, market forces, as well as fluctuations on the global dais. These uncertainties make any attempt to intervene within their complex organisation, rather precarious. The increasing decentralised forces – from transformation of workforces, ecological and environmental change to migration, compel a new manner of engagement. However, cities continue to operate within disputed forms of urban renewal and antiquated models of real estate speculation. Collectively, the models and tools of engagement with the city have arguably have not adapted to the plurality of the urban environment, its variables, and utter hybridity. Urban planning too, seems hopelessly retrospective in its inability to meet current demands and expectations. Meanwhile, the peer-to-peer economy can be seen to promote the occupation of our cities according to transient, temporary and dynamic demands - a disruptive technology operating as a non-physical infrastructure that results in its nimbleness, manoeuvrability and has an extended a temporal dimension in its influence on the city and its change over time. The Temporal City is a kinetic organism that is simultaneously and synchronously enabled by the flow of data, people and logistics. It proposes a spatial operating system, a stream of inputs and outputs – I/O. Its intensity and form unravel and wane as an organic mechanism that underpins a chronologically-based urbanism. Traditional principles of the city are upturned. The Temporal City is not about absolutes or repeatable spatial products - but a framework that embraces and amplifies the indeterminate, messy, contradictory, combinatory, uncertain and improbable conditions. Agility instead of stability, multipliers rather than repetition.