City 2.0: An Introductory Guide

I have been sifting through some of the work produced in the final days of my Thesis, in a bid to catch-up and clear something of a backlog. I could not think of a better place to start than with these two posters, which were produced in an attempt to provide an introduction (non exhaustive but plain speaking) to the concept of the semantic city. The beginning of the Thesis followed my Dissertation City 2.0: New Urban Realities Through Open-Sourced Ubiquitous Informatics, which explored the intersection between architecture, urbanism and information communication technology in this, the Information Age.

Conceived as a new text-based language schema, City 2.0 acts as a semantic framework to the built environment enabling professional or layman alike to quite literally author the city. From cultural or historical reference to analysis and research, City 2.0 links the key paradigms of the Web 2.0 revolution (the open source, hyper-locality, user content creation etc. - factors that have already begun to revolutionise both our spatial and socio-economic relationships – to our understanding, approach towards and indeed experience of the city. One of the key elements of City 2.0 is its ability to describe geometries, events and artefacts semantically in both time and space, ready for when the temporal relevancy of the Web improves.

The covering page is speculative in extending Charles Jencks’ Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth-Century Architecture (2000) as provocation for what this next century may hold in response to technological advance. The following page provides a more detailed introduction to the emerging concept of the digital city and relevant key paradigms.

About George

George Metcalfe recently graduated with Distinction as Master of Architecture from the WSA. A freelance designer and multi-creative, he is interested in the intersection between architecture, urbanism and information communication technology.

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