Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

Instructor: Greg Niemeyer, Ronald Rael

Term: Fall 2014

Course #: Architecture 229 / Art Practive 229 / New Media 202

Why Read This Case Study?

The rise of digital media and related technologies are rapidly reshaping how cities are planned and managed, and how people experience the urban environment on a daily basis. Environmental sensors, video cameras, electronic data collection, digital maps, satellite photography, and drones (to name a few) are involved in urban service delivery, traffic analysis and control, public safety, wayfinding, monitoring weather and climate events and more.

This graduate methods studio, Sensing Cityscapes, was led by art practitioner and new media expert Greg Niemeyer and architect and 3-D fabrication innovator Ron Rael. The studio included students from a variety of disciplines including architecture, information science, archeology, public health, geography, city planning, and performance studies. All were interested in learning more about new media, data visualization, digital fabrication, and urban field methods. The faculty-student team worked with the City of San Leandro to fabricate 3-D printed street installations equipped with actuators designed to tackle a public safety problem in a sustainable way: how to improve pedestrian path safety without having energy-intensive street lights on all night?

Students created and interrogated tools for collecting data on urban metabolisms. Through practical projects, students experimented with methods for retrieving and working with existing city data, investigating cities through surveys and mapping, generating data through digital sensing, and ways of presenting data to a public audience. Students actively partnered with the San Leandro’s Information Technology Division, to find new ways of collecting and using data to improve city planning. Their final collaborative project illustrated how sensors responsive to pedestrian movement could turn on the lights when needed – and then turn them off.