Out of the loop? On the radical and the routine in urban big data

This commentary interrogates what it means for routine urban behaviours to now be replicating themselves computationally. The emergence of autonomous or artificial intelligence points to the powerful role of big data in the city, as increasingly powerful computational models are now capable of replicating and reproducing existing spatial patterns and activities. I discuss these emergent urban systems of learned or trained intelligence as being at once radical and routine. Just as the material and behavioural conditions that give rise to urban big data demand attention, so do the generative design principles of data-driven models of urban behaviour, as they are increasingly put to use in the production of replicable, autonomous urban futures.

Large-scale Projection and the (New) New Monumentality

The use of the moving image in public space extends the techniques of cinema — namely superimposition, montage, and apparatus/dispositif — threatening, on one end of the spectrum, to dehistoricise and distract, and promising to provide new narrative and associative possibilities on the other. These techniques also serve as helpful tools for analysis and practice drawn from cinema studies that can be applied to examples of the moving image in public space. Case studies and creative works are presented in order to examine and illustrate the ways that public projections extend the effect of superimposition through the rehistoricisation of space, expand the diegetic boundaries of the moving image through spatial montage, and enact new possibilities for the cinematic apparatus and dispositif through scale and interaction in order to reframe and democratise historical narratives and scripts of urban behaviour.

The Everyday Usage of City-Centre Streets: Urban Behaviour in Provincial Britain ca. 1930–1970

This article examines the user experience in the city-centre street space, focusing on three main themes: space usage; the behaviour of users and interventions to direct behaviour by urban authorities; and the sensory and emotional experiences of being on the street. The emphasis is on people’s interaction with the city centre and their perceptions of it. These interactions generated multi-dimensional perspectives linked to individual socio-demographic characteristics producing place-specific experiences. The article uses film, photography and testimony to provide insights into street usage and, while acknowledging that the retail function of the city centre was fundamental, argues that this space generated wider experiences beyond the acquisition of goods and services in commercial transactions. The article concludes that the user experience, behaviour and relationship with the city-centre street are as important to understanding urban function as capital investment and city planning.

Timing Space and Spacing Time

A plea is made for a chronosophical approach to the selection of dimensions of time which might be relevant to the description and explanation of urban processes. Following the definition of some basic terms and concepts which might be used in the future development of a notational schema, the paper considers some possibilities which are inherent in the idea of timing space. This is followed by similar consideration of the idea of spacing time. These themes are compounded in a simple example which suggests that fundamental ongoing processes in daily urban behaviour are usefully summarised by what we call the accordion effect. The final section proposes that new insights into the problem of evaluating the quality of life of urban residents are obtained when such an approach is taken.

Age at Marriage in England from the late Seventeenth to the nineteenth Century

In the two centuries after 1700 there occurred upwards of twenty million marriages in England and Wales. It is perhaps forgivable, therefore, that this paper has about it the air of an interim report. It might be thought doubly foolish for an individual, and in this field a professedly amateur investigator, to embark upon any enquiry into past demographic behaviour when there exists that formidable, professional task force, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. At the last count it had within its lockers, for example, ‘aggregate analyses’ of over 550 English parishes. To provide information about the ages at which people married, however, the Cambridge Group appears to be relying primarily upon ‘family reconstitution’ techniques. It is not necessary to explain these techniques or to describe the remarkable light they have shed on the vital events of the past. With such tools the Cambridge Group have not only crept literally between the sheets of history; its individual members have not been abashed at publishing their preliminary findings. Yet obscurity remains and with it the thought that family reconstitution may not prove entirely adequate to the insistent demands for more information on when and why people married. For the undertaking of full family reconstitution both registration and record survival have to be good, and the method is undermined where there is a great deal of migration, albeit temporary or permanent. Unfortunately many of the most interesting demographic questions revolve around urban behaviour, and town records may be deficient on many of these counts, especially in that vital and perplexing period from about 1780 to 1840.