Planning (in) the digitised future
One of the suggestions made by the Skyline Campaign is that there should be better, and publicly accessible, digitised modelling of project proposals. I don't agree with a lot of they say about tall buildings, but I do agree with this. Citizens should be able to find out for themselves what is being put forward, and the technology exists for them to be able to see images of what it would look like from a viewpoint they are interested in. If you can make a film like Gravity, then you can certainly make a system like that without inventing any new technology. It wouldn't be cheap, though; it raises tricky questions of open access to data; and it also makes you think about just how accessible such a system is likely to be for everyone, as opposed to IT literate bien-pensants. Here is a piece on this subject that I wrote for the RIBA Smart Cities programme: If you were excited by the digital world created in Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, then looking up a planning...