Ttesting

by Gulnaz Aksenova and Artur Shakhbazyan

In the words of John Holland, "the city is a pattern in time." Yet actions within its boundaries leave traces. Whether crossing the street, making a phone call or entering the subway, our traces are retained in the city's memory.


Arbatskaya Station, Moscow Metro. Source: Insight Guides

As the world becomes more digitized, so have our traces, joining the massive aggregate known as big data. This information is updated daily by sensors tracking social media, traffic flows, retail transactions, mobile phones, GPS signals and many other sources. A virtually limitless trove of quantitative measures, it has the potential to add new dimensions to our understanding of human experience in urban environments. But the positive and negative aspects of this potential defy measurement.



The Moscow Metro is full of urban traces. An estimated 70 percent of Muscovites, representing almost all social strata, use the Metro on a regular basis. This is inevitably tied to interaction with technology, both directly (validating tickets, riding escalators, using emergency call stands) and indirectly (being recorded by CCTV). The Metro's underground passages have become urban laboratories for collecting and analyzing data.


Crowded platform in the Park Kultury Station. Source: RIA Novosti

Macro data are among the oldest and most widely used sources, offering a snapshot of the past that can be used to forecast general trends. We know how many passengers used the Metro in the past few years and can thus predict the approximate number for the current year. What we do not know, at least from publicly available statistics, is how busy each station or train is at a given time, which is more intriguing.

Social media provides user-generated data from digital telecommunications and the Internet. Today, anyone can add to big data via cell phones and computers, sharing their thoughts or simply their locations. Digital networks collect information as people update their statuses and chat with friends, contributing to global databases that archive this activity.


Regularity of Foursquare check-ins in the Moscow Metro.

The Foursquare social network allows users to show where they are by "checking in" online. They can also rate places and leave tips for others based on their experience. These data show, for example, that stations in Moscow's outlying residential districts have surprisingly higher rates of check-in per user than those in the city center.

Biological data can tell us about human-environment interactions at local and global scales. Recent studies have addressed outdoor settings and their influence on experience. Yet there is relatively little research on the impacts of indoor transitive spaces, like subway stations.


Human ecological data from the Sokolnicheskaya Line (click for an enlarged image).

Earlier this year, as students at the Strelka Institute, we built a wearable data-collection tool to gather information on human-environment interactions in the Moscow Metro. The device measures galvanic skin response, body temperature, air temperature, humidity, noise levels and light intensity. This helped us identify where people experience stress or excitement, shedding light on contextual factors that influence their experience.

Embedded technologies are capable of recording, correlating and even anticipating human behavior. They can inform urban governance and play important roles in safeguarding health conditions, reducing criminal activity, improving transit efficiency, and other public services. At the same time, they can threaten privacy and facilitate the abuse of power.


Speculative forms of data collection and use in subway stations.

Data collection is becoming part of everyday life for Muscovites and visitors who use the Metro. Each person, train and station holds insight into solving urban problems. However, it is essential to remember that people decide how to apply data. These decisions must be transparent and democratic, with careful attention to potential errors and misuse.

Gulnaz Aksenova and Artur Shakhbazyan are 2013 graduates of the Strelka Institute in Moscow. Gulnaz is now a doctoral student at the École de technologie supérieure in Montreal, and Artur is a project director at the Moscow Department of Transportation.

Credits: All images are by Gulnaz Aksenova and Artur Shakhbazyan unless otherwise noted.

+ share

by Pierre Nadilon

My first encounter with Tubism was at a house party with a large poster of the London Underground hanging in the living room. Looking closer, I found that the Tube stations had names like Semantics, Leonardo Da Vinci and Fordism. The map was full of intriguing references that served as perfect conversation-starters for the many guests who gathered around it that night.


Harry Beck's design for the London Underground map from 1933. Source: Connections

The poster's designer, Sean O'Mara, encouraged me to try doing my own Tubist posters. It wasn't easy but I began to learn by experimenting with themes like scientific inventions, the Arab-Israeli conflict, LGBT celebrities, songs about Paris, social sciences, poetry and religious rites. Some people asked me to do Tubist portraits based on information from their friends and Facebook profiles.


A Tubist portrait by Pierre Nadilon.

Tubism makes it fun to wander through topics and spot connections. At the same time, it has been criticized for a lack of originality bordering on copyright infringement. I agree that designers who created the original subway maps deserve credit. Tubist imitation is based on respect for the enduring quality of their work. It is also useful for adding an element of surprise: subtly altering well-known images helps bring playful unexpectedness into everyday settings.


"LGBT Pride" version of the San Francisco Muni map, by Pierre Nadilon.

It isn't clear whether Tubism is art, design or something else. Artistically, it draws upon pastiche and trompe-l'oeil. Based on Marcel Duchamp's view of art as the interplay between intent, realization and perception, one might conclude that Tubism is artistic when intended and perceived that way. Simon Patterson's adaptation of the London Underground map, for example, is now part of the Tate collection.


Simon Patterson's famous altered Tube map, "The Great Bear" (1992). Source: Londonist

According to Nelson Goodman, art performs symbolic functions in different contexts, creating aesthetic experiences from specific perspectives. He finds the question "What is art?" less important than "When is art?" Tubists may create aesthetic experiences, but presenting information in unexpected ways is usually a higher priority. In this respect, Tubism is a form of communication design. It is even used for résumés and advertisements, but it is not always so pragmatic.


"Axeland" advertisement by BBH Asia Pacific. Source: Coloribus


"Metro Wine Map of France" by David Gissen. Source: The Atlantic

Despite Tubism's questionable originality and identity, it is a fresh newcomer in the world of street expression. Tubist posters can be attached quickly to walls any time without attracting much attention. In public space, they are akin to understated graffiti or psychogeographic urban interventions. As digital tools for design and printing become more accessible, Tubism could flourish in cities around the world.


"Le Plongeon" version of Line 6 on the Paris Metro, by Pierre Nadilon.

Pierre Nadilon is a digital, conceptual and urban artist based in Paris. He is currently working on a comic with psychological ingredients. Pierre is always willing to share what he knows with people he doesn't know.

by Alex Schafran

I imagine that most people, when confronted with the end of a two-year sojourn in the City of Lights, would make plans to visit the unvisited museum (Louvre, check), finally scale the Eiffel Tower (soon, surely), eat the uneaten or discover the exhibition that will change history. The 19th century romantic in me feels pulled to Benjamin's passages and Baudelaire's promenades, even if they're overdone as subjects of literary flânerie. Harvey's Sacre Coeur is part of my daily run, part of life on the Hausmannian edges between the gentrified and the gentrifying.


Parc des Impressionnistes with La Defense in the distance.

Intramuros Paris is still fascinating, still full of impressive and controversial interventions into the urban fabric. The gigantic Rive Gauche project continues to unfold, as does the Batignolles, transforming vast space once dedicated to train infrastructure without sacrificing trains as a mode of transportation. But as Laurent Vermeersch and I have argued on Polis, the banlieues (residential districts beyond the city center) are the main course for any conversation about change in metropolitan Paris and the Île-de-France region.


The Clichy-la-Garenne commune, outside central Paris. Source: Les éditions illimitées

In the comments section of Vermeersch's post, an anonymous reader asks how the banlieues' reputation for monotony survives despite their incredible diversity. The answer is, in part, included in the comment: "True, many people living in the City of Paris don't often set a foot in suburbs, but how many people living in Manhattan, Central London, San Francisco set the foot in the suburbs or in the outer districts of those cities? This is quite normal ... people living in the central area of the city don't go often in the periphery." Normal, yes; conducive to actually knowing anything about your region, no.

So, armed with "L'Indispensable" (my old-school, low-tech guidebook), a streeted-out road bike and a proper camera, I've begun a mad dash around the first three rings of the banlieue. I hope to experience the diversity of this most misunderstood of contemporary urban spaces as it rapidly transforms. The pace of change eludes the navigational powers of my Indispensable (as well as Google and Apple combined); this project seems destined to continue long after I lose my Parisian address.

Extramuros Paris is a bevy of surprising discoveries, a crazy patchwork of historical layerings with micro and macro interventions that make your head spin. All the things you'd expect to find are there — enormous cités (housing projects), freeways, old factories, new office complexes, residential neighborhoods of varying social compositions, malls and outlet stores, single-family homes and reminders that the banlieue is also suburbia. One of my favorite unexpected gems is the parks: not the fact that there are parks, but that there are awesome parks.


A field to rest in can be hard to find in Paris, but not at the Parc des Chanteraines.



Two of these parks are in the northern transect, which crisscrosses the meandering border between the Hauts-de-Seine (92) and Seine-Saint-Denis (93) banlieue departments. Parc des Impressionnistes, in Hauts-de-Seine, is a bizarre update of Monet's perspective on urban life (the original is still accessible at Parc Monceau). It sounds hokey but it's totally brilliant, with quiet forested nooks, water lilies and big open fields. Wedged between train tracks, factories, neo-Haussmanian apartments, older modernist cités, a sewage treatment plant and various architectural remnants, it boasts a view of both the Sacre Coeur and La Defense, allowing one to contemplate the entire history of the Île-de-France in one sunny afternoon on the grass. Socially, it feels very much like a place between old and new industries and populations, a park that refuses the stereotypes associated with Hauts-de-Seine (bourgeois) and Seine-Saint-Denis (racialized poverty).


Parc des Impressionnistes. Source: Google Earth


Neo-Hausmannian buildings line the Parc des Impressionnistes.

A few miles to the northeast lies the incredible Parc des Chanteraines, a meandering 75 hectares of fields, lakes, bird sanctuaries, pony clubs and prairies. Work on this park began in 1978 and proceeded in stages. From inside, it's hard to believe that you're surrounded by industrial zones. The landscape even cascades across a major freeway, such that you hardly realize what you're doing as you walk to the other side.


Parc des Chanteraines. Source: Google Earth


You are standing on top of a seven-lane highway.

The expansive fields are also an escape from the demographic monotony of the Buttes Chaumont and other leisure spaces of Bobo Paris, where more and more I feel surrounded by people who look like me. Chanteraines boasts a hyper-diverse set of parkgoers seeking respite from the concrete and steel that surrounds it. With the opening of the Saint-Denis/Asnières extension of the T3 tram, this respite is even more accessible from the racialized heart of Saint-Denis. On a sunny afternoon, you get a sense of just how nice this can be.


People of many different backgrounds meet in the Parc des Chanteraines.

Whether or not the transit-led revolution in the Parisian banlieue will be successful is a complex question that will unfold for another half-century, at least. Paris is not simply connecting the periphery to the center, but also taking on the more progressive challenge of connecting the periphery to itself. It certainly helps to have nice places to connect to — places that offer something unavailable inside the walls of the Boulevard Périphérique.

Credits: Photos by Alex Schafran unless otherwise noted in the captions.

+ share