Glocal Insights IV：Sensing the City

Big data, AI, VR, sensors…… With new technologies dazzled nowadays, can we sense the city we live in better? Urban China Glocal Insights Panel IV was held in MIX-SPACE in Shanghai on the afternoon of Sep. 16th. Many Thanksto all the readers and friends coming to listen and participate.

Three speakers and two mentors shared researches and insights on the topic of "SENSING THE CITY：When Your Urban Identification Being Reorganized By Data".

The speakers are Xu Shuchen from Tongji University, Zhang Ding from CUHK, and Isabella Frances Baranyk from NYU Shanghai. The Mentors are Dr Anna Greenspan from NYU Shanghai, and Dr Gao Feng, the CEO of SODA Data Tech, Co-founder of Open Data China. 

The speaker introduced the principle and analysis methods of new technology(big data, artificial intelligence) , and shared the application of new technology in the analysis of the street identity, and described the behavior of the individual in cyberspace. 

During the panel, speakers, mentors and audiences discussed the possible problems and impacts of applying big data,etc.

From Sensing to Toolization ——

Possible Combination of Data, Environmental-Behavior Study and Spatial Perception

Shuchen Hsu 

PhD candidate of Department of architecture, Tongji Universit   Research associate in ETH Future Cities Lab

Data science, machine learning and AI have been the hottest terms in the field of scientific creation over the last few years, people begin to heavily rely on data and demonstration to seek for the scientific logic and quantitative description hidden behind the things instead of trying to explain the phenomena in real word via empirical assumption.

■ Complex space and emerging data

When big data and sensor are combined with urban study and spatial scene, we are capable of describing the urban issues and phenomena which are inenarrable in the past and focusing on things with more accurate and finer time-space granularity. In the past, classical research on spatial perception and environmental behavior is focused on the correlation between people's behaviors and environment in physical space, while currently when the mobile internet products and technologies go deep into daily urban life, it is apparent that new technologies and new data are transforming people's perception and experience about cities. People's perception, cognition and behavior about urban space is no longer based on physical spatial environment and conventional means, but are re-defined by combining the relentlessly emerging new technologies and applications.

■ Several trends in urban data and spatial perception

General process flow of data analysis usually involves steps of data acquisition, storage, data processing and washing, analysis and modeling, displaying and application. These steps are also applicable to urban and spatial data processing.

As the tools of data acquisition, storage, operation analysis and visualization continuously evolving, urban and spatial data is increasingly becoming precise and real time. Behind the obtaining of real-time data is the trend of acquisition, transmission, processing, storage, visualization and computer image processing towards real-timeliness through the whole flow, which completely benefits from the proliferation of new spatial data perception technologies such as IOT, cloud computing, large-scale data processing and so on.

After obtaining substantive data, we are confronted with the problem of how to treat and interpret them. The field of spatial perception and analysis is witnessing continuous emergence of new tools for data processing. The development of these tools is all based on classical theory of spatial analysis and spatial perception to develop measurement variables applicable to environmental designers, to provide reference for environmental designers and researchers and support professional decision-making. Previous professional tools more likely run independently in local environment, while the popularity of cloud-based service, network cloud computing and Saas results in these tools moving into a trend toward distributed and networked development.

The improvement in algorithm and arithmetic capability helps people to solve heaps of challenges in terms of mathematical tools, while the availability of machine learning and in-depth learning makes it possible to solve complicated mathematic problems. Machine learning indeed can offer algorithmic solution in processing structured and non-structured mass data. Industry experts should cooperate with both computer science and mathematics experts to treat complicated subjects in environmental design studies and practice.

Simulation and virtual reality tools provide a test platform based on classical theory and empirical experience for verifying effectiveness of spatial perception studies and conclusions on the basis of algorithm and data analysis.

■ From sensing to toolization

In the past, research on environmental behavior and spatial perception has accumulated substantive classical theoretic frameworks, research paradigms and materials of case studies. With the continuous development of research techniques and paradigms, it gives rise to new research and knowledge along with the evolution of urban scenes and technologies. The processing and analysis of data obtained through new technologies still rely on the tools of classical spatial analysis, behavior and psychological knowledge and theoretic framework, while the data flow of continuous full sample will in turn help to update and identify research blind spot due to the smaller size of data in the past.

In the professional fields, it occurs to us that more and more research by professional scholars is combined with such technologies as front end and data visualization to support the perception, cognition and decision making of government, residents and environmental designers. These tools will support all stages throughout the entire flow including design phase, pre-use and post-use evaluation, and will substantially transform the environmental designers’s work flow, decision reference and information source.

■ Conclusion: transform spatial perception knowledge and research into professional and public tools

In the past, the influence of classical research on environmental behavior and spatial perception are often limited to the scope of professional practice and academic journals due to theoretical and technological constraints. In this era of human-orientation and quality-focus, this discipline of human behavior will attract more attention and participants.

Currently, the study of spatial perception and environmental behavior should not only focus on the human-oriented research and newer case study, but also should be based on the classical research framework and paradigm of the past, combined with technological means, as a way to develop new knowledge of spatial perception and environmental behavior. In addition, through redevelopment of classical theory and generation of new knowledge, the study of spatial perception and environmental behavior can be further developed and transformed into tools and products for public and professional use.

 Q & A 

Q: I have to emit some scepticisms. A few years ago a research in data have done all the taxis in NYC, the conclusion was it is really hard to get the taxi when raining outside. anyone is trying to get a car but raining. I wonder is this data really help to get to design ,have you been surprised by anything you found through the stuff ,or have you found it to be actually helpful in a way that is intuitive?

A: Almost in conference related to big data ,there will be the question what the big data will bring to us. From my viewpoint, first from the big data we can get the general trends , get to know the specific person's activity. Usually we say big data has four steps, first to describe, second to predict, third to direct, fourth to cognize. Maybe nowadays we just do the first step. Some people from financial, investment, they are always talking about machine learning and AI. It‘s just beginning. So now we can try to predict sth.

Q: With so many urban planners,designers, years, decades, they are working heavily. Do you think is there any risk of taking these approaches, or over-widely relying on data analysis to understand data instead of city, lead us to wrong decision, or make those people underserved. A possible problem is we don't have senses in every will. In other way we see we really have Big Brother, and we dont need planners any more. We can see in your lab, VR or sth else are having people to verify sth., but on the other hand, people behave sometimes differently when they know they are in lab. So how address that?

A:  My research field is environment behaviors, so for the classical environment behaviors study methodology, we usually use the small data, we collect data one by one. once I travelled and stayed in Japan for fifteen days, just to count people, how many people will pass the metro stations in Tokyo, now there is a new phrase called"thick data". Not only do we need to know what data is, bu also know why, to reveal the feelings, stories and meanings behind the data. When we do some designs, we should combine big data with small data and thick data, to prevent the mistakes which possibly from big data.

Expression of Street Identity Using Artificial Intelligence

Ding Zhang

National Geo-survey and Public Policy from the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Place, as one of the most important and fundamental concepts in the research of geography, has been defined as a particular location whose the meaning and attachments would have a particular effect on person’s identity. Also, urban street, as a major ‘place’ for human mobility and activity, deserves to be studied as the elementary unit. The relevant studies were conducted in the past. Nevertheless, the representation of urban street identity has long been a challenging problem due to the lack of appropriate data source and approaches to deal with it. The lack of a comprehensive and quantitative representation of the identity has thus limited the ability of the researcher to explore the interaction between urban layout and human cognition.

Currently, the development of Big Data and deep learning models has brought new opportunities to help researchers to understand and represent the place, of which the large-scale street-level images contribute to enriching the place semantics from perspective of urban visual environment. However, place-identity is considered as people’s cognitive “database” in experiencing physical settings. In identity theories, place-identity is about the ’self’, ‘cognition’ and ’personality’ of individuals.

As the physical and object settings play an important and the most fundamental role in people’s identity to a place, accordingly, in this study, enabled by the proliferation of computer vision, artificial intelligence technology and the increasing street-level image data, a scene element-based street-identity representation framework has been proposed. The framework is comprised of two major components: street scene ontology and street-identity vector, which can be useful for general scene understanding and quantitative representation respectively. 

A case study is then conducted in Yau Tsing Mong District, Hong Kong SAR, which involves 1155 streetlinks and 41,838 street-level images. For demonstration, the distribution analysis, the visual similarity analysis and the correlation analysis based on street-identity vector have been carried out. Different levels of road were represented and calculated in terms of street-identity vector. Spatial distribution analysis, clustering analysis as well as correlation analysis were accordingly conducted to give insight into the characteristics of the street networks. Results have proved the identity vector to be an effective tool in representing the street identity. The characteristics of the streets could be recognized and clustered within this framework. It also went in line with the urban street network in terms of space syntax.

However, this study was not delivering an answer of what the place-identity is for a particular place and group, whereas the proposed street-identity representation framework tried to give a few answers by installing preliminary pillars to bridge gaps between scene quantitative representation and place-identity, further to facilitate the quantitative and comparative analysis between places in urban space. The limitation of this work also deserved to be discussed. The street scene ontology depicted the elements and its relationships statically, which was limited in representing the rapid dynamic changes in urban streets.

This issue can be addressed potentially by two ways: 1) building a series of reasoning models based on the proposed scene ontology; 2) integrating new computer vision based model for scene event/activity recognition. Secondly, for street-identity vector, scene elements and its proportion were modeled artificially. However, more dimensions like the quality, age, status, of the element, and the spatial relationships between the elements were needed to describe the real complex and dynamic urban environment. The simplicity and the effectiveness of the representation model needed to be balanced. Lastly, the research area focused in this study was at district level. It is believed that more interesting and significant outputs could be revealed on a larger scale.

 Q & A 

Q:Can human's vague impression be analysed by quantitative data?

A:That's why it's difficult as everyone has different impressions on the streets and impressions are hard to quantified to put into research. So with the help of AI and only with the help of AI, we try to create an "average" person, a person behind everyone,an imaginative representation of human to feel the identity of streets.These data are captured for AI for its understanding. People may don't care much about building percentage in an area but AI cares.

Our Own Sacred: Virtual Space-making in Networked Religious Communities

Isabella Frances Baranyk

Senior student of art and architectural history at NYU Shanghai

I’m going to talk about virtual space-making in networked religious communities. So: communities that exist online, where everyone who is a part of them is accessing them through an internet connection, and the common interest they share is the practice of a particular religious or spiritual belief. In this production of “sacred” space online，or VR “heaven”, people could walk around as angels in something that resembled a sort of socialized afterlife, attend virtual mass together in any time zone and then meet up for virtual coffee next door to talk about their beliefs. 

In the West, we have a long tradition of organizing urban space around religious sites. You see the map of the French town of St. Denis from 1706, and the cathedral is not only at the heart of the city, but it’s even emphasized on the map. It’s reachable by all the main streets. And this is quite common. Not only in Europe but also in the colonized Americas, the church or cathedral was a social meeting place in addition to a religious one; it’s somewhere you would go every day. It was often at the heart of urban activity.

But today we aren’t talking about the real world. in the place called Second Life, cities aren’t just organized around religious sites, but religious sites themselves are the entire city. Second Life refers to a massively online role playing game that began in 2003. Basically, you can make an account for free, create an avatar, and walk around in a virtual world. You can talk to people and buy stuff. The whole fun of being in that world is based around the social relationships you develop, and the way you express and identify yourself by modifying your clothes and your built environment. Nearly the entire half a million acre virtual world has been created and uploaded by “residents” who make their own designs in 3D modeling software and then pay for server space to make their creations accessible to everyone else.

Second Life sims are almost always organized around a certain theme, and users who spend a lot of time in a particular sim do so because they are interested in that theme. The entire social structure of this virtual world is arranged according to common interests that manifest in a built environment. So there are a lot of religious and spiritual sims, which interest me because they do have real counterparts in the non-virtual world. Second Life is just one example of a virtual platform for this type, but it may well be representative of a whole future for the way social groups respond to virtual built environments, and vice versa. 

▲  So we’re going to go on a little tour with my research avatar, Melba Rose. I wanted her to be able to blend in with the community. Our first stop is Koinonia Congregational Church, which is a progressive Christian church founded in 2006. The first thing you’ll notice is that the church is the only thing on this island. So we can think about what spiritual implications it would have for a believer that there is no urban context to potentially distract from the architectural impact of this building, and no more human-scale urban artifacts to make this building feel less dominating to my avatar.

▲  When we go inside, it’s a different story.  Here, we sit on cushions arranged in a circle, not pews that direct our attention to the altar. It reinforces the church’s message that everyone, even LGBTQ members who may feel rejected or out of place in their real world churches at home, is welcome and equal in this space. But in SL, we don't have to settle for subtlety. As soon as I sit down on a cushion where masses are held, I’m prompted to open a note card of Koinonia’s community guidelines, which emphasize equality and open discussion.

▲  Our next stop is Hikaru, which is a Zen Buddhist sim. Avatars move between sims by teleportation — there is no street to act as a transitional fabric between different specialized sites. Sim owners can set their own teleportation stands, which means they can determine what a user’s first view of a space is. This is Hikaru’s teleportation stand, which you’ll see is filled with information and maps about the sim.

▲  On the edge of the island, we can find what’s labeled on the map as a tai chi pavilion. These colored spheres are action balls that sim owners can place in their land. When I click on an action ball, my avatar performs a set choreography according to the programs. This one is “cuddle,” which gives us a whole new understanding to the practice of “tai chi,” and it also provides some context to this floating orb over there in the water. This is the first fantastical element we’ve seen so far.

▲  This is another part of Hikaru, which is labeled as the Dojo on the map.Sylvio is the creator of Hikaru and the community leader. He told me that he found inspiration for his designs by searching Zen buddhism on google images, which introduces a pretty significant breakdown in the power structures that normally control the physical outcome of a spiritually identified building. 

▲  If you go into a real temple, you have donation boxes near where you bow in front of the Buddha, and whatever you donate goes back into the temple and the community. These donation cards serve a similar purpose, where they help Sylvio pay for server space, but they are also given these yellow titles that become part of the environment like an advert and disrupt whatever ritualistic purpose this place might have.

▲  Our final stop at Hikaru are the private homes. Sylvio rents parcels of his land out to members of the community, but their design has to be approved by him and fit into the sim’s aesthetic before building.

▲  Next we arrive at the Ashram of Brahma, where sim owners can set the position of the sun on their islands. The sun is perpetually rising at the Ashram. The designer and owner, Sir Dom Haven spent a few months in India during college and has been exploring his spirituality ever since. He built this place based on his perception of Indian spirituality in the hope that he could encourage more people to explore their spiritual sides.

▲  After 2008, Second Life membership started to taper off because the technology couldn’t handle the popularity. Everything got really laggy and servers were constantly crashing. On the right side, you can see what is essentially a giant image plane that actually ends up being higher resolution than the rest of SL. Processing wise, its’ too expensive for your computer to actually build out the entire lake and mountains. So the creator, Sir Dom Haven, just put an image instead. Even today, technology still isn’t at a point for most users where these graphics would load immediately. 

▲  Sim owners can create barriers to certain parts of their islands, which only appear when you approach them. There is a material difference that feels much more aggressive between this neon yellow railing versus something like a paper sign taped to a door that says “staff only,” but it’s impossible to have someone on site 24/7 to politely monitor the traffic flow of avatars in every time zone.

▲  This is something I found on the shore of the sim. It’s the home of Dom Haven. Obviously, nothing about the aesthetic this represents fits with the Ashram in the background. Dom Haven owns the whole island, and paying to rent out more land elsewhere in Second Life to build his dream home wouldn’t make much sense, even if this doesn’t seem to fit with the values he espouses in the Ashram’s weekly meditation sessions.

▲  Our final stop is the Coptic Church in Egypt, which can be seen as an attempt to remove it from the context of Second Life and back into the real world place where the church and its diasporic members come from. This is the teleport stand, where you can see that even from the first moment, the church is encouraging visitors to connect with their Facebook group outside of SL, and showing photos of real world members, not avatars.

▲  Here are some more examples of those real world figures, that this sim connects to real congregation members to pray for. But another thing we can see here is a theme I came across several times of these sort of costumed dummies. A lot of the sims stationed these dummies in key areas that made it seem like there were people in the sim, but when you try to talk to them you find out they’re just props.

▲  This sim had several buildings but nearly all were churches and chapels, with the exception of this model of the Cairo Tower. The Cairo Tower is the tallest building in Egypt, and a wellknown source of a lot of pride a lot of Egyptians. When we think about this in the context of the political situation for Coptics in Egypt right now, it becomes a sort of beacon for people to come to Second Life and safely practice their religion, while still having these national ties to their country.

▲  The interior of the church is extremely detailed and completely accurate to a real coptic church, including the choreographed animations for avatars to kiss the iconography. You can see in the rugs and iconography are used to simulate surfaces that are textured in real life, and even with the attention to detail in this space, a lot of the material quality of a Coptic Church, where light and incense smoke are reflected off of gold leaf, are lost.

▲  So that’s the end of our tour. We’ve talked about the de-institutionalized power structure that SL makes available, different sources for aesthetic inspiration, choreographed ritual performance, and design challenges that come with limited processing space.

 Q & A 

Q: I am just curious that did you speak to any users, who may visit those religious groups, who may not have a religious belief in reality, but go to those virtual space and say “ok I can believe it yet”，then in reality he will go to church. Are there any kinds of this case?

A: Less than 15 people I met on this platform. I hunted down who I was able to interview, but very few of them I was able to meet. And there’s also a big language barrier with most of them, and at the Coptic Church I was able to talk to some people but most of them only spoke Arabic. Whether these zen gardens have any effects when you are just seeing them through a computer screen and these low-quality renders. A lot of the times the answer is yes, that people get something out of that. As far as people who aren’t religious in real life but went to try these religious sims, I'm not sure if I came across any of them.

Q: Maybe we could consider the whole cyberspace as the religion, since you’ve created the avatar, you have this belief of this whole space online, as you mentioned, where this is another kind of “religion”. So the religious places you found in that particular cyberspace turned out to be quite realistic — it is just the site, or the place with an invitation to the real world. So do you think we can consider this “cyberspace” an extension of the meaning of religion?

A: Definitely. That’s a very interesting question. There used to be a few cases that we categorized as “religious”, where completely did not adhere to the real world physics and aesthetics. But those were all gone after a very short amount of time. There was once a “Bubble Cathedral” that was made out of bubbles float and pop, but did not last very long.

Event planned by Wilda Xie, Ao Song; Recorded by Ao Song, Wilda Xie, Benny Zhang; Translated by Ao Song, Wilda Xie, Benny Zhang; Webcasted by Benny Zhang; Photographed by Di Zhu, Ao Song; Edited by Han Tu.

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