Architects once aligned themselves with the future, fusing their visions to political ideals and ambitions for a bolder tomorrow, but where is our contemporary vision coming from? Who is imagining tomorrow and what will be the drivers? Does our apparent anxiety in the future point towards a confusing set of messages and a lack of political will to invest in it? Is our future suffering from a lack of faith and leadership in the present? Can we regain it?

WIRED magazine with RIBA Building Futures host a multi-disciplinary evening fusing film, architecture and debate to reveal our ambitions for tomorrow. Chaired by Ben Hammersley and including contributions from François Penz, Reader in Architecture and the Moving Image at the University of Cambridge and Eric Parry, founder and Co-Director of Eric Parry Architects with Sean Griffiths, Director and Co-Founder of Fashion Architecture Taste Ltd and Emily Campbell, Head of Design at RSA.

Book your tickets here. Do!

The other day I said on Twitter that the December issue of WIRED UK was the best magazine I’d ever seen. Well, it’s out in the shops properly today, and manic self-promotion aside (I mean, I was the deputy editor of that issue, commissioned the front section, wrote much of that, and wrote all of one feature and bits of another) I stand by the hyperbole – if the art department don’t win awards for it, for one, I’ll get deeply stroppy. If you’ve not read WIRED UK yet, get this issue – with the yellow, Gorillaz-drawn cover – and settle down for a treat. There’s a free poster, too.

The feature I wrote, from which the picture (by Søren Solkær Starbird) above is nicked, was a long time in the mix: I followed a team from IDEO as they worked on the problems of urban rage. It was a great project to work on – the piece is good, and I now have a fetish for Post-Its and Sharpies like you wouldn’t believe.

Meanwhile, the horribly young and talented Mic Wright makes his WIRED debut this month with the story of the Polaroid revival. He writes here about what happened to him afterwards. Their loss, our gain, I say.

Parkour practice on the bank of the Thames.

I love my city.

Incidentally, the picture was taken on my iPhone, and edited with the Tilt Shift App, uploaded to Flickr from the Mobile Fotos app, and posted to this blog from Flickr. Small pieces loosely joined, as we used to say.

I’m sure there’s a deep lesson there about Risk In Design but *jeeeeesus*. Nevermind that it’s also really annoying for OpenStreetMap.

Meanwhile, yesterday I met Tom Saunders, who just graduated from Camberwell School of Art by showing a piece in the final show consisting of a shop selling souvenir reproductions of the other students’ pieces in the rest of the show. A particular form of genius, that. (He also has a good story about Kanye West and sausages.)

Also, Rory Sutherland at TED Global is worth it, if only for the Shreddies advert story twelve minutes in.

I kid. It’s nice to see TBL finally finding a place for his RDF/Semantic Web stuff that’s both big enough to be cool, and with a closed enough ontology to actually possibly work. It’s also nice to see the release of creative energy that’s coming out of the hack days – Young Rewired State, especially, was extraordinary. (Although how long hack days will continue after it becomes apparent that the auditionware approach doesn’t really work for the auditionees, is anyone’s guess. Rather like moving your newspaper to awesomely expensive offices, and then getting The Crowd to do your work for free in the same year. They might tire very quickly.)

Anyway, I’ve spent quite a bit of time speaking to civil servants about this (both journalistically and as a guide – I wrote some books on semantic-webbish stuff a few years ago, and can boil triples down to wonk-speak if asked nicely) and while the technological stuff is all very exciting, everyone I’ve spoken to is deeply worried about the social effects of the grand project. It’s there that the geeks and the wonks just don’t see eye to eye. One thinks the other is being bureaucratically obstructive, the other thinks the one is horribly naive. The whimper from Westminster is that it’d be all very nice if we were starting the country from scratch – but that the culture just isn’t ready for open data. No one, they complain, is thinking about this out loud.

Will Davies’ elegant exploration of the Conservative Party’s plans for open government data is a joy, therefore, to read. Taken to its logical conclusion, he says, the transparent government movement would end with a state that was accountable, but not legitimate. It starts to break down under the weight of uneducated opinion:

So, following Mirowski, we might say that ‘government 2.0′ is the final realisation of neo-liberalism. No auditors, no experts, no objective knowledge, no sense of the common good, just maximum freedom for individuals to form opinions and privately process information. As David Weinberger says in triumphant Hayekian style, “transparency is the new objectivity.” In some instances, consumer perspectives may form the basis of action – demanding change if they’re a prominent journalist or campaigner, selecting a different service supplier if they’re a fortunate lay-person, or just mouthing off on facebook if they’re not so lucky. But siding with perspective over expertise cannot be the basis for legitimacy. Allowing people to express their frustration or disappointment, but without offering dialogue or improvement at the end of it, removes the security offered by expertise, but without offering anything in its place. Auditors act as the critics of experts, but they do so from some position of expertise; they damage legitimacy, but partly so as to then rebuild it. By contrast, a state laid bare to only the audit of general public dissatisfaction is surely heading towards a legitimacy crisis.

Readers of, say, Ben Goldacre’s on the Sunday Express’s reporting of science could well be sympathetic to this. As too can anyone who giggles at Intelligent Design, or homeopathy, or the Daily Mail. Like the misreporting of medical news, a misinterpretation of government data could have horrendous results. A media scare that causes a few hundred girls to not have a vaccine, say, will eventually kill some of them. By its very nature, government data could be equally as far-reaching if mis-used. The risks are outweighed, perhaps, by the potential benefits – but the inevitable misinterpretation is something that few but the government statistician corps appear to be taking seriously.

Even Larry Lessig, who continues as the Liberal Internet’s Intellectual Of Choice, is worried, as he writes in The New Republic:

And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The ‘naked transparency movement,’ as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

Me, I’m rather enamoured by a remark made to me the other day by a German, in Germany, well versed in international shenanigans:

“You’re releasing all of your governmental data? The Chinese will be all over that.“

I’m writing in Soho’s MilkBar, enveloped by soft layers. Just looking directly ahead, I can see references to French cinema, to the Swiss Railway, to 21st century pastiches of 1950s American diners, to Australian coffee-nomenclature, to the Florentine lily. Each one of these branching off into layers of semantics, all meaning something that directly affects my day and my behaviour, and that’s just the clothing and the stuff on the wall: the symbols go on and on, soft and made for love. You don’t need to be Umberto Eco to riff off it for hours: it’s turtlenecks all the way down.

If anything, it’s these layers that make The City our protection. The cushioning effect of history upon reference upon metaphor upon inter-mixed system is the thing that makes it the most human place to live in. It’s why Soho is nicer than L’Opera, and why Marylebone feels more human than Milton Keynes, and it’s why a good conversation, or a sunny day watching the world go by, are more meaningfully human than microclimate data or real-time search. As technologists, designers, futurists, whatever, we would do well to remember that. It’s just that we rarely do.

Matt Jones’ “The City is a Battle Suit for Surviving the Future.” is busy spawning thought all over the web at the moment. And so it is here too.

The overwhelming majority of these are not old post-industrial world cities such as London or New York, but large chaotic sprawls of the industrialising world such as the “maximum cities” of Mumbai or Guangzhou. Here the infrastructures are layered, ad-hoc, adaptive and personal – people there really are walking architecture, as Archigram said.

Walking architecture? A battlesuit?

God, how tiring.

I lived for a year in Dongguan, the even-more-hyper neighbour to Guangzhou – and since then have spent enough time in maximum cities, failed cities, edge states and post-nation state localities to know that what’s entertaining in fiction positively sucks in reality. The whole tooled-up to buy some groceries, hope I don’t get typhoid thing is romantic, for sure, but we used to do it in London too and the finest minds of the 19th century dedicated themselves to stopping it. The Victorian Mega City One wasn’t any fun at all after a while.

Of course, I don’t think that Matt is advocating a lifestyle: he’s tapping into a tradition of British speculation to give vectors for thinking about pervasive computing. Nothing more. Still, that doesn’t stop the undercurrent of yearning for the future of our pasts that seems to be returning. Nevertheless we dance with the future that brought us, and as much as we might debate Thunderbirds.v.Jetsons we’re rather stuck with a world that is much more layered than fiction ever could be.

The critique isn’t restricted to the feel of the thing. It’s historically dubious too. It’s not like the world stopped thinking in 1969, as Kazys Varnelis, the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, also points out:

Thus, when Jones invokes Warren Ellis’s comic series The Authority to conclude that cities are the best battle suits we have, I wonder if his rhetoric hasn’t revealed this fundamental problem with networked urbanism. Critique is a thing of the past for most of us, as antiquated as Archigram and its earnest modernity might have seemed in the early 1990s. When I began teaching at SCI-Arc, fifteen years ago, slides of Walking City raised chuckles among my students and I would have to explain its historical importance. How times have changed. But the research being done into networked urbanism is tied very closely to industry and even to military operations (how distinct are these under network culture anyway?). As we cheer on the latest (literal) battle suit, do we ask how these technologies will be deployed in the Iraqs and Afghanistans of the future? Or how the devices with which we activate the city control us and allow us to be tracked? Projects that critically interrogate the sentient city, as for example Mark Shepard’s Hertzian Rain does, are precious few.

True enough, but again, I think missing a point. It’s not a battlesuit, because this isn’t a battle. Much as one might want to be Bourne or Batman or the dude from Mission: Impossible, at the end of the day, none of us are. The layers of modern life aren’t grand missions to vanquish evil, or the preparation for the time that we’ll be called to action, activated by the Global Frequency. Instead our cities are made of, and our lives build up, layers and layers of soft actions. We’re already massively networked. We can already read the city’s data, it’s just that it’s encoded in patina, in fashion, in accents, in flirting. Why is this important to remember? Because if we want to predict the future by inventing it, we’d (i.e. us 30-something white male post-digital types) might want to remember everyone else – the people who don’t have a theme tune running in their head when they run out of the tube station. As Alex Deschamps-Sonsino wrote, it’s about the…

…things about this, that makes me feel like I’m not included in the city experience in the same way as my more testosterone-driven peers

All of this is a long and sprawlingly bloggy way of saying that I’m in the middle of something in my head. It’s not tech-shaped, but I can’t see it yet. Hmmm.

It’s a weird job-title, and a weird job: a flanneur-ish dilettante-y job mixed with both trouble-making and dubious shenanigans, and the responsibility to throw oneself into synergistic side-projects. My first, for the Foreign Office, started last week. Another, Louesque, will begin soon. The rest, and the point of my company, and all of that, later. Meanwhile, I am, in short, positively giddy. I am, in long, back.

It’s top value: my piece on synthetic biology is in there too, as is some great work by Kabir Chibber on Richard Branson – just how kosher are his claims to Green-ness.

Talking of investigations, meanwhile, you might remember Ben Goldacre’s piece on Matthias Rath, from our third issue. Earlier this week we received an email from Dr Rath’s organisation, for my attention, pointing us to this webpage, which implicates me as one of the “most wanted” in their call for a second Nuremberg Tribunal. As far as I know, this makes me the first Condé Nast editor to be accused of aiding and abetting genocide. All that, and I don’t even wear Prada.