GREY CITIES, GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE

THE PURSUIT OF LEGIBLE POLICY: Agency and Participation in the Complex Systems of the Contemporary Megalopolis

Newton FundBritish Council

CONACYTIIMAS - UNAM

Laboratorio para la Ciudad Future Cities Catapult

Superflux Royal College of Art

Unidad de Protocolos

Buró–Buró

GREY CITIES, GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE

THE PURSUIT OF LEGIBLE POLICY: Agency and Participation in the Complex Systems of the Contemporary Megalopolis

Newton FundBritish Council

CONACYTIIMAS - UNAM

Laboratorio para la Ciudad Future Cities Catapult

Superflux Royal College of Art

Unidad de Protocolos

Buró–Buró

The digital publication The Pursuit of Legible Policy: Agency and Participation in the Complex Systems of the Contemporary Megalopolis was conceived with the support of the Newton Fund and is product of the collaboration between the following institutions: The British Council, The Newton Fund, CONACYT, IIMAS - UNAM, Laboratorio para la Ciudad, Future Cities Catapult, Royal College of Art and Superflux.

First edition, 2016

Editor Lacey Pipkin Designer Diego Aguirre FernándezIllustrations Juanjo GüitrónEditorial Coordinator Jorge Munguía Matute

This electronic publication is for free distribution in its digi-tal presentation. Any printed version of this publication is not recognised by the publisher and is not registered under this ISBN.

Digital ISBN of future publication: 978-607-96255-5-9

©2016 by Buró Buró Oficina de proyectos culturales, S.C.; and the authors, illustrators and photographers.

Published by:

Buró Buró Oficina de proyectos culturales, S.C. Jalapa 27, Colonia RomaMexico City, Mexico 06700

buroburo.org

Mexico

Newton Fund | British Council | CONACYT | IIMAS - UNAM | Laboratorio para la Ciudad | Future Cities Catapult | Superflux | Royal College of the Art | Unidad de Protocolos

Iván Abreu | Jon Ardern | Roberto Ascencio | Sofía Bosch | Jorge Camacho | Sergio R. Coria | Laura Ferrarello | Gyorgyi Galik | Carlos Gershenson | Gabriella Gómez-Mont | Begoña Irazabal | Anab Jain | Vytautas Jankauskas | Pablo Kobayashi | John Lynch | Dan Lockton | Leticia Lozano | Isaac Serrano | Rodrigo Téllez and Anastasia Vikhornova

GREY CITIES, GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE

THE PURSUIT OF LEGIBLE POLICY: Agency and Participation in the Complex Systems of the Contemporary Megalopolis

Buró—Buró

The Pursuit of Legible PolicyAgency and Participation in the Complex Systems of the Contemporary Megalopolis

Introduction

Prototyping the City 10 by Gabriella Gómez-Mont, Laboratorio para la Ciudad Project Presentation 12

The City as a Product of its Citizens 15

Perspectives 19

Institutional Actors 23 Individual Actors 28 The Urban Context of Mexico City, London and Global Megacities 35 Photo Essay of the Binational Collaboration 38

Creating a Case for Legibility 43 Legible Policy in the Participatory City 45 by John Lynch, Future Cities Catapult Designing Agency in the City 53 by Dan Lockton, Royal College of Art Citizen Engagement In and Beyond ‘Smart Cities’ 63 by Gyorgyi Galik, Future Cities Catapult/Royal College of Art The Ecology of Public Spaces 73 by Laura Ferrarello, Royal College of Art

Dimensioning Legibility 81

Political Imagination: Towards an Experimental Theory of Legible Policy 83 by Gabriella Gómez-Mont, Laboratorio para la Ciudad Design’s Role in Policymaking 89 by Sofía Bosch, Laboratorio para la Ciudad Encouraging (and Inciting) Participation in the Architecture of the Public Space 95 by Leticia Lozano, Laboratorio para la Ciudad An Approach to a Museum City 101 by Begoña Irazabal, Laboratorio para la Ciudad

Practicing Legibility 105

Shifting the Balance—Design for Equitable Cities 107 by Anab Jain, Vytautas Jankauskas and Jon Ardern, Superflux A Case from Mexico City: Laboratorio para la Ciudad’s Mapatón CDMX 121 by Rodrigo Téllez, Laboratorio para la Ciudad Hacks and Probes 125 The Value of Disruption 137 by Iván Abreu, Centro de Diseño, Cine y Televisión

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Applying Legibility Within the City’s Complex Systems: Mobility in Mexico City

Systemic Design and Writable Policy 141 by Jorge Camacho, Machina Speculatrix Improving Urban Mobility by Understanding its Complexity 149 by Carlos Gershenson, IIMAS - UNAM Open Data on Road Traffic Incidents in Mexico City: 153 Current Situation and Perspectives by Sergio R. Coria, Laboratorio para la Ciudad Mapping Initiatives and Spatial Analysis 167 by Isaac Serrano, Laboratorio para la Ciudad The Democratic Dilemma: The Incentives for Long-Term Policy 173 By Roberto Ascencio, Laboratorio para la Ciudad A Blinking Pixel 177 by Pablo Kobayashi, Unidad de Protocolos A Point of Comparison: Mobility in London 181 by Gyorgyi Galik and Anastasia Vikhornova, Future Cities Catapult

Epilogue 185

Collaboration Graphics 186 Tools for Legible Policy 189 A Glossary of Legible Policy 194

References 211

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PROTOTYPING THE CITYBY GABRIELLA GÓMEZ-MONT, LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Our future is urban. As has been said over and over again, more than half of huma-nity is now living in cities, and by 2050 the number will jump to an astounding 70%.

In this context, discovering different answers to the fundamental question of “What is a city is for?” poses an interesting challenge. We are long past the days where we thought a city’s purpose was to be as practical and efficient as possible, zipping us in cars from point A to B, from one bubble to the next. We have come to realize that a city is a multifaceted and complex cultural invention that we are constantly creating, all together, with many other possibilities to explore. Additionally, we now also have a better understanding of the effect of cities on the world—for better and for worse.

In this shifting paradigm, in which cities can be great change-makers, where urbanity is suddenly seen as desirable again, but when the future of cities still needs urgent reinven-tion, what are the new ideas, areas, disciplines, technologies and ecosystems that cities could explore? What needs to happen for cities themselves to become intensive traveling surfaces and enablers for ideas? What type of prompts, strange attractors, experiments and conditions are necessary and how do we go about generating them?

During the collaborative sessions between the London and Mexico City teams, we found our explorations of these questions leading us to extended contemplation of the realities of Mexico City. We realized this has to do with how Mexico City epito-mizes so much of both the great potential and the many challenges that the City of tomorrow holds. As a megalopolis of the developing world, it shares many of the problems faced (or soon to be faced) by cities in Latin America, Africa and Asia; it emerges as an opportune place to try out future scenarios in the present. Because as one of the most important city economies of the world, it also has the necessary infrastructure to create important experiments and become a city capable of proto-typing, testing and implementing ideas that can later be exported to other cities. In that sense, Mexico City is the perfect bridge between first world and emerging world, since it exemplifies a complex and enticing mix of both.

In recent years, Mexico City has quietly become one of the world’s most socially pro-gressive and creative urban areas in the global south. Its energy continues to ampli-fy as it embraces its density and cultural roots. Mexico City is getting bigger, more imaginative and is starting to defy stereotypes of what a Latin American megalopolis can and cannot do. Yes, we can pass progressive gay rights in DF despite Mexico being religiously conservative. Yes, we can have a successful bike-sharing program (with more than 20,000 rides a day, a number that continues to grow) despite our size. Yes, a metropolis with 22 million inhabitants can win international green transportation awards and significantly improve the quality of its air in less than ten years.

At the same time, Mexico City also faces the many challenges that come with a city of its size and complexity, including social inequality, problems related to urban sprawl, a possible health crisis related to obesity and many other urgent issues. These

10difficult and complicated truths of contemporary urban life show there is still much to be done to realize this city’s full potential, and provide us with opportunities to rethink the way we make decisions and interact with the many facets of our urban environment. This is the crux of the work of an urban laboratory (in whatever city it operates), and the motivation behind its many activities, from gathering, analyzing, interpreting and visualizing data (as seen in the chapter Applying Legibility to the City’s Complex Systems, p. 141) to its forms of thinking and problem solving based in creativity, synthesis, collaboration and intuition (as described in Hacks and Probes, p. 125). As the natural course of the London-Mexico collaboration tended toward examining issues facing Mexico City and their implications for legible policy, much of the work presented in this publication considers this specific context from a binational point of view. The conclusions drawn and tools identified and developed will be the subject matter for future collaborations to contemplate in relation to London and other cities across the world.

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PROJECT PRESENTATIONThe Mexico City/London Institutional Links program bridged two of the most impor-tant cities of the world, bringing together several award-wining teams from Mexico City and London to think about the present and future of cities.

The program was composed of in-depth research, joint workshops, collaborative ses-sions, city walks, presentations and sharing of best practices, public events, urban prototypes and a continuous conversation across borders via email and videoconfe-rence, using these different formats to explore the challenges shared by both cities, and also those unique to one specific metropolis. Across this binational series of wor-kshops and programs, locals converged in studio sessions led by design-thinking in order to rapidly prototype collaborative and urban strategies.

Each team member took different approaches and formats to investigate and share ideas that could directly (or obliquely) inform new social scripts and urban futures: proposing insights from wide-ranging fields and pointing towards other possibilities born out of each individual’s practices and experiences and offering up thought-pro-voking conceptual tools with which to view cities—and with which to try to tackle imposing urban challenges.

This editorial project functions as a summary (and even a diary) of this sustained conversation between London and Mexico City, which took place from August 2015 to April 2016. It is also a library of experiments and conceptual tools that will now inform the practices of all those involved, and which can serve to guide future inqui-ries into the subjects herein.

At the same time, this book also functions as a first approach towards an exploration of the potential of international and multidisciplinary teams tasked with not only sharing ides, but coming together with the objective of creating a common language and theoretical framework that can later be taken to its next evolution, both collecti-vely and individually, across the Atlantic.

Grey Cities, Green Infrastructures: A Point Of Departure

The initial point of departure for the the Newton Fund consisted in exploring the relationship between health and the built environment, since this is a key issue in both London and Mexico City, and one that especially impacts poor and vulnerable urban dwellers. Both cities have significant issues with poor air quality and its atten-dant causes: primarily traffic-related pollution, though other factors are also present, including industrial pollution, domestic heating and cooling, waste-processing and lack of “green infrastructure” in the form of parks, trees and foliage. Poor air quality

12significantly impinges on the health of citizens in both cities—and in many others worldwide—with the greatest cost in fundamental human terms (early, painful dea-ths through respiratory illnesses) as well as secondary costs in terms of healthcare.

In the first phase, the teams did independent research on the specific challenges of the two cities. Pollution was high on the list for both, especially mobility-related and industry-related causes, as well as domestic heating and cooling and geographical/topolo-gical inversion. And so, the initial reflections were based on collecting new approaches to built environment projects that combined innovative, high-quality, sustainable design. After enough data and research came in, both cities came to the conclusion that certain interesting policies were already in place, but had been poorly received by citizens, for example, congestion charge in London and car-pollution policies in Mexico City, such as the expansion of the bike sharing system and bikeways, auto emissions testing centres and the Doble No Circula program, among others.

So, during the first London workshop it was identified that there was another key issue at hand: the translation of public policy into the public realm.

Second Stop: Legible Policy

At that first London workshop the group agreed on a common interest: the neces-sity of public policy that manages to induce cultural change and shifts. The teams began collectively investigating the potential of hard facts (such as urban geography and data analysis) and soft tools (design fictions, for example) to come up with a re-pertoire of urban experiments capable of positively affecting quality of life in cities. Also established from the start was the need for new political languages and urban forms that could bring not only more transparency to the complex systems at hand, but take advantage of narrative qualities and input from systems thinking, the social sciences and other relevant disciplines.

Given the multifold perspectives and diverse skill sets of all involved, a conclusion was reached to make a collection of conceptual tools addressing these priorities, and to use Mexico City as a test-bed for the idea of legible policy—a relatively recent con-cept that, while still in the process of definition, offers tremendous potential for tackling issues inherent to the complex urban landscapes.

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THE CITY AS A PRODUCT OF ITS CITIZENS

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MAKE POLICY LEGIBLE -> OPTIMIZE AND INCREMENT OPPORTUNITIES FOR UNDERSTANDING, LEARNING AND GETTING INVOLVED -> INCREASE DISCUSSIONS AND PARTICIPATION OF CITIZENS (WHETHER OR NOT THEY ARE DIRECTLY RELATED TO THE CITY OR ENGAGED IN COMMUNITY AFFAIRS)

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-> STRENGTHEN EACH CITIZEN’S RELATIONSHIP AND COMMITMENT TO THE CITY -> FACILITATE THAT EACH INDIVIDUAL’S ACTIONS HAVE A GREATER OPPORTUNITY TO ADDRESS THEIR IMMEDIATE CONTEXT WITHIN THE CITY’S COMPLEX SYSTEMS AND AGENDAS.

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19PERSPECTIVES

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LONDON

MEXICO

Mobility

Mobility in the Megalopolis (Mexico City)

Future Case Studies

Analysis of the current state (Mexico City)

Legible Policy UK/MX (conceptual tools)

Grey cities, green infrastructure

• Air quality• Health• Public space • Productivity• Urban Infrastructure

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NEWTON FUND

Newton Institutional Links is part of the Newton Fund. This is part of the UK’s official development assistance programme. Newton Institutional Links provides grants for the development of research and innovation collaborations between the UK and partner countries. The research facilitated by these grants tackles local development needs and challenges such as extreme weather conditions, access to affordable health care, food and energy security.

The grants are intended to provide small-scale seed funding to: start and develop collaborations between academic groups, departments and institutions in partner countries and the UK support the exchange of experti-se and research knowledgeestablish local hubs for UK-partner country activities.

INSTITUTIONAL ACTORS

The Newton Fund grants are intended to support areas relevant to the econo-mic development and welfare of part-ner countries. For the purpose of the Newton Institutional Links Programme, it defines research and innovation with development relevance as activities that have the potential to contribute to the economic development and social welfare of the Newton Fund countries, benefitting poor and vulnerable popu-lations in these countries and beyond. Multidisciplinary proposals and propo-sals in Arts and Humanities and Social Science disciplines are welcome.

BRITISH COUNCIL

The British Council was founded to create a friendly knowledge and un-derstanding between the people of the UK and the wider world. They call this work cultural relations.

CONSEJO NACIONAL DE CIENCIA Y TECNOLOGÍA

The Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tec-nología (CONACYT) is an institution that fosters, coordinates and articulates national scientific and technological activities in order to promote the de-velopment of basic science, expanding the borders of knowledge and linking it with the formation of human resour-ces and enhancement of education in science and technology. In addition, CONACYT promotes the development and strengthening of applied research that attends society’s most pressing needs, widening the perspectives of the productive sector and, as a result, making it possible to raise quality of life for Mexico’s population.

CONACYT’s funds, distributed via grants and financing, go to activities directly linked to the development of scientific and tech-nological research; fellowships and the formation of specialized human

resources; the implementation of specific projects involving scientific research, modernization, innovation and technological development pro-jects, the dissemination of science and technology; the creation, development of consolidation of research groups or centers. Economic stimuli and recogni-tions are also given to researchers and technologists following evaluation of their activities and results.

INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES EN MATEMÁTICAS APLICADAS Y EN SISTEMAS

The Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas (Institute for Research in Applied Ma-thematics and Systems, IIMAS) is one of 21 institutes within the area of Physical and Mathematical Sciences that make up the Subsystem for Scientific Research of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). The Institute’s mission is to create, develop and foster original

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The British Council works in over 100 countries, connecting millions of people with the United Kingdom through pro-grammes and services in the English language, the Arts, Education and Society. They believe these are the most effective means of engaging with others and have been doing this work since 1934.

Their work in English aims to bring high quality language materials to every lear-ner and teacher who wants them. In de-veloping and post-conflict countries they teach English and train teachers through radio, web and TV broadcasts. They also offer over three million UK examinations worldwide, helping people gain access to trusted qualifications to support their career and study prospects.

In the fields of Education and Society their work helps transform national education systems, builds more inclu-sive and open societies and increases young people’s opportunities.

They encourage international students to come and study in the UK, and Briti-sh students to experience life abroad. They bring schools around the world together so young people and teachers from different countries can share with and learn from each other.

Their work in the Arts involves the very best British and international artistic talent. They help increase audiences for international work in the UK and for UK work globally, and they bring artists to-gether and support the development of skills and policy in the arts and creative industries. Through this work they en-sure that culture in its broadest sense plays a vital role in connecting with and understanding each other.

In these ways, the British Council builds links between UK people and insti-tutions and those around the world, helping to create trust and lay founda-tions for prosperity and security around the world.

scientific research in the disciplines of Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering and Systems.

IIMAS works to guarantee the con-tinued existence of research groups in Applied Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering, and Sys-tems, ensuring that the study of these disciplines is kept up-to-date, and thus contributing to scientific knowledge of universal value. In addition, we aim to provide both the university community and the society at large the means to access such knowledge.

Objectives:• Carry out original research in

Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering and Systems.

• Participate in the following graduate programs: Mathematical Sciences; Computer Science and Engineering; Earth Sciences; and Engineering. Participate in the undergradua-te programs in both the Science

Department and the Engineering Department, among others.

• Train high-level human resources through research projects.

• Disseminate scientific knowledge.

Functions:• Research the areas studied at the

Institute. • Train human resources in research

and teaching in higher education through the provision of courses, tutoring and direction of theses.

• Organize and participate in se-minars, conferences, congresses and symposia and other academic events, both nationally and interna-tionally.

• Develop outreach activities through collaborations with academic units and related national and interna-tional institutions, and with the industrial sector.

• Disseminate the results of research and technological developments produced by the Institute.

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FUTURE CITIES CATAPULT

Future Cities Catapult accelerates ur-ban ideas to market, to grow the eco-nomy and make cities better. They bring together businesses, universities and city leaders so that they can work with each other to solve the problems that cities face.

From their Urban Innovation Centre in London, they provide world-class facilities and expertise to support the development of new products and services, as well as opportunities to collaborate with others, test ideas and develop business models.

Future Cities Catapult helps innovators turn ingenious ideas into working pro-totypes that can be tested in real urban settings. Then, once they’re proven, Fu-ture Cities Catapult helps spread them

to cities across the world to improve quality of life, strengthen economies and protect the environment.

Their Cities Lab provides data analysis, modelling and visualisation capabilities to understand and elucidate city pro-blems, while on-the-ground demons-trators in their network of collaborating cities provide opportunities for testing new approaches in-situ. Combined, they help them discover which new ideas can have the biggest impact on the urban environments.

By bringing together the UK’s top archi-tects, engineers, designers, academics and business professionals, Future Cities Catapult can help transform cities on a global scale. They strengthen the UK’s ability to turn excellent urban innovations into commercial reality.

LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

The Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Labora-tory for the City) is Mexico City’s new ex-perimental office for civic innovation and urban creativity, the first city government department of its kind in Latin America. Laboratorio para la Ciudad is a space for rethinking, reimagining, and reinventing the way citizens and government can work together towards a more open, more livable and more imaginative city.The world is becoming more urban by the minute: In 2030, six out of ten peo-ple on Earth will be city dwellers. This great urban shift—particularly in emer-ging countries such as Mexico—will bring radical environmental, technological, social and cultural transformations that affect our everyday lives and demand innovative responses. Does government have what it takes to assume a deeper role in shaping the way we deal with change? In many cases, city governments and other traditional institutions dea-ling with urban issues could be better

equipped to deal with the challenges or seize the opportunities of this foreseea-ble future. The Laboratorio para la Ciudad believes that the growing disconnect between citizens and government, some-times broadened by one-way conversa-tions and lack of trust, can be addressed and actually reverted by reimagining roles and repurposing traditional me-chanisms of engagement.

How can cities and citizens reconnect through government itself? This is the question that drives the Lab’s work, and they approach it not only as a matter of delivering better services or offering new channels for engagement, but truly reimagining the role of government and how it can contribute to building better cities. What if government went beyond administration, promoting innovation, and even possibly channeling imagi-nation? What if government was not just a regulator, but a true catalyzer for change?

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SUPERFLUX

Superflux is a design, research and foresight company producing critically acclaimed work at the intersection of emerging technologies and culture.

Founded by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern in 2009, the Studio’s early work brought experimental design approaches to new audiences, working for some of the world’s biggest companies like Micro-soft Research, Sony and Nokia, and exhibiting work at MoMA New York, the National Museum of China and the V&A London. Over the years, Superflux’s work has been recognised by clients, partners and commissioners—allowing the Studio expand its work into new territo-ries of strategic and design-led futures, culture and context-sensitive design for emerging technologies and special projects for breakthrough innovation. The Studio’s partners and clients conti-

nue to grow, and include Government of UAE, Innovate UK, Future Cities Cata-pult, Samsung, BBC and Forum for the Future.

The Studio also has a dedicated re-search lab within its design practice, developing ambitious projects around future quantum computing, synthetic biology, civilian drones and the Indian Mars Mission. Most recently the Studio incubated IoTA, a civic organisation enabling people to use their data as evidence for change.

The Lab is a new breed of government office, the first of its kind in Latin Ame-rica. A few weeks after being elected, Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera approa-ched director Gabriella Gómez-Mont to create an experimental area within the new city government that could reimagine the way government and civil society could collaborate, by implemen-ting public policy and projects that promote citizen ingenuity and talent. The outcome was Laboratorio para la Ciudad.

The Lab is conformed by a young, multidisciplinary team, mostly without prior government experience. It’s an unusual bunch: architects, technolo-gists, editors, art historians, political scientists, journalists, urban planners, filmmakers, sociologists, designers, urban psychologists… But one shared characteristic is impatient optimism, a passion for the city, and the belief that

positive change can be born within go-vernment. The other unifying element is collaboration: The team constantly seeks new proposals and provocations around the problems and opportunities of the city through collaborative efforts, both within government and through civil society.

BURÓ–BURÓ

Buró-Buró is an interdisciplinary office that works on strategies and projects addressing contemporary problema-tics through an approach that focuses on culture, art and work with specific communities, for both internal projects and the projects of institutions, orga-nisations, museums and foundations. Buró—Buró, also a publishing platform, particpated in the editorial develo-pment and design of The Pursuit of Legible Policy.

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ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART

The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a who-lly postgraduate art and design school, founded in 1837 and based over two si-tes in central London. The RCA is known for its design and art research and technological innovation, and achieved first place in the QS World University Rankings for Art & Design in 2015 and 2016, based on academic and employer reputation. The RCA aims to advance the understanding of the influence and scope of creativity and contribute to be-nefiting society. Key to this is the ability to apply theories and methodologies to real-world issues, translate research findings into practice and work directly with academic, corporate, nonprofit and government sectors.

Within the RCA, research staff and students from two departments worked on the Legible Policy project. Innovation Design Engineering, in the School of Design, covers a range of domains, from

the social through to the industrial, focusing on research in design thinking, design practice and experimentation, and the application of new design me-thods within the expansive remit of in-novation. Research is targeted towards inter-disciplinary and cross-discipli-nary practice.

In the School of Communication, Infor-mation Experience Design focuses on transforming information into experien-ces, through encompassing data visua-lisation and narrative, installations and exhibitions, research and investigative design. IED has quickly gained a global reputation for innovative research and experimental, critical practice that cha-llenges information presentation norms while maintaining and encouraging a high degree of creativity.

UNIDAD DE PROTOCOLOS

The work of Unidad de Protocolos is fo-cused on the implications of the use of digital technologies in different stages of the design process, from concep-tualisation to fabrication, emphasising the analysis of the theoretical and philosophical consequences of this new paradigm and its interrelation with the matter. This has been driven by the constant will to explore and apply the principles of emergence to both the structure of thought and design and research processes.

The dynamics of the unit are always shifting between an adaptable plug-in office, an external consultancy agency and an experimental art and design studio, enabling collaborations with ar-chitects, fashion and industrial desig-ners and artists.

Drifting into computational design and as a direct consequence having

gained knowledge around parametric modeling tools, evolutionary strategies and generative processes within and without the digital tool, we have conse-quently grown interested in the notions of analogue programming and material systems.

Our design approach explores the con-cept of intuition as an informed ele-ment of the code. By integrating the hu-man body as both machine and part of the code which interacts and arranges a component system following a de-termined set of rules, the system takes intuition as a pre-loaded knowledge set that drives certain decisions, testing a physical file-to-factory approach in hand-built construction systems.

28INDIVIDUAL ACTORS

LAURA FERRARELLOROYAL COLLEGE OF ART

Laura is an architect, designer, artist and researcher. She currently teaches at the Royal College of Art in the In-formation Experience Design masters program.

Through theory and design Laura’s practice speculates about the topic of the city for its multi sensorial capability of engaging citizens through perfor-mance. Laura’s work also explores the materiality of digital/physical reality by looking at design processes capable of enhancing human senses, touch in par-ticular. Laura’s work has been presen-ted in Kolding, Denmark (2015); Shan-ghai, China (2015); Geneva, Switzerland (2015); Warwick, UK (2014); Lincoln, UK (2012); Los Angeles, USA (2011); Nottin-gham, UK (2010); Brighton, UK (2009); Beijing (2008), Venice, Italy (2006); São Paulo, Brasil (2006). She received a PhD in Architectural Design at IUAV University of Venice (2010). Her mas-ter’s thesis in Architectural and Urban

Studies received the Distinction Award (2009). Her graduation thesis received the Rotary Award (2007).

GYORGYI GALIKFUTURE CITIES CATAPULT

Gyorgyi is a London-based desig-ner and researcher. She has recently started her PhD in Innovation Design Engineering at Royal College of Art in London. Alongside her studies, Gyorgyi is working as a Design Researcher at Future Cities Catapult. Her practice focuses on voluntary social change, and more specifically on how we can trans-form socio-ecological systems and our collective relationship towards the en-vironmental commons to address and respond to contemporary social and environmental challenges. With PAN Studio and Tom Armitage, Gyorgyi has been nominated in the Digital Category of the Design Museum’s Design of the Year 2014 Award for their project Hello Lamp Post (winner of the first Playable City Award 2013, Bristol).

IVÁN ABREUCENTRO DE DISEÑO, CINE Y TELEVISIÓN

Iván is an artist and programmer who works and lives in Mexico City. Using a broad range of media including drawing, photography, electronics, software development, sound experi-mentation and industrial design, Abreu explores the accuracy and capacity of science and technology in the con-text of art. His work produces unusual situations linked to physical, social and political phenomena

His work is included in public and private collections as FEMSA, CIN-TAS Foundation, Patronato del Centro Histórico, Casa Vecina; Televisa and Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo. He has received grants and support by FONCA, grant awarded by the National System of Art

Creators of FONCA (2012–2014); 2012 The Prix Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria); the CINTAS Foundation Award in Visual Arts, 2011–2012 and the Program for Research in Arts and Media at the Na-tional Center for the Arts (2007).

He is the Chair for Digital Media Design at Centro de diseño, cine y televisión.

ROBERTO ASCENCIOLABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Roberto, a political scientist, has wor-ked in affordable housing and has spe-cialized in mobility and traffic control policies. He now coordinates mobility projects at Laboratorio para la Ciudad.

He studied a double major in Political Science and International Relations at the Instituto Técnico Autónomo de México (ITAM), Mexico City.

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Her interdisciplinary approach allows her to study a variety of subjects, among others: art history, dramatur-gy, visual studies, art and technology, design, creative writing, media and communication theory, art analysis, environmental psychology, anthropo-logy, human ecology and design for social change. She has participated in numerous conferences and workshops in Budapest, in Europe, in the UK and in North America.

ANAB JAINSUPERFLUX

Anab is a designer, filmmaker and co-founder of Superflux, a critically acclaimed foresight, design and tech-nology innovation company. Superflux consistently produces inventive work in the realm of emerging technologies for business, cultural, and social purposes. Anab’s work has won awards from Apple Computers Inc., UNESCO, ICSID and the UK Government’s Innovation Department. Her work has been exhibi-ted at MoMA New York, V&A Museum,

Science Gallery Dublin and the National Museum of China, amongst others. She is a TED Fellow, a RSA Fellow, sits on the advisory boards of Broadway and Mztek, and curates the Long Now Foundation’s London Meetup Group. She is also the co-founder of IoTA, a civic innovation and advocacy platform around the Internet of Things and com-munity engagement. She has tutored at the Royal College of Art, HEAD Geneva, Goldsmiths University, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Anab has led technology and design innovation projects for numerous organisations including BBC, Sony, Samsung, Microsoft Research, No-kia, Govt. of UAE and Anthemis. She regularly speaks about the impact of exponential change and emerging technologies on people, society and culture. Originally from India, Anab is a graduate (with distinction) from the Royal College of Art, and lives in London with her partner and son.

SOFÍA BOSCHLABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Sofía, a designer, is interested in gra-phic, social and sustainable design. She graduated from the Design Art program at Concordia University in Montreal, and she currently works on the Ciudad Lúdica (Playful City) and Visual Com-munication teams at Laboratorio para la Ciudad.

JORGE CAMACHOMACHINA SPECULATRIX

Jorge is a creative technologist who works at Google Mexico and as a lecturer in the MA Design Studies at Centro de Diseño, Cine y Televisión Mexico City. His career has constantly moved between academic work and practice. After com-pleting a master’s degree in Cybernetic Culture and a PhD in Cultural Studies, both from the University of East London,

he worked as researcher and lecturer at London South Bank University, Universi-dad Iberoamericana, and Centro. From 2014-2015, he was the Postgraduate Academic Director at CEDIM (Monterrey and Mexico City) where he launched and coordinated courses on business innovation, design thinking, organizatio-nal design and design futures. He was a member of the design studio Eramos Tantos and has worked as Director of Innovation at creative agencies JWT and Flock in Mexico City. He is currently inte-rested in theoretical and practical issues at the intersection of design, futures and systems thinking.

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VYTAUTAS JANKAUSKASSUPERFLUX

Vytautas is a visual designer and futures researcher at Superflux. He’s curious on how citizen migration, rapid expansion of cities and local communities, shape the modern understanding of our nationality and cultural background. Originally from Kaunas, Lithuania, Vytautas has a bachelor’s degree in Media Art from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan. He did a six-month research exchange in Copenhagen, the Royal Danish Design School, faculty of Interaction Design. In June, 2015, Vytautas graduated with a master’s degree in Media Design at HEAD, Geneva, Switzerland.

DAN LOCKTONROYAL COLLEGE OF ART

Dan specialises in the links between design, understanding and human ac-tion, particularly what’s become known

as “design for behaviour change” for social and environmental benefit. He is interested in how people understand and make sense of the world around them, as well as their agency within that world, and how design can help with this process. His work centers on in-context research with people, including the use of products, services and built environments, with a focus on practical prototyping. His book Design with Intent will be published by O’Reilly in late 2016.

At present Dan is a visiting research tutor in Innovation Design Engineering at the RCA, and beginning in September 2016 he will be joining Carnegie Mellon University as assistant professor in Design.

CHRISTOPHER CHÁVEZUNAM

Christopher, a graduate in computer engineering, is currently pursuing a second degree in mathematics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He has experience in mobility and data science and is an intern at Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas (IIMAS). He also took part in D4D Sene-gal, the Audi Urban Future Initiative and other social initiatives.

`TT R. CORIALABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Sergio is a data analyst with back-ground in Computer Science, parti-cularly on data mining, and natural language processing. Prior to joining Laboratorio para la Ciudad, he was a re-searcher and a lecturer in a new public

university in the Oaxaca state. Most of his recent academic publications ad-dress the application of data mining on government data. Currently, his major responsibilities at the Laboratorio para la Ciudad are promoting the opening of data on Mexico City and fostering the culture of data analytics. He is also a practitioner of data mining on informa-tion from the city government.

CARLOS GERSHENSONIIMAS-UNAM

Carlos is a research professor at the computer science department of the Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas (IIMAS) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where he leads the Self-organizing Systems Lab. He is also affiliated researcher and member of the directive council at the Center for Complexity Sciences

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JOHN LYNCHFUTURE CITIES CATAPULT

Part of the Urban Futures team at Futu-re Cities Catapult, John leads projects which work to highlight the potential for new products and services to improve the quality of life and sustainability of our cities.

John has a bachelor’s degree in Mul-timedia from Dublin City University and completed the Interaction Design Programme at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design in 2011. Before joining Future Cities Catapult, John has worked in diverse contexts from sof-tware development to design consul-ting with international brands including consumer electronics, automotive, healthcare and financial services.

at UNAM and is currently a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Northeastern University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the New England Complex Systems Institute (2007-2008). He holds a PhD summa cum laude from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (2002-2007), where his thesis was on “Design and Control of Self-organizing Systems”. He holds an master’s degree in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems from the University of Sussex (2001-2002), and a BEng degree in Computer Engineering from the Fundación Arturo Rosenblueth in Mexico. (1996-2001). He also pursued studies of Philosophy at UNAM (1998-2001).

GABRIELLA GÓMEZ-MONTLABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Gabriella, founder and director of Mexi-co City’s Laboratorio para la Ciudad, is a

multilingual writer, visual artist, docu-mentary film director, cultural advisor and arts curator. She has also founded several multidisciplinary projects for which she has won several internatio-nal awards and recognitions, including the Prince Claus Fund (Holland), First Place of the Best Art Practice Award (Italy) and the IMCINE National Film Grant (Mexico); in addition she is a City 2.0 TED Prize grant awardee. Gabriella is an alumnus of Fabrica, a TED Senior Fellow and a Yale World Fellow, and she was recently selected as a World Cities Summit Young Leader. BEGOÑA IRAZABALLABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Begoña studied Art History at Mexico City’s Universidad Iberoamericana. She has worked at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros and at Museo Jumex, and she now directs her own art gallery named

ANASTASIA VIKHORNOVA FUTURE CITIES CATAPULT

Anastasia is a designer-researcher at Future Cities Catapult in London. Anas-tasia holds an MA in Design Interac-tions at the Royal College of Art, where she focused on the potential impli-cations of emerging technologies on society. Prior to this, Anastasia studied Interactive Design & Moving Image at the London College of Communication. Anastasia’s interests and expertise lie in the intersection between technology and cultural practices.

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Breve. She writes for local publications and has a radio show, Altavoz, at Ra-dioArquitectura.com, where she invites interdisciplinary artists, curators and cultural managers to discuss the con-temporary state of the art in Mexico City.

PABLO KOBAYASHIUNIDAD DE PROTOCOLOS

Principal at the design and strategies studio Unidad de Protocolos (Protocols Unit) and Unidad de Producción (Pro-duction Unit), its fabrication branch dedi-cated to the development of urban furni-ture systems that question the dynamics and definition of public space. He studied architecture in at Mexico’s Universidad Intercontinental and received a mas-ter’s degree from London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture after completing the Emergent Technologies and Design program.

He is interested in the development of a thinking structure that derives from the use of the computer but can prescind from it. He studies material systems and the relationship between digital ge-neration, digital fabrication and crafts-manship through a deep understanding of the material’s inherent properties. His work is driven by the notion of emergence, where the results are not the direct sum of a system’s parts but the interaction of simple components following a simple set of rules.

LETICIA LOZANOLABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Leticia, an architect, designer and re-searcher, is passionate about designing immersive and innovative urban expe-riences. She is guided by her curiosity about the dialogue between people and places and how it morphs from culture to culture. She currently coordinates

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the Ciudad Lúdica area at Laboratorio para la Ciudad.

JOEL NUÑOLABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

An audiovisual artist, Joel is passionate about pedestrians, cyclists and mobility in the city. He currently coordinates the audiovisual area at Laboratorio para la Ciudad.

ISAAC PÉREZ-SERRANO LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Isaac holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Science (Economics and Geogra-phy) and a master’s degree in Human Geography and Urban Planning from the Utrecht University in the Nether-lands. He also studied at the University of Bologna in Italy and graduated from the Mahindra College in India, and has served as a visiting researcher at the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. Isaac has ex-perience in the fields of Education, Sus-tainability, Development Banking and Urban Planning. He currently coordina-tes the urban geography research and analysis at Laboratorio para la Ciudad.

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THE URBAN CONTEXT OF MEXICO CITY, LONDON AND GLOBAL MEGACITIESIn 1950, only 30% of the world’s population lived in urban areas. In 2007, for the first time in the history of humanity, more than half of the world’s population lived in cities, and in 2014 that percentage reached 54%. At 82%, North America is the most urbanized re-gion on the planet, followed by Latin America, where 80% of the population lives in cities. In 1950 there were only two cities with more than 10 million inhabitants: New York and Tokyo. By 1975 there were three, with the addition of Mexico City. By 1990, the number grew to 10, and today that number stands at 28, among which we find London. These megacities have a combined population of 453 million inhabitants and constitute 12% of the total urban population on Earth—their combined populations are similar in size to that of the European Union—estimated at 500 million—or to the combined population of Brazil, Russia and Japan—an estimated 472 million.1

MEXICO CITY

Greater Mexico City, with its 20.1 million inhabitants since the latest census, is the fourth largest urban area in the world, and the largest on the western hemisphere.2

It is also one of the 28 megacities (above 10 million inhabitants) of the planet, one of the three megacities in Latin America and was the third city to cross this threshold after Tokyo and New York.

During the 1980s, Mexico City was well known for its urban sprawl. The city had around three million inhabitants in 1950, but by 1980 it had surpassed 13 million. Some predictions estimated that the city would reach 30 million inhabitants or more by 2000. Even when this did not happen, the city now has more that 20 million peo-ple living within the same urban space.

LONDON

London, with its 8.7 million inhabitants, is the largest city in the European Union, and was the largest city in the world for much of the 19th century. It experienced a decline in growth in the period from the late 1930s to the 1990s, when its growth acce-lerated. After reaching a population of 8.5 million inhabitants in the 30s, it had only 6.5 million in the 90s, but today London’s population has returned its historical high point.

The area of the city of London has expanded considerably since the 1940s, and with the creation of the green belt around the city favored growth of the city beyond Greater London. The paradigm shifted again in the 90s with a voluntary densifica-tion of the city.3

1 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Population Division (2014). World Urbaniza-tion Prospects: The 2014 Revision, Highlights. Retrieved from: http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/highlights/wup2014-hi-ghlights.pdf

2 Consejo Nacional de Población (2010). Delimitación de las Zonas Metropolitanas de México. Retrieved from: http://www.conapo.gob.mx/es/CONAPO/Delimitacion_de_las_zonas_metropolitanas_de_Mexico_2010_-_Analisis_de_resultados

3 Appert, M. (2009). Les mobilités quotidiennes à Londres : aspects, impacts et régulations. Lyon Univer-sity. Retrieved from: http://geoconfluences.ens-lyon.fr/doc/transv/Mobil/MobilScient6.htm

36COMPARING URBAN CHARACTERISTICS OF MEXICO CITY AND LONDON

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CREATING A CASE FOR LEGIBILITY

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LEGIBLE POLICY IN THE PARTICIPATORY CITY BY JOHN LYNCH, FUTURE CITIES CATAPULT

THE LEGIBILITY OF THE CITY

Cities are perhaps the most complex creations of humankind. To borrow a phrase from Edward Glaeser, Harvard professor of economics and author of “Triumph of the City” (2011), they are “our greatest invention”. Cities solve a lot of problems, but also crea-te some—and legibility is key to the understanding of their infinite complexity.

The built environment, in every city around the world, has a language. Whatever city we visit, we, as people, are capable of understanding that language—we can, through our learned knowledge of the affordances of the physical and social space, navigate infrastructure, transport systems, hazards, etiquettes and social interactions. In basic terms, we “get” what the city is saying to us. We know a pavement from a roadway, a market from a park, and some more complex understandings emerge, open to our own interpretation.

46From the grid systems of modern mega-cities to the medieval streetscapes of a Euro-pean capital and on to the informal settlements surrounding and comprising emer-gent “megalopolises”, there is a language we understand and interpret in order to use the urban environment. This is a language of affordance, communication and convention, which changes dialect, but has global common principles.

In just a few days exploration of Mexico City, our team found many wonderful ele-ments of the Mexican Capital which leapt out as specifically “of” Mexico City. These were the subjects of our conversations at dinner, as we walked the streets and the fulcrum of debates in our work with our partners at the Laboratorio para la Ciudad in CDMX. In addition, there are the factors which London and Mexico City share, as a common language of the urban space.

What makes travel, and the exploration of new cities so intriguing is the discovery of the changes of dialect, the local idiosyncrasies, and the serendipity that misunders-tandings of this language creates. The global city is a routinely legible space, without this legibility, chaos would ensue. Even in the face of local, contextual quirks, cities are understandable, navigable, usable places.

THE POLICIES BEHIND THE PLACE

But behind our cities, shaping their fabric, their development and influencing their legibility, is something far less transparent. The policies that our city governments create and implement affect our every experience in the city, but the processes by which these policies come about are opaque, inaccessible and often convoluted.

As an interaction designer, being a digital practitioner, and working with the challen-ges of city governance, the single most common conversation I have encountered has been the challenge of planning, and the potential of digital technology as a means for improvement in the consultative process. This is an old brief, and still today cities are struggling with this complex but vital area of policy implementation. The process is simply not legible to all of the necessary stakeholders.

At the outset of our collaborative mission, we set ourselves this challenge: How could we make policy creation and implementation more legible, better understood, more inclusive and understandable?

What is a legible policy? In the context of policies often so opaque and inaccessible as to be utterly unapparent to many citizens, I like to think of a single qualitative metric by which to understand this. If a policy is actively discussed, before, during and after implementation, the relevant authority has at least demonstrated positive momentum towards policy legibility.

But here, I would like to push that thinking further, for beyond legibility, and beyond a conversation, is true participation in the policymaking process, the adoption and implementation of policies, and the process of iterating policy over time in response to the changing needs of the city.

CITIZENS

The citizens of a city are its greatest resource. The collective knowledge, the common will, the innovative capacity and the force for change that lies in the population of a city is largely underutilised and misunderstood when it comes to policymaking. Beyond policy legibility lies participatory city-making, indeed I would posit that this is the end-game of legibility, for what better way to understand a policy than to par-ticipate in it’s creation and implementation?

What is public participation in the creation of a given policy? What level of partici-

47pation is optimal? How might new technologies assist and how can good design of a participatory process help us move past mere “consultation” and towards true parti-cipation? How might policies be iterated, or calibrated in a more dynamic way, based on the participation of a city’s inhabitants? What would the downstream effects be on a society which, by virtue of participation, feels more ownership over the city and the ways in which the city provides for its citizens?

And so, through our mutual collaboration in Mexico and London, it was wonderful to watch ideas emerge which not only made policies more visible and understandable, but which empowered citizens to express their influence on these policies, to partici-pate in the making of their own locality.

To vote, or invest in a given urban development using a parking fee, is both to make the flow of financial resources within the city more legible, but potentially also em-powers citizens to participation in the decision making process of the city. This con-cept, sketched during our workshop in CDMX, takes the policy implement of a “rin-gfenced fund” and places it directly in the hands of citizens, at the “point of sale”.

Participation through greater legibility is something which is already underway in cities across the world. Indeed it was greatly encouraging to see examples, even in a short visit, of this evolution in Mexico City.

The first such example encountered is the spectacular effect of the closure of Paseo de la Reforma on Sundays to all motor traffic. As a small element of the policy of CDMX to encourage cycling, this weekly event sits alongside the public bike sharing scheme (EcoBici), the construction of kilometres of separated bike lanes, signage and priori-tisation programs in traffic management and probably a myriad of other measures. But the experience of what is essentially a weekly festival of cycling that takes place on the city’s central thoroughfare is a truly participatory phenomenon. Here, policy becomes reality, and there is a sense of the expression by citizens of their ownership of the public space in a very different way to that of motorists.

I am certain that the awareness, the debate and the controversy this event creates enhances public understanding of policy, its purpose and its intended impact on the city.

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DATA AND PARTICIPATION

A huge enabler in the modern city is the possibility to gather and understand huge quantities of data about how the city operates. Indeed, this it the entire precedent of the “smart city” dogma that has been driven, in a very “top down” manner by global technology vendors. The accumulation of new knowledge about our cities should, in theory, enable better policy creation.

Unfortunately, the “smart” utopia that technology advocates promise has never really come to fruition, and even as efforts step up to better quantify urban environments, citi-zens are often forgotten in the rush to “instrument” the city. Gyorgyi Galik, on page 63 of this publication, examines the narrative of Smart Cities in much more detail.

In the meantime the ability of individuals to record and understand their own beha-vioural patterns using consumer technology has bred an entire social movement. The premise of the”Quantified Self” movement is that by better understanding our lives as individuals, we can take steps to improve our own well being.

The very technologies that we use to improve our navigation and fitness—mobile pho-nes and cheap wearable sensors, can, in aggregate provide great value to our cities. Nowhere have I found a better example of citizen participation in this process of understanding the city than with the CDMX project Mapatón (p. 121).

Here, the capacity of the citizenship was unlocked using a smartphone app and some basic incentivisation. A small group of citizens, participating in a game not dissimilar to “territory capture” gameplay, succeeded in a very short amount of time in creating the first ever map of an informal transport network (the micro buses of Mexico City) of huge complexity. The cost of this initiative was a fraction of that of traditional alternatives. The result, though a moment in time, included learnings about the huge potential of incenti-visation and citizen participation. I would speculate that the project also fostered a sense of community and ownership, a pride in participation among the citizens who took part.

It would be no small step to extend this project to a long term application for citizen participation through their movement data, or through other easily quantifiable measu-res. Imagine a city where citizens provide not just taxes, but operational information to their city administrators. Imagine a city where policy is written to ‘self calibrate’ based on the near-real-time data accrued from hundreds of thousands of streams of data from smartphones. Policy changes could occur in minutes, as opposed to years, reacting directly to the needs of the city.

49Upon returning to London, and on reflection, it is clear that in the U.K.’s capital work is being done to foster this kind of participation in policymaking and city making as a result.

The Talk London platform (talklondon.london.gov.uk), operated by the Greater Lon-don Authority, represents successful use of digital technology to engage with a broad range of citizens on issues of extreme complexity, and to involve their opinions and experiences in the creation of new policies for the city. Much has been learned, over the years that Talk London has existed, about how best to foster participation.

The platform allows for many behaviours, from the participants who are “London Champions”, extreme users who contribute regularly and extensively to the “lurkers” who simply poke around and explore the conversations our of curiosity. It is also com-plemented by extensive work in the curation of content, the clear communication of the value of participation and the policy implements that benefit from citizen input.

Another example of a project which wishes to create a more participatory approach to city making, specifically the use of “smart” technologies like urban data platform and the internet of things, is OrganiCity—an EU funded project in which Future Ci-ties Catapult plays the role as London lead.

OrganiCity (www.organicity.eu) aims to provide citizens of London (UK), Aarhus (DK) and Santander (ES) with an accessible and flexible uniform platform for experimen-tation with urban data and the internet of things. Through a complex programme of online and offline engagements, the project has defined challenges specific to each city and has opened up a data platform and a comprehensive suite of technology tools to enable citizens, researchers, businesses and city government to create their own experimental applications and services using smart technology.

We are entering an age of lateral innovation in cities. The challenges our cities face can no longer be defeated with a “divide and conquer” strategy of government silos and separate policy implements. Only by taking an informed holistic approach can we understand the complexity of the modern megalopolis and create the policies that our future will require.

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Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity, made a beautiful statement in a presentation to the Interaction16 conference in Helsinki shortly after the time our teams spent in Mexico. He said “The most sustainable building in the world, is the one that is loved.” I believe that this sentiment can extend to a street, a town, a city, indeed to a country. An engaged citizenship, with the inherent capacity for par-ticipation and innovation, is the single greatest resource our cities have in the face of modern challenges.

Therein lies the knowledge, the data collection capability, the behavioural influence and the capacity for resilience in the face of change that can revolutionise the way our cities work. Citizens who understand policies become citizens who can partake in policy making. Legibility is key in this evolution.

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DESIGNING AGENCY IN THE CITYBY DAN LOCKTON, ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART

CITIES, COMPLEXITY AND CYBERNETICS

For Margaret Mead, cities had unique characteristics: “A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again” (Partnow, 1993). Jane Jacobs (1961) pointed out that cities “differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of them is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.” This is as true of Mexico City as of London.

What this suggests, as with so much in contemporary life, is complexity. Cities, and the issues facing them, are complex, difficult to grasp, through size and diversity and life. They are messy (Haque, 2013). But this complexity is often part of their appeal—from Samuel Johnson’s “No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford”, to Kevin Lynch’s (1960) “Looking at cities can give a special pleasure... At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored”—writers have demonstrated a fascination with unpredictability, with verve and emergence in the city context.

54As Carlos Gershenson points out (p. 149), complex systems such as mobility within the city are not something where studying the individual components in isolation enables you to say much about how the system functions as a whole, nor to predict with much confidence. The interactions or couplings between parts of the system (in-cluding people, in all their diversity), and how those relationships act on each other, mean that any model or simulation needs the ability to adapt, to change itself, and—taking a second-order cybernetic perspective—so do the people creating the models and simulations, in terms of learning how to learn.

Beyond the city scale, humanity is surrounded by, and enmeshed in, complexity which at once causes us paralysis over not being able to take action, and regret over the actions we do take (and continue to take). We simultaneously worry—and yet do very little—about issues such as the military-industrial surveillance state, ageing po-pulations, inequality, war and privatisation of the commons. We fudge our responses to planetary-scale crises such as climate change, pollution or poverty because our understanding of what we are able to do locally does not match our understanding of what is possible at a larger scale. We face a crisis of agency, in the phrase used by Natalie Jeremijenko, Gyorgyi Galik, Zygmunt Bauman and others.

In this sense, planners, designers, and civil servants need not just humility about their ability to enact change, but recognition that their decisions, of what to model, what to measure, and what possibilities are considered, are themselves being influen-ced by their positions within the system and the history of their previous actions. There are no detached observers: what a government seeks to ‘control’ inevitably ends up controlling it, in turn, just as a thermostat ‘controlling’ the temperature of a room is in turn controlled by the room temperature it leads to (Glanville, 1995).

Complexity can be difficult for governments to handle. Scott (1999) emphasises how so much work of central planning, from Haussmann’s Paris to Soviet collecti-visation, has been about trying to reduce complexity, to simplify populations and places, natural and human, to make them ‘ordered’, quantified (compare Domes-day Book) and hence ‘legible’ by state apparatus with a paucity of social or cultural sensitivity.

As Gyorgyi Galik explains (p. 63), the “perfect knowledge” intended through the uncritical quantification of “smart cities” is fraught with political and commercial incentives and decisions which potentially make the result a reductive, unrepresen-tative and dangerous one. Too often, legibility and quantification go hand-in-hand with control: the echoes of the ‘high modernist dream’, from Pruitt-Igoe (see Laura Ferrarello’s essay, p. 73) to the ways in which corporations (and even universities) are embedding the ‘Quantified Self’ within the workplace (Moore & Robinson, 2015; Ma-

55chkovech, 2016; Whitson, 2015), can be read as attempts at aligning the behaviour of populations with a particular model of ‘best practice’, both biopolitical and ideological.

In one of my own areas of research and practice, what has become known as ‘de-sign for behaviour change’ (Lockton, Harrison & Stanton, 2013) has increasingly been applied in ways which embody a deterministic (Broady, 1966), even behaviourist, mo-del of a kind in which people are essentially considered to be components in a system, with known properties, which, if made legible to the system’s controller, whether algorithmic or human (Dutson, Fantini van Ditmar & Lockton, 2015), can be treated as ‘solved’. We are seeing this reductiveness applied in visions of our domestic life (Fantini van Ditmar & Lockton, 2016) and potentially even in visions of human beha-viour in ‘streamlined’ futures (Ranner, Lockton, Steenson, Galik & Kerridge, 2016). As reflective, thoughtful, engaged designers, we must challenge this, and open up more pluralistic approaches. People’s lives are not just there to be made ‘legible’ to autho-rities (or indeed to corporations).

And yet, as we will see, legibility of the system, of policy and politics, is something that can work from the other direction—to empower change by the people, rather than solely from above.

LEGIBILITY AND POLICY

What do we mean by ‘legible policy’? It’s perhaps easiest to start by looking at illegible policy. Using an example from the UK, here is a sign, in a little bit of public space alongside the River Thames, in Surrey (just outside London). That’s the borough coun-cil’s logo on the sign, and it gives details such as the name of the space, including the heartening phrase “This public open space is provided for the pleasure of all”—swans included!

56If we look closely, on the back of the sign, also hidden by the tree, we find this extra sign:

These are bye-laws, a form of local legislation, enacted by the local council, which in a sense supersede or go beyond the laws which are nationally applicable. For example, it is not generally illegal to climb a fence in the UK, in and of itself (it might be ille-gal for other reasons), but the bye-laws here (if you can squint enough to read them) make it illegal—a criminal offence, leading to prosecution in a magistrate’s court—to climb any fence within the particular area of the public space, which could poten-tially include the railings alongside the road. Among other things, the bye-laws also appear to make it illegal to allow your dog to jump into the river in this area (a law which must be breached dozens of times a day), putt a golf ball, or “deliver a public address”, and there are a whole lot of specific rules about playing sports and sharing space with others.

In themselves, these seem like reasonable policies for a public space, but the question of legibility is important: how many of the people who take their dogs out for a walk,

57and let the dog splash about in the river (often chasing ducks, swans or moorhens—which is also against the bye-laws) know that it’s illegal and they could be prosecu-ted? Elsewhere this behaviour is permitted, or at least is not banned. But how many of the visitors actually read these bye-laws, printed in tiny text, in complex legal lan-guage, on the back of a sign half-hidden by a willow tree? Do any of the policy-makers at the council genuinely believe that visitors will read the text, and understand it, or is it essentially assumed that the public will not care?

Legible policy, then, is partly about making policy (and law) accessible: using lan-guage which is easily understandable, making things visible and open and readable, potentially also less complex and more consistent across contexts (for example, as the Common Good movement in the US proposes), and not hiding policy changes. But, legibility is somehow more than this.

One of the extra dimensions of legibility which became apparent through our discus-sions of mobility policy in Mexico City with Laboratorio para la Ciudad was the idea of making the intentions behind policy much more visible. A policy is essen-tially an argument put into practice, a stance on an issue which almost necessarily involves some debate and dissent about what the ‘best’ thing to do is (otherwise there would, perhaps, be no need for the policy).

But how much of this argument is apparent in the way that policies are presented and explained to the public? Does the public get to see the rationale, the intended consequences, or the reasoning which presumably was persuasive enough to win over a committee (or at least other colleagues) at some point, within whichever go-vernment agency produced the policy? How much are policies even explained to the public? Is it any wonder that misinformation, and mistrust of government policies, spreads easily when there is so little transparency around the intentions? Is this about consultation—genuine consultation, in which the public’s ideas and views are accorded value?

So, as we build our tentative model of legible policy, it seems as though intentions are something else to communicate, and actually to involve the public in. In Mexico City’s implementation of parking meters, for example, to what extent was the percep-tion of lack of consultation (as complained about on this poster in Coyoacán) part of a wider ‘illegibility’ of the policy?

In his essay in this volume, John Lynch suggests that while “a policy... actively discus-sed, before, during and after implementation... demonstrate[s] positive momentum towards policy legibility”, going beyond this means “true participation in the poli-cymaking process” on the part of the public, and in “iterating policy over time in

58response to the changing needs of the city.” This implies the need for the public to be able to act, and this is indeed something others have considered in this context. For Abraham Moles (1986), designed legibility is associated with an explicit dimension of potential for action on behalf of the person who is apprehending a ‘sign’ (which can be taken to refer to any kind of presented information in the world). Design is a key tool for “transform[ing] visibility into legibility, that is “transform[ing] visibility into legibility, that is, into that operation of the mind that arranges things in the form of signs into an intelligible whole in order to prepare a strategy for action”. This consideration of (graphic) design as “a project of legibility of the world” is intrinsically linked to agency, to people’s perceived ability to act, and it is to agency that we turn next. But what can it mean, in relation to policy? Is it the ability to challenge policy, to change it, to overturn it—or simply to feel that you are able to be involved in crea-ting the policy in the first place?

In summary, three components of legible policy which seem important, on this preli-minary reading, are accessibility, transparency of intentions, and the potential for action—and they are all components which design is, I think, able to address.

AGENCY, DARK MATTER AND DESIGN

“The city we experience is, to some extent, a product of a city council’s culture and behaviour, legislation and operational modes, its previous history and future strategy, and so on. The ability for a community to make their own decisions is supported or inhibited by this wider framework of ‘dark matter’, based on the culture of the municipality they happen to be situated within as well as the characteristics of their local cultures.”

Dan Hill, Dark Matter & Trojan Horses, 2012 “For each technology in infrastructure space, to distinguish between what the organisation is saying and what it is doing—the pretty landscape versus the fluid dynamics of the river—is to read the difference between a declared intent and an underlying disposition.”

Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, 2014

To engage with complexity, rather than attempt to destroy it, requires planners, de-signers, and civil servants to understand society, culture and context better—to un-derstand people’s lives, and appreciate the realities of situated decision making and subjective experience, appreciating the systems not just from the point of view of a fictionalised ‘user’, but from the perspectives of multiple actors, including other civil servants.

We need designers to engage with the invisible ‘dark matter’ (Hill, 2012) of infras-tructure, politics and institutions, “the substrate that produces” the world as it is. We need this engagement even though the dark matter may often be experienced—and perceived—by designers as an impediment to action, rather than an enabler. We need designers to understand (and be allowed to deal with) the wickedness (Rittel & Webber, 1973; Conklin, 2005) of the problems we are facing: they will not be understood un-til ‘solutions’ have been attempted (which will in turn create new problems, as Gall (1975) points out); there will be no stopping rules; there will be no right or wrong answers; and all attempts to deal with a problem will only highlight its uniqueness and contextual peculiarity.

If we take an example such as Mexico City’s transport and mobility systems—and the policies around them—as discussed throughout this book, understanding the com-plexity of the interactions, the dark matter of infrastructure and organisations, and the everyday decision making of millions of people is a laudable aim for researchers,

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but it is surely not the ultimate goal, whether for transport planners or members of the public. The real goal is understanding how to enact change. Understanding how to act to change the systems we’re in is arguably the biggest meta-challenge of our age. We need not just information, but agency: tools for connecting our understanding of how things work and how we can act, around everything from cities, the environment, our own bodies, and networked infrastructure to policies in social, civic and political contexts, emerging technologies and plural considerations of futures.

This is design for behaviour change, but is not about planners, designers or civil ser-vants trying to change ‘public behaviour’ as if it were somehow a separate phenome-non. We are all part of the same systems. An approach which prioritised ‘designing agency’ would use ‘design’ — in the broadest sense — as a way to:

1. understand the world

2. understand people’s understandings of the world

3. help people understand the world

4. help people understand their agency in the world

5. help people use that agency in the world

…in a progression from understanding to action. But how would we do it in practice? Different techniques would be effective at different levels. Some would be investiga-tory, some practical, some speculative or critical. Some would give us tools for unders-tanding and learning, some tools for doing, some provocations for reflection.

60At Level 1: Understand the world, Laboratorio para la Ciudad’s Mapatón (p. 121) is a fantastic example: designing a system which is essentially a large-scale probe deplo-yed into the world, running a designed experiment to investigate phenomena in the world through gathering data in a way which provides meaningful scaffolding for the next level.

Level 2: Understand people’s understandings of the world, in attempting to ‘un-derstand understanding’ (in Heinz von Foerster’s phrase (2003), would take things a stage further: using activities which practically try to explore the different ways in which people imagine, conceptualise and think about how things work. For exam-ple, very basically, it could be about using techniques such as drawing (Bowden et al, 2015), to uncover people’s understanding and mental imagery of a system, or creative ga-mes to explore people’s thinking about the world and possible futures (Tsing & Pollman, 2005). In the example concepts we generated with Laboratorio para la Ciudad (p. 125), one idea in this vein was to ‘Probe the Government’, to put probes inside government offi-ces, to find out how much civil servants actually know about their ‘own’ system: what’s spent, where it goes, and how decisions are made. This is partly about triggering people to think through their own thinking about an issue, making the invisible visible, tangi-ble or legible, from the point of view of people themselves (i.e. what is legible, or not, to them), but also about surfacing people’s different understandings of situations, and how that leads different people to act.

One of the key issues here for legible policy is one pointed out by Leisa Reichelt (for-merly of the UK’s Government Digital Service, and now leading service design for the Australian government’s Digital Transformation Office): “people have no mental model of government… Most people don’t know all the parts of government and what they do. Many people think of government as one thing but government generally doesn’t present a single view to end-users” (Reichelt, 2016). Perhaps government is not just invisible dark matter, but perceived or imagined dark matter in this sense, a complex, difficult mass.

So, understanding what people understand at present about a system—within and without government—is an important step towards, at Level 3: Help people unders-tand the world, designing ways which help change people’s understandings of the world and the systems they’re in. This could take the form of new kinds of interface, designed experiences, educational activities — a range of things. Some of the examples collected by Dieter Zinnbauer’s Ambient Accountability project (Zinnbauer, 2015) perhaps fit here, from a transparency perspective, but Level 3 interventions could be about changing mental models, expanding horizons, reframing of situations, or even trying to facilitate empathy for other people within a system. In a sense, the microbus map produced by

61Laboratorio para la Ciudad as a result of the Mapatón research could be considered in this way—it helps people to understand a system they use every day, in a different way.

In our example concepts generated with Laboratorio para la Ciudad, we considered ideas such as putting a form of ‘price labels’, Sankey diagram or other forms of infor-mation visualisation on urban infrastructure such as parking meters, to show where the money raised from parking charges actually goes, since as Sofia Bosch argues (this volume), increasing trust in government can come about through transparency. It’s important to be clear here that this isn’t just about ‘correcting incorrect mental models’ on behalf of the public, but about enabling and supporting people to cons-truct and refine their own models of the world, and the government of the cities they live in, experientially, which serve them better, and standards of evidence which satisfy their decision-making.

Level 4: Help people understand their agency in the world and Level 5: Help peo-ple use that agency together are where agency comes in more directly: helping peo-ple understand what they can do to change things, and then helping people do that. What could this look like? Examples such as DemocracyOS (as discussed by Gyorgyi Galik in her article, p. 63) are very clear instances of empowering people not only to understand what they can do, but take action. We can consider creative agency as an important component of this—the ability to use creative approaches to participate in, and have an impact on, civil society (Hargreaves & Hartley, 2016; Lockton, Gree-ne, Casey, Raby & Vickress, 2014) including changing the behaviour of the systems around us. Can this be more constructive than ‘fighting back’, and actually be about co-designing policies that behave more effectively, and work better for more people? These could be applied critically, speculatively or provocatively — a what if? — or they could be direct ways of enabling action, empowering people to change the behaviour of the systems in which we live.

In this vein, A. Baki Kocaballi has written very usefully about agency sensitive de-sign, particularly the notion of relationality (recognising that assumptions of nei-ther full technological determinism, nor full social determinism, are useful when understanding agency in context. Kocaballi’s six qualities for agency sensitive de-sign (Kocaballi, Gemeinboeck, Saunders, Loke & Dong, 2012) — relationality, visibility, multiplicity, configurability, accountability and duality — could be a valuable set of considerations to explore in relation to the design of these ‘Level 4 and 5’ attempts to help people understand and use their agency in the world.

CONCLUSIONS

In conclusion, the complexity of cities and the policy issues involved means that simple solutions which address phenomena in isolation are likely to miss important relationships. When considering engagement with the public, reflective planners, desig-ners and policy makers must challenge reductive approaches to ‘behaviour change’ and consider opening up policy in ways which improve its legibility, through accessibility, transparency of intentions, and making the potential for action clearer. Legibility of the system, of policy and politics, can empower change by the people, rather than solely from above. Designing agency in this way, in a progression from understanding to ac-tion, offers a series of potential intervention types.

At this level, planners, designers and policy makers should be particularly mindful of their roles within the systems we are aiming to help people change. The power dynamics, and our assumptions about the people we are designing with or for, need to be surfaced and questioned.

Parts of this essay draw on Dan Lockton’s blog post ‘Let’s see what we can do: Designing Agency’ published 23 December 2015: https://medium.com/@danlockton/let-s-see-what-we-can-do-desig-ning-agency-7a26661181aa

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CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT IN AND BEYOND ‘SMART CITIES’BY GYORGYI GALIK, FUTURE CITIES CATAPULT / ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART

INTRODUCTION

How would you rate the air quality in the room you’re sitting in now—poor, fair, or excellent? If you think it’s poor, does that matter? Is there anything you could do to improve it?

Citizen sensing and engagement tools or platforms are becoming increasingly po-pular ways to engage everyday people in city problems, such as air pollution, noise, traffic congestion, and broken infrastructure.

Unlike the ‘top-down’ smart city solutions offered by big technology corporations, the-se ‘bottom-up’ applications are intended to be initiated and run by members of the public, on the premise that citizen involvement will lead to better awareness and positive actions.

In relation to environmental pollutants, it’s widely suggested that citizen sensing tools give citizens the awareness they need to effect change.

However, while these tools do have the potential to help citizens make more infor-med decisions, citizen sensing and engagement alone are arguably not enough for systemic change. Many of these tools are built on the false premise that more informa-tion automatically leads to behaviour change and some oversimplify the complexity of these problems altogether.

In this article, I will explore some of the strengths and weaknesses of the citizen en-gagement movement in the context of making cities more ‘legible.’ I will introduce projects that broaden the current discussion on citizen sensing, engagement and behaviour change along with several ideas that may offer cities and citizens a more holistic and creative approach to participation. To provide some context to the rise of the citizen engagement movement, I will first give an overview of the smart city perspective.

HOW CAN WE BETTER UNDERSTAND A ‘SMART CITY’?

Over the last 20 years, the use of certain narratives has dominated our understanding of cities. One of the most significant phenomena in contemporary urbanism and dis-cussion of cities is the rise of the notion of ‘smart cities’ (Minton, 2014). As defined by

64Siemens, for example, smart cities are cities that “will have countless autonomous, intelligently functioning IT systems that will have perfect knowledge of users’ habits and energy consumption, and provide optimum service… The goal of such a city is to optimally regulate and control resources by means of autonomous IT systems.”

The writer and urbanist Adam Greenfield (2013) argues against this simplistic narra-tive, questioning how this approach could be put in practice:

“On the corporate and government level especially, we hardly see any ques-tions raised around how these technologies and solutions actually mesh with local practices, activities and cultural norms. How these systems are given meaning and change by being situated in a specific cultural or human context.”

It is claimed that smart city systems will give their leaders (and planning authorities) perfect knowledge of their citizens: for example, people’s energy consumption, tra-vel, etc.; and in return for these insights, the smart city will provide them ‘optimised’ services. In smart city statements there is often only one, universally correct solution to each individual, or even to a collective human need. And this solution is expected to be scalable and repeatable in most cultures and locations.

It is also important to mention that each of these technologies was designed, and therefore they reflect something about their designer, and the designer’s particular worldview. As the architect and designer Usman Haque (2016) puts it:

“Somebody somewhere decided on a definition for optimisation, or a defini-tion of efficiency, or a definition of safety, of risk, of certainty. They decided how to evaluate progress towards a goal. They also decided precisely how goals would get encoded into algorithms – the set of rules used to derive solu-tions, or make decisions.”

The timeframe in which these perfect scenarios are supposed to happen is unknown. These ideas operate in a generic future, occupying a generic space in a generic time (Greenfield, 2013). Perhaps it is then easier to avoid accountability for any failure of a vision and an impact that is still yet to come. Or perhaps we have always lived in cities that were ‘smart’—or at least smart enough? Some argue that ‘smartness’ is relational (Fantini van Ditmar and Lockton, 2016)—that an interaction with a city (or a person) is only ‘smart’ if the people involved perceive that interaction as smart; it cannot be a static quality of a system.

Maybe in this context there is something to learn from Buckminster Fuller’s maxim that, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” In line with this thin-king, what if people who want to challenge top-down visions stop fighting them, and instead aim to make them ‘smarter’ from the perspective of citizens themselves?

In opposition to the ‘top down’ smart city approach, the last few years have seen a rise in citizen sensing movements, and citizen engagement platforms, which aim to involve the public more directly into various political and environmental processes.

THE RISE OF CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT SERVICES AND PLATFORMS

As cities and citizens become increasingly disillusioned with the current premises (and promises) of smart cities, new initiatives and citizen-engagement platforms have started to evolve. Their aim is to encourage citizens to participate more in decisions affecting their city, and better understand complex environmental and political pro-cesses. We are observing a rise of projects and conferences that investigate the rela-tionship between technologies, citizen engagement and practices of environmental sensing.

65The upcoming conference Design & the City (2016), for example, will examine the potential of these platforms to shape society itself:

“A variety of mobile sensors (air pollutants, humidity, noise, temperature, etc.) and their resulting (big) data have provided us with yet another new range of opportunities and promises for the future of our cities. The network society, heralded by scholars and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs alike, is slowly turning into a platform society: a society in which personal, social and poli-tical relations are organised through the interfaces and algorithms of digital media platforms.”

The event will discuss emerging projects and collaborations that are introducing “new modes of social organisation, economic production and political decision-ma-king.” In other words, it will explore how these platforms are forming new relations-hips between citizens, businesses and policymakers.

The designer John Lynch (2016) gives an example of this type of project from the city of Aarhus Denmark, in which “citizens have voluntarily allowed their bikes to be radio tagged—enabling them to be tracked as they pass important intersections in the city. By doing this, they aim to directly increase the likelihood that when they reach an intersection they will get a green signal.”

WHAT IF CITIZEN SENSING IS NOT ENOUGH?

While environmental citizenship and citizen science are established areas of re-search, citizen sensing is an environmental practice that has not yet been analysed in detail. Citizen sensing is not just made up of observations of environmental change, but also involves technical and political practices that form a complex ecology of sensing. In order to establish environmental engagement, citizen-sensing initiatives often depend on forms of monitoring, reporting, managing and even self-managing (Citizen Sense, 2015).

As the principal investigator of the project, “Citizen Sensing and Environmental Practice”, Jennifer Gabrys (2013) points out:

“Practices of monitoring and sensing environments have migrated to a num-ber of everyday participatory applications, where users of smart phones and networked devices are able to engage with similar modes of environmental observation and data collection. These citizen sensing projects intend to democratise the collection and use of environmental data, and in the process enable public engagement with environmental issues, such as air pollution.”

Gabrys (2013) goes on to ask, whether such sensing can lead to “new modes of envi-ronmental awareness and practice?” In addition to this question, I would also ask what happens with people who are either less or not technologically literate? And, what happens with people who are simply not interested in these issues at all?

THE ‘POLITICS OF INVISIBILITY’ AND CONSTRUCTED NARRATIVES

Why does environmental sensing matter at all? Current evidence indicates that envi-ronmental factors are important contributors to chronic diseases and developmental disabilities, which in some cases have reached epidemic proportions. These pollu-tants have become widespread in our air, water, soil, food, homes, schools, and wor-kplaces, and thus also in our bodies (Health Effects Institute, 2013).

Emphasizing the importance of health through minimizing environmental exposu-res to invisible hazards in our environment is critical for effective and better-infor-

66med decision making by both policy makers and the public. Yet so far this serious issue has not been critically and adequately addressed through design research and practice.

UNESCO’s (1997) ‘Educating for a sustainable future’ explains:

“There are several sorts of challenges in communication: the influence of ves-ted interests—the efforts of industry and government to manipulate the visibi-lity of contaminants, the neglect or inadequacy of communication strategies, the complexity of the messages and the unfortunate tendency of some of the messengers to spend more time squabbling with one another than communi-cating with the public.”

One of the most interesting examples to describe this challenge is the case of Belarus. As a result of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, nearly a quarter of Belarus was covered with long-lasting radionuclides. The damage from this disaster, however, was largely imperceptible; it could only be known only through constructed represen-tations. In The Politics of Invisibility, Olga Kuchinskaya (2014) describes the politics of manufactured invisibility and in particular the production of the invisibility of Cher-nobyl’s consequences in Belarus. She explains the practices that limited public atten-tion to radiation and that made its health effects impossible to observe or address.

LEGIBILITY, TANGIBILITY, VISIBILITY AND ENGAGEMENT

In this collection of essays, we have heard a lot about legibility, of which visibility is a significant component. But would ‘making the invisible visible’ actually lead to more engaged citizens? What could be the difference between legible, tangible and visible in an environmental sense? Environmental impacts that can be seen, smelled, or perceived by individuals and recognized as an environmental or health problem tend to get more attention than those which are less readily detectable, and those that are not directly associated with an environmental problem, such as neurological disorders caused by eating mercury-contaminated-fish over many years (Isaacson and Jensen, 1992). It is often suggested that there is lack of civic action and grassroots so-cial movements around these imperceptible pollutants for the very reason that they are invisible.

In their public messaging various health organizations suggest that, “awareness is a prelude to informed action.” Even if there are a number of seemingly intuitive rela-tionships between the visibility and awareness of environmental contaminants and public responses to those problems, they may prove to be misleading. The common perception is that the more visible pollution is, then the more likely people will be to do something about it. But sociological research reveals that what often appears to be most obvious or intuitive might be false (Gould, 1993; Vila, 2003; Steinberg and VanDeveer, 2012).

Looking at shocking examples of manmade environmental disasters—including the toxic waste contamination of the Love Canal, the dioxin pollution of Times Beach, and the poisoned soil of New Orleans and Silicon Valley—the visibility and tangibility of contaminants were not always enough to raise wider and sustained public discus-sion or civic and political action. This all begs the question, do visibility and aware-ness actually make a difference?

How could legibility mean more than just seeing and understanding? How could it lead to action that would make a difference? This process, which Dan Lockton calls ‘progression from understanding to action’, would mean real and sustained chan-ge. Legibility could mean a situation in which citizens have gained a real change in perception; a better understanding of possible impacts of their decisions; and also a broader understanding of the political and economic motivations, behind compa-nies, polluters and governments. Change may require something visceral, such as

67rage, fear, passion, or a burning sense of (un)fairness. It will certainly something more than just data.

RHETORIC AND LANGUAGE

The rhetoric and language we choose (and use) is important. In thinking through the-se issues, we need to consider how we can challenge and expand on the simplifying rhetoric of citizen engagement.

It is hard to think of something more engaging than a natural disaster, such as ear-thquakes or hurricanes. They have immediate and tangible impacts on our safety and well-being, while the health effects of invisible hazards such as radiological fallout and air pollution are often delayed in time and difficult to perceive. As Kuchinskaya (2014) describes:

“The imperceptibility of these hazards means that [how an] individual expe-riences them is always highly mediated by ways of visualization, maps and measuring equipment, and also through the narratives of people. How these representations and technologies are produced matters; therefore analysing the current ways in which politically-driven invisibility are constructed is also crucial.”

As the result of this simplifying rhetoric around citizen engagement, city authorities all around the world often share the strong belief that if only they could deploy a sensor-infrastructure, then they could measure and define the whole city: as if they could somehow find a sort of ultimate truth in the data that could be used to engage and ‘nudge’ citizens into becoming ‘better citizens’.

From a personal perspective, as a designer and researcher working in this field, see-ing some of the current critiques, advantages and challenges of previously deployed sensing infrastructures (e.g., Air Quality Egg, Safecast), I am a bit skeptical about this logic. In many cases, these applications and technologies did not necessarily help people to better understand the complexity of the context in which the data was ga-thered, nor the trend, over time or space, in relation to all other data points. Instead, they seem to distract or even pacify us. In some ways they remind me of the ancient Roman maxim: “Panem et circenses” or in English “bread and circuses,” supposedly coined by Juvenal and describing the cynical formula of the Roman emperors for keeping the masses content with ample food and entertainment.

My hope for all of these widely deployed, inflexible and sometimes very expensive in-frastructures and technologies is that they will be more than a tool for creating the false belief or feeling that we are directly participating in democracy. My next question, there-fore, is what else do we have, beyond sensing infrastructures to affect real change?

HOW TO BUILD A CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT PLATFORM?

In developing new citizen engagement platforms, it will be critical for all companies and cities to look at existing or past examples (such as Participatory City, Urban Data School, Commonplace, OpenIDEO, Changify, Neighborland, CITIVIVA, to name a few.) to analyse the ones that actually managed to engage citizens and learn from the ones that ‘failed’.

Beyond informatics and sensor data, one of the very inspiring examples of this shift towards citizen engagement is the project Democracy OS, launched in Argentina in 2014. “After a disappointing brush with traditional political parties”, the platform’s founder, Pia Mancini (2014), “realized that the existing democracy was disconnected from its citizens—and that no one was likely to fix it. In response, she helped launch Democracy OS, an open-source mobile platform aimed at providing Argentinian citi-

68zens with immediate input into the legislative process (TED, 2014). To promote it, she helped found the Partido de la Red, a new party running candidates committed to legislate only as directed by constituents using online tools for participation.”

Another very promising, ‘citizen co-creation’ projects in this field, run by Corpora-ción Ruta N Medellín in Colombia, is the global platform, Cities for Life. As the crea-tors explain:

“Using this platform, we process specific issues for cities and define concrete urban challenges that must be met. We then receive solution proposals from the global community participating in the platform, as well as from a bank of successful innovative experiences that are a part of the ecosystem. With these proposals, we create guidelines to design action plans for cities.”

Looking back to earlier examples, we could also learn from how Pachube (now Xi-vely)—a platform for connecting sensors and other Internet of Things devices—ena-bled a huge public discussion after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011, by aiding the crowdsourcing of real-time radiation data (Haque, 2012). We could also look at the crowdsourced emergency response platform created in the wake of wildfires that struck western Russia in 2010. What grew out of Russian-fires.ru was Virtual Rynda: an Atlas of Help, which was an online project to support and facilitate mutual aid and crowdsourced solutions to different types of problems, not only in emergencies but in everyday life (Asmolov, 2010).

UNDERSTANDING AND BEHAVIOUR CHANGE

Much of this work, around engagement and action, is about behaviour change—not only on the part of citizens, but also city authorities. The architect and designer Us-man Haque (2012) argues that having access to data, and monitoring one’s beha-viour or environment doesn’t necessarily lead to civic and/or political action; but the public visibility of relevant data can lead to discussion, and reach a broad variety of disciplines and people. Haque believes that the idea of extreme connectivity is not about efficiency and smartness—or as he says more succinctly, “[it’s] not about con-nected bloody fridges.” Instead, connectivity is about enabling people to make sense of a situation collectively and then do something about it. He rejects the notion of simplicity and encourages people to embrace the notion of ‘complexity’; he believes that connectivity could allow us to collaboratively coming up with ways of making sense of the world and then taking action.

Haque’s last point relates well to a point from the UCL ICRI Cities PhD, Mara Bales-trini (2013) who questions whether being connected to the community could lead to personal behaviour change and instead calls for empathy:

“Within the field of Personal Informatics much research pursues the design of applications for self-tracking to motivate behaviour change. Such tools usually follow an ‘egocentric’ approach where the user is expected to reflect on and change her behaviour by visualizing her own collected data.”

In her paper, she goes on to suggest that “a system where the data of a user is mapped into the wellbeing of an external entity or a community, with which the user establi-shes an affective bond, could lead to an alternative approach towards self-awareness, based on empathy and vicarious emotions such as altruism and compassion.”

There is also the question, as Dan Lockton (2014) asks, whether instead of starting at the level of ‘behaviour’, we rather work on “designing ways which help change people’s understandings of the world and the systems they’re in.” Understanding the contexts in which people make decisions is also important. In his paper, ‘As we may understand’, Lockton argues that “the common approach [to behaviour change] assumes that differences in outcome will result from changes to people—‘if only we

69can make people more motivated’; ‘if only we can persuade people to do this’; ‘if only people would stop doing that’—overcoming cognitive biases, being more attentive, caring about things, being more thoughtful, and so on… considering questions of attitude, beliefs or motivations in isolation rather than in context—the person and the social or environmental situation in which someone acts.”

It is important here to look not only at people who have changed their behaviour, but the ones who haven’t changed at all—and understand why. One suggestion is the idea that—similarly to Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘Hyperobjects’ (2013)—phenomena such as climate change are so massively distributed in space and time as to transcend localization. They become “invisible forces” over which we feel little agency, and so little capacity to change. It’s a lack of “response-ability” and agency that we feel. For instance, as artist and engineer Natalie Jeremijenko (2015) reflects further on the need for agency in the face of climate crisis: “I think you draw on whatever resources you have to make sense of an issue – if it’s question driven, it doesn’t matter if it’s cultural, historical, scientific or biochemical. So the question is about how to figure out what makes sense for you as a citizen, the questions that are compelling to you.”

There are many popular campaigns that aim to change our relationship with natural sys-tems, but they rarely draw on the creative imagination and autonomy that each of us has to design and manage our own lives. Content tends to focus on either grand policies, such as tax incentives for solar energy; or cookie-cutter actions, such as changing light bulbs, buying local, or reusing shopping bags. And, while the content of these messages is very important, the way these ideas are communicated tends to be uninteresting or even confusing.

As the writer and professor, Richard Sennett (2006) argues in his talk on the Open City: “We have more resources to use than in the past, but resources we don’t use very creatively.”

CONCLUSION: DEVELOPING NEW FORMS OF ENGAGEMENT AND PUTTING THEM INTO PRACTICE

While citizen engagement platforms are not enough to inspire systemic change on their own, they can be powerful tools for change: they can help challenge our assumptions and build a more informed understanding of our surroundings.

There is, however, still a lack of platforms, measuring devices and sensors that somehow pro-voke people to think deeper about what is actually going on in our world and bring about meaningful change. As Buckminster Fuller put it in 1966, in an interview with the New Yorker:

“In the universe, everything is always in motion, and everything is always mo-ving in the directions of least resistance. That’s basic. So I said, ‘If that’s the case, then it should be possible to modify the shapes of things so that they fo-llow preferred directions of least resistance.’ I made up my mind at this point that I would never try to reform man—that’s much too difficult. What I would do was to try to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions.”

How could we redefine what we mean by environmental sensing and participation, and open up this very narrowly focused discussion? How could we design tools that would encourage citizens to participate in re-designing our collective relationship to complex urban systems?

70In cases when people are not engaged, is it because they don’t care? Is it that simple? There is an implicit faith in citizens as the ‘agents of change.’ But one of the dangers of this faith is that it shifts responsibility from those with real power to those with only limited power. A city government, for example, could point to the apathy of its own citizens, rather than evaluating the failings of its own policies.As I go forward with my own practice and research, I am left asking the following questions:

• What practices are available beyond citizen-sensing and engagement that could lead to lasting change?

• What is the ideal balance of transparency? How much do people need to know about the world?

• Who has the power to act?

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THE ECOLOGY OF LEGIBLE URBAN SPACEBY LAURA FERRARELLO, ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART

“Today’s planner has an arsenal of technological tools, from lighting and heating to structural support to materials for buildings and public spaces, which urbanists even a hundred years ago

could not begin to imagine. We have many more tools than in the past, but these resources we don’t use very creatively”.

RICHARD SENNETT, “THE PUBLIC REALM”

The documentary Pruitt Igoe Myth describes the story of the Pruitt Igoe council estate in St. Louis, Missouri, through a series of interviews of former residents. The complex was blown up in 1970 because of its state of social and physical decay. For such violent action the American architectural historian Charles Jencks describes Pruitt Igoe’s demolition as the day when Modern architecture died (Jencks, 1977). In light of these events, the documentary explores the economical, political and social causes and effects that lead to that final day. The stories told by residents unfold an interwoven pattern where architecture is one of the fragments of a complex urban plan of invest-ments and social housing policies the government undertook to regenerate the city of Saint Louis. If on one hand Pruitt Igoe represented the government’s attempt to give slum dwellers a better place to live, on the other it also supported and triggered “white flight”; once the government sold land at a cheap price, white Americans left downtown to pursue the American dream in the suburbs. In addition to the social segregation created by such politics, Pruitt Igoe’s residents had to agree to a series of policies before moving into the brand new apartments (Freidrichs, 2011). Policies didn’t take into account the social substratum existing in the communities; they established rules decontextualized from the people they were defined for. As a result, the policies became the trigger of social decay, because of the division they created between communities and government.

How can policies speak the language of communities? How can the government de-sign a set of rules that help run the organic complex machine of the city and reflect citizens’ social and cultural background? This essay would like to address possible strategies that contribute to the legibility of governmental policies under the roof of citizens’ everyday experience of the city. It will look at the social syntax that shapes policies and at the value they have in creating ways for citizens and government to interface.

THE ZEITGEIST POLICY

The area of Pruitt Igoe is comparable to the scale of a city; indeed the social hou-sing complex was part of urban strategy aiming for the regeneration of Saint Louis. Nevertheless, as the events show, the city is a complex organism. Cities run under entropic laws, with factors coming from different contexts. Socio-cultural relations-

74hips and people’s engagement with urban space is one of them. The zeitgeist of the city—which includes aspects like places to meet and how people move—is a pivotal factor that any government needs to take into account to understand which policies can trigger socio-economical innovation. Understanding the urban context through themes that work throughout the city (mobility, environment, technology, etc) out-lines diversities, complexity, causes and effects of “behaviours” and “phenomena”. Themes can help to identify the DNA of the city and tackle problems via a form of communication that understands (and comes from) the people. On the other hand, the experience of governmental strategies, largely represented by policies, is a me-dium that facilitates communication between parties. Indeed, engaging communi-ties in the government’s vision of the city via the experience of it, enabled by tangi-ble media, can improve legibility; policies can be an active urban agent enabled by people’s experience.

THE ETYMOLOGY OF POLICIES

Policies are a form of language applied to the urban fabric, in which syntax articula-tes governmental strategies and intentions that relate to the vision of the city. In any language, words have cultural substrata. Words take meaning from past events, of which they guarantee continuity across time. Similarly policies, as urban language, refer to the past to take the city forward. Policies are guidelines that change with the city by interfacing different agents that act in the urban everyday.

Nonetheless, the challenge that policies need to tackle is quality, i.e., the cultural resiliency and texture that any language has. Etymology is the medium that enables and transfers quality. By comparative methods etymology analyzes how words chan-ge meaning through time. It also adds cultural context to sentences, by helping the reader to look beyond the direct meaning of a word. Words are like vessels that em-body the value of the past, which is taken forward to the future. The evolution of any language is comparable to a membrane, which absorbs and repulses different factors. The selection of such factors doesn’t follow a specific linear path, but understands and reflects the social context and its faceted structure. Society, culture and habits are indeed the main filters through which the memory of the past passes toward the future. Policies can play the role words have in language, which is to retain cultural quality and to move urban communities forward. The common perception of policies as restrictive boundaries can shift to a dynamic system that challenges the present and future of communities.

Just like words, policies are not strictly tangible. They might be visible, as with street signs, or they might not be, as with council or district borders. Nonetheless, visible or invisible, the policy framework feeds and regulates the machine that makes the city alive.

Mexico City and London are the capitals of two different nations, with different cul-tural and political backgrounds. Their infrastructures, from public transportation to sustainability, run under different laws and policies that are shaped around local conditions. The ecology of the two cities follows rules that are linked to the local territory. For instance, in Mexico City public transportation signage speaks largely through symbols. The language of symbols is not new for Mexicans, as the pre Colum-bian alphabet was composed of pictograms. Keeping this in mind, in 1967 American graphic designer Lance Wyman designed a public transportation language to link the underground to the surface—in this case, “surface” his understood as physical te-rritory and Mexican cultural heritage). Wyman’s language removes the sense of alien abstraction for a shared and generally recognized familiarity. The pictographic un-derground signage would reach both people who can and can’t read (Mogilevich M., Campkin B., Ross R., 2014). In London, the public transportation map (TFL) legibility is delivered via the river Thames. Harry Becks’ 1931 map incorporates the possibility to scale the content over time (to account for extension of the system) and clearly illus-trates its sense of direction with the least amount of information. The TFL tube and

75railway map stations are represented as knots connected by lines of different colours, and the only reference to the geography of the city is the Thames. The simple graphic representation of the river makes London TFL map one of the best examples of legible maps. The pivotal importance of the river was made evident in 2009, when the river was removed in a new edition of the map. After a general outcry from the public, the river returned its legible navigation to the map (Glancey, 2015). The map illustrates physical territory by showing the relationship of stations to the river.

In the essay “The Open City” (2006), Richard Sennett describes how continuity is the factor capable of triggering sustainable living. The concept of continuity can be applied to different scales, from urban growth to people. By referring to Jane Jacobs, Sennett describes how the adjacency between elements underlines contrast, similari-ties and hybrids. Thresholds have resiliency, a quality with an important urban value, as thresholds are interfaces and gateways to futures that embrace the memory and value of the past. Thresholds enable a kind of future that remembers the past in order to move one step forward.

The concept of continuity among parts can apply to different aspects of the city. Con-tinuity, and its opposites, can filter policy analysis between London and Mexico City as strategy to increase legibility. During the workshop at the Laboratorio para la Ciu-dad we proposed low-res probes and hacks around selected topics, from “How do people make decisions?”and “Tangibility of Information,” to “Government Spending and Accountability” that can generate a new system of urban analysis, which takes into account citizen’s engagement from the beginning (p. 125). Citizens embody the resiliency of the city; they enable a system that interweaves policy with its territory. Citizens’ experience of the city make policy legible by turning them into guidelines of the urban territory.

The ecologist Steven Gould (Sennett 2006) differentiates a border from a boundary: The first is a dead edge, whereas the second behaves as an interface. In the city there are many borders, which define different jurisdictions with their own policies. On the other hand, boundaries can be experienced as defined perimeter or thresholds, i.e., areas with an embodied exchange and transmigration of information. Borders/thresholds are blurred territories of osmotic interchange—they are the place of the hybrid. Legible policies, like thresholds, are porous and continuous at the same time, bridging the boundaries of the city by acknowledging the complexity of it. They un-lock and regulate urban life via the public’s acknowledgement of its rule and partici-pation in everyday politics.

According to what has been described so far, the resiliency of any policy lies in its recognition of the value of urban complexity as strength; the understanding of ur-ban stratigraphy and the ambition to challenge it are, indeed, factors that enable new opportunities. The low-res probes and hacks the UK and Mexico City teams de-veloped can work as triggers to understand solutions. Considering this, I propose an infrastructural system that works through tangible experiences. Citizens can “feel” the value of data through urban physical interventions that engage the human body and its senses. To this extent, legible policies are tangible guidelines that move away from abstraction.

Pruitt Igoe was designed according to core Modernist guidelines; it was considered a Moder-nist masterpiece, one that applied abstract speculations to the physical territory. The Moder-nist built environment was thought of as a product of conveyor belt production; it became symbol of society, with people, like objects, aligned to the conveyor belt order. Modernist so-ciety was then the reflection of Modernist rules. Nevertheless, as history displays for us, an ordered society establishes constraints and boundaries. People, like buildings, had to follow the rules, which the government outlines as the driver of urban innovation. It then follows that the over-designed city, from forms to people, remains at the level of illegible abstraction. Top-bottom design demonstrated the problems proffered by the tendency to impose new re-gulations detached from the history of the place and people dwelling it.

76Urban analysis is a medium to understand the intricacy of a territory. The complex dynamic of the urban fabric, from the socio-cultural point of view, is among the most relevant information to be extracted from any investigative processes for the proposal of scalable solutions. In their (dis)symmetry, London and Mexico City can learn from each other. Diversity and multiplicity are, indeed, the key values for the development of possible strategies to address urban sustainable infrastructure. By employing the concept of etymology as urban methodology, which employs data as tangible experience, and by using the hacks and probes proposed in the workshop, policies can draw a path that understands contemporary urban territories. On such a path, policies can adapt and change in relation to real time information, which un-derstand public engagement. Tangible policies express the government’s intention through the experience of value, so that words and numbers become tangible. The platform I envision looks at legibility as an interactive set of information that travels in a loop among urban agents and is displayed via tangible experiences. The city be-comes a body that performs in relation to the environmental conditions.

MEXICO CITY AND LONDON: URBAN SPACE IN CITIZENS’ EXPERIENCE

The Futura CDMX model is an interactive space that looks to interface the public and the government around the strategies and policies of Mexico City. The space wraps around the scaled map of the Mexican capital: Two sets of seats allow people to gather and discuss, as if in a theatrical performance. At the top floor, Mexico City is dissected in different topics that display data on the map of the city. One of them illustrates the EcoBici area, i.e., Mexico City’s public shared bike project supported by the government under the politics of better mobility. Bikes are used within an area defined by a boundary, which encompasses the districts of Polanco, Condesa, Cuauh-témoc, Juárez and Roma. In other words, EcoBici users are a small section of Mexico City citizens. Of course, there are specific reasons for this. Nonetheless, bikes are one of the most flexible transportation systems. How can the EcoBici boundary blur and become a threshold? How can it “leak” beyond the current area?

One of the tasks of the collaborative workshop was to observe Mexico City citizens using the lens of mobility. From the Centro Histórico to Polanco, Roma, Reforma and Condesa, I noticed that, even more than cars, trolleys are often used to trans-port merchandise (by street food vendors in particular), whereas bikes are more of a leisure transportation. How can people switch their understanding of bikes from leisure to business? One of the proposals that Superflux founder and co-director Anab Jain addressed looked at designing accessories that enable bikes of different func-tionality for different usages. At the beginning of the 20th century, bikes were the

77vehicles that convinced Americans to drive. According to Frank Geels, the weekend leisure journey to the countryside triggered urban Americans’ imagination to move and explore suburban territories (2005), and the resulting sense of curiosity and free-dom triggered car culture in the landscape of American cities. Can a similar sense of curiosity, imagination and aspiration get Mexico City inhabitants on two wheels? Can inspirational and experiential policies facilitate citizens’ engagement and ena-ble new forms of behaviours or behaviour change? Another relevant example is the Mapatón, the public campaign and Android app developed by Laboratorio para la Ciudad, which involved public transport users in a game to map the routes and loca-tion of microbuses, using the incentive of rewards (2016).

Is there a specific culture and habit about dwelling in the urban space that triggers and drives behavior change? The hacks and probes we developed in the workshop are systems that can analyse and articulate contemporary city patterns for drawing beha-vior change. Nonetheless, testing them in the physical space of London and Mexico

City would be a point of departure to understand new pathways for designing the city of the future via legible and tangible policies. The physical experience of the urban space offers a good spectrum of the city.

From October 26-30, 2015, I ran an urban experiment with Information Experience Design (IED) PhD candidates Benjamin Kozlowski and Jimmy Tidey at the Royal Colle-ge of Art. The project Metalondoners (Ferrarello L., Kozlowski B., Tidey J., 2015) looked at theater and social networks as a means to unfold intangible social patterns of the city and understand people’s behavior between the digital and physical space. The workshop used walking as prop to collect and use data to design the individual form of the city. In London, one’s sense of place changes continuously. A combination of factors like people’s background, political strategies and infrastructure contribute to create different kinds of spaces. For instance, looking at the Future Cities Cata-pult project “Whereaboutslondon” (2014), Londoners with similar socio-cultural bac-kgrounds do not cluster around the same council; they live in different parts of the greater territory. Nonetheless, contemporary urban space is no longer just physical. We understand space as hybrid, i.e., in-between the physical and the digital.

Urban life takes form through the spaces in which we dwell, which are equally sha-ped by dynamic places (such as our journey to and from work) or static ones (home, work, places of leisure, etc.). The contemporary experience of the city is mediated by what I define “content maps”, which are maps created by means of content. From the restaurant we love to the cinema, gym, pubs, etc., we understand and read the city under themes. Navigating the city through these content maps creates our own urban space, illustrated by the set of metadata we leave along the journey. Booking an

78Airbnb, tapping an Oyster card, buying a meal and connecting to Wifi are all acts that generate information that speaks for us and tells our everyday story of the city. Under this framework the “Metalondoners” project employs metadata to entitle citizens of their content. Acknowledging the presence of metadata, which is understood by ur-ban performance, gives a sense of responsibility of being a citizen. Which citizen am I? How can I contribute to the management of the everyday?

“Metalondoners” takes inspiration from James Joyce’s The Dubliners, a collection of short stories describing people belonging to different social backgrounds in Dublin. The diversity and complexity of the book renders a “social section” of the city. Simi-larly this is what happens when we leave data behind; our stories are valuable in-formation we can’t embody. If metadata represent our digital fictional everyday, The Dubliners is fiction related to physical space and society. In “Metalondoners” the story of contemporary hybrid space is constructed by Twitter feeds and urban space. The city is a theatre per se—stories happen in real time.

Similarly, Twitter creates social space by clustering information that has physical conno-tation. The power of social media is the capacity of creating an engaged audience. Fiction belongs to human nature as well as the will to share experience. Through Twitter, stories fluctuate through people who enrich content with their personal experiences. “Me-talondoners” participants embodied a theatrical character, envisioned through the crossover of digital and physical information, a character that is an interface between the physical and digital world and transforms students’ perception of physical spa-ce. The students’ behaviour was indeed influenced by the city and Twitter feeds. By dwelling in this the hybrid, students experienced the materiality of the information they collected. The character became real, once students experienced its reality—by looking at space through the eye of the character students “saw” the resiliency of ur-ban space. The three selected areas in London (West Hampstead, Bethnal Green and

Brixton) were reshaped through the three characters. Through the workshop, data became tangible through performance: Abstract digital information became matter that shapes the individual and shared understanding of one’s surroundings.

CONCLUSION

79In this essay, I described different scales of possible pathways that might generate a culture of legible policies. Human beings generally rely on tangible forms that reify the abstraction of the surrounding. Intangibility is often too abstract for comprehen-sion; abstract content becomes complex and alien. To tackle the concept of familia-rity means to look for strategies that increase the individual and collective sense of legibility through individual and shared cultural backgrounds. Within the context of legible policies, familiarity is quite important, as it creates a common ground of discussion for the politics of the city.

During the workshop in Mexico City we looked at tangible means of influencing the government’s decision making process in the context of urban strategies. We looked in particular at the topic of mobility to understand which politics can help the te-rritory of Mexico City and London to reduce problems like obesity, air pollution, etc. We identified specific topics like “Visions of the City”, and “Government Spending and Accountability” and we developed hacks and probes for each with the purpose of enabling categories in physical space. We then identified the most feasible ideas that could be developed into a prototype stage. A future step of the project would be to enable the shortlist in real space via low-res prototypes and tools performed both in London and Mexico City.

No form of strategy can move beyond the abstract territory if not tested in reality. Citizens are the heart of the city, each one constructing the place of the city by dwelling in it. No form of urban guidelines can take shape if not shaped by people that live in the space the government manages for them. In conclusion, we must prioritise the introduction of new design strategies for urban complexity that work via multi-agent participations and engagement.

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DIMENSIONING LEGIBILITY

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POLITICAL IMAGINATIONTOWARDS AN EXPERIMENTAL THEORY OF LEGIBLE POLICY

BY GABRIELLA GÓMEZ-MONT, LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Culture is “… a radically unfinished social process of self-definition and transformation”

- PAUL GILROY

I have always been helplessly fascinated by the place where (so-called) fact and (so-ca-lled) fiction collide; the volcanic and viscous borders where symbol, myth and meta-phor create tiny fissures in what we call “real life.” I am interested in the way mul-tiple subjectivities are added up to make the world as we know it, in all its forms, truths and disguises.

This might seem a whimsical yet utterly impractical reflection to mention while exa-mining cities and their governments. In terms of public policy around gray cities and green infrastructures—the initial starting point for the work between London and Mexico City—one would think there is little relationship. But I believe we public offi-cials will come to realize with more certainty every passing day that each of our cities and our societies first gets its start and gathers its particular momentum from within the invisible and symbolic landscapes. Culture writ large, in other words. Culture, the great apriori; our first principles, our collective DNA that silently spells out what is possible and what is not, how we tackle our challenges and explore our possibili-ties: how we think of ourselves individually and collectively.

There are many ways to envision a city’s future aspirations: imagine it becoming first-world, becoming alpha or becoming smart. Each has its own subset of organizing principles, policies and ways of instigating a particular social energy and political will while obfuscating others. Each with its own potential and its own blind spots. So, if you ask me, we should bring to the forefront an additional thought-experiment when thinking about policy: serious reflections on urban life, taking for granted that cities should not only be built for the human body but also for the human imagina-tion. The mind is the place where our cities start. We must better understand our political and social imagination and know that public policies must also have agency there, if they are to be at all effective. I believe, with great urgency, that we should bring these reflections to the very heart of government life. We need to know where and how our seemingly neutral regulations are inscribed within a certain vision of the city. This is the basis for starting a long-term deep dive into our definition of legi-ble policy at Laboratorio para la Ciudad, to be conceptualized, prototyped, iterated,

84possibly transmuted: theory in practice; emergent strategies that adapt to changing scenarios, tools for interpretation and the making of conceptual frameworks relevant to daily urban life.

In my three years in public office, I have come to realize our need to explore new urban languages and political forms—other tools for thinking about social life and systemic change—because, as we sometimes forget, government is a channel towards city life, not a tautological thing unto itself. We need to learn to read and speak again in city and social tongues.

This is might be the crux of things. It is clear that in Mexico we are caught in an in-teresting paradox: There is a growing mistrust of institutions and politics, and at the same time there is growing desire on behalf of citizens to be part of the way a city is and how it evolves. This brings to the forefront new questions (and potentialities, and challenges) that pertain to urban governance, plus the need for new mindframes—and possibly even new types of institutions and civic ecosystems—for rethinking both the possibilities of social capital as well as the creative capacity of a city. Back to that basic building block: the nature of the polis and how we collectively decide what type of life we want to live together.

LEGIBLE POLICY: BEYOND TRANSPARENCY

In an increasingly intricately connected world, there is no doubt that we need tools to make complex systems understandable if we are to explore our agency within them. As Roberto Ascencio points out in his essay (p. 173) there are many examples of how lack of proper communication can turn good policy into bad politics—and even citi-zen outrage.

The word Legible comes to us from the late 14c, from Late Latin: legibilis, “that can be read,” from Latin legere, “to read.” But lest we think that to be “legible” begins and ends at transparency, or the clarity of the “writing” before us, it is interesting to take an extra step back in time, and explore the etymology of “reading”: from the old English rædan (West Saxon), redan (Anglian) “to advise, counsel, persuade; discuss, deliberate; rule, guide; arrange, equip; forebode; explain; learn by reading; put in order” (related to ræd, red “advice”), from Proto-Germanic *redan (cognates: Old Norse raða, Old Frisian reda, Dutch raden, Old High German ratan, German raten “to advise, counsel, guess.”

So even though legible policy can (and must) pass through the realm of a good and honest explanation (the hows and the whys) we must also take into account that legi-bility—which is also about counsel, discussion, persuasion, arranging and guessing—is in the end a tool for us to collectively make sense of our world. To frame, deliberate and envision. And to ask ourselves difficult questions at times, with no easy answers.

This framework of deliberative and participative governance has been at the heart of our work with our Open City agenda at the Lab. This is also our inflection point towards an experimental theory of legible policy in the ongoing projects of Labora-torio Para la Ciudad: a way of bringing not only data but also narrative deeply into the equation; so instead of being simply surface it becomes the way we inform and communicate but also engage and evoke and ponder together.

During our research and workshops between London and Mexico City, we have come to a better understanding of new inputs available for thinking about cities when using tools borrowed from behavioral design, futures thinking, creative and expe-rimental practices, ludification, computational science, data visualization, systems design, patterns modelling, social and urban innovation, visual ethnography, evolu-tionary psychology, artistic fields—and even fiction.

85These are spaces that could compliment policy as we now think of it, with better un-derstanding of different nodes and connections in a system of human relationships that permit (or block) different social configurations.

CULTURE AND CIVICS

“The distribution of knowledge is the key contemporary task. Knowledge empowers people.

If people know the rules, and are sensitized by art, humor, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change.”

Antanas Mockus, former Mayor of Bogotá

The power of open knowledge is unquestionable. The more information that is avai-lable and flows freely, the better people learn from each other. It is the way towards exponential and agile evolution of a system. But information and data are not enou-gh. A creative ethos is also necessary for information to travel, for ideas to take hold and evolve.

I believe we have spent too much time thinking that policy begins and ends with laws or interventions upon the physical infrastructure. New optics can discover and switch paradigms in relationship to individual human behaviour and communal life that happens within these shape-shifting cultural and organic artefacts that is a city.

Politicians like Antanas Mokus, once-upon-a-time Mayor of Bogotá, have proven that unusual ideas and powerful metaphors can be so much more effective in making im-portant changes within society—that one can become creative and even playful while tackling all-too serious problems. Mockus found a different way of making policy legible.

He is well-known for complementing new policy and norms with citizen engagement through creative methods, as highlighted by the Harvard Gazette:

The fact that he was seen as an unusual leader gave the mayor the opportu-nity to try extraordinary things, such as hiring 420 mimes to control traffic in Bogotá’s chaotic and dangerous streets. He launched a “Night for Wo-men” and asked the city’s men to stay home in the evening and care for the children; 700,000 women went out on the first of three nights that Mockus dedicated to them... Mockus sees the reduction of homicides from 80 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1993 to 22 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2003 as a major achievement, noting also that traffic fatalities dropped by more than half in the same time period, from an average of 1,300 per year to about 600. Contri-buting to this success was the mayor’s inspired decision to paint stars on the spots where pedestrians (1,500 of them) had been killed in traffic accidents.

He also managed to reduce water waste by 14% in two months, and later on by 40%.

Mockus’ seemingly wacky notions have a respectable intellectual pedigree. His mea-sures were informed by, among others, Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass Nor-th, who has investigated the tension between formal and informal rules, and Jürgen Habermas’ work on how dialogue creates social capital.

This, I confess, is one of the topics that intrigues me the most: how to create city through culture and all of imagination’s instruments, and how, in turn, a social in-vention can be incubated by its surroundings.

There are questions we have forgotten to ask within the walls of government. What have been our sense-making tools throughout history? What lies at the edge of the legible and other ways to read and write the city? Are there more to urbanscapes than their physical and visible spaces? What transformations are possible within the

86intangible realms? How do we analyse and understand both quantitative and quali-tative data? What happens in the hybrid world between aesthetics and politics? Are our fictions capable of creating social realities? What does it take for public policy to truly have a positive effect on shaping realities and community life?

With each passing day we should become more interested in exploring (and creating) meeting points between a specific and objective geography and the way it is collec-tively constructed through the social imaginaries of the people that inhabit it—the symbolic infrastructure of a city, that forgotten “real” estate.

TOWARDS CREATIVE GOVERNANCE

One of the most powerful forces that shapes a city is government, by ordering and laying out both the physical infrastructure as well as many of the rules of engage-ment. Which why it is an interesting (even necessary) experiment to explore what would happen if we design hybrid strategies that also stimulate and facilitate public and private imagination from within the political realm. But instead of using “spin” these strategies need to be embedded within the ethos of open knowledge and legible policies. The more deeply and creatively we understand what is at stake, the better decisions we can make as a society.

Which is why we need to make ideas, infrastructures and decisions visible. But, I insist, legibility should be not only about objectivity and clarity, but also about sub-jective relevance. Legibility can be our capacity to create “suture” within our systems and how we write and read them: openings where an individual can inscribe herself or himself into public life. And what could be better than to have increasingly more imaginative social tools to envision our possible worlds and our place in them?

So perhaps true legibility begins when one is enticed into actively becoming part of the unfolding story. This is how agency is born—and where grey first turns into green.

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DESIGN’S ROLE IN POLICYMAKINGBY SOFÍA BOSCH, LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Mistrust is palpable in Mexico between the government and its citizens. This happens in many city governments around the globe, but in the context of Mexico this lack of trust has major impact on the public policies that affect the daily lives of millions of people. Where do citizens’ misgivings come from? Two important culprits are lack of understanding and communication. The way public policy decisions are made in Mexico City creates a black box effect: Its citizens do not understand how, where or by whom decisions and changes are made. This fact shows the need for a more profound conversation about legible policy, design and its effect on public policy outcomes.

During the collaboration with the Royal College of Art, Future Cities Catapult and Su-perflux, we understood that many of our concerns regarding decisions made within a government structure are often the same, regardless of the city, country or context. Our questions were similar: Where were ideas for public policy incubated? Who made the decisions and with what type of information or data was considered? Examining both our shared doubts and our different experiences, we reached a com-mon agreement: The process of turning public policies into legible policies is essen-tial because there is a clear and felt mistrust from civil society towards the decisions made within government. Not only do citizens not trust the leaders making those decisions, but they do not believe the choices made are truly for the common benefit. Within the design profession practitioners are trained to employ several special qua-lities to determine a process that is both very tangible and understandable: empathy, common sense and pinpointing necessities, among others. If the process of a design solution is not understood, the client (in this case, the city and its citizens) will not empathize with it—they will not understand why a certain result is being exposed instead of another. This type of design-thinking should play an essential role in the way the government communicates to its citizens, if this bond is not respected in the process of public policy creation, the decisions made by politicians will never be understood by city dwellers. This results in misunderstanding, mistrust and a barrier that will not allow for better public policies to be put in place. It is imperative those in public service recognize the benefits brought by the integration of design to the policy making process. Working with designers as allies, they could develop and implement better strategies of communicating with the public and reconcile the two often-opposed fronts: the government and the citizens it serves. DESIGN AS A TOOL FOR EMPATHY AND COMMON SENSE Recently Donald Norman, director of the Design Lab and emeritus professor at the University of California in San Diego, gave a talk at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, ITAM, an important private university in Mexico City. The relevant object of study was not only his talk, but also the audience to which he spoke: Most of them

90were engineers, mathematicians, and people from the social sciences, many of whom go on to seek a career in the public service. Most of these students had never heard before about design concepts, such as human-centred design, behavioural design or even design thinking. One might think he was not speaking to the right target au-dience, but sitting there in the crowd I realized that this is exactly the type of people design concepts should be reaching. These are the people who will someday make decisions in government, and with the tools offered by design they will be better able to make thoughtful, prepared choices and regain the trust of their communities. Don Norman spoke not only about his experience in different fields, such as educa-tion, health, andtechnological emporiums, like the Apple Company; the main point of his talk was to emphasize the importance of design in other educational careers because it brought to the conversation two far-reaching tools: empathy and common sense. A designer has to be able to see the big picture, to understand the wider pano-rama as well as the small details of a complex problem to try to iterate solutions and tackle it through limited interventions. This wide-angle view allows design to make informed decisions about a possible solution and the consequences it can trigger or unleash. Moreover, design has to work closely with its final user, to understand its needs, futures and imaginaries. This cannot happen without empathy, with which one tries to relive certain experiences to consider solutions or to deeply understand a specific topic to grasp the real needs. It is through the process of design that peculiar, empathic, culture-specific decisions can be taken. These are all qualities felt to be lac-king in the current decision-making methodologies within governments.

As mentioned, a designer’s job is to empathize with the user to pinpoint problema-tics which need to be tackled in the design process. There is a constant complaint co-ming from citizenship about the government’s lack of understanding (and resulting poor performance history) of the everyday problems citizens face, especially related to participating in complex systems such as urban transportation. It is felt the so-lutions proposed by the government are not well thought out to consider the city’s inhabitants, but rather for the benefit of the government itself. Hence, having the data and possibility to communicate all the ethnographic research, observations and prototyping that goes into the making of every political decision would not only help validate the actions taken, but would help mend public perception of the govern-ment as a whole. Over a longer period of time, understanding how public policy is su-pported by evidence and data would promote trust, lack of which is one of the main problems diagnosed during the binational collaboration, and for this reason design methodologies should be applied to the making of policy decisions. DESIGN AS A COMMUNICATION AND CONNECTION TOOL A large part of design has to do with the way the solution is communicated or approa-ched by citizens. If trust is absent and no connection is built, the solution will pro-bably not be successful or will be prematurely discarded. This has happened many ti-mes with different public policies that are actually very beneficial for the city but are poorly perceived or received due to miscommunication and lack of understanding from the population. One example is the Hoy No Circula program in Mexico City, in which car gas emissions are regularly evaluated with respect to each car’s date of ma-nufacture. If a car’s motor is not in good condition and emits too much pollution, the sanction is prohibiting that car from circulating in the city one or two days a week. In 2015, while reshaping the program, miscommunication about changes to the pro-gram provoked a total rejection from a large part of the population. The government failed to explain in depth how the Hoy No Circula program not only benefitted the city’s environment but also reduced the massive numbers of cars that create terrible traffic congestion throughout the city. Thus, after many public protests and support from opposition parties, users found a loophole in the legal stipulations of the pro-gram and insisted that cars could not be banned from circulating due to the age of the motor, but only by the level of gas emissions. This debacle created a way to allow 300,000 more cars to circulate without restriction in the city, triggering not only

91ferocious traffic jams, but an environmental crisis of air quality that had not been experienced in Mexico City in more than 12 years (Servín, González & Romero, 2015).

Mobility is a delicate subject in a city as big and populous as Mexico, and gives us this specific example of how poor end-of-process design can hamper a public policy that otherwise would be a plausible solution to enforce. Politicians do not take into account that the last step in the creation of a new public policy—or the rearrangement of an old one—needs to be impeccable communication. If the population does not understand the new proposals they will likely resist the change. That is common sense: No one wants to try something new without knowing exactly where it came from, what it will do and how it will affect their daily lives. As much as we are social animals, there is a big individuality influencer: The decisions made must be beneficial in a tangible, personal way, more than in a collective way. That is the heart of the matter and where design can step in. How does the govern-ment communicate the personal benefits of a public policy without leaving behind its social and collective assets? How do we convince people that making long-term choices, even though the results may not be immediately visible, is the best road to take? These are all interrogations where design can intervene. Design exists in the over-lap of the social sciences and the arts, a quality that helps illustrate why it requires the creation of a communication campaign as part of the process to be taken into account by decision makers. Furthermore, design should be given the same impor-tance as the rest of the political process. Without a proper outreach design appeal, it is practically impossible for citizens to grasp and understand even the most positive and genuinely progressive aims of the government. DESIGN AS A TOOL FOR TRANSPARENCY Design must not only become essential in the political and the forthcoming commu-nication process, but as a democratization tool. In the moment that the government starts to have clear goals, with open data as a basis of decision making, with accessi-bility and accountability to its citizens, transparency is imminent. And a transparent government minimizes the risks of corruption and mismanagement. Legible policy can be applied as street level interventions, where data and decisions are made visual and public to citizens, imprinted upon their everyday cityscape, as explored in the essay by Superflux (p. 107) and in the Hacks and Probes developed during our collaboration (p. 125). However, what happens when legible policy not only becomes a tool for understanding and conciliating decision makers and the ge-neral population, but also becomes a comprehension tool for politicians and public servants? A great example can be found in Nicholas Felton’s Annual Reports. For 10 years now, Felton has developed a series of data visualizations related to his everyday life. He has spent years collecting data on and mapping his heartbeat, both the banal and in-depth conversations he has had, the food he has eaten and his sleeping habits. Con-sequently, the American government has discovered raw benefits in this: Through his distilling of this data, people are interested in the story he has to tell, even when the information featured is so highly personal. For many years now he has applied his knowledge of graphic design and data to work in different projects related to public data. His data visualizations are so clear and graspable for viewers of all levels of experience and education that they are a clear example that graphic design has a large important role in the way the government permits the user to understand the information. Beautiful, accessible, tangible graphic design can be a democratic statement from a political view: If the government permits citizens to understand their information, their decision making, automatically the processes become trans-parent, inclusive and democratic.

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Nicholas Felton Annual Report, 2014. Cover.

Nicholas Felton Annual Report, 2013. Types of conversations

Lack of trust in the government creates a very relevant anguish in Mexico, and it stems from a long history of known corruption, the absence of accountability and the general per-ception of the government as a blurry institution with a very limiter public face. Using design to counteract this, the work of thousands of public servants can be visualized and communicated. As citizens, do we really know or understand how many people it takes to operate the metro system of the city? How complex it is to coordinate traffic lights in rush hour moments, or to assign beds in emergency rooms at public hospitals? The ge-neral population may not have a pressing need to know all of this information, but if the government opens up about these processes, an empathic understanding between the two parties can begin to be built.

93If we want the idea of legible policy is to succeed, it is essential that it comes hand-in-hand with transparency and accountability. The government must be morally pre-pared to open its doors not only to the outside but also to the thousands of public servants that often (just like citizens) do not deeply understand the processes of de-cision-making (or even the main goals and values that is desirable we strive for as society). Perhaps in the future, a participatory and democratic indicator could be the degree of legibility of policies, including the degree of design inherent in the process of policy making awaits us in the future.

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ENCOURAGING (AND INCITING) PARTICIPATION IN THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE PUBLIC SPACEBY LETICIA LOZANO, LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

When we look at architecture, we can view it as a historic manifestation of the “status update” of societies. Architectural remains help us understand the social complexity of ancient cities, which are so often reminiscent of our contemporary urban spaces. While we’re well past the days of the Greek agora as a centerpiece of public social interaction, looking at architecture reveals that much of what was important to our predecessors is still valued today. But as our populations grows and our societies evol-ve, the problems faced by cities grow in significance, relevance and priority, making them more complex to reflect upon and act on.

Everyday, academics, NGOs, governments and policy makers are confronted with complicated problems related to managing urban expansion and congestion, foste-ring competitiveness, innovation, social inclusion and environmental sustainabili-ty, among others. These issues should matter to each and every human being, or at least to the majority of us living in cities. We all should want to take part in making decisions about the courses of action to address these problems, because eventually, either directly or indirectly, they will affect us all. But how do policy makers make these decisions? How do those decisions address the common good? Are they consi-dering what is likely to happen in the next 100 years—or just in the next electoral period? How do they take citizens and our concerns and interests into account?

This is where architecture has to step in. Our cities have to be designed once again for people, to host public life. The built environment must engage people to go beyond organizing the public protests that are common in places like Mexico City and take an active role in decision making affecting the problems that affect them. Likewise, decision makers need to take advantage of public spaces to effectively and transpa-rently communicate their actions and choices.

Representatives from institutions of urban laboratories (and pioneers in civic inno-vation) in two of the world’s largest metropoli came together in London and Mexico City for a series of exchanges. During the collaborative sessions between the Royal College of Art (RCA), Superflux, Future Cities Catapult, UNAM (the National Autono-mous University of Mexico) and Laboratorio para la Ciudad, many concerns, ideas and questions surrounding the notion of how to make policies more legible emerged.

Around the world we find many examples of organizations and collectives instigating participatory processes for decision making, organized around different topics, and the resulting tools and methodologies have become increasingly popular for enga-ging regular people with complex problems. Having proved very effective at develo-

96ping a sense of belonging and propriety of their urban surroundings, the tools and methodologies of legible policy have the potential to create more interconnected and responsible communities. But how might we keep involving citizens in the decision making processes, and would these strategies have a positive effect not only on citi-zens and politicians, but ultimately on our cities and our everyday lives?

The collaborators agreed that the decision-making process needs to be more open and accessible for people to participate. It must be responsive and reflect the contri-butions of citizens, and this process must be developed in parallel with the urban fabric.

THE SHAPE OF ANONYMOUS DECISIONS

Whether they concern the project to pave the sidewalk in front of our house, deter-mine if our neighborhood will get a new library or postpone the implementation of a plan to improve safety on the streets, every day anonymous decisions are made that affect us directly or indirectly. Decision makers, whom in Mexico we elect based on the notion that they are suitable people to make decisions for us, should in theory have citizen’s interests as their number one priority. Unfortunately citizens only get to see the final results in the form of policy decisions, and not the process itself. The resulting anonymity of the process deepens already prominent public distrust of elec-ted officials; when one does participate in the processes, understand the strategies considered, nor have a say in the decisions, it is quite easy to believe that those deci-sions respond to the agendas and benefits of others rather than our own.

The urban environment is full of physical manifestations of anonymous decisions. A very clear one is the global prominence of “starchitects” and the common belief that they uninterested in designing spaces to accommodate people’s lives and activities and prefer to concentrate on promoting their brands and attending to governments’ and developers’ financial desires, offering little to improve the urban environment for the commonwealth.1 Regrettably, this may be at least partly true, as developers often attach a renowned name to a project to help win major governmental decisions concerning urban planning. Considering that Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao earns €320m for the city every year, we should wonder what mayor or go-vernor would not want that kind of economic boon?2

Even beyond the mayor or executive official, I speculate that if a city-wide vote were to be implemented to make the decision of whether or not to invest in a building that would bring profits like Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum does for said city, citizens would support the endeavor—still more if it meant the new city income would then be spent on improving the quality of life in different neighborhoods. People might even feel proud of making a good decision for the common good. But what if, again, this decision is made anonymously and is perceived to respond to an agenda that differs from major public concerns?

A NEW PARADIGM FOR THE URBAN CONTEXT

In December of 2015, Mexico City experienced an unprecedented situation: An “ur-ban regeneration” project on a main avenue of the city centre was taken to public consultation. Avenida Chapultepec, the site of the project, is an 11-lane avenue where the experience of crossing is best described as tortuous and dangerous. It is perceived as a barrier dividing the creative zone of the city comprised by the Condesa, Roma and Juárez neighborhoods, home to a large population of young adults with comfor-table purchasing power.

1 The term starchitect is used to describe particular architects whose landmark buildings and well-paid projects give them a degree of fame or celebrity status amongst the general public. 2 Gehry famously stated, “I don’t know who invented that fucking word ‘starchitect.’ In fact a journalist in-vented it, I think. I am not a ‘star-chitect’, I am an ar-chitect...” See http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/architecture/frank-gehry-dont-call-me-a-starchitect-1842870.html

97The proposal for the Corredor Cultural Chapultepec (CCC), developed by Fernando Rome-ro’s architecture office FR-EE, entailed a linear park that would connect the neigh-bourhoods and extend the greenery of Chapultepec Park, the world’s largest urban park that is located adjacent to the proposed project site. In the words of Archdaily editor Karissa Rosenfield, it aimed “...to transform the congested avenue into an effi-cient, multimodal roadway that features an elevated promenade lined with commer-cial and cultural programs that are powered by renewable energy and connected by lush landscaping.”3 As a narrative, the CCC sounded like an astonishing urban strategy and was even acclaimed on international media. But here in Mexico City, the story rolled out differently. The public found the process of announcing the project’s master plan suspicious and opaque, and the content of project itself would up cau-sing more problems than it aimed to solve. Citizens quickly perceived the proposed corridor as a mere excuse to privatize public space and build a large outdoors shop-ping center. Immediately, the community organized itself into the the ‘No Shopul-tepec’ movement and brought a powerful wave of controversy crashing down on on the city government.

CRITICAL FACTS ABOUT THE DECISION MAKING PROCESS AROUND THE CCC INCLUDE:

1. There was no international competition to identify the executors of the project. Only two offices pitched proposals, and the winning office belongs Fernando Romero, son-in-law of Carlos Slim Helu, the richest man in Mexico and fourth richest in the world.4 In a country plagued with recent examples of political fa-vortism and corrupt development contracts, this greatly damaged the public’s acceptance of the project.

2. All of the plots of land that fell into the proposed area to develop were consolida-ted into one single tract, without the approval of the mayor or the local deputies. The land was then granted for the next 40 years to the semi-public company ProCDMX, which in turn gave overall control to a trusteeship mostly managed by members of the private sector.

3. The members of said trusteeship were the same companies that developed the project’s feasibility studies. The contract granting them overall control gives them 94.88% of the CCC’s profit, leaving only 5.12% to the city. Clearly, the pro-ject’s approval was in their best interests, rather than the interests of the public.

4. The long-term control of the trusteeship was brought to public knowledge in mid-August, when construction was slated to begin mid-September. The “public consultation” was to be hosted in the brief interim, leaving a practically non-exis-tent time frame to include citizens’ perspectives and opinions, and giving the impression that the intended attempt at public consultation was in truth a gross deception.

5. Citizen opposition stopped the first attempt at public consultation and delayed construction, leading the government to forcibly schedule the public consulta-tion for early December 2015 and limit participation to inhabitants of Delega-ción Cuauhtémoc, one of 16 city boroughs, despite the prominent location of the project in an area frequented by people from across the city.5

3 See: http://www.archdaily.com/772173/fr-ee-proposes-cultural-corridor-chapultepec-in-mexico-city4 The World’s Billionaires (2016). Forbes. See http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ 5 Summary from:http://www.landscapeinstitute.org/news/Backlash-begins-for-Mexico-City-s-linear-parkhttp://www.citylab.com/design/2015/09/the-terrible-plan-for-mexico-citys-high-line-style-park/408010/http://www.animalpolitico.com/blogueros-el-dato-checado/2015/12/03/diez-puntos-para-entender-shopultepec/http://www.animalpolitico.com/blogueros-ciudad-posible/2015/08/20/dudas-legitimas-y-razonables-sobre-el-corre-dor-cultural-chapultepec/http://www.animalpolitico.com/blogueros-salir-de-dudas/2015/09/01/necesidad-o-necedad-avenida-chapulte-pec-y-su-entorno/

98Significant facts about the characteristics of the proposed CCC project include:

1. The CCC was an elevated multi-story shopping mall presented to the public as a “public cultural space,” another of the popular privately-owned public spaces proliferating around the globe.

2. The master plan was strongly criticized because, beyond the capital investment, the elevated corridors would cause increased pollution, noise, darkness and pla-ces with high crime risk.

3. Mobility consultant Steer Davies highlighted that the cyclist infrastructure did not cover SEDEMA’s (Mexico’s environment council) standards and that the pu-blic blueprints did not specify where the bike lane would go. The company also warned the trusteeship about the insufficiency of public transportation infras-tructure, stating that the proposed Metrobus line (an articulated bus) would not meet user demands.

4. The project’s compliance with seismic standards was unclear and made more questionable by the passing of the city’s metro’s tunnels precisely underneath the location of the project.

5. The trusteeship planned to contract private security, likely enabling them to deny the right of access to citizens who were judged undesirable based on appearance, in other words, segregating certain segments of the population.

6. While Mexico City as a whole has great need for cultural regeneration projects to repair the fragmentation of the social fabric, the objective of the CCC seems mis-placed, as its location, in the words of David Ortega, planning scholar at ITESM, “...is well-served when it comes to transit, retail, and namely, green space…”6

With controversy roiling around the project, at the last minute Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera made a public statement promising he would “...respect the results of the public consultation and would keep nurturing citizens’ participation.” When the public consultation finally happened, according to a national newspaper a total of 22,370 people participated, only 4.8% of the total population of the neighborhood.7 The results were not surprising: Approximately two-thirds of voters rejected the pro-ject. At the time this book was published, in seeming respect for the public consulta-tion, the construction had not begun, and it is uncertain if it ever will. However, the construction of another elevated park has appeared on the outskirts of the city, and the government has announced the construction of ten similar “amenities” around the city, setting the precedent for how a local government can impose the private sector’s financial agendas in the guise of urban regeneration projects.8

There are many relevant conclusions to draw from this effort to transform urban decision-making into a citizenship-driven exercise, and the people of Mexico City should be proud of having made their voices heard in this matter. It sets an example of citizen empowerment and determines some characteristics to take into account when conceiving legible policy as a new paradigm for cities.

CIVIC INNOVATION, CITIZENSHIP INVOLVEMENT

While the public’s suspicions of the validity of the public consultation has its roots in common (and well justified) Latin American habit of distrusting the government, we should recognize it as a good civic exercise. Even if the methodology used (a de-mocratic vote) was not particularly innovative and despite the low voter turnout and

6 See http://www.citylab.com/design/2015/09/the-terrible-plan-for-mexico-citys-high-line-style-park/408010/7 See Robles, J. (2015, Dec 7). Dicen “no” al Corredor Cultural Chapultepec. El Universal. Retrieved from: http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/metropoli/df/2015/12/7/dicen-no-al-corredor-cultural-chapultepec 8 For further reference: http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/metropoli/df/2015/12/7/dicen-no-al-corre-dor-cultural-chapultepec

99highly flawed communication between government and citizens, it still managed to stopped the construction of the CCC, showing that the people’s voice was heard and taking us one step closer to the open processes and engaged community we aspire to. Change will not come if citizens do not start it.

THE PRECEDENT FOR AGENCY

The public consultation for CCC sets many precedents, and shows us a resounding exam-ple of how citizenship engagement can change a government’s decision. The public united against a common enemy, and this situation created an environment in which everyone’s opinion was important. Neighbors of the affected area gathered to discuss the situation; people outside of the neighborhood took part in demonstrations; various architectural offices presented alternative projects for discussion in open forums; social media vigorously embraced the subject (the hashtags #NoShopultepec and #AsíNo permeated online networks); and a debate summoned by the Instituto National Elec-toral (National Electoral Institute) gave both favoring and opposing groups the oppor-tunity to discuss three topics: transparency/accountability, public participation and the project itself. During the months this city-wide effort flourished, academia, civil society and government worked together towards a shared goal and created an atmos-phere of agency, for once, within our own city.

THESE THINGS TAKE TIME

The original timeframe imposed for the public consultation was far from ideal, and in my opinion, absurd, giving only one month to hear and consider the opinions of the public at large, make design iterations and approve a proposed project that would have an impact on the city for at least 100 years. While I don’t believe it should take six years, as did New York City’s High Line, which seems to have provided inspiration that guided the CCC, there must be a proper co-design process. First, local concerns and comments should be taken into account, then a project should be presented to all stakeholders, accompanied by a clear urban and financial impact plan, and then the iteration process takes place and continues until all problems are addressed in a transparent and coherent way. In addition, it is vital that the project be evaluated by an impartial third party. Corredor Cultural Chapultepec may have been many things, but it was not a cultural corridor. It was quite clearly a private development project that would not have be-nefitted the city nor its residents. There was no justification offered for building an elevated park next to the 847 hectares (almost 2,100 acres) of forest in Chapultepec Park, nor for why the city would need more “cultural” space in between the creative zones where the city’s most culturally vibrant neighborhoods are located. Holding up the success of the High Line as an example falls flat when we consider that park’s problems keeping the spaces under the freight rail line safe for everyone. And at root, we must remember that for the high line, neighbors and stakeholders were in the decision-making process from the beginning, and the project of the park was guided by the reuse, refurbishing and refreshing of decrepit infrastructure—not creating an elevated park from scratch! These facts make me question the professional values in practice at FR-EE and serve as pivotal points to emphasize the importance of architec-ture and of the architect itself as the one responsible for the physical manifestation of a legible policy in the urban environment.

In conclusion, architecture and architects have essential roles to play in the concep-tion and implementation of legible policies. They must facilitate and participate in a shared space with citizens, where all can interact, listen and understand each other to create a level playing field and shape urban decisions. This space is full of oppor-tunities for hosting public interactions and spontaneously engaging civilians with their social and built environments; if governments, developers, architects and the public are able to work together to create it, the architecture of our cities will stand as the physical manifestation of our legible policies.

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AN APPROACH TO A MUSEUM CITYBY BEGOÑA IRAZABAL, LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Artworks contain messages that can form powerful discourses, and art museums are sites where the public can participate in them, appreciating and reflecting on the work of great artists of all times. At art museums, visitors take in information rela-ted to history, sociology, anthropology and aesthetics, among many other subjects; they contemplate techniques, identify their lives in scenes that move them, feel pain, transgression, and other complex emotions while developing their understanding of socio-economic, political and religious contexts in different parts of the world at different moments of history.

What happens when we apply the concept of an art museum to the city in order to expand and improve our perception of our urban environments’ function in our dai-ly lives? How can the metaphor of a museum help us define the relationship between policy makers and end users and show us how can they relate? The intention of this text is to suggest an approach to a Museum City, exploring the roles of governments and citizens, evaluating who plays the parts of artist and curator and their relations-hip to the exhibits and the experience therein.

If we consider the policy maker, the government, as the curator of the Museum City, its public policies are works of art: the tools it uses to intervene in the experience and general discourse of the population. This rather conventional application of the metaphor makes rather evident what kind of Museum City will result. I propose swit-ching the role of the government, placing policy makers in the role of the artists and making citizens the curators, but leaving public policy as the works of art whose creation and implementation is a collaborative effort.

Urban innovation coexists in harmony with (and even manifests itself in) art. When potentialized by education, both can offer a message for every citizen, a provocation to act and think toward a better livable city. German-Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer says the museum is a school that explores studies its own relationship to education; his work is often directed toward the acquisition of knowledge through people’s abili-ty to freely make connections between ideas. Camnitzer confronts traditional modes of art contemplation, opening them to the process of questioning created by a work of art, and showing us how the art museum can play the role of the educator.

Art has the capacity to change the public space and the way we live in cities, but it is essential to define how we intend art to function in urban life. One of art’s grea-test potential contributions is how it can help make public policies more readable, understandable and engaging to the public. Looking at the issue of urban mobility, we should expect the government to offer good, functional public transportation for city inhabitants. They must encourage citizens to use it, without demanding or obli-gating us to do so—and one great way to bolster citizen acceptance and participation in public transit systems would be to employ the discursive possibilities of works of

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art along with the educational possibilities of the museum-city. When we look at the city as a platform for curated exhibits that provoke reflection and questions, we see how art can help change the way we perceive our environment. Curation, the deci-sion of what is exhibited and how, is a crucial question that arises; decisions must be made about how to use the principles of beauty, change, function and the many other concepts that help deliver a curatorial message. For this reason, it is vital that the Musuem City be interdisciplinary and why design is fundamental to the project to help communicate the messages of the artworks shown. Imagine a contemporary museum in which a performance piece invites citizens to ride bikes, in the process showing us how to be more sensitive to the cityscape and making us aware of the emotions of car drivers.

Who participates in the Museum City, and how? In the creation of legible policies, it makes sense to view the government’s as curator of the city, but it is essential that citizens also engage in shaping the policies and discussions that affect life in the city. Citizens have a multi-faceted role in the Museum City: We are both co-curators with the government and students learning from the city’s “blackboards,” including the many offered by technology—online networks and public spaces to draw and express our ideas and opinions—voting, writing, posting messages, for example, requesting the expansion of public transportation lines so that we may get further without a car. We can even collectively work as the artists of the Museum City, participating in projects that deepen understanding of the city and its residents, such as making a great transit map by painting the tires of bicycles in colors that indicate the area of the destinations towards which we are heading, creating a collective artwork that also offers important information for city planners. In these ways, users can be the “artists of legibility” for policy and the example they set is the work of art that others will contemplate.

To further understand the potential of the city as museum, the example of Mexico City museum Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros is helpful. Its Proyecto Fachada (Façade Project) program focuses on public art and maintains a curatorial agenda that exami-nes the complexity of contemporary artistic strategies related to the public dimension of the art, its social character and potential for political immersion. The program in-vites artists to intervene upon the façade of the Museum, which often translates into the extension of the façade to the street, with the aim of diversifying the concept of what is public in the surrounding neighborhood, employing a variety of media and exhibition formats to raise and debate questions about underlying social problems in the city’s cultural and public policies. The program, well established in its locale, is easy to replicate on a larger scale, and offers a beneficial and practical way for users to turn the city into a living, interactive museum driven by citizen engagement.

The Museum City promotes biodiversity in the general population, allowing the many “art movements” of different creeds, preferences and habits to help make the city more sustainable in aspects of mobility or ecology. Participation is key to citizens becoming artists in a Museum City, setting examples for others in order to promo-te, strengthen or disseminate a policy, using oral traditions and word-of-mouth to encourage legibility and engagement on the part of fellow citizens. Understanding the city as a museum can help individuals to overcome the expectation of personal benefit and place greater priority on social benefit, by looking at and understanding policy it in a creative way. Ultimately, rather than looking to determine which body within the city plays what role at the Museum, we should see the Museum City as the diverse ecosystem in which we would like to engage in a number of roles to ensure that our policies are dynamic, creative and legible to all.

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PRACTICING LEGIBILITY

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SHIFTING THE BALANCE— DESIGN FOR EQUITABLE CITIESBY ANAB JAIN, VYTAUTAS JANKAUSKAS AND JON ARDERN, SUPERFLUX “Modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a civilizing mission.” This quote from the seminal work of James C. Scott (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed) outlines one of the nemeses of con-temporary democracies: lack of transparency. Scott proposes that the central métier of modern statecraft is to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that sim-plified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and the prevention of rebellion (1998). All efforts—from application of novel systems which name and classify places, roads, people, property and now the collection of citizens’ private data—are mechanisms by which the state renders its people and landscapes legible to political ends. While the public is becoming more and more legible and exposed to governments, the inner workings of the state, how policies are formulated and decisions made, often remain, whether intentionally or not, largely complex and opaque to the public. In this essay we reflect on our learning around current policy making and citizen engagement approaches in London and Mexico City for the Legible Policies project. We then explore possibilities for using some of our successful design methods and experiments to help in creating a more equal footing between those in power and those who are meant to trust that power.

UNDERSTANDING NOTABLE RIFTS IN POLICYMAKING While policy making strategies in London and Mexico City are very different, and in both cases difficult to penetrate, we observed systemic rifts common to both. One of the key pain points for civil servants internally, as suggested by policy makers we spoke to, and outlined clearly in the Institute of Government’s Report (Hallsworth et al., 2011) is the gap between theory and practice in policy making. The lack of ca-pacity and opportunity to adapt policies to local or changing circumstances means that in practice, policy making processes remain difficult to explain, even for those who make them. The report points to an urgent need to introduce more iterative design-led approaches to policymaking that can take into account rapid social, eco-nomic and technological change, increased citizen engagement and political unrest. We also observed discontent in the tokenism around ‘active’ citizen participation in governance processes. Sherry R. Arnstein in her important paper Ladder of Citizen Par-ticipation (1969) labelled this practice as ‘placation’—the co-option of hand-picked ‘worthy

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citizens’ onto committees, allowing them to advise or plan ad infinitum but retaining the right to judge the legitimacy or feasibility of the advice to the power holders. The London Plan (2015), a long-term strategy for the city of London, which is legally drafted and finally versio-ned by the Mayor is a recent and ongoing example of placation. Consultation sessions with local councils and citizen unions are held in order to receive feedback. But, there is no obligation for the Mayor’s Office to take suggestions from these sessions into account. For instance, an 80% affordable housing (London Plan, pol. 3.10, 2015) prices threshold had been introduced in a draft for the currently approved London Plan. The decision was turned down by several local boroughs, based on an indepen-dent planning inspector’s report which stated that local authorities should be able to determine their own local affordable rent levels to meet local housing needs. The Mayor allegedly ignored the report and included the policy in the final version of London Plan. This resulted in a legal action (Freeman, 2014) by nine councils against the Mayor’s office. Another systemic error is the misalignment between the policy’s long term benefits to the city and its citizens, and citizens’ aspirations in the short term. Often this is because there are no sustained dialogues to discuss the visions behind such a policy. For instance, in Mexico City, the introduction of parking meters brought in much criticism. The government’s intent was to reduce car usage, eliminate the shadow economy of nontaxable local franeleros as well as collect money for local infrastruc-tural improvements. Unfortunately, citizens did not see the benefits of such strategy, (Morse, 2015). Shop owners in the city centre were worried that the presence of par-king meters outside their shops would reduce clientele. Regular commuters were afraid of losing their habitual parking spaces, previously secured by befriended fra-neleros. Further confusion ensued because of the lack of transparency around actual spending on the implementation of the policy. While the authorities claim that as much as 30% of the collected funds were invested in local area infrastructures, data shows that in 2015 only about 11% of public spendings have been accounted for, and the Supreme Court has ruled out a necessary audit. (Morse, 2015)

Fig. 1. Residents in Coyoacan march down the streets protesting the city govern-ment’s plan to install parking meters in their neighborhood. (2014)

109 What becomes obvious in these examples is that whilst policy making has good in-tent, in reality citizens often feel alienated from the process and lack the appropriate knowledge and tools that would create mutual trust and affect change. Here, we use ‘legible’ as a term that is more than just making invisible or complex policy layers le-gible. Instead, legibility would mean the creation of a shared understanding of gover-nance and political processes, for all stakeholders, above all citizens. It should make it easier to understand what influence and agency citizens have within the system, what tools and capacities can help act on that agency, and how citizen input beco-mes actionable through sustained dialogue and transparent feedback loops. If this is one of the key ambitions of the Legible Policies project, then first of all, we need to acknowledge how complex and misunderstood the term ‘citizen’ is in contemporary democracies, in order to better understand the changing notions of citizenship.

CHANGING NOTIONS OF CITIZENSHIP (BEING A CITIZEN) In contemporary terms, citizens are members of a political community: They can exercise their rights and power to participate in the affairs of the city, voice opinions while withholding their unique multiple identities and can, most importantly, in-fluence change (Jones, Gaventa, 2002). If we go right back to the notion of Polis, the involvement in the affairs of the city defines the modern day citizen’s identity to a large extent (Polis n.d. In Wikipedia, 2016). We know today how elitist and difficult that ambitious vision of citizenship is. These changing definitions of citizen and citi-zenship are often at odds with the everyday lived realities of people. Does the term ci-tizen mean anything more than paying taxes, voting (occasionally, with discontent), and the fragmented opportunities to express their opinions through various media? Do most people care enough to actually volunteer their time to better understand, and when possible participate in the workings of the state? As we began our research, we traced a particular trajectory of active citizen enga-gement in both cities. It leads us to believe that there is desire and intent, within large groups of people, to affect change. Mexico City’s history of authoritarianism has created a deeply engraved culture of regular protest as a means by which citi-zens question the decisions and actions of the government. Between 2013-2014, there have been 2302 registered manifestations in Mexico City, averaging 6.3 a day. (Ortuño, 2015). From the Suffragettes to the CND marches in the 1980s to the recent anti-war and student protests, London’s history too, is replete with instances of relentless citi-zen demands for voice and power. (List of Riots in London. In Wikipedia. 2015).

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Fig. 2. A local taxi driver paints ‘Uber Out’ on the back windshield of his car during a protest in Mexico City on May 25. (2015)

Fig. 3. Activists and residents gathered for a Reclaim Brixton protest in April against gentrification. (2015) Today, we see a steady rise in the number of citizen-led organisations advocating for people’s input in policy making processes. For instance, London’s Just Space, has orga-nised its own working groups with local citizens, and together they intend to propose an alternate London Plan. The plan will be introduced directly to the new Mayor, on his first day of service, right after the upcoming elections (Just Space, 2016). Some earlier adjustments (Just Space, 2012), proposed by Just Space and their partners to the currently approved London Plan, have also been taken into consideration by the Mayor. The Open Government (2015) is an international initiative with numerous go-vernmental, NGO and citizen-led organisations who come together to propose an al-ternate National Action Plan based on broad and participative engagement with civil society. The International Association for Public Participation (2016) offers worldwide consulting on citizen engagement benefits for governments, civil society organisa-

111tions, and industry. From within the government too, several programs have been created to encourage transparency. Policy Lab’s Open Policy Making (2014) initiative has published a toolkit (2016) and techniques policy makers can use to create more open and user led policy. Other similar initiatives are the Smart London Commu-nity Engagement (2016) proposal and Mexico City’s Presupuesto Participativo (2015), a promising drive to introduce new policies to citizens. The Mapaton CDMX (p. 121) project is a great example of how citizen participation can generate data that would otherwise be impossible to gather, thus closing the loop between data generation and data consumption.

Fig. 4, 5, 6. Mapatón CDMX. (2016)

A LIBRARY OF DESIGN EXPERIMENTS These initiatives have created awareness and raised questions about accountability and transparency. But there is an urgent need for many more creative, bottom-up and inclusive methods for a shared pathos for multiple actors. We would like to draw on our own research and design practice to suggest an exploratory set of experiments that are more profoundly grounded in actual practice, so that all stakeholders may gain greater trust in generating and implementing policies. Our design and research practice focuses on generating alternate visions of the future by bringing in the voice of multiple stakeholders and communities. Examples of such methodology from our work include projects like Power of 8 (Superflux, 2009), Lilo-rann (2010), Synbio Tarot Cards (2012), Mangala for All (2015), Port Fiction (2015) and Failed States (2014). Increasingly we find that this design-led approach of creating ex-periential, inclusive, plural futures is proving valuable for governments and public sec-tor organisations. For instance, we are currently working with City of Eindhoven (Smart Council, 2016) to design strategies for participatory smart cities, as well as the Policy Lab in the Cabinet Office (2014), to use speculative design to create more inclusive policies for the future of rail transport. Based on this experience, we propose five experiments in the policy making process that could work alongside current methods.

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1. POLITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY Political ethnography is not a new method, but we would like to enhance it with spe-cific design tools to aid insight gathering and dissemination. In our experiment, po-litical ethnography becomes a means by which unbiased third party actors study the direct inner workings of state actors and political institutions, as well as the ‘grey zones’ of clandestine political activity (Auyero, 2007). Such activity, encou-raged by academic and research institutions, could provide a deeper understanding of policy making processes, the evidence and intent behind decision-making, and po-tential implications of those decisions. Where possible, audio and video recordings of various civil servants and policy makers could become powerful emotive mechanis-ms by which citizens understand the aspirations and even the vulnerability of those in whom they trust. Most importantly, such activity would display a willingness for political actors to become participants in making their own work legible, rather than asking citizens to actively participate in governance processes. For instance, Labora-torio para la Ciudad continually document their urban experiments and make them publicly accessible. (2016) Object-driven design research is a successful experiential method we have used for our ethnographic work in which diegetics and prototypes are used to provoke responses. Alongside observations and interviews, by looking and even touching actual props, participants are encouraged to imagine new possibilities. These often speculative prototypes help ask ‘what if’ and ‘as if’ questions, giving people the space to develop opinions, get involved and commit to the conceit. Within the context of political ethnography, creating tactile props such as visual diagrams of alternate po-licy process, or new versions of existing policies, could act as valuable provocations.

Fig. 7, 8. Superflux: Mangala for All (2015)

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Fig. 9, 10, 11, 12. Superflux: Synbio Tarot Cards (2012)

2. DISSEMINATION TACTICS It will be critical to ensure that the insights from the political ethnography work are widely accessible. One possibility to achieve this is to redesign the traditional tools of political campaigning as it is a familiar and accessible format. For instance, a tactical dissemination toolkit could include templates for flyers, posters, stickers and notices which could be filled in with key findings and placed on public noticeboards, cafes, libraries, town halls and pubs. We imagine local councils, citizen-led initiatives, and numerous non-governmental organisations would be keen to try such low-cost tools and become early adopters. Several of the ideas that emerged during our workshop in Mexico City explore such dissemination tactics. Prices in Public, for example, are stickers on public infrastructure which enumerate their costs and funding sources, Parking Meter Monthly Updates would show how much money was collected and how much (and where) it was spent. Also, Money Off, is a prop highlighting that govern-ment is providing bikes, parking and much more at highly subsidised rates. Apart from visible stickering, cheap and accessible digital tools could also be designed to help people understand the multiple hidden layers of the city and its infrastructure.

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Several artists and designers have successfully explored such analogue tactics. Candy Chang’s project I Wish This Was (2012, see fig. 9), used a very simple stickering tool, which said I Wish This Was—on vacant buildings across New Orleans to invite resi-dents to easily share their hopes for these spaces. Anab Jain’s project Yellow Chair Stories (2005, see fig. 10, 11) became a shared community space for neighbours to meet and debate local issues in exchange for a free WiFi connection.

Fig. 13. Candy Chang. I Wish This Was (2012).

Fig. 13-14. Anab Jain. Yellow Chair Stories (2005) Another highly successful and effective way of raising awareness and visibility about opaque political procedures dissemination tactic is performance, either in the street or theatre. The prolific Dutch actors’ group Wunderbaum (Redcat, 2012) creates ex-ceptional, performative presentations that confront audiences with the realities of politics and citizenship.

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Fig. 15. Wunderbaum: Songs at the End of the World (2012)

3. SPECULATIVE POLICYMAKING One of the biggest rifts in the current system is the lack of shared future visions be-tween the state and its citizens. When a policy needs to be implemented in London, there is a consultation process through which people can comment and respond (London Elects, 2015). However, such public feedback often comes too late in the policy-making process. Subsequently, implementation of a new policy comes as an unpleasant surprise to people who have no mechanisms to reverse it. As we saw with the parking meters in Mexico City, there is a notable disparity around the notions of greater good, dividing the visions of policymakers and the public.

We strongly believe that there is a clear need for safe spaces, both physical and concep-tual, where future policies can be openly extrapolated and their implications considered.

Fig. 16. Superflux. Drone Aviary: Traffic Drone. (2015)

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An environment is needed where alternate future visions and aspirations of citizens could be expressed without the constraints of existing socio-political, eco-nomic and legal conditions that can bind them to present day lived realities. When people envision such futures it becomes easier to also envision and understand their consequences. Furthermore, they feel encouraged to create and share their aspira-tions, as well as their doubts around particular policies.

The practice of envisioning futures via speculative design can be a powerful tool, particularly worth considering in this context. Presented through visual aids, the proposed policy becomes a drawing board where relevant stakeholders and citizens can annotate their own suggestions through pictures, words, photographs and much more. It becomes a vehicle for creating an open and editable policy for the fu-ture, paving the way for an iterative approach to participatory governance, where

policies can be publicly versioned through collaborative visioning.

117Fig. 17, 18. Superflux: Power of 8 (2009) One immediate opportunity to conduct small speculative experiments could be around Mexico City’s Ecobike scheme (CDMX, 2010 currently used by specific seg-ments of primarily young people. During our field visit we observed numerous ways in which people currently transport small numbers of good (walking and pushing small trolleys, walking with objects on their heads etc). Are there opportunities to speculate jugaad-like hacks such as modular addon or foldable attachments around the ecobikes that might be useful for these groups? An inclusive and iterative specu-lative design process could yield surprising results, and in turn make the designed system more culture and context sensitive.

Fig. 19, 20. Ecobike Scheme, Mexico City operating since 2010. Modified bikes for carrying goods, Mexico City (2016)

The current London Plan proposes big improvements to the cycling infrastructure. (London Plan, pol. 6.9, 2015) Another long-term strategy that figures in that same plan, however, is to increase the number of parking lots around the city (London Plan, pol. 6.13, 2015). The two policies, part of the same long-term plan, clearly contradict each other. Parking lots, notably in residential developments, are in some cases pro-jected to be increased up to 100%. Sustrans, a charity for sustainable mobility, stresses that there is high risk of encouraging the use of two or more cars with consequent impacts on local congestion and pollution, while discouraging cycling and walking (Sustrans, 2015). Here, speculative design approaches could become useful mechanis-ms in exploring future mobility scenarios by involving different stakeholders.

Citizens who commute to central areas for working purposes, as well as families who use cars for longer-distance weekend trips, along with mobility experts, ethnogra-phers and designers, could be invited to participate. Such an experiment is not meant to replace official Consultation processes, but instead be used alongside these proces, or perhaps work some of the methods we describe into the consultation processes. Recently, the Inclusive City Roadmap (Kaufman, 2016) by City of Cambridge has adop-ted an exemplary creative, interactive process to engage citizens in collaborating on urban planning projects. Ultimately, this experiment becomes a generative space of future dreams and conflicts where citizens and those in power can meet on an equal footing.

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Fig. 21, 22. Cambridge worked with Interboro Partners to design this mobile engage-ment station. (2016)

4. CONTEXT-SENSITIVE SENSE-MAKING How do Working Groups process the rich qualitative data gathered in the futuring process and experiments? Thoughtfully designed filtering and visualising methods can work effectively alongside traditional sense-making techniques to help policy makers pick weak signals from the noise and work towards a sensitive, ethical strategy for decision making. The experiment here would be to design a series of frameworks and filters that emerge after the futures visioning exercise rather than predetermined, generalised filtering. For instance, a game-changing technological breakthrough in emission efficiency or the failure to reach a major global political agreement for sustainable development can both be used as context-sensitive fil-ters for discussions in terms of specific policies. This can become a robust tool for addressing the messy ground-level realities of policy making. Furthermore, specific filtering would encourage decision makers not to resort to comforting narratives that impose specious order on a complex reality, but feel confident in adopting emergent design practices for iterative policy making.

5. TRANSPARENT FEEDBACK LOOPS One of the most important aspects of making policies legible is to ensure that new governance models in democracy move past tokenism. When citizens who choose to volunteer their time achieve a sense of agency and ownership toward the activity, it is imperative that they be kept abreast of the translation of that activity into a policy, and know how their involvement aids in the final decision-making processes. Simple tools of design and media can help make the translation, decision making and communication processes more open, and ensure that contributors retain their sense of ownership and agency. Debates can be tweeted, videos streamed, where pos-sible, with the possibility for people to respond in real time. Even if people don’t watch, the fact that it is being streamed can give them the sense that the intention is transparency rather than closed doors. Some practices (parliamentlive.tv) already include live streams from parliamentary sessions and interactive means for citizens to simulate voting on legislations.

119CONCLUSIONS Through the experiments we have outlined we wanted to sketch out new opportu-nities for addressing some of the systemic rifts in policy making by giving all actors who have a stake in shaping our cities a voice and safe spaces for creative drea-ming. In order to understand the direct value of these experiments, we would need to conduct ground level, small scale trials. If designed sensitively, ethically and with respect for individual privacy, such safes spaces can support and encourage shared ownership of ideas and in turn, a bigger stake in governance processes. Any such experimental or out-of-the-textbook repertoire of tools will need immense political will, conviction and suspension of disbelief. To acknowledge the need for any such alternatives would mean acknowledging the need for a world where power is more evenly distributed between the state, non-state actors and citizens.

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A CASE FROM MEXICO CITY: LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD’S MAPATÓN CDMXBY RODRIGO TÉLLEZ, LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Laboratorio para la Ciudad’s Mapatón project was mentioned frequently during the collaborative workshops in Mexico City, as team members from both London and Mexico saw in it many examples of the practice of legibility; similarly, it is referenced in many essays in this publication. Here, we provide a detailed account of this experi-ment in civic innovation: its origins, results, and how it stands out as a model of how governmental processes can be made more legible to citizens by involving them in the resolution of complex problems that affect their everyday lives.

Mexico City is home to an incredible diversity of people and cultures, but it is hinde-red by infrastructural deficiencies. In a city of such big scale (the metropolitan area measures 4,887 m2) transportation is one of its main problems. Finding ways to im-prove how people move within the city requires imagination and cooperation from decision makers and society alike.

The megalopolis lacks an updated map of the approximately 1,500 bus routes that circulate within—and well beyond—its limits; it is calculated that around 14 million trips are made everyday. Keeping up-to-date, quality information about this system represents a task that seems almost impossible to tackle. Conventional processes for

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the generation of mobility data are time-consuming and expensive. Consulting firms are hired by the government to provide this service, this implies contracts for hun-dreds of thousands of dollars and a trail of red tape that makes an already arduous task more ineffective. In an effort to find an alternative solution to the issue, Labora-torio para la Ciudad brought together and managed a group of 12 organizations that included NGOs and other government offices to explore possible courses of action. The result was Mapatón CDMX: a crowdsourcing experiment to map the city’s bus routes through civic collaboration, gamification and technology.

The development of the Mapatón project was not easy; it took roughly a year’s time and a series of pilot tests involving hundreds of volunteers to design the application. Also, it was vital to develop a communication strategy that could call the attention of the public and persuade as many Mexico City inhabitants as possible to collaborate with the gover-nment in the city-wide exercise. At a time where trust in governmental institutions is pe-rilously low, the process of building mutual trust between civil society and government was essential to enable both to work together to solve a common problem.

The premise of the game was simple: to map routes of licenced public transport (bu-ses, minibuses and vans, the city’s most widely-used form of transportation) from start to finish. Users scored points according to the routes they travelled, which was monitored and recorded via an app for Android devices that gathered GPS data from the user inside the bus. Mappers could participate individually or form teams with friends and family. As an incentive, the participants with the highest scores earned cash prizes or electronic devices.

Citizens had a two-week period in which to participate in the game, after which a group of volunteers went through the collected data to validate routes and clean up the complete database. A total of 2,765 prospect routes were mapped, of those, 1,763 were considered useful and were entered into the final database.

The experiment of the Mapatón was a success by any measure. 3,996 people registe-red to use the app and 736 teams were formed. A total of 51,308 kms (31,881 mi) were mapped, a distance that amounts to 1.2 times the circumference of the Earth. Users spent a total of 685,188 minutes (translating to 475 days) actively mapping. All this demonstrates that citizens had an authentic interest to participate with the local government in finding ways to improve life in their city.

It is truly groundbreaking that in a period of two months local authorities gathered information that could have taken more than a year to obtain through traditional methods, and at a fraction of the cost. Additionally, resorting to these methods would have implied some kind of ownership, and therefore restricted public access, to the

123information from whoever covered the cost of gathering the data, while the database created from the Mapatón results is available to anyone through an API and in Gene-ral Transit Feed Specification format.

Just one day after the database was published, PIDES Innovación Social (an organiza-tion that was a member of the Mapatón work group), in collaboration with Google, hosted a hackathon that awarded cash prizes to teams who came up with innovative digital solutions using the Mapatón database. And we at Laboratorio para la Ciudad continue to run into ways people are using the database for different purposes. For example, urbanist José Manuel Landin used it to map the frequency with which bus-ses pass through a certain route, representing a synthesis of information that the city had never had access to before the Mapatón.

The information gathered by the game’s participants is of value to a variety of po-tential users. City planners, academics and the local government see the database as an important tool to make better informed decisions and create multi-layered visua-lizations and maps. For entrepreneurs, it provides free, unrestricted access to infor-mation that could significantly improve applications focused on mobility and other digital products.

Future iterations of Mapatón are as yet undeveloped, but the prospects are exciting. The work group is thinking of ways to make the app available to other cities around the world that face similar transportation problems, in order to provide them an example they can use to organize their own version of the game. However, releasing the source code of the app is not an option, as it would allow anyone to tamper with the algorithm that rewards points.

The Mapatón in itself did not set a path to a particular public policy; one could actua-lly argue that the need for such an exercise is the result of a series of very complicated policies (among many other factors) put into place decades ago. But it did prove that providing citizens with the right tools to transform their environment and an attitu-de of full disclosure and transparency from the government sets the scene for new, different and certainly very positive forms of citizen engagement.

The Mapatón CDMX work group consists of Laboratorio para la Ciudad, Centros de Transferencia Modal (Cetram), the Secretaría de Movilidad (Semovi), PIDES Innova-ción Social, Krieger Electronics, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP México), Planeación & Desarrollo SC, M+urbano, Transconsult, Ally and Urban Launch Pad. The project was supported by the Hewlett Foundation and the British Embassy in Mexico.

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HACKS AND PROBESPlayful, fast-paced and intense ideation sessions are an important tool within urban laboratories, allowing for concentrated discussion and speculative thought that ideally functions as a conceptual provocation, as well as a way to gain insights (both logical and spontaneous) that help point the way forward towards established goals. Dynamic group exercises to propose and conceptualize possible solutions that are imaginative and en-gaging lets participants start anchoring previous theoretical discussions into practical realities, without losing the freedom that comes from imaginative and highly intuitive thinking, exploring the outer edges of ideas and paradigms. As part of the London-Mexico collaboration, the binational, multidisciplinary team held several of these sessions, proposing “hacks” and “probes” informed by the inves-tigation of Legible Policy, sparking discussion among the team members about con-cept implementation. This idea session was not meant to propose finalized ideas, but rather serve as a space of joint reflection and bridge-building among disciplines, in addition to being part of the methodology to register initial thoughts so that teams could later identify common interests in projects to be further developed and scaled in the future.

First the team chose five problematics faced by modern cities on which to focus, lis-ted as follows:

• GOVERNMENT SPENDING AND ACCOUNTABILITY This topic concerns how the government spends its budgets, how those deci-sions are communicated or represented to citizens and how the processes can become more transparent.

• VISIONS OF THE CITY This encompasses the concept of the city as a whole seen through the eyes of its citizens.

• HOW DO PEOPLE MAKE DECISIONS? This topic explores the reasons and behaviors that influence how the popula-tion makes decisions, and experiments with creating changes in those patterns of choices.

• WHAT KIND OF USER AM I? This area seeks to understand the behaviour of citizens, their daily habits and how can that information be used to better the function of the city.

• COLLECTIVE DISCUSSION ABOUT TRANSPORT Here we thought about how citizens can effectively communicate and share their transport experiences with each other in order to promote the usage of public transportation over personal automobiles.

With these these topics established, Anab Jain of Superflux led the exercise, separa-ting the participants into small groups charges with inventing hacks and probes for each city problem: ideas that proposed new ways to fix them. The suggestions from each group ranged from highly practical to highly utopian, and after discussing the feasibility and utility of each suggested hack and probe the group voted on the most promising or implementable options, generating a list of potential projects explore in future collaborations. Below is a list of some of the most promising ideas that came out of this exercise.

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127DEFINITIONS HACK THE DESIGN OF SMALL CHANGES OR THE ADDITION OF A PLUG-IN TO AN EXISTING SYSTEM, CAUSING IT TO WORK IN A DIFFERENT WAY OR ADDING AN EXTRA LAYER OF PARTICIPATION OR ENGAGEMENT TO THE SYSTEM.

PROBES THE INSERTION OF MICRO-EXPERIMENTS IN A SOCIAL SPACE, CAPABLE OF TESTING SPECIFIC OR PARTIAL HYPOTHESIS AND GATHERING QUALITATIVE DATA THROUGH OBSERVATION OF ITS RIPPLE EFFECTS (“WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF…”)

GOVERNMENT SPENDING AND ACCOUNTABILITY

HACK

Inputs and outputsUse parking meters to display information about ways money collected from parking fees is used. Allow users to understand clearly where the resources end up. Make physical elements of infrastructure communicate with the public.

PROBES

Bugging the GovernmentPlace anonymous survey stations within government offices and civil service buildings to measure how much government staff actually knows about expenditures and responsibilities. For example, put up a poster with a photo of a nearby park and ask the question, “How much does it cost per month to maintain this park?”, or inquire if people know how many mobile law enforcement units are on the street. Rotate the questions asked to cover different branches of city govern-ment and responsibilities.

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VISIONS OF THE CITY

HACKS

Mini-ModelIn the office of each city delegation, make a scale model of the area that citizens can use to mark issues, problems, events and other information to be shared with fellow users and local government. PROBES

Pop-Up Survey Shop A mobile pop-up stand or kiosk where the public can go to ask questions, request solutions or propose alternative visions for mobility. Its location changes every day of the week like an itinerant market.

Vote with your Feet

Host a massive event in a public plaza where the public can express their preferences about issues affecting the city by participating in large-scale, life-size graphic representations. People can show their support for different policy decisions and solutions by standing in bar charts or other formations that track different proposals. Take aerial photos to observe what proposals receive the most support.

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HOW DO PEOPLE MAKE DECISIONS?

HACKS

Bike-cessories Have bike-sharing programs offer accessories that adapt the way you can use a bike, so that a wider range of users can participate. Offer car seats for children, baskets or small trailers to transport heavy objects, and other accessories whose use can be tracked to identify what kinds of users borrow bikes.

Free Transit Host free transportation days when users don’t have to pay to encourage more people to adopt public transportation. Alternatively, offer random incentives for using public transportation like having free ticket winners or a lottery that metro users can win. PROBES

Amazing RaceMake a game for the public in which participants gather at one point and are asked to travel to a different part of the city. The first to arrive wins a prize, but all the users have to track their routes using an app that registers their movements and use of transportation, allowing organizers to examine how people make choices about getting around and which routes are the most efficient.

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WHAT KIND OF USER AM I?

HACK

Good Citizenship Tracking AppDistribute a free app with which citizens can post their good civic deeds, from carpooling or choosing to bike instead of drive to voting or attending neighborhood meetings. Allow users to see what good deeds are happening in their vicinity and in other parts of the city. PROBES

Work on Your WayOffer free WiFi on public transportation, but to access it each user must register anonymous information about his or her profession in order to understand what types of users choose different modes of transport.

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COLLECTIVE DISCUSSION ABOUT TRANSPORTATION

HACKS

Water Cooler Transportation MapsPlace maps and dry erase boards near office water coolers so that employees can share the routes they prefer to use to get to work or advise their colleagues about potential delays due to obstructions. Help people identify with whom they could carpool or share their commutes with.

PROBES

City Travel HacksCreate an app that gathers user-generated data and incident reports to make recommendations of how to best use public transportation to get around the city.

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THE VALUE OF DISRUPTION: A REFLECTION ON COLLABORATION AND THOUGHT EXERCISESBY IVÁN ABREU, CENTRO DE DISEÑO, CINE Y TELEVISIÓN

Present and future problems related to mobility in Mexico City, as well as the legi-bility of public policy that sets out solutions to those problems, were the focus of for three days of intensive work for a small, multidisciplinary and binational (UK/Mexico) group of which I formed a part. Faced with the urgent issues of present-day urban centers, our projections tended toward the immediate (rather than long-term) future, and we concentrated mainly on contemporary dysfunctions.

The groups’ work confirmed my belief in several principles. First, disruption is po-litics, and ideas that irrupt into the established map of beliefs activate individuals, politicizing them. This is a desirable procedure in contexts of art, design and techno-logy, but it features less commonly in public policy, despite the fact that its capacity to create exceptions reactivates interest in a topic, and its potential to affect the cu-rrent state of things makes everyone want to know how much the implementation of a disruptive idea will favor to their day-to-day existence. Second, it affirmed to me that attention has political value. Without it, it is not possible to start a process of change within social or communitarian dynamics that largely depend on the will of individuals, and less on the conditioning of their behaviors by the exercise of the law.

Perhaps, thanks to the profiles of the members of the work group—designers, artists, architects, curators, researchers, and academics linked to creativity—we all agreed on a disruptive approach to the problem of mobility, as well as the indispensable com-munication and awareness-raising of the problem. Ideas floated included the design of new uses for modes of transport to make long commuting times useful; payment systems in public transport in which the user chooses which type of mobility their fee will go to support; mechanisms that make the uses of resources transparent; real-ti-me data on the road network embedded in objects; economic value given in exchan-ge for civic conduct. These were just some of the many approaches, some of them so radical they seemed to come from a writer’s imagination, and others, more concrete, thought up with a view to making them doable. Creativity was an important element in the equation, to think up solutions, and communicate them effectively.

This brings us to the legibility of a public policy—its clarity, its ability to engage the public, that aspect of communication that complements the systemic conception of a solution, added to variables that are architectural, related to design, financial, legal, and many more.

Legibility is a mediation for the true objective, which is to mobilize or activate the conduct of individuals that promotes a public policy. Comprehensible, however, does

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not mean actionable; this is only the first step towards being able to count on the will of the individual and make them take consequent action. This is why, during the sessions, many ideas were orientated towards an understanding of legibility in the sense of a conversation between institution and community—a conversation that will shape public policy over time and, for this reason, in an open and iterative way, will allow the elements of the equation to be moved from public policies to politicized publics.

To politicize in this context does not necessarily imply disagreement. It assumes that indifference is less productive than involvement, and that part of the problem stems precisely from indifference. It also assumes that the complicity of individuals with public institutions and policies takes place principally at a micro-political level: fami-ly, friends, private spaces, and the habitable space of design—many ideas addressed this approach. Ideas related to micro-mobility, trying to bulwark and promote the responsibility of the individual who in the end has the capacity to advance larger-sca-le community processes.

In conclusion, the thought exercises touched on above were made possible by the synergy between fields of work that address social problems from distinct metho-dologies: on the one side, fields like design, art, architecture, affective computing, trend researchers, etc., and on the other, governmental institutions. The first start with the individual, her ergonomics and affective relation with her environment, as well as the value of innovative disruptions; the second start with the community and basic concepts. These are two different approaches, one micro-political and one macro-social; both, however, allow for the construction of the individual from indi-vidual relations.

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APPLYING LEGIBILITY WITHIN THE CITY’S COMPLEX SYSTEMS: MOBILITY IN MEXICO CITY

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SYSTEMIC DESIGN AND WRITABLE POLICYJORGE CAMACHO, MACHINA SPECULATRIX

It is most likely a case of selective attention—CENTRO has just launched a new course in Systems Thinking for the Master of Arts in Design Studies program—but lately I have noticed all kinds of signals pointing to a general reappraisal of the systemic perspective in the field of design. This very publication (not to mention the project of Laboratorio para la Ciudad as a whole) serves as one more.

A few weeks ago, IDEO—arguably the most important design and innovation firm in the world—announced their integration with Kyu Collective. Presumably, the intention (beyond financial considerations) is to bring their human-centered pers-pective “to tackle today’s toughest systems challenges… education, government, healthcare.”1 Alex Ryan, a Canadian practitioner in charge of Alberta CoLab, “the world’s first standing systemic design team in government,” is known to be wri-ting what may become the first monograph focused on the theory and practice of the emerging field of systemic design.2 Perhaps more symbolically, a new wave of appreciation for the ideas and work of R. Buckminster Fuller, including his call for a “comprehensive anticipatory design science,” seems to be sweeping the art and design world once more. There may be a twofold motivation behind this trend: On one hand, individuals and organizations could be realizing that in or-der to tackle the world’s most complex problems we require sensibilities that transcend the standard responses of politicians and technologists; on the other hand, designers themselves seem to be equipped with a newfound confidence to tackle more ambitious challenges after successful strides into the design of beha-viors, experiences, services and organizations.

Be that as it may, the invitation to participate in this bi-national collaboration came as a timely opportunity to assume the systemic-designerly mindset. After all, urban policies and interventions may be the paradigmatic example of the type of problems that systemic design is claiming for itself: large-scale, complex, unbounded, contes-ted, socio-technical and ecological at once. Roberto Ascencio, from Laboratorio para la Ciudad, did an excellent work in his introduction to the workshop, presenting us with these challenges as they appear in mobility programs recently implemented in Mexico City: ecoParq, ECOBICI, Hoy No Circula, the new traffic law, etc. The tensions between short and long term objectives, micro and macro scales, interior and exte-rior perspectives, may prove to be tractable only by means of the aforementioned mindset. Systemic design is emerging (or, perhaps more precisely, re-emerging) at the intersec-tion of systemics and design—both of which enjoy a convoluted history that exceeds by far the scope of this text. The former refers to a family of theories, frameworks 1 Brown, Tim. (2016). The Next Big Thing in Design. Available at: https://medium.com/ideo-stories/the-next-big-thing-in-design-513522543a6f#.z2l1y173p2 Ryan, Alex. (2016). What is Systemic Design? Available from: https://medium.com/the-overlap/what-is-sys-temic-design-f1cb07d3d837#.hfttz3lfy

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and practices related by at least some of the following principles: a notion of system as a whole composed of interacting things, the idea that the universe is a system of systems all the way down, and the conviction that certain abstract models are useful for understanding the structures and dynamics of a wide variety of concrete systems. Design, on the other hand, following Herbert Simon’s definition, refers to those cour-ses of action (formalized in methods and practices) “aimed at changing existing situa-tions into preferred ones.”3 In this way, as Ryan argues, “systemic design is a mash-up of two dangerous ideas”: the idea of interdependence and the idea of intentionality.4

Given the comprehensive ambitions of systemics, all design, strictly speaking, should be considered a systemic endeavour. And yet, the label “systemic design” is current-ly being applied not simply to design that incorporates systems thinking but, more precisely, to design practices tasked with challenges in which a systemic framework is non-trivial. “Systemic design as we define it here,” Ryan writes elsewhere, “is inten-ded for situations characterised by complexity, uniqueness, value conflict, and ambi-guity over objectives.”5 In a similar vein, Don Norman launched the kindred project DesignX arguing that “the major problems facing humanity today involve complex systems of stakeholders and issues. These challenges often involve large numbers of people and institutions intermingled with technologies, especially those of commu-nication, computation, and transportation.”6 For some authors, the fact that the de-sign profession has unlocked this new set of challenges represents nothing short of a new stage in its development, namely Design 4.0 or “design for social transfor-mation... design for complex societal situations, social systems, policy-making, and community design.”7

Mobility in the Mexican megalopolis is a systemic, DesignX or Design 4.0 challenge if there ever was one. To talk about large scale, Mexico City is one of the largest ag-glomerations in the world with 8.6 million inhabitants (or 18.3 if we consider the whole metropolitan area) and growing at 1.7% annually.8 The STC Metro transports around 4.2 million passengers, the bus RTP network carries 750 thousand people and the taxi system undertakes 1.1 million trips—all of those on a daily basis. The unbounded nature of the problem can be exemplified by the 4.2 million trips that cross the political limits of the city on a daily basis (a number which would grow exponentially if we were to consider the trips connecting the metropolitan area with the surrounding states). As for complexity, consider that the recent Mapatón organi-zed by Laboratorio para la Ciudad had to deal with more than 1,500 informal routes which the network of pesero buses employ to criss-cross the city and its vicinities.9 As a thoroughly socio-technical system, mobility in the city depends on more than ten thousand kilometers of streets, 302 Metro trains, and more than one thousand buses of the publicly owned RTP system matched by the same number of buses concessio-ned to more than nine private companies, among other infrastructures. Finally, from an ecological perspective, the city is constantly on the critical edge in terms of air, water and noise pollution, to mention only the most salient problems.

And yet, despite all these impressive and even alarming figures, the most relevant as-pect of the problem of mobility in Mexico City, from a systemic design perspective, is its contested nature. The struggles and oppositions between government and citizens,

3 Simon, Herbet A. (1969) The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press., p. 130.4 Ryan, Ibid.5 Ryan, Alex J. A Framework for Systemic Design. FORMakademisk - Research Journal for Design and Design Education. Vol.7, Nr.4, 2014, Art. 4, 1-14. Available from: https://journals.hioa.no/index.php/formakademisk/article/view/7876 The Design Collaborative (2014), DesignX: A Future Path for Design. Available from: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/designx_a_future_pa.html7 This stage is predeced by Design 1.0: artifacts and communications; Design 2.0: products and services; and Design 3.0: organizational transformation. See Jones, Peter H. (2014). Systemic Design Principles for Complex Social Systems, in Metcalf, Gary S. (2014). Social Systems and Design. Springer Japan. Available from: http://www.academia.edu/5063638/Systemic_Design_Principles_for_Complex_Social_Systems See also: Jones, P.H., & van Patter, G.K. (2009). Design 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0: The rise of visual sensemaking. New York, NextDesign Leadership Institute. Available from: http://humantific.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/NextD_Design_4.0.pdf 8 All figures, unless otherwise noted, are from Secretaría de Transportes y Vialidad. Source: http://www7.df.gob.mx/wb/stv/estadisticas9 Mendelson, Zoe. In Pursuit of Big Data, Mexico City Mapathon Gamifies Crowdsourcing. Next City. February 25, 2016. Available from: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/big-data-mexico-city-mapathon-gamifies-crowdsourcing

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and, perhaps most importantly, between diverse groups of citizens, around the pro-grams mentioned above, such as ecoParq, ECOBICI and Hoy No Circula, defy attempts to frame the problem even in the multiple variations of the concept of NIMBYism.

To illuminate this dimension, systemic design would benefit greatly from that strand of its genealogy that places great emphasis on the unique, if somewhat obvious, cha-llenge that characterises what Peter Checkland called ‘soft systems’. “The complexity of problematical situations in real life,” he wrote,

stems from the fact that not only are they never static, they also contain multiple interacting perceptions of ‘reality’. This comes about because different people have different taken-as-given (and often unexamined) assumptions about the world … di-fferent worldviews. Tackling problematical situations has to accept this, and has to pitch analysis at a level that allows worldviews to be surfaced and examined.10

From this perspective, the design of social systems is less a question of problems and solutions than it is, correspondingly, about issues and accommodations. “It is a pro-cess of finding versions of the to-be-changed situation which different people with conflicting worldviews could nevertheless live with.”11 This is the point at which an irreducibly political, in fact, agonistic perspective on urban policy emerges—agonis-tic in the sense that it downplays the hope for consensus and accepts the inevitability of conflict.12

The topic of this project has been legible policy, which has roughly come to mean accessible with regards to its contents and transparent with regards to its goals and intentions. In this way, the idea of legibility has arguably played the role of a contai-ner for our hopes of consensus. It is as if, in stressing the importance of legible policy, we were lamenting: “If only we could make people understand what’s best for them in the long run!” Yet, from the soft-systemic, agonistic perspective that I’ve arrived at in this text, that may not be a realistic objective after all. The development of policies, as an instance of systemic design, may irremediably operate in a horizon of conflict. If this is the case, legibility qua accessibility and transparency may play the equally (if not more) important role of a minimal requirement for an accommodation of conflic-

10 Checkland, Peter and John Poulter. (2010). Soft Systems Methodology, in M. Reynolds and S. Holwell (eds.) Systems Approaches to Managing Change: A Practical Guide. The Open University. Available from: https://devpolicy.crawford.anu.edu.au/public_policy_community/content/doc/2010_Checkland_Soft_systems_methodology.pdf11 Ibid.12 See Mouffe, Chantal. (2000). The Democratic Paradox. London, New York: Verso.

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ting worldviews. And given that these accommodations are always local and temporary, an interesting idea pops up: Shouldn’t we be also considering the conditions in which policy ought to be writable? That is, readable and writable like a computer file.

MY RECOMMENDATIONS: Transparency should be a property of the process and not only of the policy itself. Gover-nments should be transparent, from the outset, about the fact that a political process will begin to transform an existing system.

Such initial, procedural transparency may serve, first and foremost, to surface and exa-mine all the worldviews exposed to the situation.

Attempts must be made to reconcile conflicting worldviews using wider, shared frames of reference. In this point, design futures, understood as the production of collective and tangible imaginations of the future (involving possible, plausible, probable and prefera-ble scenarios), will play an essential role.

Policies, and the regulations and interventions in which they are embedded, should be treated as local and temporary accommodations rather than definitive solutions.The conditions (who, what, when, why and where) in which policy is writable should be part of the design process.

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IMPROVING URBAN MOBILITY BY UNDERSTANDING ITS COMPLEXITYBY CARLOS GERSHENSON, IIMAS-UNAM

For nearly the past two decades, I have worked in the field of complex systems as a computer engineer, using simulations to explore scenarios for designing and contro-lling complex systems that can adapt to changes in their environment in a robust fashion. My focus is urban mobility because it deals with highly complex systems and affects billions of people worldwide, and moreover, with Mexico City boasting the “most painful commute” in the world, as a local I have extra motivation to use recent scientific advances to improve my city’s mobility.

The source of the complexity of urban mobility comes from the vast number of in-teractions within the system: interactions between (and among) pedestrians, cars, buses, trains, vehicles and infrastructure. These components cannot be studied in isolation, as the future of each is partly but strongly determined by its interactions with other components and its environment, which makes it difficult to separate the components of a complex system. However, traditional scientific and engineering methods rely on separability, and so we are obliged to find novel approaches to com-plex systems. If we cannot study components individually, we must model two levels of abstraction at the same time: the component level and the system level. This lets us understand how interactions between components give rise to system properties, and also how system properties constrain and promote behaviors and states of the components. Computer simulations have been the ideal tool for this, to the point that they have been compared with microscopes or telescopes. Similar to the way the-se instruments allow us to explore the microworld and the macroworld, computer simulations let us explore the complex world.

As our understanding of complex systems has increased, we have realized that inte-ractions between components generate novel information that is not present in initial nor boundary conditions. This implies that even if we know everything there is to know about a complex system, its predictability is still limited, as we do not know what infor-mation will be generated until the moment it happens. Science and engineering have assumed that the world is predictable, and that we simply need to find the proper laws of nature in order to be able to foresee the future, but the study of complex systems has shown that this assumption is misguided. If novel information is produced by interac-tions, then the only way to perceive the future is by actually going there. This limited prediction requires us to take a different approach when dealing with complex systems, such as those related to urban mobility. Instead of building predictive systems, we will be more efficient if we build adaptive systems that can adjust to the current situation as changes present themselves. While there are things we can predict—and predict we should, as it is advantageous to deal with predictable situations beforehand—the fact that there are things we cannot predict means we must provide our systems with the capabilities to adapt by themselves to the unexpected situations we know will occur.

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To this end, we can identify several factors affecting urban mobility: transportation requirements (for example, living far from workplace or school), schedule distribu-tion (i.e.,if everyone has to be at the same place at the same time, demand spikes during rush hours), quantity (of passengers, vehicles), capacity (of public transport, infrastructure), technology (efficiency of infrastructure), planning and regulation (to avoid undesired situations, although they must be enforced), social contagion (if owning a private vehicle is seen as a sign of “success”), and human behavior (of pass-engers and drivers). This last one is perhaps the factor over which citizens have most control. Still, in seeking individual benefits, for example, in trying to reach our des-tination faster, we can generate delays at the system level (e.g. advancing our car into a crowded intersection and blocking traffic flow, or not letting subway doors close). Usually policies, regulations, and codes try to mediate these behaviors precisely to avoid these conflicts, but in many cases people will continue to seek their own indivi-dual benefit as long as they can get away with it.

Some policies are not efficient in all situations, which creates the temptation for individuals to ignore those policies. For example, if on a freeway the speed limit is set so that it is safe to drive under all weather conditions, people will be inclined to break the limit when conditions are good, especially if other drivers do the same. Cameras and other sensors to detect and punish such behaviors work only locally, as drivers tend to change their speed only in the vicinity of the sensors. A more effecti-ve approach would be to set dynamic speed limits according to the immediate con-ditions. Moreover, due to the “slower-is-faster” effect, in areas of dense traffic vehi-cles actually move faster if the speed limit is lower, as they are more likely to move forward continuously and avoid constant stop-and-go braking and accelerating.

In other cases, policies are simply not understood by the public, making it difficult to generate acceptance. But if citizens are made aware of the benefit said policies will have, the public will be more inclined to adopt the regulations. This means that it must be clear that the policy will have positive effects—which is not always the case, as many policies are, unfortunately, the product of whims rather than scientific ex-perimentation.

In order to better develop and implement public policies to maximize user adoption and system functionality, I suggest the following five recommendations, based on my experience with complex systems and urban mobility.

ADAPTATION OVER PREDICTION

Urban systems change constantly. Even if we have all the positions and velocities of all the vehicles in a city, we cannot reliably predict for more than a couple of mi-nutes into the future where vehicles will be, as their positions depend on countless externalities, from the reaction times of other drivers to blocked lanes to pedestrians crossing and more. We may have statistics about past densities, which can be useful for planning infrastructure, but our urban systems will be much more efficient if they are able to adapt to changes in demand as quickly as these occur, in other words, within seconds.

REGULATE INTERACTIONS

One way to achieve efficient mobility is by regulating interactions of the compo-nents of a system. If the behavior of one component negatively affects the mobility of another, we can say that there is friction generated. If we regulate interactions to minimize friction, we will achieve efficient performance. This is also evident with the slower-is-faster effect: If components try to maximize their benefit, in many cases they create negative interactions that lead to global inefficiency. If we regulate and constrain the components, even if they do not go as fast as they would like to, they can reach their destination faster, to the benefit of all (both the components and the system).

151USE SENSORS

To make correct decisions, systems require information. Sensors are becoming che-aper, making it possible to deploy them massively to obtain relevant information—that necessary for the system to be able to adapt to changes in demand, as they occur.

USE ALGORITHMS

Information collected by sensors can sit nicely on the cloud, but to make use of the information we must use adaptive algorithms that are able to respond precisely to the changes in demand. In our laboratory, we have used self-organization to design adaptive algorithms: Instead of trying to solve a problem that we know will change in ways we cannot know beforehand, we build components that will constantly seek solutions to the current situation by the interactions present—so when the situation changes, the algorithm adapts.

USE AGENTS

If algorithms can give us solutions, these solutions must be taken into the real world in the form of agents. In some cases, agents are already there (for example, traffic lights), but in others we still have to design them, as in the case of regulating driver or passenger behaviors. Agents must have the ability to influence urban mo-bility systems towards the desired state, otherwise sensors and algorithms will be of little use.

The benefits I believe would result from following these recommendations, and the many potential solutions already identified to resolve current problems, make me optimistic about the future of urban mobility. Despite the many challenges inherent to its systems, I think we have the capability to prevent future generations from suffe-ring mobility as a constraint and rather experience it as a system full of opportunity.

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OPEN DATA ON ROAD TRAFFIC INCIDENTS IN MEXICO CITY: CURRENT SITUATIONS AND PERSPECTIVES

BY SERGIO R. CORIA, LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

INTERNATIONAL OVERVIEW

Governments in a series of the most developed countries apply public policies and specific programs for reducing the number of injuries and fatalities in traffic facts since the late 1990 decade. The Vision Zero initiative is reputed worldwide. Its pur-pose is reducing the number of these fatalities to zero. This initiative originated in Sweden in 1997 and has been acknowledged by diverse international agencies, such as the World Health Organization (WHO, 2004). Additionally, the initiative has been used as a guideline by other national or subnational governments, e.g. New York City, Boston and San Francisco, in the United States; Edmonton, Canada; Bristol, UK; a number of cities in Netherlands as well as other countries mainly in Europe.

Several international experiences suggest that modifying traffic regulations by re-ducing the maximum speed permitted in urban areas is one of the key aspects to reducing the number of injuries and fatalities in traffic facts. In a number of cities in Austria, Netherlands, Switzerland and UK, a 20 MPH (approx. 30 km/h) maximum speed limit has been established in delimited areas. State governments in the United States have also established this action, including Massachusetts, Florida, Wisconsin and others. The efficacy of these measures has been studied by Hart, J. and Parkhurst (2011) and Dover (2013), among others. In Mexico, the speed limit reduction has been applied in Monterrey (State of Nuevo León), Guadalajara and Zapopan (State of Jalis-co), and Los Mochis (State of Sinaloa).

Reliable statistical data are necessary for designing and evaluating public policies and specific programs, and open data are of even higher utility. Reliable open data allow government officials, researchers and society to evaluate the effects of the poli-cies and programs. Since the year 2004, the WHO has recommended gathering data on traffic facts to determine prevention priorities on a rational and satisfactory basis.

NATIONAL OVERVIEW

Mexico City (CDMX) has adopted the Vision Zero (Visión Cero, in Spanish) initiative. This adoption includes, among other actions, the following: reduction of maximum speed limits, and publication of open data on traffic facts. The CDMX Traffic Regula-tions (F.D. Govt., 2015) establish the existence of zones where the maximum permi-tted speed is 30 km/h (approx. MPH). Regarding open data on traffic facts in CDMX,

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the main source that is fully available online is the Statistics on Road Traffic in Urban and Suburban Zones (ATUS statistics), by the Mexican Institute on Statistics and Geography (INEGI, 2014). These have been produced with a national, state and municipal scope on an annual basis since 1997 (approximately 18 consecutive years). The most recent-ly disseminated is the one corresponding to 2014 and it is expected that statistics from the year 2015 become available in the months following publication of this document in May 2016. The data items (i.e. the variables, attributes or features) that are recorded by INEGI to produce the ATUS statistics are presented in Appendices 1a and 1b. However, the only geographic feature that is provided by ATUS about each road traffic fact is the municipality (or delegación of CDMX), with no more specific features, such as the names of the streets or the coordinates. Thus, although ATUS is useful to know and to analyze patterns of traffic incidents at the aggregation level of municipality (or delegación), this does not suffice to design prevention actions that are focused on more specific geographic scopes, such as one street in particular.

Other highly cited statistical data source of traffic incidents is the Mexican Council on Accident Prevention (CONAPRA). However, CONAPRA obtains most of its input data from the ATUS statistics. The data features in ATUS are based on international recommenda-tions by the Organization of American States (OAS) for Statistics on Road Transportation. The INEGI’s data sources are: local agencies on public security and road safety in the Sta-tes and municipalities of the whole country. In the particular case of CDMX, other data sources of INEGI are: district attorney offices and civic courts. The INEGI’s methodology for gathering of traffic incident data is described in (INEGI, 2009).

MEXICO CITY

Figure 1 presents the historical rising trend of the road traffic incidents in CDMX since the year 1997 until 2014 (the data most recently disseminated by INEGI). The-refore, the CDMX government implemented the Visión Cero program, which includes gathering, organizing and analyzing data of traffic incidents, among other actions. Articles 47 and 48 of the Mobility Law (F.D. Govt., 2014) obligate the City Government to implement two information and tracing systems: one on mobility, and other on traffic road safety. The purpose is to systematically review the execution of the Inte-gral Programs on Mobility and on Road Safety (art. 49).

Figure 1. Road traffic incidents in urban and suburban areas in CDMX (in gray color).Source: Mr. Gerardo Rodríguez with data from INEGI (ATUS statistics, 1997 to 2014).

155CURRENT AND POTENTIAL IMPACTS

If no actions are applied to reduce the number of road traffic incidents in CDMX, the statistical trends in the 1997-2014 period suggest that 15,000 cases per year can be expected for 2015 (whose statistics will be informed by INEGI) and a similar number for the year 2016. In 2014, 291 incidents occurred in which there were one or more fatalities; this is 2% of 14,319 incidents. On this basis, approximately 300 incidents with fatalities can be expected in each the 2015 and 2016 years.

A desirable goal is that the information systems that are mentioned by the Mobility Law can produce open data of the road traffic incidents on a basis that is as recent as possible to real time. Nevertheless, the updating periodicity of these data will de-pend, mainly, on the administrative and technological processes for recording and validation that will be established by the Public Security Department (SSP) and the Mobility Department (SEMOVI).

As the Traffic Regulations in CDMX (F.D. Govt., 2014) have reduced the speed limits in a number of areas in this territory, a certain possibility of collateral effects on air pollution exists. However, research works using recent empirical data on this matter do not exist, yet. This has been confirmed to LabCDMX, via e-mail (March 17, 2016), by Prof. Ricardo Torres-Jardón, who is a researcher in the Group on Atmospheric Phy-sical Chemistry at the Center for Atmosphere Science (CCA) at the National Autono-mous University of Mexico (UNAM).

One of the impacts of the implementation of the mentioned information system on the federal government scope will be that INEGI can use concentrated data about traffic incidents from CDMX in quantity and quality that will be greater than the currently available. This will allow INEGI achieving significant improvements on its ATUS statistics. Also, indirectly it could achieve an effect of motivating other cities in the country to set up other similar information systems.

KEY ACTORS AND MAIN DATA SOURCES

Although diverse information sources exist on the matter of transit incidents in CDMX, SSP has determined that the Procuraduría General de Justicia (Attorney General’s Office, PGJ) is the official source to measure the efficacy of the CDMX Traffic Regulations. This source has been chosen because it is officially auditable. However, PGJ and other additional sources will be those officially used for pro-ducing statistical indicators and analyses on road traffic safety. The Mobility Law (Art. 48) states that the information for feeding the system on road traffic safety “will be generated and provided by the corresponding local government entities, in addition to those private actors that produce key information on this matter, on a monthly basis.”

In March, a work team has been established for the planning of the system on road traffic safety. The second information system (i.e. for mobility), will be addressed by the same team (or by other) in a subsequent stage. Three of the main actors in the work team are: SSP, SEMOVI and the Agencia de Gestión Urbana (Urban Management Agency, AGU). The latter includes LabCDMX and the Dirección de Inteligencia Urbana (Urban Intelligence Division). In order to achieve the goals of the work team, LabCD-MX contacted the Division for Development of Government Information, Indexes and Indicators in INEGI. This Division is in charge for producing the ATUS statistics on road traffic incidents. Due to this, it has extensive methodological experience on gathering, depuration and dissemination of this type of information. This Division started its participation in the team on March 29, which has contributed to optimi-zing resources and time in the planning and specification of the road traffic safety information system.

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Other participants in the team are: the Consejo Nacional para la Prevención de Ac-cidentes (National Council for Accident Prevention, CONAPRA), the Observatorio de Lesiones (Injury Observatory) of the Servicios de Salud de la CDMX (CDMX Health Ser-vices), and a number of researchers from the Instituto de Geografía (Geography Ins-titute, IGG) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM). All have an extensive experience investigating the tra-ffic road incident phenomenon at local and national scopes. The work team is aware of the need to produce open data and this is taken into account along its planning activities. On an informal non-official fashion and with no confirmation from a spe-cific government official, the work team subjectively estimates that the information system for road traffic safety can have a first functional prototype by the end of 2016.

Four major government sources of digital data on road traffic incidents in CDMX have been identified by the work team:

1. ATUS statistics by INEGI .2. Data on Excel worksheets from SSP.3. AGU’s web platform on CDMX road incidents .4. The Registro de Accidentes Vehiculares de México (Vehicular Accident Registry of Mexico, RAVMEX) from CONAPRA.

In addition, other digital data exist in a number of private sources, such as the Aso-ciación Mexicana de Instituciones de Seguros (Mexican Association of Insurance Com-panies, AMIS), SinTráfico, etc., and also in non-government organizations, such as the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), RepuBikla, etc. These digital data and platforms can facilitate the design and supplying of the system for road traffic safety. So far, RAVMEX is the platform that stores the largest number of attributes (i.e. variables) and offers the finest granularity of information on road traffic incidents. The CDMX Injury Observatory has access permissions for insertion and query into RAVMEX. However, the Observatory has presented a significant delay in its information registration process; this information is available on paper only. Recently, the Observatory obtained funds to perform the registration process from paper forms and to perform statistical analyses of the data, which is planned for the subsequent months.

KEY PROCESSES AND FEATURES

The Mobility Law obligates the City Government to register data on mobility and on road traffic safety to be analyzed in order to apply preventive or corrective actions. On this basis, the main task to generate the data on road traffic incidents of CDMX is the registration of the specific (microdata) from each incident. Initially, this task is performed by the traffic police officers. Therefore, SSP has designed a paper form for manual recording of the data, a software (i.e. an app) for mobile device and a web platform (see Appendixes 2a, 2b and 2c). Currently, no funds are available to provide road traffic officers with mobile devices for these purposes. Therefore, a series of pilot tests on the use of the paper registration form will be started in a short term. In a subsequent stage, the mobile app will be used on real conditions and this will allow to introduce all these data in the information systems of SSP and SEMOVI.

INEGI, SSP and SEMOVI agree that a minimum set of attributes (i.e. variables) on traffic road incidents has to be defined in order to produce indicators and indexes on road traffic safety. These indicators and indexes are being defined by SEMOVI and SSP with assistance from the Injury Observatory, UNAM’s Geography Institute, etc. The aim is that these indicators are consistent and comparable to those of the Orga-nization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

AGU’s Urban Intelligence Division has a certain volume of data on mobility and road

157incidents in general (including traffic crashes, construction and maintenance of pu-blic infrastructure, and other types of incidents). Urban Intelligence has an informa-tion system on the cloud that stores, manages and analyzes data on a series of aspects of the City public services. They produce dashboards and maps with geo-referenced information. However, Urban Intelligence needs to incorporate data from other sour-ces (e.g. Health Services) in order to complete the information on road traffic inci-dents.

On the basis of international experiences, the cities in other countries that have suc-cessfully applied the Vision Zero initiative have used certain key indicators for desig-ning and evaluating their corresponding programs. Experiences from New York City (NYC) are highly interesting to CDMX due to similarities between both cities regar-ding the number of inhabitants and social complexity, in addition to the fact that NYC has obtained highly encouraging results. The indicators and indexes in NYC are mainly based on the quantities of pedestrians, cyclists and automobile drivers who have been injured or died in traffic road incidents on a monthly and annual basis, in-cluding the geographic coordinates and the names of the corresponding streets or su-burban roads. These data are complemented with others regarding: design of streets and suburban roads, speed limits, location of schools, senior citizen centers, taxi services, city government offices, etc. The NYC government offers open data on its Vision Zero initiative (NYC, 2016). These data start in January, 2009. One of the most important sources for recording data on traffic road incidents in NYC is a paper form that is filled by traffic police officers whenever an incident occurs (see Appendix 3).

FINAL COMMENTS

On the basis of international experiences, it can be foreseen that the reduction of maximum speed limits in diverse areas of CDMX will reduce the number of road tra-ffic incidents. Potential collateral effects of this reduction on the air pollution in this territory have not been quantified on empirical data, yet. While empirical data co-rresponding to a large enough period do not exist, only approximate calculations can be computed by using models created by using historical time series data. Thus, no empirical evidence is available to affirm that reducing the maximum speed limit will produce a significant rising in the air pollution. These and other analyses and models can be produced once data of mobility and road traffic incidents become open, along with already open data of air quality, in order to measure the general effects of the Visión Cero initiative in CDMX. Finally, the activities of the City Government team that is working on the definition of the System for Information and Tracing of Road Safety suggest that significant advancements on the opening of enriched road traffic incident data can be expected in a term less than one year.

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Motor Vehicles.

Appendix 1a. EE-4-8 2015 form (page 1 of 2): Record form of road traffic accident in urban and suburban areas. Source: Mr. Lázaro Trujillo, Department of Foreign Trade and Administrative Records, INEGI.

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Appendix 1b. EE-4-8 2015 form (page 2 of 2): Record form of road traffic accident in urban and suburban areas. Source: Mr. Lázaro Trujillo, Department of Foreign Trade and Administrative Records, INEGI.

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TRAFFIC INCIDENT FORM

Reference Number:__________ I. DATE, TIME AND LOCATION OF TRAFFIC

INCIDENT

Date:____/____/______ Day of the week: 1. The road where the incident occured:___________________________________________________ 2. Nearest Street:_______________________________________________________________ Neighbourhood:_____________________________ Postal Code:____________ Delegation: _______________ Weather conditions: Cloudy:____Sunny:____Rainy:____Foggy:____Time:______a.m._____p.m.

II. TYPE OF INCIDENT III. TYPE OF INTERSECTION

Collision with pedestrian Four-way Caída de Pasajero T junction Collision with motor vehicle Y junction Collision with fixed object 5 or 6-way Collision with cyclist Traffic circle Collision with motorcycle Magpie Skid out Overpass Automobile flipped Other

IV. VEHICLE TYPE

Vehicle Licence Plate Condition Brand Sub Brand Colour Model

Automobile Passenger Microbus Cargo Microbus Urban Passenger Bus Autobús de Pasajeros Foráneo Cargo Bus Motorcycle Bike Metrobus Taxi Tráiler (doble remolque) Trolleybus Light Train RTP Other

V. POSSIBLE INCIDENT CAUSE Driver error Road Conditions Speed limit excess Road surface Drinking and driving Potholes Cell phone use Road obstacle Carelessness Lack of signs Children’s car seat, helmet, use of seat belt Other Other Climate Conditions Vehicle Error Rainy Mechanical failure Cloudy Tire problems Hail

Appendix 2a. Form for reporting a road traffic fact. Source: Public Security Dept., CDMX (page 1 of 3).

161Appendix 2b. Form for reporting a road traffic fact. Source: Public Security Dept., CDMX (page 2 of 3).

Reference Number:__________

VI. ROAD CLASSIFICATION

1. Road where the incident occurred No. of Lanes

TRAFFIC DIRECTION

East to West West to East North to South

South to North

Controlled Access

Inner Loop Beltway Radial (?) Viaduct

Principle Artery Axis Road Primary Avenue

Secondary

Road

Collector Street or Avenue

Local Street Alleyway Closed Private Corner Dirt road Sidewalk Pedestrian Street

2. Via próxima

No. of Lanes

TRAFFIC DIRECTION

East to West

West to East

North to South

South to North

characteristics

Controlled Access

Inner Loop Beltway Radial Viaduct

Principle Artery

Axis Road Primary Avenue

Secondary Road

Collector Street or Avenue

Local Street Alleyway Closed Private Corner Dirt Road Sidewalk Pedestrian Street

VII. IMPLICATED PARTIES

ID (CODE) Name Injured Deaths Age Sex T.C Automobile driver Passenger 1, 2 Pedestrian 1, 2 Cyclist

Headlight failure Foggy Other Other Tolvaneda

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Appendix 2c. Form for reporting a road traffic fact. Source: Public Security Dept., CDMX (page 3 of 3).

Motorcyclist Other

Reference Number:_________ VIII. MEDICAL CARE

Identity Diagnostic Priority of Attention

Identity

Transfer required Medical Unit

1-High 2-Medium

3- Low Yes No

IX. EMERGENCY UNITS

Vehicle License Plate Person in Charge Ambulance Sectoral Patrol Car Traffic Area Patrol Car Firefighters Civil Protection M.P de remisión Others

X. DESCRIPTIVE SKETCH Indicate final position of the vehicles.

Indicate position of the signs. COMPLETED BY: Name: Badge: Level: Area: Traffic Zone: Official Unity:

Description

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�DRIVER OF VEHICLE 1 VEHICLE 2 � BICYCLIST�PEDESTRIAN � OTHER PEDESTRIAN

Did police investigateaccident at scene?� Yes � No

Public PropertyDamaged

Public PropertyDamaged

New York State Department of Motor VehiclesREPORT OF MOTOR VEHICLE ACCIDENT

www.dmv.ny.gov

Accident Date

MV-104 (5/11) PAGE 1 of 2

Day of Week Time � AM

� PM

� �

Number of Vehicles

NumberInjured

Number Killed

If “Yes”, Name of Police Agency or Precinct & Accident Number

Driver Name–exactly as printed on license (Last, First, M.I.) Name–exactly as printed on license (Last, First, M.I.)

Name–exactly as printed on registration Name–exactly as printed on registration

Address (Include Number & Street) Address (Include Number & Street)

City or Town

Date of Birth

Date of Birth Sex

Sex Number of People inVehicle

State of License

State Zip Code City or Town State Zip Code

City or Town State Zip Code City or Town State Zip Code

Plate Number State of Reg. Vehicle Year & Make Vehicle Type Ins. CodePlate Number

Describe damage to vehicle 1

State of Reg. Vehicle Year & Make Vehicle Type Ins. Code

Apt. Number Apt. Number

Address (Include Number & Street) Address (Include Number & Street)Apt. Number Apt. Number

Driver License ID NumberDriver License ID Number

Names of All Persons Involved

How did the accident happen?

Identify Damaged Property Other Than Vehicle(s)

VIN

Name of Insurance Company That Issued Policy For Vehicle 1Name and Address of Policy Holder

Policy PeriodFrom To

If Vehicle was Operated Under Permit(ICC, USDOT or NYSDOT), give No.If Self-Insured, give Certificate No.

and State

Name and Addressof Permit Holder

Policy Number

8. Which Veh.Occupied

10. SafetyEquip.Used

9 . Positionin/on Vehicle

12.Age

13.Sex Describe InjuriesA B C

If Deceased, EnterDate of Death

16. Injury

Date of Birth Sex Number of People inVehicle

State of License

Estimated Cost of Property Damage - Vehicle 1� $1,001-$1,500 � $1,501-$2,500 � Over $2,500

Estimated Cost of Property Damage - Vehicle 2� $1,001-$1,500 � $1,501-$2,500 � Over $2,500

1

2

3

5

6

7

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

4

Rear End Sideswipe (same direction)

Left Turn

Right Angle1. 2.

4.3.Sideswipe(opposite direction)

8.

Head On

7.9. 6.

Right Turn

5.

ACCIDENT DIAGRAM: Circle one of the 9 diagrams (numbered 0-8) if itdescribes the accident, or draw your own diagram below in space #9.Number the vehicles. Your vehicle is # 1

0.

➧Signature of Driver(or Representative*) of Vehicle 1

Print Name of Driver (or Representative*) of Vehicle 1

A representative may sign for the driver if the driver is unable to signbecause of injury or death. If you are signing as the driver’s representative,check the box that describes why the driver cannot sign.

An accident report is not considered complete and filed unless it is signed,and if not signed may result in the suspension of your driver’s license.

Date

Describe damage to vehicle 2

Page _______ of _______ � RUSH - DRIVER OF VEHICLE 1 - LICENSE SUSPENDED FOR FAILURE TO REPORT

Month Day Year

Left Turn

Right Turn

FOLD HEREUse only for accidents that happen in New York State

Month Day Year

Month Day YearDate of Birth SexMonth Day Year

Month Day Year

DR

IVER

REG

ISTR

AN

TVE

HIC

LE D

AM

AG

EIN

SUR

AN

CE

AC

CID

ENT

LOC

ATI

ON

ALL

INVO

LVED

❶

❷

❸

❹

�

�

Place Where Accident Occurred in New York State:County ______________________ of __________________________________.

Road on which accident occurred _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

at 1) intersecting street______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

or 2) __________ __________ ______________________________________________________________________________________

� City � Village � Town Permanent Landmark___________________

� N � S � E � W of

(Route Number or Street Name)

(Route Number or Street Name)

Feet Miles (Milepost, Nearest intersecting Route Number or Street Name)

�

DO NOT FORGETACCIDENT DATE

BEFORE COMPLETING THIS FORM, READ THE INSTRUCTIONS IN SECTION A ON PAGE 2

� Injury

� Death*

Appendix 3. Form for reporting a motor vehicle accident. Source: NY State Dept. of

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24

ROADWAY CHARACTER1. Straight and Level 4. Curve and Level2. Straight and Grade 5. Curve and Grade3. Straight at Hillcrest 6. Curve at Hillcrest

LIGHT CONDITIONS1. Daylight 3. Dusk 5.Dark-Road Unlighted2. Dawn 4. Dark-Road Lighted

PEDESTRIAN/BICYCLIST/OTHER PEDESTRIAN ACTION1. Crossing, With Signal2. Crossing, Against Signal3. Crossing, No Signal, Marked Crosswalk4. Crossing, No Signal or Crosswalk5. Riding/Walking/Skating Along Highway With Traffic6. Riding/Walking /Skating Along Highway Against Traffic7. Emerging from in Front of/Behind Parked Vehicle8. Going to/From Stopped School Bus9. Getting On/Off Vehicle Other Than School Bus

11. Working in Roadway12. Playing in Roadway13. Other Actions in Roadway14. Not in Roadway

POSITION IN/ON VEHICLE (Column 9) - Enter the number from this diagram which corresponds to each person’s position.1. Driver 2-7. Passengers 8. Riding/Hanging on Outside 78

36

1425

N NE

SESW

NW1 2

3456

78

S

W E

Veh.1.

Veh.2

Veh.1

Veh.2

First

Event

Veh.1

SecondEvent

6

7

5

26

27

28

29

Veh.2 30

25

23

4

1

2

3

1. Other Motor Vehicle2. Pedestrian3. Bicyclist4. Animal5. Railroad Train

COLLISION WITH FIXED OBJECT

6. In-Line Skater7. Deer8. Other Pedestrian

10. Other Object (Not Fixed)

TYPE OF ACCIDENTCOLLISION WITH

11. Light Support/Utility Pole12. Guide Rail - Not At End13. Crash Cushion14. Sign Post15. Tree16. Building/Wall17. Curbing18. Fence19. Bridge Structure20. Culvert/Head Wall

21. Median - Not At End22. Snow Embankment23. Earth Embankment/

Rock Cut/Ditch24. Fire hydrant25. Guide Rail - End26. Median - End27. Barrier30. Other Fixed Object

NO COLLISION31. Overturned 33. Submersion32. Fire/Explosion 34. Ran Off Roadway Only

40. Other

11. Avoiding Object in Roadway12. Changing Lanes13. Passing14. Merging15. Backing16. Making Right Turn on Red17. Making Left Turn on Red18. Police Pursuit20. Other

1. Going Straight Ahead2. Making Right Turn3. Making Left Turn4. Making U Turn5. Starting from Parking6. Starting in Traffic7. Slowing or Stopping8. Stopped in Traffic9. Entering Parked Position

10. Parked

1. On Roadway 2. Off Roadway

MV-104 (5/11) PAGE 2 of 2 SECTION BUSE TO COMPLETE

BOXES 1-7 and 23-30 ON PAGE 1

8

8

8

1. North2. Northeast3. East4. Southeast

5. South6. Southwest7. West8. Northwest

1. Dry2. Wet

3. Muddy4. Snow/Ice

5. Slush6. Flooded

0. Other

2. Cloudy3. Rain4. Snow1. Clear

5. Sleet/Hail/Freezing Rain6. Fog/Smog/Smoke0. Other

1. None 2. Traffic Signal3. Stop Sign4. Flashing Light5. Yield Sign6. Officer/Guard7. No Passing Zone8. RR Crossing Sign9. RR Crossing Flashing Light

10. RR Crossing Gates11. Stopped School Bus-Red

Lights Flashing12. Construction Work Area13. Maintenance Work Area14. Utility Work Area15. Police/Fire Emergency16. School Zone20. Other

DIRECTION OF TRAVEL

PRE-ACCIDENT VEHICLE ACTION

LOCATION OF FIRST EVENT

WEATHER

TRAFFIC CONTROL

ROADWAY SURFACE CONDITION

1. None2. Lap Belt3. Shoulder Restraint4. Lap Belt Restraint5. Child Restraint Only6. Helmet (Motorcycle Only)

C.Helmet OnlyD.Helmet/OtherE.Pads OnlyF. Stoppers Only

7. Air Bag Deployed8. Air Bag Deployed/Lap Belt9. Air Bag Deployed/Shoulder RestraintA. Air Bag Deployed/ Lap Belt/RestraintB. Air Bag Deployed/Child RestraintO. Other

SAFETY EQUIPMENT USED (Column 10)

B. Bicyclist P. Pedestrian O. Other Pedestrian1. Vehicle 1 2. Vehicle 2WHICH VEHICLE OCCUPIED (Column 8) - Enter the appropriate number or letter.

INSTRUCTIONS - PLEASE PRINT OR TYPE ALL INFORMATION - USE BLACK INK* First — fold along this shaded, dotted line.*

Then fill in the boxes numbered 1-7 and 23-30 in the right margin on page 1 by entering thenumber of the item from Section B that best describes the circumstances of the accident.If a question does not apply, enter a dash (“-”). If you do not know an answer, enter an “X”.

❶❷

❸

❹

❺

�

In-Line Skater/Bicyclist�

�

�

INSURANCE - Enter damage to private property, if any, insurance policy information and VIN.

Send original to: CRASH RECORDS CENTER6 EMPIRE STATE PLAZAPO BOX 2925ALBANY NY 12220-0925

SECTION AYou must report within 10 days any accident occurring in New York State causing a fatality,personal injury or damage over $1,000 to the property of any one person. Failure to do sowithin 10 days is a misdemeanor. Your license and/or registration may be suspended until areport is filed. Check the “RUSH” box at the top of page 1 if your license is suspended forfailure to report this accident on time. You must fill in all information requested on the report.

VEHICLE INVOLVEMENT - If you were in an accident involving:� two-cars, enter your information in the VEHICLE 1 section and the other driver’s

information in the VEHICLE 2 section.� a pedestrian, bicyclist or other pedestrian (a person using a non-motorized conveyance such

as in-line skates, skateboard,sled, etc.), enter the information in the “Driver” spaces provided for Vehicle 2, and check the PEDESTRIAN, BICYCLIST or OTHER PEDESTRIAN box.

� a vehicle other than a motor vehicle (such as a snowmobile, mini-bike, aircycle, all-terrain vehicle, trail bike, or other non-motor vehicle), enter the driver, registrant and vehicle information in the space provided for VEHICLE 2.

� an unoccupied vehicle, enter all available information. Be sure to enter the correct vehicle Plate Number and Vehicle Type in the VEHICLE 2 block.

� more than two vehicles, fill out additional accident reports. On these reports, place the information for the third vehicle in the space marked VEHICLE 1 and mark it # 3. Use the space marked VEHICLE 2 for the fourth vehicle, and mark it # 4 and so on. Additional forms are available at any Motor Vehicles office or from the DMV website: www.dmv.ny.gov.

DRIVER - Enter the information for each driver EXACTLY as it appears on his/her driver license.

REGISTRANT - Enter registrant information EXACTLY as it appears on the registration ofeach vehicle involved in the accident.

VEHICLE DAMAGE - Indicate if the accident exceeds the $1,000 threshold for property damageto any one vehicle or property caused by the accident, and describe the vehicle damage.

ACCIDENT LOCATION - Enter the county, locality and street(s) where the accidentoccurred. Check the box if there is an intersecting street. If available, identify a permanentlandmark nearby, such as a business, school, shopping mall, parking lot, water tower,railroad, mountain or cell tower.ALL INVOLVED - List the names of all persons involved in the accident, and provide thedate of death if anyone was killed in, or as a result of, the accident. If more than fourpeople are involved, complete another report. In the ALL INVOLVED section of thatreport, provide the required information for everyone else involved in the accident. Enterthe following codes in the appropriate columns:

INJURY (Columns 16A-C) - Check all column(s) that apply and DESCRIBE INJURIES:A -Severe lacerations, broken or distorted limbs, skull fracture, crushed chest, internal

injuries, unconscious when taken from the accident scene, unable to leave accident scene without assistance.

B - Lump on head, abrasions, minor lacerations.C - Momentary unconsciousness, limping, nausea, hysteria, complaint of pain (no visible

injury), whiplash (complaint of neck and head pain).

Attach additional reports to page one. Each page of the report must be numbered in the upperleft corner. Mark additional sheets #2, #3, etc. Date and sign on the bottom line of eachattached report. THE REPORT MUST BE SIGNED BY THE DRIVER OF VEHICLE 1, UNLESS HEOR SHE IS UNABLE TO SIGN BECAUSE HE/SHE IS INJURED OR DECEASED.

* Don’t fold internet form. Instead, place page 2 over page 1, with the arrows on page 2 pointing to the boxes on the right edge of page 1.

Be sure youranswers are marked

INSIDE THEBOXES ON

PAGE1

PEDESTRIAN/BICYCLIST/OTHER PEDESTRIAN LOCATION1. Pedestrian/Bicyclist/Other Pedestrian at Intersection2. Pedestrian/Bicyclist/Other Pedestrian Not at Intersection

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MAPPING INITIATIVES AND SPATIAL ANALYSISBY ISAAC PÉREZ-SERRANO, LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

If you can’t map it, you can’t see it.if you can’t see it, you can’t fix it.

Openstreetmaps, Latin America Geospatial Forum 2015

Data stands as a powerful tool to address the challenges faced by cities today: It is the key ingredient for evidence-based policy, for reading and understanding various phenomena and scenarios as well as for finding solutions and propelling innova-tions. Data is an asset for cities, their communities, citizens, entrepreneurs and po-licy makers, and maps in their turn make data more usable, friendly and attractive. They are instruments for visualizing and reading data and with a spatial dimension, telling a story of what happens where. They provide insights into how a phenomenon takes place and how it is displayed over the city and its territories. Maps allow us to see how assets, resources, needs, risk and hazards vary in the city space and show how they are unevenly displayed in the territory. Furthermore, they let us connect layers of the city and observe synergies between variables and in space. Maps help us design solutions and policies based on these understandings, facilitating our targe-ting the right population, areas and challenges. Simply put, they allow us to better narrate, read, understand and navigate the city and its layers. Cities around the world generate copious amounts of data that is often not easy to read. Furthermore, cities often lack tools to display this data geographically and in a more decipherable and inviting manner, inhibiting the usage of this data and pre-venting themselves from capturing its benefits. Mexico City, a megacity of more than twenty million people, is no exception. In order to address this issue the Laboratorio para la Ciudad has created more than 30 maps of the city on various themes (di-gitalization, poverty, settlement typology, cars registered, participatory budgeting, creativity in the city, cultural infrastructure, children and young population, crime and homicide rates) and at different scales (municipal, AGEB and block, as well as for Mexico City proper and for the whole of Mexico City, or the Mexico City Metropolitan Area, MCMA). On the topic of health, the Laboratorio para la Ciudad has also made digital maps of disability, including motor disability and visual impairment as well as maps of people entitled to medical treatment in public or private institutions and by institutions (IMSS, ISSSTE, Seguro Popular).

The maps created serve as a guide in the design, planning and implementation of projects at the Laboratorio para la Ciudad. They are also shared and disseminated to create awareness on various topics. For instance, during car-free day in 2015, a map was created of cars registered in Mexico City and its Metropolitan Area. Calculations were made to show the growth rate for each borough and municipality. These figu-res were mapped to show where the growth rates were higher to help increase un-derstanding of this phenomenon. These maps were shared through the social media

168

platforms of the Laboratorio para la Ciudad, especially Twitter. Various maps were developed allowing users to check the number of cars registered by borough in Mexi-co City from 1980 up to 2014, as well as the growth rate in this period. A different map allowed the user to check cars registered for each year between 1994 and 2014 in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area. This analysis also allowed us to calculate the space used by the total number of cars in the city and create other similar forms of data visualization on this subject.

For centuries maps have helped us understand and navigate the world. Today they stand as a powerful, friendly and attractive tool for understanding and reading cities, prompting innovations and designing solutions, urban planning and evidence-based policy. We imagine a city where, through the use of maps, people are able to see con-nections and synergies between issues and phenomenon. But most importantly, we envision a city where people act upon these spatial notions and understandings. We see a city where maps are an essential part of the shared work of citizens, entrepre-neurs and policy makers to make a better Mexico City.

EXAMPLES OF MAPS CREATED AT THE LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Cars Registered: Mexico City Metropolitan AreaGrowth Rate by Borough and Municipality 1997-2014

http://bit.ly/1GG03EgMap created by the Urban Geography Department at the Laboratorio para la Ciudad. Data from INEGI Cars Registered. Own calculations of the growth rate for the period.

Disability: Visual Impairment in Mexico City Metropolitan AreaAbsolute and relative as percentage of the total population

Map created by the Urban Geography Department at the Laboratorio para la Ciudad. Data from INEGI 2010-Census Data. Own calculations of the relative numbers. To access the digital map, please click here

169Disability: Motor Disability in MCMAAbsolute and relative as percentage of the total population of the borough or municipality

Map created by the Urban Geography Department at the Laboratorio para la Ciudad. Data from INEGI 2010-Census Data. Own calculations of the relative numbers. To access the digital map, please click here

Disability: People with Some Form of ImpairmentAbsolute and relative as percentage of the total population of the borough or municipality

Map created by the Urban Geography Department at the Laboratorio para la Ciudad. Data from INEGI 2010-Census Data. Own calculations of the relative numbers. To access the digital map, please click here

170

Poverty Map (Marginalization): Mexico City and MCMA

Map created by the Urban Geography Department at the Laboratorio para la Ciudad. Data from INEGI CONAPO 2010-Poverty Data (Grado de Marginación 2010). The map on the left shows poverty in Mexico City and the map on the right poverty in Mexico City Metropolitan Area. The map shows this at the AGEB (basic geo-statistical zone) scale.

Map created by the Urban Geography Department at the Laboratorio para la Ciudad. Data from INEGI 2014 DENUE (Economic Units National Directory). Heat map showing the concentration of cultural in-frastructure in Mexico City. The data was classified and filtered in order to create the map.

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THE DEMOCRATIC DILEMMA:THE INCENTIVES FOR LONG-TERM POLICIESBY ROBERTO ASCENCIO, LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

Political science studies politics as a place of encounter, rivalry and struggle. Whe-never humans interact, they create a space of opportunity for politics to arise and be used in countless different ways. Whether the example is an autocrat pursuing his latest whim or a democratically elected leader answering his constituents’ demands, politics always deals with the exercise of power, creating the mechanisms that will determine the processes of decision making. Through these mechanisms, those in power can start policies with very specific objectives in mind, and it is their relation to the people they govern that will mostly determine the type of policies they actua-lly produce.

If we look at democracies, elected leaders are not meant to remain in power for an extended period of time, at least not compared with the terms some non-democratic leaders can serve. For instance, the longest term of a democratically elected Prime Minister in Britain has never even come close to the time the current queen has go-verned. And while this example does not describe two positions with the same scope of action, it does give us a glimpse of how the perception of time between these two types of leaders can be very different. This opens up a very pertinent question: If democratic leaders are concerned with shorter terms, why would they bother about policies that could transcend their time in power?

In order for a democratically elected leader to invest time and money into a policy that will only show its benefits in the long run, it is necessary for voters to have certainty that these benefits will eventually arrive. Parents would support today’s politicians who are pursuing policies that will unquestionably benefit their children in a few decades’ time. The problem with this chain of thought is that policies with short-term impact are much easier for politicians to capitalize on, since there is no need to wait to see immediate results nor to guarantee that these results will remain in the long run. Unfortunately, this can lead to what has been called “good politics, bad policy”—good politics are those maneuvers that will benefit the incumbent in polls, whereas bad policies are those that will have larger costs in the long run than their promised benefits (or even produce the opposite effect from what they intended to achieve).

This kind of politics often benefits from the fact that what is desired by individuals is not necessarily desired by society as a whole. Governments frequently find themsel-ves juggling individual and collective interests, which many times can oppose each other. The aggregation of those individual preferences can also create collective pre-ferences that are completely irrational. For example, let us imagine a city that has to choose how to distribute a street into car lanes, bike lanes and sidewalks. Among city inhabitants, teenagers and young adults might be expected to prefer bike lanes

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above all, car lanes in second place, and sidewalks last, while senior citizens might ask for sidewalks over bike lanes and those over car lanes. Finally, adults in middle age might want car lanes over sidewalks, and not care at all about bike lanes. If we assume each of these groups is more or less the same size, how should a democratic government proceed? If these are the only elements taken into account in decision making, there is no clear answer. we evaluate sidewalks prefered over bike lanes, bike lanes prefered over car lanes, and car lanes prefered over sidewalks in an endless loop of opinions. One approach to this dilemma would be to bring other elements, aside from voters’ immediate preferences, into the equation, communicating to the public how the different outcomes of reorganizing this street might affect their lives in the future. Giving priority to a sustainable arrangement will improve the city’s quality of life, even though at the moment of the policy implementation it might not be what car drivers prefer, and even if they might use their votes to punish the incumbent for pursuing it.

Society as a whole can not only maintain contradictory preferences but also demand policies that could backfire in the long run. Even when all individual preferences are aligned, the aggregation of interests will not always lead to a straightforward policy. For instance, if government ensures that every citizen gets access to financing tools in order to purchase a car, politicians who advocate this will receive a boost of popularity and people will applaud incumbents, even though the overall effect will generate traffic congestion and pollution, an outcome clearly not desired by society in the long run. Since politicians care most about the former rather than the latter, the challenge is to align the benefits of policies with both time frames.

At an urban level, mayors often face this quandary. Whether they seek reelection or positioning themselves as reliable politicians for a different popularly elected posi-tion, they need to turn to their advantage during their mandate the policies they are promoting, regardless of the time when the expected results will be visible.

In this sense, mobility is an excellent example of the conflict presented by the short run and long run. Automobiles have been a ubiquitous element within cities for the past century—one that has proved very problematic. They need space to move around the city and also to remain still; they play an important economic role and offer a comfortable and flexible way to move around, but they generate pollution and traffic and are a symbol of economic wealth. A political approach to cars is anything but simple. Policies that benefit the driving of cars, like faster urban freeways or free parking, might offer immediate benefits for car drivers and they might not clearly and directly affect people that do not own cars. These policies can be very attractive, since the negative consequences of introducing too many cars to the roads might not be visible right away, but the political benefits to elected officials will most likely be immediate.

We saw this in Mexico City in the 1970s, when the city was reaching full capacity on its roads. In order to increase the available space for cars, the construction of a sys-tem of major thoroughfares was announced. Many boulevards lost their medians and trees to become one-way seven-lane streets crossing the city from one end to another. Their construction was very painful for city inhabitants, and during this time the tra-ffic increased while buildings were torn down to make way for construction, sending dust everywhere. Nevertheless, in a few months’ time, the thoroughfares (known as the Ejes) gave car drivers an immediate increase of space and made it possible for dri-vers to cross the city in very short time while avoiding small winding streets. This was a very successful policy in terms of approval, however, the noxious consequences of these axes became evident only a few years later. Links between neighborhoods were lost; the increase of speed limits also brought new threats for pedestrians; people found incentives to buy more cars and therefore pollution levels also rose. Evidently, the city had once again reached capacity on its streets, and regrettably during the following decades the answer pursued by the city government was to keep finding ways to create more road space.

175Increasing road space is not a long-term solution. Around the world, urbanists and city planners have come to the conclusion that there is no way around traffic. The only way to address or resolve the issue of traffic it is to make driving less attractive and make alternative ways of transport more efficient. But the problem with imple-menting a mobility solution that will offer sustainable transport in the future is that car-oriented policies are not only desirable to the car-owning population, but also by the population who wishes to own a car, making pro-car policies very attractive for politicians. Historically, the creation of more and wider streets has solved traffic problems in the short run, but the solution backfires after time by only intensifying the issue.

In order to have society demand long-term policies implemented by incumbents who we know care most about the short term, the goal must be for governments to effi-ciently communicate in the present time a policy’s future benefits. To achieve this, long-term policies must become legible, meaning that their goals must be easily un-derstood by citizens. If this task seems rather easy, let us remember that it is seldom applied. When voters are aware of the future benefits of a policy, even if the present costs are high, they are more likely to reward incumbents for their decisions; for example, let us consider how investing in elementary education has become a policy cherished by voters today, even when the future benefits will take some time to be felt. Legibility in policy not only boosts the implementation of better policies, it also becomes a tool for informed citizens to go against popular but noxious policies and demand solutions for the future.

In sum, within a democratic context there are specific incentives that determine the creation of policy, and multiple preferences of society are an important factor for their implementation, despite the potential for a popular policy to produce harmful effects in the future. Since politicians often pursue policies that grant them imme-diate political capital, regardless of their future consequences, the legibility of po-licies becomes a key factor for any democratic regime. In order for governments to be able to answer to society’s demands without pursuing policies that could hinder future generations, their policies must become easily legible. Legibility is a political tool that should be more often applied due to its potential to align good politics and good policy.

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A BLINKING PIXELBY PABLO KOBAYASHI, UNIDAD DE PROTOCOLOS

When I received the invitation to participate in the workshop “Legible Policy: Mobility and the Megalopolis,” I had an initial question that continued to surface throughout the collaboration: What can I bring to the table? I emphatically stated at our first session: I was trained as an architect. But I’m conscious of the many ways that title is deniable—I no longer consider myself an architect. What’s more, considering the similarities of that career to dogmatic religious practices, I consider that I exercise a secular version of archi-tecture: I have my own definition of it, and I follow my own relationship to it.

As such, when faced with a design problem, I confront it as a designer, not as an ar-chitect or a sociologist or an anthropologist, even less as a politician. I tackle with it with the design tools I have adopted, both intellectually and practically.

I have a special interest in the notion of emergence. This concept is present in many layers of my professional practice and also in the realm of the personal. I endorse the value of accidents, the use of ignorance as a design strategy and the importance of openness to constant discovery.

Material systems and their inherent properties have tremendous potential to be con-trollable, even programmable. I have keenly embraced technological advancements that enhance, inform and even define design strategies, and I find that the process of otherness in digital generative processes reinforces a constant search for objectivity. This relation has evolved into a structure of a digital design thinking, a systemic approach to design and architecture that derives from the use of digital tools but can prescind from them.

I am skeptical of democracy, especially in design processes, weary of the capital le-tters too often found in the words Architecture, City, Government, Nature, Public Space, People, Community, Participative Design and Sustainability. The naivety an outsider’s view can have towards exoticised local dynamics often renders its concep-tual construction useless for practical intervention purposes, but I value the fresh approach to the same dynamics only someone seeing them from afar can provide.Circumstances have led me, despite my own resistance, to deal with public space and all the implications of intervening, or rather interfering, in it by designing and pro-ducing precast concrete urban furniture. This forced me to leave my spectator’s role and take an active position towards topics I normally avoided.

It is precisely this sceptic, critical, materialistic, blunt and nearly cynical position that I have brought to the table.

Soon after our workshop, it became clear to me that legible policy is not so much about the enunciation of the policy itself, but rather the communication of the ori-gins of the policy and the awareness of the positive consequences of its implemen-tation on the greater good. Policies imply a top-down imposition. They also imply governmental exercise, thus provoking mistrust. Their generalised adoption requires

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a personal connection, a fact that triggers an emotional response which gives the im-plementation of the policy a sense of purpose, of personal gain, one that transcends the resistance created by mere imposition.

As a designer tackling the dynamics of public space, I have heard many times (and this collaboration was no exception) that empathy must be a major factor in creating something that truly responds to people’s needs and creates emotional connection—the imperative that designers should be empathic to the users their design target. Frankly, I find this both naive and ineffective. I cannot experience empathy for hypo-

thetic individuals of whom I know nothing but assumptions of their realities, nor can I be empathic to every individual, with all the complex layers of information and experiences that make up each individual. Even less can I can be empathic to the abstract notion of the People. Who are they? Who is he/she? When the People is everyone, it becomes no one.

However, in a deep but auspicious contradiction, by designing for no one, I can de-sign for everyone.

During the design phase of the first of our modular public furniture system, I was constantly confronted with this argument. On whom should I focus? If I try to de-velop a public seating system for Mary, a single mother in her late 20s, 1.56m tall, weighing 62kg, who lives in Iztapalapa, commutes for two hours every day, and sees concrete as a material used in unfinished buildings, I will attend to Mary’s needs in every single detail, and I will be constrained by her very specific experiences and preferences. I will also exclude the individual needs and circumstances of the other potential fourteen million users of my system. Individuality excludes, and empathy is mainly focused on the individual.

Instead, if I simplify the understanding of these many individuals to examine shared factors, mere physical characteristics which have behavioural consequences, then I can be more effective for a larger population. I can design a system focused on people between 13 and 100 years old, between 1.30m and 1.85m tall. This will still exclude some to an extent, but the ratio of inclusion vs. exclusion will be inverted, covering a greater number of individuals’ needs.

179But I can take this notion even farther by adopting a completely different framework. If I choose to eliminate the individual from the process, even eliminate the idea of a user completely, and instead I focus on the geometric consequences of an action—in this case, seating—I will obtain a much more neutral result. I can then design a set of horizontal solid surfaces elevated 45cm from the ground which, if placed at the co-rrectly at the right time, if they conform to the correct dynamics, will probably fulfill its initial purpose: providing seating.

From there I can work on bringing more variations to the formula, ones that will not interfere with the essential task. I can, for example, focus on grouping individuals by arranging these surfaces in a parallel packing configuration. Such configuration will make it more probable that people sit close to one another, facing each other, which will also increase the probability of them talking to each other. (It will not guarantee it.) I can work on the field of possibilities this particular intervention will open, ins-tead of a narrow set of predefined specificities.

This approach leads to a more open, adaptable and therefore appropriable product.I think this same reasoning can bring us to more open solutions to a major problem that is at root a basic communication issue: How do we make a broad spectrum of a city’s population understand that a lower speed limit will decrease the overall chance of participating in a fatal traffic incident? What means do we use not only to explain the origins of a decision to reduce the speed limit, but also the positive consequences of its adoption at a personal level?

Just as individuality often excludes, anonymity can include. I will expand on this with a specific design proposal: If you see a vertical LED display that arranges a ma-trix of 20x200 pixels, where each pixel represents a death caused by a traffic incident in the city, a passerby will likely feel shocked by it, but will not feel close to the facts displayed. However, if that display becomes a site-specific beacon integrated with a traffic post, and the pixels are made to represent the deaths that have occurred on the very spot connected to a real-time feed, then you greatly reduce the possibility of spatial or temporary detachment. Passersby must understand that they are where these deaths happened. The anonymity of the information becomes inclusive, and the immediacy of the means of representation provoke a direct, unavoidable con-nection. The integration with a known code of communication gives it a sense of familiarity, even frugality.

The end message is clear: Someone died there. It could be someone you know—or it could even be you. You could be the offender, or you could be the victim. One small blinking dot could be your son, your friend, your spouse or yourself. Everyone, or in this case no one, is you. Then your decision to accelerate goes beyond a personal urge to defy authority or the quotidian circumstance of being in a hurry; you must face the question of whether, after speeding, that blinking dot might be you.

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A POINT OF COMPARISON: MOBILITY IN LONDONBY GYORGYI GALIK AND ANASTASIA VIKHORNOVA, FUTURE CITIES CATAPULT

London is a city of cities. Its 32 boroughs, distinct and full of character, make a world city of huge diversity around the central City of London. London is connected to the rest of the globe by no fewer than five airports and directly to continental Europe by the Channel tunnel. The city is more than a national capital—it is also centre of in-ternational connection and global mobility with a massive influence on economics, trade and a globalising society.

Like many global cities, London has been experiencing rapid growth over the last decades. Currently the population of London is around 8.6 million. It is projected that by the 2030s London’s population will peak at 10 million, which might increase the current 26 million daily trips by an additional 5 million trips each day (Road Task Report, TfL, 2015).

International experience points to a more effective strategy of shifting travel habits from cars to public transport by introducing high service frequencies, central coor-dination of timetables, traffic priority for trams and buses and a conspicuous staff presence (Public Transport Users Association, 2013).

London has an extensive and developed transport network which includes both pri-vate and public services. Too many people in London still choose to use cars for short journeys when more sustainable modes—public transport, cycling and walking—would be practical. In order to achieve a continuing and greater shift towards more sustainable modes, the Mayor of London and Greater London Authority understand the importance of providing Londoners with the necessary infrastructure, informa-tion and support to choose alternatives to the car.

Recently there has been a substantial net shift away from private transport towards public transport in London. London’s public transport system includes a wide variety of modes: underground, overground trains, busses and even river bus, as well as a ca-ble car link that takes passengers across the river. The public transport infrastructure builds on a common electronic ticketing system, Oyster card, that allows passengers to easily shift between different types of transportation. London underground by far is the most popular mode of public transport, with its network connecting 270 diffe-rent stations with an annual passengers flow of 1.305 billion (TfL, 2015).

More than 90% of Londoners live within 400 metres of a bus stop. London’s bus ne-twork is extensive and highly technological, e.g. cashless payment, speed-limiting technology and e-paper bus stops are being tested to provide travel information (TfL, 2015). There are number of routes that operate even at night, and most of the bus stops have a live arrival-information display to ease the experience of the user’s jour-ney. London’s bus brigade is also environmentally sound and will soon have the big-gest fleet of hybrid busses (combination of diesel and electric motor) in Europe.

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As part of the London Infrastructure Plan 2050, the ‘Crossrail’ project has begun to accommodate the future growth of the city and to ease road congestion. It is a hi-gh-capacity railway system that will connect the outside of London to the very centre of the city. Crossrail is due for completion in 2018 and will have a high impact on mobility flows within central London. Some estimates show that Crossrail users may bring an extra 65 million journeys to some of the key underground stations.

Transport for London (TfL), the government body responsible for the transport system in Greater London, introduced a ‘Road Modernisation Plan’ that aims to improve the travelling conditions by making roads more accessible, enjoyable, safe and healthy for all kinds of users. The Plan includes 17 major schemes, including the expansion of the Cycle Superhighways and the construction of better public realms for pedestrians to encourage walking (Road Task Report, TfL, 2015).

During the continued development of a city, there are moments of change where people accept that something different is happening. The 2012 London Olympics, for example, encouraged people and authorities to think differently about how to manage transport.

As a separate project, TfL is experimenting with occasional road closures on wee-kends to demonstrate how these temporary interventions can have a beneficial im-pact including improved safety and air quality, decreased noise pollution and increa-sed physical activity. The idea of a ‘car free day’ is based on the success of many other cities around the world (including Mexico City) where officials have incorporated car-free days to promote improvement of mass transit, biking and walking. Instead of pressuring the individual to develop healthy habits, the intervention creates an environment where exercise is not only possible, but pleasant, ultimately motivating some individuals to choose to be physically active (Centre for Health Advancement, 2016).

Great strides have also been taken in London to improve air quality. The Mayor, throu-gh the Greater London Authority (GLA), has already committed to taking action to reduce air pollution from London’s transport system. These actions include the deve-lopment of electric vehicle infrastructure, congestion charging and the London Low Emission Zone (LEZ), smarter travel initiatives to encourage a shift to greener modes of transport, funding and supporting car clubs (especially hybrid and electric cars) and smoothing traffic and bus emissions. Older buses have been fitted with particu-late traps and diesel-electric hybrid buses are being introduced as quickly as possible (The Mayor’s Air Quality Strategy, 2010).

Current research indicates that the focus on stability and commuting habit “masks some important issues of variability, flexibility and change” in people’s behaviours. If the experiences of individuals actually incorporates greater flexibility than we cu-rrently design for, the opportunities to drive a little less will be missed (Flexi-Mobility, 2014).

Future Cities Catapult is broadening its focus to a wider range of mobility-related issues including working practices, urban logistics, schooling and leisure. In order to develop a coherent strategy, Future Cities Catapult is looking into transport policies that enable multi-modality allowing Londoners to shift towards more sustainable and active modes of mobility.

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TOOLS FOR LEGIBLE POLICY

Behaviour Design

As Dan Lockton points out, (p. 53) new methodologies are proving more effective at exploring the links between design, understanding and human action, particularly with respect to what’s become known as “behaviour change” for social and environ-mental benefit, searching for solutions from a myriad of technical as well as and social science disciplines. As the UK Nudge Team has proven, public policy that also designs for sustainable behaviour and cultural shifts needs to explore a myriad of possibilities: from data analysis to storytelling techniques, since good design and po-tent policy solutions both have the objective to influence individual actions for the benefit of both individual and society.

Civic Tech

Worldwide, there is a growing interest in technology used for social good; a particu-lar vein of this exploration known as civic tech looks to further citizens’ engagement and thus better their quality of life by creating more efficient communication chan-nels with government and/or increasing public value in some way. At Laboratorio para la Ciudad, we believe two hacks (see p. 125) are needed to propel this conversa-tion to the next level. First, the realization that tech is only the beginning of a solu-tion, and that deep work must be done to rearticulate bureaucratic structures and society in new ways, thanks to the existence of said technology. In other words, deep social structuring and institutional design must be part of the equation if civic tech is to have a lasting effect and rearticulate social realities.

Second of all, much of civic tech has focused on usability, practicality and efficiency; to engage and interact with new notions of civitas, cities must take into account a whole other set of values such as legibility, fascination, community, metaphoric and symbolic capacities etc. The humanities (its tools and frames) can have an important place in this conversation.

Complex Systems and Interventions

The built environment and the social spheres are in continuous and symbiotic flux. Cities are systems of systems. Important issues, such as health, are multi-factorial and must be analysed and treated as such. Siloed and linear thinking is not enough—the study of complex systems represents a new approach to science that investigates how relationships between parts give rise to the collective behaviors of a system and how the system interacts and forms relationships with its environment. Hence, governments need to incorporate systems thinking as a tool when designing public policy, as well as thinking of of “leverage points”. Donella Meadows (1999) ex-plains that these are places within a complex system—a corporation, an economy, a

BY SUPERFLUX BY LABORATORIO PARA LA CIUDAD

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living body, a city, an ecosystem, etc.—where a small shift in one aspect can produce big changes system-wide. Meadows professed the importance of applying the relati-vely new tools of system dynamics to global problems, and she also analysed the most effective intervention design, which in many ways is also a practice of legibility.

Places to intervene in a systemby Donella Meadows(in increasing order of effectiveness)

9. Constants, parameters, numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards).8. Regulating negative feedback loops.7. Driving positive feedback loops.6. Material flows and nodes of material intersection.5. Information flows.4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints).3. The distribution of power over the rules of the system.2. The goals of the system.1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system—its goals, power structure, ru-les, its culture—arises.

Context-Sensitive Sense-making

Thoughtfully designed filtering and visualising methods can work effectively alongsi-de traditional sense-making techniques to help policy makers pick weak signals from the noise and work towards a sensitive, ethical strategy for decision making. The experiment here would be to design a series of frameworks and filters that emerge after the futures visioning exercise rather than predetermined, generalised filtering. For instance—a game-changing technological breakthrough in emission efficiency or the failure to reach a major global political agreement for sustainable development —can both be used as context-sensitive filters for discussions in terms of specific poli-cies. This can become a robust tool for addressing the messy ground-level realities of policy making.

Dissemination Tactics

Critical to ensure that the insights from the political ethnography work are widely accessible. One possibility to achieve this is to redesign the traditional tools of po-litical campaigning as it is a familiar and accessible format. For instance, a tactical dissemination toolkit could include templates for flyers, posters, stickers and notices which could be filled in with key findings and placed on public noticeboards, cafes, libraries, town halls and pubs. We imagine local councils, citizen-led initiatives, and numerous non-governmental organisations would be keen to try such low-cost tools and become early adopters. Another highly successful and effective way of raising awareness and visibility about opaque political procedures dissemination tactic is performance, either in the street or theatre.

Experimental Zones (Revisiting minimal states of exception)

States of exception are a polemic tool for states craft. Born as concept in the legal theory of Carl Schmitt, it proclaims that heads of state can and should be able to act beyond the rule of law if it benefits the public good in a state of emergency. This measure has been used on many occasions to questionable means, most recently to suspend civil liberties in the United States as measures that form part of the “War on Terror”. The historic consequences of government acting outside of carefully cons-tructed (and hyper-contained) legal and administrative scaffolding leaves societies understandably wary of states of exceptions in government.

191And yet, bureaucratic structures need to be strategically relieved from the weight of their own rules and regulations if they are to question the status quo and envision other (hopefully better) ways forward: to innovate. Minimal and controlled states of exception—zones where the usual rules no longer apply—have to be designed into governments in the shape of Laboratories, innovation offices et al., with agility and experimentation in mind instead of blind adherence to the rules; shaped and protec-ted with the proper mechanisms, finding ways of going back to first principles and proposing new paradigms where, for example, radical transparency can (and should) go hand in hand with fast-acting, experimental and emergent strategies, plus the legal and administrative capacity to continuously rearticulate its borders and add new actors or agendas.

Paradoxically, concepts borrowed from self-proclaimed anarchist Hakim Bey can in-form the ethos of these government-bound Temporary Autonomous Zone: reminding us of the socio-political value of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structu-res of control; the importance of non-hierarchical systems of social relationships and the possibility of releasing one’s own mind from the controlling mechanisms that have been imposed on it; new territories recreated on the boundary line of establi-shed regions (Bey, 1991). These minimal spaces become a place to question the very nature of the larger structure that contains them, mitigating risk for all. They differ from states of exception as we know the in the following characteristics:

Scale: These are micro territories instead of nations.Temporality: They are experimental, prototypes, quick-flowing and have ludic ethos.Legibility: They use new means to make more visible the inner workings and me-chanisms of a contained space instead of supplanting legibility with endlessly tau-tological rules. Plus they offer clarity on how each experiment’s medular question optimizes for public value, notwithstanding its success or its failure.

From Data Viz to Visual Epistemology

Image matters. Graphic design has become a great tool to turn data into information through visualizations and graphics. Yet at Laboratorio para la Ciudad we believe we are just at the beginning stages of understanding how to use images not only to convey the relationship between different data points in clearer ways, but also as a way of communicating subjects in nonlinear fashion and creating tools for thinking, helping make sense of complex systems and model interventions. Visual thinking is widespread in mathematical practice and has diverse cognitive and epistemic purpo-ses, but has not been sufficiently explored in the realm of social sciences and urban practices. Could images be at the center of the legibility discussion—with both peda-gogical and innovative tools for discovery and exploration?

New Urban Typologies: Civic Spaces, Open Spaces

Cities now acknowledge the importance of participation and governance. Efforts are underway to rethink the place of the digital sphere in terms of citizen engagement: open data, new apps, new portals. However, especially in cities where there is an important digital gap, physical public space could also serve as a point of encounter between citizens and their government, beyond public buildings created for services and complaints. Although the notion of government solely as a provider of budgets and services is still pervasive, if we accept this new social reality, we must reenvision our role: government as catalyser. We need original civic spaces, new civic skills, pro-jects that articulate social energy and political will. To engage, city-making has to be-come fascinating—meaning we need political imagination, reframing potential, the prototyping of urban creativity, all approached with deeply collaborative and social mindsets to develop open source places that are programmable by the community and their needs.

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Object-driven Design Research

A successful experiential method for ethnographic work, in which diegetics and pro-totypes are used to provoke responses. Alongside observations and interviews, by loo-king and even touching actual props, participants are encouraged to imagine new possibilities. These often speculative prototypes, help ask ‘what if’ and ‘as if’ ques-tions, giving people the space to develop opinions, get involved, and commit to the conceit.

Participatory Platforms and Programs

New technology and methodologies can allow for governments to evolve from models of representative democracy to participatory and deliberative governance, creating better feedback loops. Mexico City recently approved an “Open City Law” that proc-laims the right of citizens to be part of the design of public policy, and not only by voting for their representatives during elections. Hence, understanding that Open Government is an evolving cultural phenomenon, the law also obliges government to continuously experiment with new ways of making this possible.

It is often assumed that deploying participatory initiatives is enough to engage citi-zens, regenerate the city and make a difference in people’s lives. This is not the case. Likewise, citizens’ participation on its own is not enough. It is insufficient to merely open doors of participation and expect great ideas, let alone great results capable of instigating even bolder solutions. We assert that paradigms of creative governance is the way forward. In this new paradigm of governance, new public policy should be created to increase communities’ skills, city knowledge and collaborative and creati-ve capacities.

Plug-ins

Coincidentally, both Unidad de Protocolos and Laboratorio para la Ciudad work with the plug-in theory expounded by Pablo Kobayashi, in which a small group can tempo-rarily adhere itself to a larger system, giving the system augmented or different capa-cities. Once the objective is reached, it disconnects and keep working autonomously, but it is capable of still propagating the new knowledge and tools acquired with each project or mission, adding to a multidisciplinary repertoire of possibilities. Traces of the collaboration are also usually left within the host system in the form of new optics, tools, capacities, relationships.

In the case of Laboratorio para la Ciudad—a group that always works as as a bridge between government and citizens—the traces that remain are also social structures in the form of new communities articulated around a common vision, ideally blurring the dividing lines between disciplines, citizens and public institutions, all coming together seeking to create public value.

Political Ethnography

Unbiased third party actors study the direct inner workings of state actors and poli-tical institutions in order to provide a deeper understanding of policy making pro-cesses, the evidence and intent behind decision-making, and potential implications of those decisions. Such activity would display a willingness for political actors to become participants in making their own work legible.

193Speculative Policymaking

The practice of envisioning futures via speculative design can be a powerful tool, particularly worth considering in this context. Presented through visual aids, the proposed policy becomes a drawing board where relevant stakeholders and citizens can annotate their own suggestions through pictures, words, photographs and much more. It becomes a vehicle for creating an open and editable policy for the future, paving the way for an iterative approach to participatory governance, where policies can be publicly versioned through collaborative visioning.

Symbolic Infrastructures

A city is not only composed of its visible and physical aspects. It is also a fluctuating composite of intangibles: a sense of identity, a repertoire of historical or contempo-rary symbols, living metaphors and collective urban imaginaries, merging and clas-hing. Creativity and culture must be part of the design of cities’ “public-ness”, and not only in the form of art per se. Culture is the great a priori. We need new political forms and urban languages, and we also need to think about how a city is shaped by its belief systems, how these intangible assets help or hinder the creation of public value and how these abstract infrastructures hold our potential worlds, articulating (whether loudly or silently) both subjective and social meaning. Cities are, in the end, cultural artefacts and storytelling machines.

Transparent Feedback Loops

Ensure that new governance models in democracy move past tokenism. When citi-zens who choose to volunteer their time achieve a sense of agency and ownership toward the activity, it is imperative that they be kept abreast of the translation of that activity into a policy, and know how their involvement aids in the final decision-ma-king processes. Simple tools of design and media can help make the translation, deci-sion making and communication processes more open, and ensure that contributors retain their sense of ownership and agency. Debates can be tweeted, videos streamed, where possible, with the possibility for people to respond in real time. Even if people don’t watch, the fact that it is being streamed can give them the sense that the inten-tion is transparency rather than closed doors.

References

Bey, H. (1991). T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poe-tic Terrorism. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/stream/al_Hakim_Bey_T.A.Z._The_Temporary_Autonomous_Zone_Ontological_Anarchy_Poetic_Terror/Hakim_Bey__T.A.Z.__The_Temporary_Autonomous_Zone__Ontological_Anarchy__Poetic_Terrorism_a4#page/n0/mode/2up

Meadows, D. (1999). Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. Hartland, Vt. The Sustainability Institute. Retrieved from: http://donellameadows.org/wp-con-tent/userfiles/Leverage_Points.pdf

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The word Legible comes to us from the late 14c, from Late

Latin: legibilis, “that can be read”, from Latin legere, “to

read”. But lest we think that to be “legible” begins and ends

at transparency, or the clarity of the “writing” before us, it

is interesting to take an extra step back in time, and explo-

re the etymology of “reading”: from the old English rædan

(West Saxon), redan (Anglian) “to advise, counsel, persuade;

discuss, deliberate; rule, guide; arrange, equip; forebode;

explain; learn by reading; put in order” (related to ræd, red

“advice”), from Proto-Germanic *redan (cognates: Old Norse

raða, Old Frisian reda, Dutch raden, Old High German ratan,

German raten “to advise, counsel, guess”.

So even though legible policy can (and must) pass through

the realm of a good and honest explanation--the hows and

the whys--we must also take into account that in the end le-

gibility--which is also about counsel, discussion, persuasion,

arranging and guessing--is in the end a tool for us to collecti-

vely make sense of our world. To frame, deliberate and envi-

sion. And to ask ourselves difficult questions at times, with

no easy answers.

— GABRIELLA GÓMEZ-MONT (p. 83)

Legible PolicyGlossary

195

What is a legible policy? In the context of policies often so

opaque and inaccessible as to be utterly unapparent to many

citizens, I like to think of a single qualitative metric by which

to understand this. If a policy is actively discussed, before,

during and after implementation, the relevant authority has

at least demonstrated positive momentum towards policy le-

gibility.

But here, I would like to push that thinking further, for be-

yond legibility, and beyond a conversation, is true partici-

pation in the policymaking process, the adoption and im-

plementation of policies, and the process of iterating policy

over time in response to the changing needs of the city.

— JOHN LYNCH (P. 45)

196

Legible policy…is partly about making policy (and law) ac-

cessible: using language which is easily understandable, ma-

king things visible and open and readable, potentially also

less complex and more consistent across contexts (for exam-

ple, as the Common Good movement in the US proposes),

and not hiding policy changes.

…The three components of legible policy which seem impor-

tant…are accessibility, transparency of intentions, and the

potential for action.

—DAN LOCKTON (P. 53)

197

Legibility should “mean more than just seeing and unders-

tanding—more than even engaging, but actually acting upon

things to make a difference…Real and sustained change:

power, and agency. Even something visceral, such as rage,

fear, passion, skepticism or fairness. Legibility in which ci-

tizens gain a real change in perception, a better understan-

ding of possible impacts of their decisions, and of, first and

foremost, the broader political and economic relations, inte-

rests and power of companies, polluters and governments.”

— GYORGYI GALIK(P. 63)

198

Legible policy, which has roughly come to mean accessible

with regards to its contents and transparent with regards

to its goals and intentions. In this way, the idea of legibility

has arguably played the role of a container for our hopes of

consensus. It is as if, in stressing the importance of legible

policy, we were lamenting: “If only we could make people

understand what’s best for them in the long run!” Yet, from

the soft-systemic, agonistic perspective … that may not be a

realistic objective after all. The development of policies, as

an instance of systemic design, may irremediably operate in

a horizon of conflict. If this is the case, legibility qua acces-

sibility and transparency may play the equally (if not more)

important role of a minimal requirement for an accommo-

dation of conflicting worldviews.

— JORGE CAMACHO ( P. 143)

199

IS IT POSSIBLE TO IMAGINE A CITY CONSTITUTION THAT IS UNDERSTOOD BY EVERY CITIZEN?

200

ARE POLICIES THE TOOLS/PLANS FOR THE FUTURE CITY RATHER THAN THE FIRST AID KIT FOR THE CURRENT ONE?

201

CAN WE SEE CITIZENS AS THE BUILDERS OF THE FUTURE, RATHER THAN THE RECIPIENTS OF TODAY’S RULES AND REGULATIONS?

202

WHAT IS THE EFFICIENCY COST OF LEGIBLE VS. OBSCURE POLICY?

203

DO THE GOALS OF POLICIES RESPOND TO WHAT WE VALUE AS A SOCIETY? ARE THESE GOALS EXISTENT IN EVERY POLICY AND ITS COMMUNICATION?

204

DOES OUR GOVERNMENT—AND DO WE OURSELVES—CONSIDER CITIZENS AS PAWNS OR AGENTS?

205DO WE SHARE AND AGREE ON OUR VALUES?

206 IS OURS A CITY OF

RULES OR VISIONS?

207

210

210

211211

REFERENCES

212

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Figure 3. Kemp. M. / In Pictures / Corbis. Activists and residents gathered for a Reclaim Brixton protest in April against gentrification (2015). [photo] Available at: https://media.guim.co.uk/f9b95037503bbaea8e10658ce71a59c13a22216d/0_130_5126_3076/5126.jpg [Accessed March 23, 2016].

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Figure 15. Wunderbaum. Songs at the End of the World (2012). [photo] Personal archive.

Figure 16. Superflux. Drone Aviary: Traffic Drone (2015). [photo] Personal archive.

Figures 17, 18. Superflux. Power of 8 (2009). [photo] Personal archive.Fig. 19, 20. Ecobike Scheme, Mexico City operating since 2010. Modified bikes for carrying goods, Mexico City (2016)

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