"What is the city but the people?"

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus asked the question first. And we've been attempting to answer it as we respond to each wave of new technology that is meant to make our lives easier as we engage in public spaces. We now voluntarily agree to contribute information to urban databases in exchange for information on the ground that is useful to us. We don't make money from this but the private companies managing the databases stand to gain. Is this the role the citizen plays as a city evolves, a pixel on a map? What happened to the random and the unpredictable? 

I confess. I'm captivated by technology and appreciate how it can be leveraged to solve problems. I love knowing when the next bus is arriving, or how to navigate to my destination, or where the nearest cup of coffee is waiting. But how do you get optimisation without losing the melting pot that makes "place" so special? Let's not forget the abomination of large highways slicing through urban neighbourhoods in the US so that traffic could flow better. We lost sight of the local and paid homage to the automobile, and we're still doing it.

Community asset mapping enables a bottom-up, citizen-led approach to planning but it can be messy. It is ethnographic and iterative. Each sub-ecosystem defining itself for the one around it.