Richard Saul Wurman gave the keynote address at today’s ESRI International User Conference in San Diego. Wurman is an author of 83 books, a trained architect and urban planner, and the founder of the TED Conference. His address focused on his 19.20.21 campaign, which highlights the increasing urbanization of our planet, with 19 cities of 20 million or more people in the 20th century. He is working on a series of television programs called Cities: Understanding the Way We Live, to highlight the move toward greater urbanization around the globe.
Wurman invented the term information architecture to describe the grammar of visualizing how we live. He says that rather than selling his expertise, he sells his ignorance, taking the journey from not knowing to knowing. We’re all in the understanding business, communicating what we know to others by showing patterns.
If we ask questions about what makes up a city, we need to display information compatibly for better understanding. Rather than making cities better, he’s working to distill the phenomena of cities, because understanding precedes action.
A central component of the presentation were clay models that Wurman and his students created of cities back in 1962. The models depicted cities in 3D for the purpose of comparing the cities footprints to each other. An interesting observation from this and more recent exercises is that cities don’t measure themselves in the same way, and there are no set boundaries to cities, yet they organize themselves similarly.
As part of the 19.20.21 project, which includes Wurman, Jon Kamen and Jack Dangermond as partners, the group is using comparative analysis to understand the urban patterns. Interesting patterns emerge when analyzing the metrics of a city where divisions of geography such as hills or neighborhoods provide distinct patterns of citizens that also affect transportation, and other elements that all affect the quality of life.
Part of the vision of 19.20.21 is the idea of an urban observatory where the information will be organized centrally so that we can all realize that we’re not a planet of countries, but a planet of cities. The creation of a common metric and a means to view each city and compare them in a standard template will help people understand issues of sustainability.
