Jackson Free Press

Susan Piedmont-Palladino believes that new technology can help make cities better.

Piedmont-Palladino, 52, is a professor of architecture at Virginia Tech's Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center near Washington, D.C. For the past four years, she has also served as a curator at the National Building Museum. Her current project at the museum, Intelligent Cities, is a year-long inquiry into the connections between information technology and cities. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and with help from IBM and Time Magazine, Intelligent Cities combines data from researchers with public input taken from surveys on the projects' website.

On Saturday, Piedmont-Palladino will give the keynote address at FORMCities, a conference on the future of mid-sized cities like Jackson, sponsored by the Jackson Community Design Center. Her speech, which is free and open to the public, starts at 4 p.m. at the War Memorial Auditorium (120 South State St.).

Without giving it all away, what will you be addressing in your keynote speech?
I'm sort of obsessed with the city as a thing, as a cultural construct. I'm also fascinated by how we perceive the cities we're in. What is a city? Do we need a certain kind of density? Depending on your professional background, or what you do, you would make that definition very differently. So I'll be talking a bit about definitions of the city, but I'm also going to talk about how design professionals actually do what they do. When we look at something as complex as the city, how do we pull out the relevant material that we can then operate on? What kind of drawings and images do we produce to share our ideas with our own profession and with others? It's really a way of thinking about drawings and photographs as tools of persuasion, the way we often think about speech, and in a way that the community of decision-makers can be enlarged and also better informed.

It seems that the conference is especially focused on that--broadening the number of voices that contribute to these design decisions.
Exactly.

How does this relate to the 'Intelligent Cities' initiative?
Typically, when you do an exhibition, the curator does a lot of research and spends about a year doing that with an advisory committee. Then the exhibition opens, and we do public programming and outreach, and there's probably going to be a book.

'Intelligent Cities' is an upside-down project. We're starting out with the big public outreach campaign. We're going to keep this up, this public outreach, with full-page ads in Time Magazine and things on time.com until next spring. Then we're going to have a forum in June where we look at what we've learned. The theme of it is to look at how this immense amount of data and information that's out there, from Census data to satellite information--we're wallowing in data--(and ask) how do we make that actionable. How do we pull it out of all the dreary spreadsheets, white papers and reports that are in their professional silos, and the public is kept at arm's length by mystifying language? How do we get all of that in such a way that we can make better decisions, so that we can see things? We're looking at cities, technology and communication. The forum next summer will be about that. Then I'll write a book and then we'll do an exhibition after all that. Some of this is crowd-sourcing research, which is a chaotic and uncontrollable adventure. But that's kind of what a city is anyway, so it feels like the right way to do it.

What examples are there of the kind of data that you think could be useful for urbanists
There's a lab called the SENSEable lab at MIT. The spatial history project at Stanford, which actually looks at history and data like locations of goldmines and infrastructure from the gold rush--really interesting ways of representing information to us so that we see new things.

One of the things we're really excited about is some research that NASA has been doing looking at Atlanta, in particular, looking at the urban-heat island effect. That's an effect everybody's familiar with. Cities are always warmer than their surroundings. It's one of those things where, intuitively, everybody knows, "Well, there's a lot of hard surfaces, not as much greenery, a lot of impervious surfaces." NASA and some meteorologists turned up some weird data that (shows) the urban heat island actually changes weather--It isn't just warmer. But there is now data on evening thunderstorms that Atlanta causes on itself.