Real - time cities

A city is, of course, by default real-time as exemplified by the street sell of umbrellas when it starts to rain in Barcelona (Figure 1). However, people moving and acting in a city base their decisions on information that is, in most cases, not instantaneous as rain drops and not synchronized with their present time and place. In recent years, the increasing deployment of sensors and handheld electronic devices environments has reshaped these processes and impacted the urbanization of the city. In a real-time city, citizens can be aware and react to events that they can't see in their immediate vicinity or that took place days before. While humans still set the boundaries, more and more of the critical life support systems of the city are instrumented to both sense and make sense of the world around them. Or as in the “Synchronic Society” envisioned by Bruce Sterling every object worthy of human or machine consideration generates a small history. These histories are not dusty archives locked away on ink and paper. They are informational resources, manipulable in real time.