Post-Cadastral Determinism: Unravelling Urban Cartographies, Valuation, Behaviour and Decision-Making in Realtime

Nazareth, Ian (2024) Post-Cadastral Determinism: Unravelling Urban Cartographies, Valuation, Behaviour and Decision-Making in Realtime. In: P/References of Design. Cumulus conference proceedings series, 1 . Cumulus Association, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest, Budapest, pp. 811-823. ISBN 978-952-7549-02-5

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Abstract

The contemporary urban landscape delineates a departure from traditional descriptors and historic anchors, propelled by a confluence of pervasive distributed digital systems. The entanglement of the spatial internet, Web3, APIs, digital twins, real-time data, and analogous platform technologies is pivotal, enmeshing, and orchestrating interactions within urban domains. The influence of network technologies ripples across multifaceted dimensions, shaping navigation, mobility, and service provisioning. Recursive feedback mechanisms and algorithms such as ratings, reviews, suggestions, and recommendations collectively catalyse the attention economy and choice architectures through categorising individual preferences. It is an emergent landscape where the technological infrastructures permeate, not just as tools, but as mediums intertwining with the fabric of societal existence, cultural expression, and urban architecture. The 'Post-Cadastral' condition establishes and explores a domain of urban and architectural invention - a city's imminent escape from cadastral space, embracing virtual realms and digital ubiquity. It is concerned with the hyper-reality of virtual space as mooring of invisible cultural, economic, and societal forces. The domain of research operates at limits of material and spatial practice, integrating the physical, the virtual and holographic; and engaging with real-time, urban data analytics, simulation, gamification, techno-cultural discourse and narrative, AI, and generative techniques. The research explores the convergence of augmented urban infrastructures and services, delineating the interwoven threads of value generation (value capture), behavioural shifts, and performance metrics. It unpacks the emergent paradigm where cities, unleashed from historical cartographic constraints, traverse fluid territories shaped by the synergistic forces of digital evaluations and algorithmic orchestration. In this epochal shift, urban spaces transmute into arenas where cadastral limitations yield to an amorphous terrain of digital augmentation and evolving spatial imaginaries. This paper scrutinizes the intricate interplay of web-centric reviews, ratings, comments, and AI-driven algorithms that organise a departure from conventional urban spatiality - a city abstracted by search terms and contained in the comments sections and sorted by popularity. Delving into this labyrinth, it dissects the convergence of diverse valuation systems, nuanced behavioural patterns, and algorithmically mediated decision-making processes, illuminating the evolving dynamics within contemporary urban environments. Through projects, bespoke workflows, and methodologies, its objective resides in rendering discernible precise pathways wherein technological transitions become etched within the urban continuum, consequently integrated within the realms of architectural practice.

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