Urban DNA

Researchers have used geotagged images from cities around the world to develop software that can identify the little architectural details.  They found enough location sensitive architectural features to pick out which of the dozen cities they examined the photo is from.  Reports in Planetizen and New Scientist point us to the research.

Pretty interesting stuff.  Pretty crappy title from Planetizen.  A city's DNA isn't found in its balconies or its bay windows or its stoic columns.  Those are just window dressing.

There really is a genome to cities.  There are underpinnings, snippets of code, base processes that make unique places.  But they're only evidenced by architecture in the most remote and detached extrapolations.

Let's think about Paris and the gable roofs and the stout buildings and the tree lined boulevards.

Let's think about New York and the wedding cake architecture and the open plazas at the foot of massive towers.

Neither of these things were driven by some conspiracy of architects to make a city look like a particular city.  The were driven by the zoning laws that the architects were responding to, which themselves were based on

When you're looking at architecture, you're looking at an end result.  You've gone through financing.  You've gone through need.  You've gone through law.  These are the things that make up the genome of a place.

And, what's better, we're getting closer to deciphering that genome.  They did this through data mining, running geotagged pictures through software that recognizes   This type of technology is going to be fantastic, when it's connected to something deeper.

Guess what else is geotagged?  Zoning ordinances.  Development applications and approvals.  Permits and legislative decisions.  Ownership records, deeds, mortgages, wills.  Reams of paperwork that themselves can be tagged and compared between places.  That is true DNA.