Urban Codemakers

The Master Codemaker takes a spatial approach to urban codemaking. Seeing the role of the urban designer to put in place codes that inform people without words: nonverbal and visual signs that control and regulate the use of space. He creates both visual codes, spatial codes and behavioural codes that are designed to work together to form a new language – this may be the ‘Third Language’ evolving from evolution’s third replicator: genes, memes, and…

he remains missing in action.

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Don’t look at me like that, turning your head to the side al “aaaw” and ready to coo and comfort me. I am a bit distracted from lack of sleep, but that’s all. Not like I’ve had three weeks of dentist’s visits with extractions and root canals and the associated neck-spraining contortions or anything serious like that. I’ve been busy, is all.

So, the Wikileaks dipomatic cable data. Careful cryptanalysis of communications between Australia and Austria, uncomfortable neighbours in the Alphabetical Order, reveals that Canberra warned Vienna against synechdoche and contagion. The main thrust of the messages is the importance of protecting MittelEuropa from “circular patterns of play”, and I am guessing they don’t mean frisbees, hula-hoops and angle grinders, but something more sinister and primal.

Secondary analyses of tertiary patterns in the Australian-Austrian cables, however, draw a different picture. It appears that those texts have been planted by a mole, and they aren’t a warning but an invitation for Austrian infiltrees to take Melbourne’s urban codemaking and transplant it to their own Museum Quarter. There is a Fifth Column in their ranks, and it’s copying our game.

What, you say? All invention? Circular logic? Read the cables for yourself!

What, you say? All invention? The leaked cables are only from American Embassies? Oops, you got me there. Ok. But that doesn’t change my conclusion: there is going to be a ring of play this week in the Melbourne CBD, and the circles will confound you.

Sorry for the short post. I can’t sit here and type for long; the guy running this net cafe may have recognised me and phoned the authorities. Or maybe I am typing this from the beach, feet in the sand and head in a sunhat. How would you know?

Grids made the original city.
Human-sized networks flow off the main grid. Laneways.

Since he last spoke via proxy, the Master Codemaker has been silent. Today he began tagging sites in the city.
Sites that have history.
Sites that are part of the grid but off the grid.
Sites that have been claimed.
Sites that remain free for inscription.
Places you would not normally go.
Sites of the original network. Dead ends. Blind corners. Mixed-use zones. Self-organising communities.
Filling in the squares of the grid with codes. Labyrinths.

There may be up to 64 IDEOTAGs to find in these zones.

But the Master Codemaker was interrupted. Some sites may remain untagged…
For now, south of home base is where to start.

The Locative Urbanist takes a technology driven view on urban codemaking. His approach is driven by a push to remap the city via computer simulation, form-based codes and augmented reality. While this may sound cold and calculated it is motivated by a philosophy that sees urban space as having a greater flexibility when its various flows are monitored and made tangible via technology – a ‘bottom-up’ approach to codemaking in which the codes are generated via interaction between people, space, buildings and technology.

He tags the city in blue. The city itself is the program – activated and configured by the movement of people through its human-sized networks. To get an insight into the mind of the urbanist, read more here.