Tim Wu, invitado estos días en el blog de Lawrence Lessig, co-autor del reciente Who controls teh Internet? y viejo conocido de este blog, ha publicado un Tributo a Jane Jacobs (que falleció hace pocos días). Entre todos los artículos y comentarios que se han dedicado estos días a Jane Jacobs, sin duda una de las principales referencias del urbanismo y la política local, el de Wu presenta la originalidad de trasladar el pensamiento de Jacobs del diseño urbano al diseño de las redes. Del mismo modo que Jacobs atacó la planificación centralizada y los megaproyectos y defendió el desarrollo orgánico, las escalas humanas, y la evolución continua de los usos de los edificios y espacios urbanos, Wu propone que estas ideas deberían guiar el diseño de las redes de telecomunicaciones. Dado que las ciudades no son más (ni menos!) que redes de comunicaciones físicas (y soporte de muchos otros tipos de redes) la analogía es totalmente razonable. Al igual que las ciudades, las redes flexibles, reconfigurables y adaptables por los propios usuarios permitirán usos más libres, creativos e innovadores:
What Jacobs favored is letting neighborhoods be. She thought citiy planners ought create small roads and small blocks that worked on a human scale, and then stand back let the inhabitants decide how best to use their neighborhoods. Here thinking wasn’t quite economics or sociology, liberal or conservative, but rather a powerful attack on our constant tendancy to overestimate our own abilities to plan how people should live their lives.
The comparisons to network design should be obvious. Network designers, like say the writers of ATM, who have too specific an idea of what they want their users to do create abominable networks that imprison their users and become obsolute quickly. The more general purpose and useful the network, the more it does for society and individuals, and the better it evolves from one use to another.
Consider the comparison: a SoHo building can begin life as a factory, become an artist’s loft, then a boutique, then a condo, and so on. Some of the networks and even applications have led constantly evolving lives. The internet supported usenet, gopher, veronica, the web, ICQ, IM and so on, in a steady kind of evolution that was unpredictable in advance. The WWW itself has shuffled through static sites, through “home pages” of the Geocities era, through the rise of the search engine, through the blog, and through 2.0-style sites. Someone, maybe Dana Boyd, should write “The Death and Life of Great American Applications.”
Jacobs understood that the point of urban planning was not planning for a moment, but trying to cultivate healthy, evolving cities that make people happy to live in. Much of the same can be said about information architectures - the best planned networks don’t overplan, but somehow manage to create a kind of life of their own.
