Tuesday night was the inaugural event for Rapid Response, a new series at Studio-X in New York that will be held through the fall, on the last Tuesday of every month. Billing itself as “an open and undetermined platform for quick response to events that have transpired over the last thirty days,” Rapid Response is the brainchild of alumni and staff of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University.
Titled Beijing Air, the opening night was dedicated to the brouhaha surrounding air quality in Beijing during the 2008 Summer Olympics. Sarah Williams, Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University GSAPP, presented data from her work with Carbon Footprint, a small mobile carbon monoxide air quality censor attached to a GPS device that was used to measure levels of pollution in the area around the Olympic Games.
In cooperation with members of the Associated Press, Sarah and her team became local monitors, traversing the city during the week before and the two weeks of the Olympics with their hand-held censors, comparing the data they collected to the official smog readings of the Chinese government and to comparably-sized areas of London and New York City.
They discovered, as they suspected, that air pollution can be highly localized, and that the measures taken by the Chinese government to reduce pollution, at least on first glance, seemed to have had a drastic effect on overall pollution levels, raising questions about what happens next for Beijing, after the factories get back into production and the traffic resumes it’s normal level of insanity.
David Benjamin, co-founder of The Living, an architecture practice based on open-source research and design, discussed the implications that widespread use of this kind of technology could have on pollution here in New York, where pollution levels are at least three to six times lower than in Beijing (therefore differences in local air quality more acutely felt). Could an army of citizen censors, posting data online from their neighborhoods and local parks, effect real change in areas where power is normally concentrated in the hands of a select few?
Rapid Response will meet again next month to discuss something totally different, but timely. Check Studio X’s website frequently for updates.
