Data municipality

Abstract

The central goal of the project was, initially, to understand the existing role of DATA within our current society; how we use data, how we store data, what we know or do not understand about this highly prominent resource.
With this understanding gained in the initial research period it was then possible to attempt to consider how this prominent aspect of our 21st century lives might be used, housed and better understood in the future, considering how one might integrate something considered to be so far removed from the architectural realm into an architecture for the people of Amsterdam in 2050.
The projects thus acts in many ways as a polemic against the existing data storage trends:
The culmination of this research and architectural consideration manifested in two major moves, one societal and one architectural.
Socially I predict and move against mass anonymous data storage to a decentralised and highly, socially integrated system of storage, access and governance through a re-organisation of existing ownership of data, democratically placing the person back in control of where their data is stored and to whom they allow access to. The integration of data + urban context was also important in this democratic shift, I would hope that the once ‘removed’ topic of data storage could become part of ones daily journey within the Oud-Zuid.
Architecturally; I predict this decentralisation to manifest in the creation of a series of spaces from the more practical spaces of the Bank of Data (storage), University space (research) and Data Library (access) to the more symbolic space of the Data temple in which we can predict an ‘end’ to ones data post-mortem. These spaces together could be considered to be the future element of out local municipal architecture further attempting to humanise what we now see as a very un-human activity.