Urbanism on Track

Abstract

Tracking technologies such as GPS, mobile phone tracking, video and RFID monitoring are rapidly becoming part of daily life. Technological progress offers huge possibilities for studying human activity patterns in time and space in new ways. Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) held an international expert meeting in early 2007 to investigate the current and future possibilities and limitations of the application of tracking technologies in urban design and spatial planning. This book is the result of that expert meeting. Urbanism on Track introduces the reader to the basics of tracking research and provides insight into its advantages above other research techniques. But it also shows the bottlenecks in gathering and processing data and applying research results to real-life problems. Urbanism on Track showcases tracking experiments in urban studies, planning and design – from pedestrian navigation in Austria to Danish field tests, from TU Delft's Spatial Metro project to MIT's Real Time Rome and last but not least the Sense of the City project realised in Eindhoven. Urbanism on Track discusses the relevance of tracking for policy making, the possibilities of a new cartography and the implementation of tracking technologies in urban design and planning. This makes Urbanism on Track a unique book, setting the agenda for the structural embedment of research using tracking technologies in urbanism.