Emily and Gerald write “Winner Winner” for Columbia GSAPP’s ARPA Journal

Gaming, Surveillance, and the New, Optimized City: Gerald and Emily write “Winner Winner” for The Search Engine, the current volume of Columbia GSAPP’s Applied Research Practices in Architecture Journal. The essay looks at how surveillance-based data-mining systems originally built for intelligence and casino industries could be repurposed for urban planning, land use and architecture, yielding both new possibilities as well as risks. We use our “Grow A Lot” project to show how combining disparate data sets can identify under-utilized sites and catalyze adaptive urban strategies, while also highlighting the privacy and ethical trade-offs of such systems.