Something is thinning in public space. Pavements are still crowded. Parks still bustle. But if you look more closely – or, better still, if you measure it – the texture of our interactions has changed.
Together with colleagues at Yale, Harvard and other universities, we used AI to compare footage of public spaces from the 1970s with recent video in the same locations in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The findings are striking: people walk faster, linger less, and are less likely to meet up. That’s no surprise in a world where phones, Netflix and AI companions are luring us away from real-world spaces and real-world friends. Yet, if technology is part of the problem, it may also be part of the solution. By using AI to study urban public spaces, we can gather data, pick out patterns and test new designs that could help us rethink, for our time, our modern versions of the agora– the market and main public gathering place of Athens.
