As people talk, text and browse, telecommunication networks are capturing urban flows in real time and crystallizing them as Google's traffic congestion maps.

We have this condition where digital technology is becoming increasingly smaller and distributed in the environment. In a certain sense, this is the first time ever we can describe a city in real time.

With these maps, you can see down to the room on campus how many people are logged on. You can even watch someone go from room to room if they have a handheld device that's connected.

Today, for the first time - and the Obama campaign showed us this - we can go from the digital world, from the self-organizing power of networks, to the physical one.

Phone networks can capture life on our planet.

Like a tracer running through the veins of the city, networks of air quality sensors attached to bikes can help measure an individual's exposure to pollution and draw a dynamic map of the urban air on a human scale, as in the case of the Copenhagen Wheel developed by new startup Superpedestrian.