New Use of Cellular Networks
The Necessity of Recognizing the Nuances of Privacy

According to media researcher Martijn de Waal, it is time to rethink our ideas of privacy. The growing use of cellular networks is generating data that plays an important role in civil society projects. To be able to continue using such data in a meaningful and fair way, people must become aware of the fact that privacy is not only a question of either private or public, but includes many gradations in between.

During the Notte Bianca 2007 (an event in Rome comparable with the Museum Night in the Netherlands), researchers from MIT’s SENSEable City Lab set up at different urban locations a number of big screens upon which they projected dynamic maps of the city. Light blue spots indicated large numbers of people, thus enabling visitors to the event to immediately see which museum was crowded and plan their route accordingly. Making the task even easier, yellow stripes representing Rome’s municipal buses could be followed live on the same map. This project – ‘WikiCity Rome’ – sounds like a nice gimmick. The researchers gained access to the location data of mobile phone users through a telecom company. The anonymized coordinates of individual phones were combined to compile an algorithm of a – handsomely designed – real-time map of nighttime Rome.1

But ‘WikiCity Rome’ was more than just a gimmick. The project made use of an important shift in the functionality of the mobile phone (or ‘cellphone’, as it is called in parts of the English-speaking world). It is no longer simply a means of communication. Increasingly, the mobile phone is also being used as a sensor that gathers information about us and our surroundings.2 Location coordinates, images and sounds can be recorded and shared with friends, colleagues, social institutes or even with others who are unknown to us. This new use of mobile phones can have great social consequences, but it also raises questions about privacy. Who has access to all of this data we are gathering? To whom does this information actually belong? To us? The telephone company? Or should it – in anonymous form of course – be considered common property? Ought the government be allowed to monitor our movements in times of emergency? And if so, precisely what constitutes an emergency?

For the American civil rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), these developments are sufficient reason to introduce a new category of privacy: ‘locational privacy’. Will we still be able to move through a city in the near future without the places we go to being systematically recorded in all sorts of databases?3 The new developments are so far-reaching that we must ask ourselves whether our traditional idea of privacy is still tenable. The discussion is no longer only about the right to be able to act anonymously in our private lives without the government or our employers looking over our shoulders. In many instances, people will actually want to voluntarily make information about their private lives public. For the fact of the matter is that this can also have certain advantages, both for individuals and for society as a whole. But precisely what are the conditions under which this occurs? What possibilities does technology offer for sharing or protecting information? In this essay, I would first like to give a number of examples of how the use of the mobile phone as a sensor encroaches upon our lives in today’s society. Then I will go into the consequences of this for the debate on privacy and technology.

Scientific Research: A New Form of Demography?

Researchers in various disciplines are extremely enthusiastic about the mobile phone as a means of collecting data. Finally, they sigh, we can chart the behaviour of an entire population in real time instead of taking a few random samples afterwards. ‘Reality Mining’ is the name of the new discipline in which different streams of data are combined to get a handle on complex social processes. Social scientists often speak in slightly euphoric terms about these new possibilities. For instance, take Alex Pentland of the MIT Medialab: ‘By using data from mobile phones . . . we can create a “god’s eye” view of how the people in organizations interact, and even “see” the rhythms of interaction for everyone in a city.’4 This new method of measuring not only gives better insight into social processes, claims Pentland, it also has greater predictive value. Traditional demography, he states, is a bad predictor of behaviour. How old someone is, where they live and even their income is interesting information, but says little about how that person will behave in the future. Only when you can actually analyse their behaviour, can you – within certain margins – start predicting. Says Pentland: ‘The fact that mobile phones have GPS means that we can leap beyond demographics directly to measuring behaviour. Where do people eat? Work? Hang out? How does word of mouth spread? Analysis of travel patterns using mobile phone GPS data, for instance, allows discovery of the independent subgroups within a city.’5

At present, the mobile phone is already being used in this manner for health care research. In Kenya, for example, mobile phone data is being used to localize breeding grounds of infection for malaria. Other scientists have developed algorithms with which – again through data generated by mobile phone use – behavioural patterns that indicate the outbreak of a cholera epidemic can be identified. In the Dominican Republic, research into the spread of HIV is being conducted in a similar fashion.6

Urban planners are also enthusiastic about this new way of collecting information. The British ‘Cityware’ project tracked visitors to inner cities with the help of the Bluetooth technology on their phones.7 Here too, expectations are often high. Anthony Townsend, for instance, a researcher specialized in technology, sees the rise of networked sensors as a development comparable to the rise of aerial photography. For urban planners, that was a revolutionary media technology: for the first time, they could see the city from above, as a whole. And if aerial photography reveals the city’s skeleton, we now have a view of its nervous system. For the first time in history, people often optimistically say, we can observe all sorts of social interactions in the city in real time.

A little perspective is not out of place here, however. Although these methods of gathering data certainly can lead to new insights, the debate still does not address the question of exactly what kind of knowledge they actually produce. Data is not the same as knowledge, and so far the nature of the data is primarily quantitative. Researchers now know how many people are at certain places at certain times, where they have come from and where they are going. But more qualitative aspects – why do people move as they do, and what is their experience of that? – still remain out of the picture as a rule.

Citizen Science

In the above instances, scientists work from the top down in collecting great amounts of data in order to analyse social processes. But the mobile phone can also be used to collect data from the bottom up, at the initiative of users themselves. ‘Biketastic’, a project aimed at bicyclists in the notoriously car-oriented city of Los Angeles that has been set up by the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, is one such example. This research centre from the University of California Los Angeles has developed a mobile phone app that bicyclists can use to collect data on their trips through the city and share it with one another. The app measures the location, distance and speed of the bicycle route, but also its comfort. The microphone measures the noise of the other traffic, while the accelerometer indicates whether the cyclist can smoothly cruise along or has to keep stopping and starting. The geographical data can later be linked with external databases: How much air pollution is there throughout the route? And what about traffic safety? By combining the data from different cyclists with external databases, after a while you also get a bicycle map of Los Angeles with which you can plan the most pleasant, safest, cleanest or fastest route.8

This is similar to a number of ‘Citizen Science’ projects, in which citizens use the mobile phone’s sensor capacity in order to work together for a specific purpose. Eric Paulos conducted research on campaigns in which neighbourhood residents charted the quality of the air with the help of mobile sensors. Such campaigns had many positive effects. The participants gained an increased awareness of the problem of air quality and their involvement in local politics improved.9 But there are also negative aspects: Just how trustworthy is the data that is collected? Can the results be influenced, for example by holding a sensor next to a car muffler?10

Personalized Locational Services

Finally, the use of the mobile phone as a sensor can also have advantages for individual users. The mobile phone makes it possible to register information about your life automatically. Services like Google Latitude or Bliin plot your movements through the city on a map. You yourself are always at the centre, surrounded by those of your friends who have the service turned on and voluntarily share their data with you. Other services, like Yelp in the USA, also centre the map on the user’s position and then place balloon markers for the nearest pizzeria, optician, cash dispenser, taxi or other search command. Companies like Sensenetworks can also make analyses of your spatial behaviour and use that to recommend all sorts of services to you.

Christophe Aguiton, Dominique Cardon and Zbigniew Smoreda – researchers at Orange Labs, the R&D department of France Telecom – call this phenomenon ‘Living Maps’. A map is no longer a static representation of a geographical reality but a dynamic reflection of social activities. In the long run, the advent of such maps can lead to a cultural shift. Right now, our social lives still largely consist of making appointments that we write down in our agendas. But after a while, a ‘map of opportunities’ might very well seem like a much more attractive idea. If you momentarily have nothing to do, simply take a look at your personalized map. Who is in the immediate vicinity right now to meet up with? What is there to do at a reasonable distance from where I am?11

Critics point out that this can have huge consequences for life in the city. Does it still leave any room for chance encounters with the unknown? Will we become ‘people without characteristic traits’ who slavishly follow the recommendations of our ‘clever’ systems? These are relevant and meaningful discussions, which I do not wish to go into further right now. In the second part of this essay, I prefer to examine the notion of privacy that is at stake with these new technologies.12

Who Is the Owner?

How does the advent of the mobile phone as a sensor relate to our thinking about privacy? In academic circles, a cautious consensus is becoming apparent: users should be the owners of their own data. No matter how you generate data – for example, through the sensors in your mobile phone – you must be able to access that data, wipe it out yourself, keep it saved securely, and decide what is going to happen with it. Only in very exceptional circumstances should the government be able to have access to such databases.13 A view like this could very well lead to new forms of inequality. Personal particulars are very attractive data for commercial parties, and some critics suspect that the selling of your personal data will be made attractive. People who don’t want to share their personal details with commercial parties will, for example, have to pay more for a mobile phone subscription.14

Precisely what does ‘data ownership’ mean for the analysis of information on an aggregated scale? Are researchers only allowed to collect data if phone users give them permission to do so? And is that permission also necessary if the data is only used for mapping group behaviour? After all, in such cases the individual information is swallowed up in the group profile and a link with individual behaviour can no longer be made. But then, who is allowed to collect this sort of information, and under what conditions? Should telephone companies collaborate on this, for example?

Erin Keneally and Kimberly Claffy – researchers at UC San Diego – argue in favour of regulation that takes into account the positive aspects of sharing data. At present, the rules are not always so clear about what is allowed and what is not. As a result, many parties react defensively to requests for sharing data. They prefer not to take risks, seeing as the debate on privacy escalates quickly. The idea of privacy as the absolute right to protection of personal particulars soon loses out to the possible social benefits of sharing data – such as in the above-mentioned instances in the area of health care, for example. Keneally and Claffy call upon researchers and the telecom industry to develop a new protocol that makes the sharing of data possible and at the same time limits the risks of improper use of sensitive information.

Nathan Eagle compares ‘reality mining’ with large-scale medical research projects. There too, extremely sensitive personal information is stored in databases, which is why there are strict rules for their use: only professionals have access to the information and they must sign in when they want to use the databases. Eagle therefore proposes that such protocols also be quickly set up for the use of sensor data from mobile phones.

Organizations like the Dutch ‘Bits of Freedom’ are concerned about these new developments. Information that is stored anonymously, warns this organization, does not always remain that way. ‘Better technologies are always being developed to strip anonymous data of their anonymity. What might not be a “personal detail” now can soon turn into one.’15 Researchers Aguiton, Cardon and Smoreda concur. More than once in the past, new technologies have made it possible to trace anonymous data to specific users.16

The EFF therefore proposes using cryptography to design systems such that sensor information can be used without having to store it. Technologically, this is a rather roundabout way, although possible: ‘But we need to ensure that systems aren’t being built right at the zero-privacy, everything-is-recorded end of that spectrum, simply because that’s the path of easiest implementation.’17

The Desire to Share Data

The EFF’s idea of using strong cryptography can protect personal sensor data. That might come in handy with a system like pay-as-you-drive, for example. But there are also situations in which users do want to share their data, albeit not necessarily always or with everyone.

In daily life, privacy is a complex and above all dynamic negotiation between various parties, argue researchers Paul Dourish and Leysia Palen. In social situations, what plays a role is not so much the fear of the state’s misusing information but is much more likely to be ordinary worries. People do not want to be embarrassed. They want to assert their authority or voice in a certain area. And they like to have control over their own lives. Because of this, we make different demands of privacy at different moments.

In social situations it is often more important to make yourself known than to protect your privacy. If you want to capitalize on your authority in a certain area, you have to be able to show the corresponding badges. With the help of all sorts of signs – varying from word choice to greeting rituals – we send out signals through which others can deduce our social status or background. Sometimes we want to give our opinion, or we benefit from letting others know who we are. Just how much we wish to reveal depends upon what estimate we make of a situation. Who exactly is the audience? What do we expect, hope or fear in regard to the situation? Privacy, in other words, is a question of ‘identity management’, in which we show or conceal different aspects of ourselves to different audiences in different situations.

Palen and Dourish’s most important point is that the use of the mobile phone as a sensor, combined with the storage of information in databases, changes the parameters of this privacy negotiation. The situations in which we find ourselves are originally spatial and temporal. They are physically limited, for instance by the four walls of a room, and have a certain duration. Both factors play an important role in the estimates we make. We can see who is present and who is not – and therefore who could call us to account for an eventual faux pas.

When we use automatic sensors to register our behaviour in all sorts of situations and share it with others – for instance through social networks – the nature of the situation changes. Suddenly, space, time and audience are no longer limited, and instead the registration of the situation can also be called up at other times and places. But can another audience actually interpret the original context of the situation properly? And maybe you would have acted very differently if you knew that the audience was going to be wider.

Researcher Danah Boyd has written about how this development can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings. As an expert on social networking, Boyd was approached by the admissions committee of a leading university. They had received an application from a student from South Central LA. In a letter describing his motivation, he wrote that he wanted to break away from the gang life there. But when the committee looked at his page on a social network, Myspace, they saw all sorts of symbols glorifying gang life. Was he making a fool of them? Boyd pointed out to the committee that there was also another possibility. The applicant’s Myspace page was intended for his classmates and neighbours, not the admissions committee. And in his neighbourhood the social pressure to be part of something is so high that the young man probably could do nothing else but post the gang’s insignia on his Myspace page.18

Similarly, a commotion arose over the Facebook website. There too, users can voluntarily keep a log of their activities, hobbies and other titbits of information. At first this was only possible on the person’s own page. But one day Facebook changed the setup of its site. All of the messages that users placed on their own page were now automatically published on the pages of all their ‘friends’. Facebook’s reasoning was that this way, friends would be better able to keep abreast of each other’s activities. Besides, hadn’t the information already been made public by users on their own page?

Facebook didn’t do much more than publishing what was already public. But many Facebook users thought otherwise. They saw a subtle difference between making something public on one’s own page, which others must make an effort to access, and automatically distributing that data.19 Once again, this was about the assessment that users make of their audience in determining what information they do or do not wish to make public. To be sure, the information was now being distributed among friends, but there were also subtle differences within that. Some friends might very well be difficult co-workers that a person would not want to offend by rejecting their ‘friendship request’. And people show different things to members of their family than they do to old school friends. Facebook does not make it possible to make that distinction.

Privacy as Design Criterion

At the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS, the research lab behind the earlier-mentioned bicycle project in LA) they therefore believe that privacy is an important responsibility for designers. There should be a system that gives users the possibility to decide for themselves what information they want to share with whom, under what conditions, and for what length of time.20 This is why it is important that designers develop systems that visualize information in an understandable way and that immediately make it clear
what sort of consequences certain settings can have.

CENS itself uses such an application in its Personal Environmental Impact Report (PEIR) project, in which data is again collected with the help of mobile phones. This information is then converted into a carbon footprint and simultaneously combined with databases on local air pollution. In this way, users not only learn how much they themselves contribute to air pollution but also how much pollution they are being exposed to. In a log file, users can see precisely how the system uses their data: what information is registered when, and uploaded and shared with whom. Eric Paulos argues that interfaces like this should also make clear how reliable such (collectively gathered) data are. It is important that users do not trust all flows of data blindly, but that they always remain aware that data can be manipulated, or even simply not collected accurately.21

Aguiton et al go one step further. Not only should users be able to have insight into the manner in which information about them is collected, they should also be able to manipulate that information. Users have the right to lie to the system about their actual whereabouts in order to protect their privacy, they claim.22

The above-mentioned examples show that our thinking about privacy has to be reconsidered. The sensor data collected by mobile phones can play an important social role, for example in the area of public health. Such data can – as in the ‘citizen science’ instances – play a role in civil society projects. And some people will experience sharing data with others as an enrichment of their lives.

Involved parties point out that many of the present regulations are inadequate. On the one hand, the positive aspects of sharing data anonymously should be given more attention. At the same time, the awareness must also grow that privacy is not a binary affair in which something is either completely public or completely private. Between the two extremes lie many gradations that by no means are always taken into consideration in the design of new technologies. And providers of location services and social networks, for example, should also be stimulated to give the many nuances of privacy in everyday life a place in their services.

1. See senseable.mit.edu/wikicity/rome/ for a summary of the project and, for an extensive analysis of the project, Francesco Calabrese, Kristian Kloeckl and Carlo Ratti, ‘WikiCity: Real-Time Location-Sensitive Tools for the City’, in: Marcus Foth (ed.), Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City (London/Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2009).

2. For example, see Eric Paulos, who maintains that there is an ‘important new shift in mobile phone usage – from communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument”’. Eric Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt: Citizen Science and the Challenge of Change’, lecture for the conference ‘Engaging Data’, Cambridge, MA: SENSEable City Lab, 2009.
senseable.mit.edu/engagingdata/program.html

3. www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy.

4. web.media.mit.edu/~sandy/.

5. Alex Pentland, ‘Reality Mining of Mobile Communications’, The Global Information Technology Report 2008-2009. World Economic Forum, 2009.

6. See Nathan Eagle, ‘Engineering a Common Good: Fair Use of Aggregated, Anonymized Behavioral Data’, lecture for the conference ‘Engaging Data’, Cambridge, MA: SENSEable City Lab, 2009.

7. www.cityware.org.uk.

8. See research.cens.ucla.edu and biketastic.com/.

9. Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt’, op. cit. (note 2). Also see Jason Corburn, Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

10. Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt’, op. cit. (note 2).

11. Christophe Aguiton, Dominique Cardon and Zbigniew Smoreda, ‘Living Maps: New Data, New Uses, New Problems’, lecture for the conference ‘Engaging Data’, Cambridge, MA: SENSEable City Lab, 2009. Also see recent lectures by Antoine Picon and Nanna Verhoeff, in which they respectively describe how digital maps can be understood as ‘media events’ or ‘performance of space’ instead of only a ‘systematic geographic representation’. www.themobilecity.nl/2008/01/22/mediacity-conference-weimar-the-design-of-urban-situations/ and networkcultures.org/wpmu/urbanscreens/2009/12/05/nanna-verhoeff-mobile-digital-cartography-from-representation-to-performance-of-space/.

12. See, among others, Marc Shepard and Adam Greenfield, Urban Computing and Its Discontents (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 2007); Jerome E. Dobson and Peter Fischer, ‘Geoslavery’, in: IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Spring 2003.

13. Pentland, op. cit. (note 4).

14. Eagle, ‘Engineering a Common Good’, op. cit. (note 5).

15. www.bof.nl/2009/12/18/hoe-anoniem-zijn-anonieme-gegevens-eigenlijk/.

16. Aguiton et al, ‘Living Maps’, op. cit. (note 11).

17. www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy.

18. Danah Boyd, ‘Do you See What I See? Visibility of Practices through Social Media’, LeWeb, Paris, 2009.

19. Danah Boyd, ‘Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence’, in: Convergence, vol.14 (2008) no. 1, 13-20.

20. Katie Shilton, ‘Four Billion Little Brothers? Privacy, Mobile Phones, and Ubiquitous Data Collection’, in: Queue, vol. 7 (2009) no. 7.

21. Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt’, op. cit. (note 2).

22. Aguiton et al, ‘Living Maps’, op. cit. (note 11).

—
Open #19 Privacy, the main theme of Open #19, is a right that protects one’s private life, a right that is not only established by law but also has political and social significance. It can be experienced and observed differently by individuals and groups, depending upon their position in society and the desires and interests involved.
In this issue, the concept of privacy is examined and reconsidered from legal, sociological, media-theoretical and activist perspectives. The focus is not so much on deploring the loss of privacy but on taking the present situation of ‘post-privacy’ for what it is and trying to gain insight into what is on the horizon in terms of new subjectivities and power constructions.

This issue of OPEN will be launched during he opening weekend of the Berlin Biennial on Saturday June 12th. Philosopher and theorist Gerald Raunig will give his lecture ‘Beyond Privacy: Desiring DIVIDUALITY’, followed by an informal reception in the charming Villa Elisabeth.

(For the record, these were the two events: I was one of the co-hosts of the ‘Best Scene in Town‘ workshop organized by Waag Society. In this workshop participants were challenged to design an urban game with the help of the 7scenes locative platform. Kars Alfrink of Hubbub (a design studio specialized in physical social games for public space) and I were asked to give a brief introduction. Incidentally, one week earlier Kars Alfrink and The Mobile City’s Michiel de Lange as well as James Burke of Vurb were part of a panel on Visual Cities #03, that took place in De Verdieping.)

Pervasive Games as Games
The first and most apparent approach of pervasive games is to use traditional games as a metaphor. This means to think of the city as a playing board, and to translate or vary upon the gameplay and rules of existing games, be they traditional urban games (treasure hunt, tag), traditional games (trading games, strategy games, role playing games, rock-paper-scissors etc.) or console games (e.g. pacman). This approach fits in a broader development in which gaming is becoming a more physical activity, for instance through new interfaces such as the Wii. As Kars Alfring said:

Games are about doing stuff. You don’t read a game, you don’t listen to a game, you don’t watch a game (although you can do all of these), you DO a game (you play it). So at the core of any good game is an interesting activity.

Many now classic examples or urban gaming fall (partly) in this category, examples are Geogcaching, Botfighters, Pacmanhattan, Can you see me now?

Kars Alfrink talked about a street game he designed in Rotterdam called Changed your World.  Participants had to run around the city with giant flags. Alfrink said that the use of physical artifacts is good idea in the design of urban games. First of all they make clear to passers-by and regular urbanites that something special is going on. Moreover:

We had a lot of benefit from the flags we employed. Being physical artifacts, they had a lot of affordances that were readily available to us. This you don’t get in software, where you need to build every property of an object yourself.

Change Your World from Hubbub on Vimeo.

Pervasive Games as Performative Arts

Another  - and perhaps counterintuitive – metaphor to approach pervasive games is as theater, rather than as games. Many pervasive games are event based, staged performances and often include actors. The main difference between these game performances and more traditional theater is that the public has an active role in the performances, and that instead of a script or screen play, there is a set of rules that actors and audience have to follow. These rule sets make up a story engine, that drives the performance. This can be an exploratory event, or it may be incorporated in narrative structures. (For instance, last year we wrote about Michael Epstein’s (Founder of Untravel Media) take on ‘storytelling with  locative media‘, in which he discussed the role of gameplay in location based storytelling.)

Much of the work of Blast Theory (who produced classics such as Can You See Me Know,  Uncle Roy All Around You and Rider Spoke) falls into this category. While they presented earlier work as ‘games that happen simultaneously online and on the streets’, they have included direct references to theater in some of their more recent projects. Rider Spoke for instance is framed as a ‘work for cyclists combining theatre with game play and state of the art technology. The project continues Blast Theory’s enquiry into performance in the age of personal communication.’

Alfrink’s company Hubbub was involved in designing an opera staged in a Dutch town called Monster. The goal was to involve the audience as players,

One of the biggest challenges was to come up with a concept that would accommodate both a compelling story and a game-like participatory aspect. For this we sought inspiration in martial arts movies and ultimately arrived at an Enter the Dragon-like setup, which features a storyline mixed with fighting set pieces. The fights would be improvised on the basis of game rules. (We also took cues from games like Street Fighter and Pokémon for both story and character design.)

Much of the subsequent work for us went into prototyping and playtesting the ruleset. For each session we brought in a ruleset and played several matches, figuring out a balance between fun-to-play and fun-to-watch. All the matches were recorded and analyzed afterwards for improvements.

Pervasive Games as an extension of Urban Culture

In my own presentation at the 7scenes workshop I urged designers to approach pervasive games from the perspective of urban culture, rather than from the perspective of games. How can we add a certain playfullness to everyday urban situations, in order to enhance urban culture? I gave three examples of elements of urban culture that perhaps could be made more interesting by adding some playful touches to them.

• The city as a public space for deliberation, and democratic debate, as examplified by the Acropolis. I presented the example of the Climate on the Wall-project (see here for a more extensive description) designed  by the Danish Center for Digital Urban Living. This project is an interactive mediafacade where passers-by can arrange words in a certain order. This project was made playful by its allusion to  ‘magnetic poetry’ – the little magnets with single words that you can rearrange on your fridge door to create ‘poetry’.

• The City as a stage on which we ‘perform’ our identities. This is an idea that builds upon symbolic interactionism as well as on theories of ‘performativity’ by people like Erving Goffman and Jane Jacobs. These theories conceive of our daily lives as performances in which we continuously act out different social roles (we shift from being an office worker, a dad, a manager, a friend, a museum visitor, etc.). At the same time through the numerous small interactions in the city streets, over time trust is build between citizens. We could argue that social networks and especially location based ones (Foursquare, Gowalla) are stages on which we perform our identities in our times, and some of these have indeed added gameplay elements (For instance the  badges one  can earn through Forusquare).
• The City as an operating system. This approach departs from the idea that our cities of today generate numerous datastreams. We can aggregate these datastreams and build services on top of them. Think for instance of the ‘cabsense‘ app for the iPhone that collects gps-data generated by cabs, and uses that data to recommend the best corner nearby the user’s current locations to catch a cab. Can we now use these datastreams as input for playful interactions in the city? At the Visual Cities-event James Burke of Vurb presented their new Urbannode project that is partially based on this premise:

  The Urbanode Project from VURB on Vimeo.

  We are now entering an era where technology begins to weave together the desires of citizens and the services available to them in their environment in realtime. But what does the use of these new systems look like? It is quite clear that the first step to unlocking these possibilities is the mobile terminal, or ‘smartphone’. Users of such mobile devices have already become accustomed to the access to information that urban-oriented webservices available in the mobile browser provide: maps, transit times, weather information, etc. Even tasks like calling a cab or reserving a table at a restaurant have become like buttons on a remote control for the city. But what about more active uses of service made available in the environment? Applications, supported by new network hardware, more like airTunes, where anyone running iTunes can ‘discover’ nearby speakers and stream music to them wirelessly.

• The City as a community. This approach came up in Alfrinks talk, when he discussed Koppelkiek – a social photo collecting game he designed for a neighborhood in Utrecht. The goal was to ‘create a meeting place for diverse individuals in a troubled neighborhood. The game provided an excuse and a framework for strangers to have brief interactions with each other.’ In this game, the designers game up with changing ‘assignments’ for the players such as “Take a photo of yourself with someone else in front of his or her front door.” The game was a success because the designers took an effort to engage citizens in the game. They approached key figures in the neighborhood and set up a small shop as well. They also thought of a way to make a pervasive game as this physically visible in the neighborhood. This was done by exhibiting the photo’s in an old shop window.

Pervasive Games as Applied ‘Game Theory’ (Political & economic game theory that is, not a ludic one)

Although the idea of enhancing urban culture by adding game play elements to all sorts of urban situations can be an interesting one, there is also the risk (or opportunity, depending on whose perspective you take) of turning everyday life in a series of disciplining events or strategy games (hence the reference to game theory). Government agencies or insurance companies might want to promote certain behaviors and discourage others and hope to seduce citizens to comply with their wishes by adding gameplay elements and awarding points for all sorts of situations. A dystopian scenario that builds on this trend was recently described by Jessie Schell, who imagined a future in which amongst others your wifi enabled toothbrush would award you a number of points each time you brush your teeth. These points can then be redeemed at your insurance company to get a discount on your dental insurance. Schell calls this scenario the Gamepocalypse.

Urban Games and Architecture and Planning

During these sessions The Mobile City’s Michiel de Lange also addressed the relation between architecture and urban games. He discerned five levels to understand urban games (1) the city is often used as a model to construct an architecture of computer and video games; (2) the city itself has historically been understood in multiple ways as a game or playground; (3) pervasive games take digital games out to the streets and bridge the digital-physical distinction; (4) (serious) games are used in the process of (re)building actual cities; (5) urban games are a metaphorical lens through which to look at utopian and dystopian futures of cities. His presentation was based on an a (highly recommended) article he wrote in Second Nature.

Both projects build partly upon the idea of ‘the city as an operating system’ , by which we usually mean that our cities generate more and more data streams on top of which we can build interesting services for either consumers or citizens.

Main question in both projects is: how can we collect and visualize data about environmental pollution to actually change our behaviors? How can we make citizens not only aware of the problem (by visualization of data), but also give them a sense of ‘ownership’ of the problem (it’s not just society’s problem but you are part of it) while at  the same time give them an incentive to act (this is what you can do about it)?

Connected Urban Development / Urban Ecomap

With Connected Urban Development Cisco aims to …

… demonstrate how to reduce carbon emissions by introducing fundamental improvements in the efficiency of the urban infrastructure through information and communications technology (ICT).

Boorsma showed two concrete projects Cisco has been taking part in in the Netherlands. One of them was the Urban EcoMap. ‘The important shift for us’, Boorsma explained, ‘is not the shift from atoms to bits, but the shift from bits to decision making’ How can we deploy the use of datastreams to improve our decisions? Or in the words of Cisco:

Urban EcoMap is an interactive decision space that empowers individual citizens to make informed decisions about their daily lives, along with how to participate in the vitality of their communities. We aim to build awareness, fostering a sense of community, and provide actions for citizens to take to enable the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in cities.

On the ecomap visitors find a per-neighborhood mapping of important environmental statistics, such as CO2 emissions per household, broken down in categories such as transportation, energy and waste.

The central idea is that behavioral change starts with knowledge and insight in the actual consequences of one’s actions. The urban ecomap could be an interesting contribution to this process.

At the same time, the data of the map is currently quite crude: I can look up what the average CO2-emission per household is in my neighborhood and compare that to other neighborhoods. But I cannot zoom into more detailed levels such as the block where I live.

Nor does Urban Ecomap provide me with insights in what I could contribute to improve the environment. It gives some very general tips like ‘Car Share to work 2-3 times a week’ or ‘Turn off electronic devices’, but there is no way for me to find out exactly how much emissions I will save if I indeed would car share or ride my bike to work. The site does allow me to make up a list of general resolutions to live a more environmental friendly live (and publish those on Facebook), but I never learn what my actual contribution to the problem of urban pollution is, and what I can contribute in alleviating it.

Although I really appreciate Cisco’s central idea, I think there are stil some improvements to make in the execution of the project. Urban Ecomap does give me a general sense of the problem, but as of yet it doesnot really give me a sense of ‘ownership’ of the problem. It would be great if in the future a system like Urban Ecomap would be outfitted with some of the features promised in the PERSONAL TRAVEL ASSISTANT, which is also part of the Connected Urban Development program and that does make a link between personal itinerary and social and environmental impact.

In the Air

In the Air addresses similar issues as the Urban Ecomap, but it has a different origin. It was developped in the Visualizar workshop organized by the Medialab Prado:

In the Air is a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the of the city.

The project proposes a platform for individual and collective awareness and decision making, where the interpretation of results can be used for real time navigation through the city, opportunistic selection of locations according to their air conditions and a base for political action.

Just like the Ecomap, In the Air visualizes data on a map to inform citizens about pollution in the city. In the air is using real time data provided by the Government of Madrid.

What I found interesting about In the Air is that the designers have been thinking about different interfaces to communicate the datasets. Whereas the Urban Ecomap uses effective but rather boring generic cartesian maps, In the Air shows a set of alternatives. The web interface is a quite beautiful piece of datavis and they are also thinking of bringing the data back into the city. For instance by way of using facades of buildings to reflect a color scheme depending on the levels of pollution or about home units that people can attach to their balconies.

In the air – Physical Prototype from susanna tesconi on Vimeo.

The data collected by In the air can also be linked to individual experiences. They are developing a portable visualization gadget that allows users to see pollution levels nearby. It also shows the impact of taking a bike rather than a car on a certain trip. And it includes a ‘contamination compass’ that directs users away from polluted zones and toward cleaner places in the city. In addition, they are also thinking of creating a bottom-up sensor network, where individuals can also contribute to the data collection process by adopting a sensor and hooking it up to the network.

Although I really liked this presentation, it has its own problem is: In the Air is still a prototpye, all the ideas are there, but I imagine it would be quite a leap to scale this prototype to a full fledged application working city- nation- or worldwide, while making use of data sets that are detailed enough to give actual localized information.

Perhaps then, we would need more cooperation between projects like this. Organizations like Cisco could bring the technological and infrastructural clout to realize projects like this. Initiatives like In the Air are perhaps better suited to initiate original ideas and cultural innovative design that could make them successful.

This means that for the foreseeable future we probably won’t have much time to update this blog very often. So that’s why perhaps now is a good time to take a step back and see what we have been writing about since we started blogging here on October 29th 2007. Here is an overview of our best read articles since then:

1. review: Kevin Lynch – The Image of the City (book review)
2. Picnic 09 Report 2: The City as an Interaction Platform (conference report)
3. Towards a Myspace urbanism? (The Mobile City Essay)
4. Interview with Mark Shepard: ‘critical design’, architecture, urbanism and location based media (interview)
5. Storytelling with Locative Media: Michael Epstein’s take on ‘terratives’ (conference report)
6. Semantic Wayfinding, mental maps and the keyhole problem of GPS-navigation (lecture report)
7. Digital Cities 6: urban media / urban informatics and different notions of public space (conference report)
8. Urban Play: designing the urban landscape (exhibition review)
9. Augmented reality on the mobile: MoMo Amsterdam #11 (lecture report)
10. Scott McQuire’s The Media City (bookreview)
11. Review: “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities” by Mimi Ito et al. (book review)
12. review: Stephen Graham – The Cybercities Reader (2004) (book review)
13. Augmented Reality: its promises and shortcomings for architects (lecture report)
14. Design Approaches for the 21st Century City (The Mobile City Essay)
15. ISEA 2008: Visualizing the Real Time City (Conference Report)

And in addition some personal favourites that didn’t make it into this list:

• Cartography: the old versus the new? an evening in De Balie (lecture report)
• “How can architects relate to digital media?” TMC keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’ (The Mobile City Essay)
• Interview with Adam Greenfield on designing for urban computing (interview)
• Three philosophical questions about the ’sentient city’ – a response to the exhibition Towards the Sentient City (The Mobile City Essay)
• ISEA 2008: Locative Media Core Works & Classifications (Conference Report)

Enjoy!

The experience of our present day city in every day life is increasingly a hybrid one – meaning that it is made up of both physical and mediated experiences that mutually influence, extend or contradict each other. At the same time, the design of our cities is for the most part still a rather stratified process where different disciplines shape the different ‘layers’ of the urban experience.

Planners and architects are still mostly interested in the physical, spatial design of cities. Whereas it is artists, telecom-operators, activists, and dotcom-start-ups that shape the software and interface layers through which the experience of a physical place is optimized, extended, reframed, negated, denied, contested or contradicted. What is more, these different disciplines all have their own traditions of understanding what a city is or should do. Often they don’t even understand each other’s language.

This is of course not necessarily a bad thing. Cities have always been heterogeneous or hybrid spaces where different logics are at work – and in competition with each other. Urban culture has always been a negotiation between the spatial embodied ideals of architects and the messy practices of everyday life.

At the same time we think that this time around this negotiation is becoming more complicated. It is not just the architect or planner that sets the stage for our urban experiences. Digital media, software and embedded technologies  – varying from location based services to ‘smart’ sensors – play a co-constituting role in setting and sorting the stage as well as in both enabling and regulating public interaction.

While trying to get a grasp on the different ways that digital media technologies are shaping our cities and could be incorporated in the design process, we came up with a number of possible ‘design approaches’. They form a somewhat ad lib constituted list of categories, each made up of different elements that together set the boundaries for the design process. These design approaches combine certain design tools, a methodology, a particular way of understanding what a city is (often embedded in one or another discipline) and/ or particular urban ideals. A design approach thus consists of a particular way of understanding the world, and / or a particular methodology, tools and objectives to intervene in that world.

These design approaches are not neatly comparable variables: in one approach the tools might be decisive, another departs from social processes, a third from technologies and a fourth stresses a particular urban ideal. Some operate at the scale of urban planning, others mostly focus at hyperlocal interventions. Some of these approaches are overlapping, others might be combined.

This list is also not exhaustive – please feel free to add any approaches that we might have overlooked. Yet we do think that it gives a sense of all the different concurrent and sometimes competing approaches at work in the 21^st century hybrid city.

· The Wiki-City - Designing with new media – How can the design process itself be restructured through the use of (social) digital media? How can one allow for more participation, bottom-up input, and engagement in a productive way? How does this change the relation between client, architects and other performers, and the audience?

· The Real Time City – Data-aggregation in the Design Process With the rise of digital and mobile media and gps receivers, urbanites have started leaving numerous digital traces behind that when aggregated reveal their usage patterns of the city. What exactly do we learn from these datasets, and how can they be incorporated in the design process?

· The Living City – Urban experience, narratives and design Digital media can be used to annotate urban spaces with people’s everyday stories and lived experiences. How does this temporal inscription of place change they way we see and interact with the urban environment?

· The Multimedia City  – The design of urban screens and media facades Architecture is increasingly using multimedia components as part of their elementary set of building blocks. How can you incorporate these into urban design?

· The Augmented City – The design of informational services in a physical context In augmented reality, additional layers of information are projected on or over physical environments. Thus the domain of digital information is embedded in the physical domain. What is the potential for urban design?

· The Sentient City – Designing Responsive Architecture Various sensors can register real-time information about the environment, and movements, (social) processes and identities of people and objects. Technical systems may also respond to changing conditions. How can this be employed to adapt the shape, function, usage of or access to buildings and infrastructures?

· The Smart City – Using artificial intelligence to design urban systems that respond or anticipate what is happening Can AI be integrated in urban design to anticipate and respond to urban patterns?

· The Hybrid City – Designing for hybrid practices. Digital and mobile media have led to changing urban behaviors and the rise of new cultural practices. For instance, the advent of WiFi has increased ‘mobile work’ from (semi-)public spaces. How can these changes in cultural practices be translated back into design, either by physically accommodating them or by design interventions that discourage them?

· The Layered City –Integrated design of the parallel experiences of physical places and mediascapes If the experience of the city is shaped by both the shape of the physical city as well as through exchanges in the media landscape, can we design both layers (or ‘channels’) of an urban project in concordance with each other?

· The Plugin City – using digital media to optimize, personalize or extend the experience of the city Can digital media be designed as ‘plug ins’ to the existing city, make the usage of existing urban structures more efficient and personalized or extend and deepen their experience?

· The Tactical City – using digital media to design alternative usage of the city Can digital media be designed to open up the design of physical spaces to other users or practices than initially intended?

· The Critical City – using design to foreground and discuss the dominant discours on urban culture Can design be employed as a means to a debate on urban culture, rather than shaping urban culture itself?

· The Interface City – designing urban ‘interfaces’. Some urban theories understand the city itself as an information platform where goods, opinions and ideas are constantly exchanged. Can new services be designed that optimize or extend this function of the city as a platform of exchange into the digital domain?

· The Informational City – The design of information spaces In our understanding of the media world spatial metaphors play an important role. Some architects have made the leap from designing physical structures to using their spatial expertise in ‘information architecture’.

In our upcoming event in Shanghai this August we want to focus on the role of digital media in the urban design process. How can digital media be employed in the design process of cities and urban culture? There we would like to showcase and discuss varying desing approaches and investigate whether different disciplines involved can learn from each other. A call for participation will be released shortly.

with SARA, an urban augmented reality application, you can see and experience the built environment of the past, present and future, via Layar Browser. The NAI has set itself an incredible challenge: to make the Netherlands the first country in the world to have its entire architecture viewable on smartphones thanks to augmented reality.

What is interesting about SARA is that it not only functions as an annotated tour through Dutch cities, revealing bits of background knowledge concerning the architecture that is visible to the eye and the mobile phone camera. It can also project images of the past and the future on top of existing reality. Users can watch historic buildings that once were present at their current site, examine alternatives (in the case of competitions where different architect have sent in proposals), projects that were never realized, or future buildings.

In Rotterdam for instance, SARA-users can take a look at the Market Hall, a giant structure designed by MVRDV. It can even be rendered in 3D, so that users can virtually walk through or around the building that is to appear there in a few years time.

Ole Bouman sees interesting opportunities here for architects. This new technology enables them to launch all sorts of future plans –  from the functional and realistic to the utopian and provocative. Whether it can actually be build (according to either current construction technology or financial or procedural logic), doesn’t matter. Architects can thus take up their role as storytellers, by showing us alternative realities and futures for our cities through AR. Bouman ‘For me, architecture is not limited to the construction of the physcial. It is about organizing spaces inteligently. For instance, the paintings on stained glass in a cathedral are technically not architecture. They are made by artisans that added to the builded process. But of course they add tremendously to the experience of the church, by giving medieval visitors a connection with heaven. In this way they contribute more to the experience of space than the bricks and mortar do.’ Perhaps AR can fullfil a similar role?

With SARA the NAi also wanted to reflect on the role of musea in society. Ole Bouman: ‘Most people know us as state archieve. We have 18 km of stacked historical sources, that is an amazing container of physicality.’ Yet, when a medium arises that is able to represent the history and future of architecture on site, may be we will no longer care so much about physicality, Bouman conjectures. ‘We want to anticipate what might happen to architecture in the future’

AR as a medium for organizing social processes in space

The projects that developer Johannes La Poutre of Squio.nl has been involved in addressed a different dimension of architectural practice: the organization of social practices in space. La Poutre showed us a few layers that he (co-)developed for the Layar AR-browser on the mobile phone.

For instance Tweeps around is an AR layer that allows you to see what has been tweeted about the space that you are in. “Tweeps Around queries Twitter for posts for which an exact location is given. All posts within a certain distance from your current location are shown.”

Similarly his Verbeterdebuurt-Layar (the dutch equivalent of Fixmystreet.com) displays nearby suggestions given by citizens to improve the neighborhood.

Copenhagenlayer was a project executed during the climate summit last december, that mapped ‘live enviromental measurements taken by Sensaris Senspods strapped to bike messengers plying the streets of Copenhagen’ on an Augmented Reality Layer. The central idea is that with your mobile phone you can access live data about the air quality of your current location.

Although quite rudimentary, this could be a promising direction for future research, where crowd sourced measurements of environmental data are aggregated and made accessible to the public at large. The project reminds me of Biketastic by the Cens-lab in Los Angeles that aims to use censor technology to collaboratively map the most attractive biking routes in LA. I think this is an interesting direction in information design and potentially can impact the way we move through and experience our cities.

Current limitations and challenged of AR

So while the opportunities are huge, in the discussion also lots of shortcomings of the current day technology were brought up.

First of all, the processor speed of current mobile phones and exactitude of GPS signals makes the experience somewhat akward. Walking through virtual models is not yet a smooth experience. If Moore’s law doesn’t let us down, this is something that can be resolved in the near future

Second, there is the issue of the immersive capacities of AR through the mobile phone browser. Can users through their small mobile phone screens really be immersed in an AR-experience? Or is it more like watching through a keyhole? This is a more serious problem. Larger screens will solve this problem, but larger screens are also less portable. Or do we need projection technology, or AR-contact lenses for the medium to fully take off?

Third there is the fallacy of spatializing information. Currently lots of layers available in AR consist of existing datasets mapped in 3D (for example houses for sale nearby). Yet while  adding such a third dimension may look sexy, it does not always necessarily make the dataset more intelligible. Sometimes an abstract two-dimensional table or 2d map may be much more effective in communicating a message than adding data in 3d to the real world. How do you meaningfully visualize (agregated) information in a 3d, augmented reality environment? This will remain an important search for information designers in the next few years.

Fourth there are issues of control and authorship. Currently in their rendering of future projects, architects are able to control the point of view and select favorable perspectives. But what if prospective clients and public can actually inspect the whole building in 3d on site? Once a rendering is available through AR, does the architect loose control? This is not so much a shortcoming of AR itself (rather it is a feature of new media technologies in general that traditional professionals loose their control over their content), but might make architects exercise restraint in embracing the use of AR. (On the other hand, this also offers opportunities for bottom-up appropriations that could make the medium more interesting).

When over here at The Mobile City we talk about Hybrid Space, we usually refer to the work of Adriana de Souza e Silva who in several articles has convincingly argued against the dichotomy between physical or real space on the one hand and virtual or mediated  spaces on the other. The very fact that these two can longer be separated is one of the central themes of The Mobile City: media spaces and virtual networks extend, broaden, filter or restrict the experience of  physical spaces, and the other way around.

Interestingly, over at Sonic Acts they have adopted a broader concept of hybridization. Moderator Eric Kluitenberg explained that hybrid space is not a technical concept. Rather hybridization is about heterogenic logics that are simultaneously at work in the same space. For instance there is the top down logic of the build environment developed by the architect. But the same space may also be subjected to the logic of an informal street economy that may or may not be compatible with the ideas operationalized by the architect. The mediated experiences of the mediascape make up only one of the logics that operate in a space. Sometimes these different logics clash, sometimes they overlap, sometimes they just negate each other. However, we should understand all these different logics as real. They are all operative at the same time and together make up how a place is lived and experienced.

Having said that, the addition of the new media technologies such as mobile phones has increased the density of different logics operational in (urban) space, and new cultural practices and adaptations of space are emerging as a result. This makes the urban experience more complex and messier than ever. It’s even doubtful whether we can truly get a grasp on these processes. What we can do is try to increase our sensitivity of the complexity of different logics at work. It was this issue that most of the presentations in this session addressed.

Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemob

The work of sound artist Duncan Speakman, who discussed his subtlemob-project, addressed several aspects of the hybridization of space through the advent of digital media technologies.

A Subtlemob is a collective urban audio-experience set in urban space. Participants download an mp-3 file, head to a location in the city, and at a particular time they all press play at the same time, thereby collectively experiencing the same soundtrack. The soundtrack does not only consist of music but also of spoken instructions that the participants have to carry out (And sometimes there is different instructions for different groups of participants). It is like a flash-mob, yet more subtle. That is: flash mobs are often staged experiences that gain most of their audience and impact not at the moment itself, but because the event is taped on video and broadcasted on Youtube. A subtlemob is only to be experienced live, there are no recordings, it is all about the experience you have when you are there. You just have to be there to get it.

One of the starting points of this project is the work of audio culture researcher Michael Bull (I happend to do a podcast interview with him a few years ago, just in case you’d care). Bull studied the experience of the city of first walkman and later iPod users and came up with a few conclusions.

First of all, a lot of people used music to augment their experience of the city, they purposely add a soundtrack to extend or alter their mood. This is not something most composers take into account, Speakman realized. Usually music is not composed with a particular spatiality in mind. One composes for an abstract listening experience, not for the person that listens to an iPod in the back of the bus. But how can you compose for those specific experiences? Speakman therefore decided to change this around, so when composing he often goes to the location his music is intended for to check out if the match is right.

The second theme that has come up in the work of Michael Bull is the idea of the bubble-experience. Digital media have the affordance to make personal spaces warmer, but at the same time they make public spaces cooler. With an iPod one constructs one’s own intense experience in urban space, but it also privatizes this experience. Similarly many critics have argues that also mobile phones play a similar role. They create a ‘full time intimate community’ in which throughout the day a network of friends keeps continuously in touch with each other, even if friends are not physically present. Again this can be understood as a privatization (or parochialization) of public space.

Speakman:Digital media make personal space warmer, public space cooler

The idea of the subtlemob is to ‘hack’ these devices to turn their logic around. Can mp3-players also be used to construct collective experiences that heighten the experience of being in public? That encourages people to observe one another rather than retracting in their mediated bubbles of private space.

Teletrust

The other three presentations, including work of Peter Westenberg and Elizabeth Sikiaridi, addressed related issues.

Karen Lancel en Hermen Maat showed their Teletrust-installation, which consists of a full body veil that on the one hand extends the idea of a personal bubble-space. Yet at the same time it enables the wearer – by touching oneself and activating the sensors in the veil – to get in touch with stories told by other people. Is it possible to use networked media to create intimate spaces within public space?

In TELE_TRUST [we] explore how in our changing social eco-system we increasingly demand transparency; while at the same time we increasingly cover our vulnerable bodies with personal communication-technology. For TELE_TRUST Lancel and Maat designed a hybrid play zone for a vulnerable process, of balancing between fear AND desire for the other. In a visual, poetic way they explore the emotional and social tension between visibility and invisibility; privacy and trust.

How can architects relate to digital media?

The Mobile City keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’: outcomes and further thoughts

written by Michiel de Lange & Martijn de Waal

Introducing the main questions

What do developments in digital media have to do with architecture? And how should architects and urbanists relate to developments in new media? The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) and Royal Institute of Dutch Architects (BNA) invited The Mobile City to address that question for the yearly ‘Day of the Young Architect’, on November 7th 2009 in the NAi in Rotterdam. This day was themed ‘the virtual’, and was organized as part of the overarching ‘connectivity’ cluster during the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR).

We gladly accepted this challenge, since this very issue was one of the main reasons we founded The Mobile City two years ago. After all, as the boundaries between physical and digital spaces blur, this should have profound consequences not only for new media developers but also for those professionals who traditionally deal with physical spaces. We surely did not expect this to be already obvious for most architects. But the fact that only half of the audience raised their hands when asked by moderator JaapJan Berg whether architects should deal with digital media in their profession showed there is still some way to go.

This report contains the main argument of our talk. But it also presents some additional reflections, and is an attempt to take our argument further than we did at the NAi/BNA day. We address the following questions: what position can architects, planners and urbanists take in their design profession vis-a-vis new media? Why should they bother with new media in the first place? What are the challenges they face? And what are future directions and chances for these professions?

In answering these questions, we make a strong plea for an attitude of ‘critical engagement’. This posits architects should neither ignore nor completely embrace digital media. Rather we would urge them to think of themselves as designers who primarily shape social processes, and only second as designers who shape spatial forms. Which social processes underly new commissions? What kind of activities, social interactions or exclusions should a new project encourage or discourage? How can these be shaped through spatial forms? And what roles do digital media play in this? We think architects shouldn’t just build an urban screen just because you can, or the Kunsthaus in Graz has one too. Rather they should start by asking: what kind of social processes do we want to provoke or hope to avoid? Can an urban screen indeed contribute to these processes or will it disturb them? What other disciplines do we need to invite to the table to meaningfully program an urban screen so that it goes beyond mere window dressing and indeed enhances the project?

Architecture and new media

Now let us work out this argument in more detail. But first a small aside. Some might quickly object that our initial questions have already been superseded. After all, architects and urbanists have long embraced digital media in their professional practice. They have been quick to employ computers and other digital media technologies as instruments in the design process itself (computer-aided design), and to create new visualizations. Initially simply as an addition to- and replacement of hand-drawing and modeling. Later the processing power of computers was used to calculate new spaces that would otherwise not have been possible. This would lead to a second phase in the relationship between spatial design and new media, namely the creation of spatial forms that reflected the rise of the digital age. A new visual language emerged in spatial design that explored the semantics of new media. In addition, new media (and in particular ‘virtual reality’) were seen as a new spatial realm that could be shaped by a ‘virtual architecture’.

Yet we believe a new phase has ushered in. This phase is characterized by increasing overlap and integration of digital space and physical space. Rather than being a separate realm of their own (labelled by terms like cyberspace, virtual reality, digital domain, and so on), new media technologies – and mobile media in particular – have become an inseparable part of everyday life. Internet-enabled mobile phones, GPS navigation, entry cards with integrated RFID chips, CCTV cameras, media facades, and so on are embedded in the urban fabric (see our 2008 conference text).

We propose that this new phase impels architecture to relate to digital media in a new way, beyond merely using them as instruments, to represent their spatial logic in design, or to design for virtual worlds. We have seen three different attitudes towards the emerging hybrid city, that we will now briefly describe.

Ignore

Why wouldn’t architects and planners simply ignore developments in the field of new media? Arguably, new media developments and architecture operate at very different speeds. It often takes many years for an architect or planner to negotiate, design, and build, whereas the design of new media technologies is calculated in months rather than years. Further, the lifecycle of media technologies is often updated every few months, whereas an architect or planner traditionally designs for at least a few decades ahead, if not ‘for eternity’. Why think about how people use Twitter to organize their daily life and meet people, when the services may have ceased to exist or evolved into something completely different by the time the design for an urban square or university campus is finished? Architects, some argue, deal with volumes in space, and should leave digital media out of the equation.

They are wrong, we think. The merging of digital and physical spaces leads to new social and spatial practices. This has a huge impact on spatial practices and spheres such as dwelling and inhabiting, meeting and public space, traveling and mobility, work and provisioning, and leisure. The design of these spatial domains has traditionally been the core business of architects and planners. Any changes in these fields therefore directly affect their work and cannot be ignored.

Embrace

Perhaps then, architects and planners should embrace new media and try to integrate the digital domain seamlessly into the design of physical space? Architects build for people, and if people want to use new media technologies, the architect should try to optimize their personalized media-experience of urban space. Architects should use the latest technologies to shape their designs. Spaces can be stuffed with sensors that make ‘smart’ analyses of the environment so that they can respond to changing circumstances. Surfaces can be conceived of as potential pixel space for interactivity, so that surroundings can be personalized and adapted by their users. This is the ‘information age’ and architecture should express that in any possible form. Architects should not only build for the streets, but also for the screen. This response is the exact opposite of ignoring. But isn’t this over-enthusiastic stance ignoring the fact that media practices are profoundly influencing social behavior in physical space, yet not necessarily always for the better? And what remains of the valuable differences between spatial design and media design?

Critical engagement

Or can spatial design professionals relate in a third way to the ubiquity of new media in the (urban) landscape? Can they find a space of their own which neither rejects nor fully embraces these developments? We propose they can, and should, by taking a stance of ‘critical engagement’. This proposition does not just mean taking a reconciliatory position somewhere in the middle of this – admittedly somewhat caricatural – spectrum between ignoring and embracing.

The attitude of ‘critical engagement’ implies a self-reflective take on the profession of spatial design itself. For us – as relative outsiders with an interest in new media, urban culture and identity – architecture is foremost a discipline that provides spatial structures for social processes. It is a profession that literally sets the stage for the social interactions of everyday life.

The main question architects should ask themselves is how new media technologies alter the social processes behind spatial interventions? For example, is housing still the same when the home is no longer a retreat with four walls and a roof, but penetrated by all sorts of media which bring in formerly separated domains like work, leisure, meeting, and even (virtual) travel? And inversely, to what extent does ‘habitation’ become mobile, invading other domains as people increasingly dwell in the familiarity of their mobile media devices and networks which they take anywhere they go? Media-technologies form a third leg in the traditional expertise of architecture: to shape social processes by means of physical interventions.

Media practices turn this dyad into a triangular relationship: man + environment + media. Position 1 (ignore) emphasizes the relation between man + environment but ignores the fact that social processes in physical space are increasingly mediated by technologies. Position 2 (embrace) emphasizes the relation between man + media, yet loses sight of the importance of physical context for media use. Position 3 takes this triangular relationship as its point of departure. On the one hand architects have to come up with new design solutions for these changing social practices. On the other hand they can also influence these mediated social practices through physical design interventions: directing, discouraging, stimulating alternatives, commenting on them, and so on.

Challenge 1: Who sets the normative framework?

This makes architecture a highly normative discipline. Although architects cannot determine what happens in the spaces they design (and few if any still care to do so), they do set up a prescriptive environment that might invoke, encourage or prohibit particular interactions, experiences or moods. In our view this is no longer possible without at least some basic insights in the way digital media have made their way into the urban fabric and the practices of daily life.

We realize that this design practice always has to carefully maneuver between multiple and often conflicting stakeholders and interests, intended activities and events, and the character of specific sites and contexts. Architects face difficult questions about their position in relation to clients and the people they design for, the proposed uses and activities of places, and the quality of space and environment. New media practices make this process of defining stakeholders, activities, and spatial context far more complicated. Why? More often than before new media practices involve stakeholders who are not physically present. Unforeseen uses and events may arise from new developments in media, like for instance ‘smart mobs’: gatherings of people coordinated by mobile media. And the definition of context and spatial quality is challenged by new media practices like ‘geotagging’ whereby people can inscribe places with digital representations and are able to do realtime database queries for related places.

This is all quite abstract so let’s look at an example. Suppose an architect or planner is involved in designing some public space, say a park. Who are the stakeholders involved and what are their interests? What activities might take place there? What qualities should that public place have? The client, a local municipality, will want to combine a pleasant public service with some level of institutional control to prevent loitering, pollution, etc. The public may want a place were they can relax, but some also want a place to work and meet. The planner must find a position vis-a-vis the public’s wish for leisure and connectivity (e.g. by installing benches, free wireless internet, and electricity), institutional control (e.g. by somehow limiting access to wireless infrastructure, installing CCTV cameras, or uncomfortable benches that cannot be used long), and stimulating the public character of the park (e.g. by discouraging individual media consumption altogether).

Moreover, the stakeholders do not solely consist of the municipality and a heterogeneous public, but also of the wireless internet provider, the technical repair staff, the security agency monitoring the park behind screens, and even theaters, cafés and shops in the vicinity that might be affected by the media-consumption and online buying habits of the now-connected public. Similarly, free wireless internet may shift the intended activities of the park from being a local public meeting place for co-existence towards a place for individualized networking on a potentially global scale. This in turn influences the quality of a park as a specific public setting. If people use Twitter and Facebook to post that they are in the park, will they be more likely to meet acquaintances or strangers there? Moreover, the representation and quality of the park may be largely outside of the planner’s hands when people upload and share their experiences of that place online.

So, who exactly sets the design criteria, and the values they imply? Are architects to carry out the wishes of their clients? Do they play a part in shaping them in concordance with their clients? What role do external parties play, such as regulatory bodies? Should architects raise their voice in the broader public debate about the values they play a part in shaping or enforcing?

A further challenge is the relation of the architect with the client. We are well aware that the design profession is to a large extent a ‘messy’ business, where ideals and actual practice more often than not diverge rather than run in parallel. How can an architect sell these stories about new media to a client who just wants a house, or a park? We realize that our argument is not just about convincing the architect of the necessity for ‘critical engagement’ with new media, but also about educating the client. This is an important issue for the future as well, not just for the architect but also for The Mobile City.

Challenge 2: Control or open up?

Another challenge that looms is simply not to get carried away by all the new possibilities and rhetoric of smart technologies. So far we have been talking about the design of social processes, yet one could argue that this is also a dangerous path. To what extent do architects really want to direct these social processes? What level of control does one strive for? Should architects – with the help of for environmental psychologists and security experts – design for a precisely prescribed specific effect? Or should the outcome left open? Should architects design open systems that can be adopted to multiple uses? We’d argue for the latter. The city should not be turned into a collection of friction-free non-places but rather continue to allow for what Mark Weiser has called ‘seamful’ experiences.

We agree with Adam Greenfield’s suggestion (in an interview with The Mobile City) that it would be much better to merely provide ‘a service framework that is subtle and unobtrusive, yet robust and open enough so that people can reach in, grab it and use it’. Of course it can be an interesting proposal to try to ‘nudge’ behavior in a certain direction. Yet systems should be open enough to allow for unforeseen uses and adaptation by the public.

This issue is particular important with regard to new media design in a spatial context. In many instances of urban computing, unspoken cultural codes or legal codes are hardened into software code. And where the soft systems of culture and even the code of law are somewhat malleable (officer, can you please make an exception?), if a particular protocol on for instance who is allowed access or not is established in the soft- or hardware, one has to be (or hire) a hacker to get a temporary exception.

These are also questions we will continue to pose to ourselves. One of the future aims of The Mobile City is to look for ‘best practices’ (or total failures) within the field of architecture itself, in order to learn from them, and be able to provide clearer answers.

New directions and chances

One of the things we noticed during this ‘Day of the Young Architect’ is that many architects appear to feel threatened by the new media realm which is encroaching upon their profession. New media which increasingly operate in physical contexts challenge architecture’s traditional monopoly in shaping social processes through the design of physical spaces. Yet we believe there are also new chances and opportunities for architects and planners.

First, we already witness that the profession is flexibly adapting itself to new circumstances. Architecture is moving in the direction of what has been called ‘service design’. This means that a client hires a ‘designer’ not to just build him a beautiful building, but to shape a particular process or ‘customer (or ‘citizen’) experience’ from start to end. The question is how can these two structures – physical situations and media practices – be combined to design for urban experiences in meaningful ways? Surely this question cannot be solved by architects alone. Architects are increasingly working together with other professional disciplines, such as software engineers, sociologists, structural engineers, media theorists and philosophers. (See for instance Dan Hill’s talk with Carlo Ratti for an elaboration of this theme, and his recent response to the exhibition Toward the Sentient City). Depending on the assignment architects sometimes are but one of the players in such multidisciplinary teams, while sometimes they can take the lead.

Second, architects harness spatial expertise that can steer future directions of new media. Digital media developments are increasingly being integrated with geographical space, physical context, and the material world (labelled geo-spatial web, locative media, the internet of things, and so on). We think it is important that architects play a role in the debate about the values that are implied in such media designs. As experts in what Dan Hill calls ‘spatial intelligence’, architects can contribute important insights to the discussions what directions new media developments should head.

Architects might engage in methods of ‘critical design’, where the main aim of a project is to tease out the tensions, power relations and other issues at play in particular constellations of architecture, digital media and urbanism. So instead of feeling threatened by new media, why shouldn’t architecture boldly enter this field and enrich it with its own expertise? One example is ‘information architecture’ as a way to spatially represent complex information. The large majority of people think spatially. As datasets are growing in size and complexity there is a great opportunity for spatial professionals to manage and visualize digital information.

Conclusion

Spatial design starts from particular goals and seeks different channels to engage stakeholders – ranging from interventions in space to the design of information services and the structuring of organizational processes. ‘Critical engagement’ with digital media, we feel, not necessarily translates into interventions in the physical city. Rather it should involve thinking about the city as a complex of social processes that are partly brought about by new media practices and partly by physical processes.

This hybridization of the city – and its consequences for urban professionals – is something The Mobile City will continue to research and address. We believe this opens new opportunities for architects. Some may choose to pursue what they do best: the design of physical volumes and spaces –albeit as part of multidisciplinary teams perhaps led by ‘Master Designers’. Others might try to shape the design process at large themselves, a new incarnation of the idea of the ‘master builder’, and direct the process in which multiple disciplines come together. Whatever they choose, we are convinced that future architecture is at its best when it critically engages with digital media developments.

These projects did not have to be executable. Rather, the goal was to ‘design for debate’. The proposed interventions should be seen as ‘conversation pieces’. They should bring up important design issues with regard to urban media and urban culture in playful ways.

Designs for ubiquitous computing aims to make technologies disappear in the background of our daily lives, to become seamlessly integrated and invisible. With this approach on the other hand the purpose was to make visible the ideological and cultural ideas at work in the construction and appropriation of these technologies. What urban ideals and ideas about society are used as a point of departure in the design of urban media? And what alternatives could we imagine? (The original workshop brief can be found here )

The workshop took place at the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, and was part of the International Architecure Biennale Rotterdam.

Below an overview of the four projects that were developed during the workshop.

Proposal: Goeie Reis (‘Enjoy your trip’)
Group leader: Stefan van der Spek
Other members: Tina Bastajian, Lotte Meijer, Simona Sofronie

The project “Goede Reis” took the OV-chipkaart system (a public transport card based on RFID recently introduced in the Netherlands) as their starting point. The team had three interrelated goals with this project: to raise awareness about OV chip card data collection and privacy issues, to improve social interaction between disparate groups (location/culture), and to increase serendipity. The medium and location for the proposed intervention are the turnstiles/ticket control machines in the public transport system.

The idea of the project is that when you scan your OV chip card, the machine – via the built in screen and/or sound -  broadcasts information about the traveler. This is both based on his/her actual travel behavior but also on imagined personal characteristics which are made up. For instance, the machine may say “she is late today!” or “he is always home by 6!”. Through this semi-public exposure of some private information (which is not necessarily true), a conversation may start between bystanders. The project further proposes a game-like element, in which people can get higher scores by going to areas in the city they haven’t been to before. The OV card keeps a record of the urban areas that are familiar and unfamiliar to the individual. It recommends exploring unknown areas and awards points if the person goes there.

Proposal: What clicks on the street
Group leader: James Burke
Other members: Kristina Andersen, Niels Hendriks, Liesbeth Huybrechts

This intervention takes the notion of the Dutch “probleembuurt” (‘problematic neighborhood’) as the point of departure, and rephrases it into a “space of negotiation”.

These neighbourhoods are thus perceived by government and citizens as a problem. Since we found it a bit of a strange definition, we started to think about what could be defined as a ‘problem’. We realized that finding something to be a problem is often a result of not knowing the cause of for example loud noise, disturbing behaviour and so on. When there is a lot of noise in a square, people might find it irritating. But if they would know that this noise is produced by two love birds kissing for the first time, this would maybe perceived as less of problem and rather cute.

We therefore thought that we should design a system that could ‘leak’ this kind of intimate information into the neighbourhood. We made a choice for the term leakage, because this answers to an important principle of critical design, namely that the design artefact or experience enters your familiar world as a strange element, to grasp your attention. Via this leakage qualitative information about neighbourhood events can be provided. Just like a company does not receive any qualitative information about his website by measuring clicks, ‘clicks in the street’ can’t be measured by just registering noise, complaints,… So our question is: ‘what are clicks in the street?’ Our designed leakage system would want to do more than measure clicks in the street via detector systems. It would collect intimate stories via central figures in the neighbourhood, like shop owners or kids, and spread/leak this via unexpected media.

Take the example of the shop owners. They could collect personal stories in their shop – since they do this daily anyway – and leak them randomly via their printed receipts to the visitors of the shop. Receipts always contain a little note about the shopowner (contact information, a logo,…). This note could be replaced by some intimate information about people in the neighbourhood. Clients in the shop could accidentally read the anonymous story of a person in his/her neighbourhood, like “yesterday my boyfriend organized a surprise party for my birthday. It was amazing, we danced until the morning”.

Via a game (in a newspaper for example) we would stimulate neighbourhoods to invent new unexpected ways via which people can leak their intimate information. This to engage people in the neighbourhood, to create an increased local awareness about the personal stories of people and maybe to increase tolerance.

Proposal: Landmarks
Group leader: Levien Nordeman
Other members: Arthur Clemens, Ohyoon Kwon, Davide Dulcetti

The “Landmarks” team wanted to enrich events taking place in Rotterdam. ‘Landmarks’ are immaterial bits of information about events created by organizers. These landmarks can be revealed at physical locations in the city with the use of augmented reality software on mobile phones. Landmarks thus augment events by disseminating information via mobile devices as a way to elicit experiences. Such landmarks should become mandatory for biennales and festivals.

The timeline for a landmark is as follows: first, there is the initial idea for an event; second, organizers go to the local government to get the event permit, and are required to add landmarks; third, the event organizers make an augmented reality landmark. Participants themselves can add information and experiences to these landmarks in pictures, sounds and texts capturing the experience in pictures, memories, text and sound in order to make the event visible after it has finished, as a kind of ‘living monument’.

Proposal: Nuggit
Group leader: Klaas Kuitenbrouwer.
Other members: Monika Codourey, Edward van der Veen, Juan Esteban Rios

In this project called “Nuggit” people can share something they have to offer without a monetary exchange involved. This can be some free time, a certain skill, a situation, and so on. One can become a ‘nuggeteer’ by offering a ‘nuggit’, whatever it is one is offering to someone else. A nuggit can be walking someone’s dog for twenty minutes while waiting for the bus. The supply and demand of nuggits are managed through a mobile phone platform. Proximity of nuggeteers is indicated on a radar-like interface. A rating system is used to separate the good nuggeteers from the bad ones, and establish one’s ‘nuggitude’.

Nuggit thus addresses issues with regard to social networking in urban space and the idea of reciprocity and reputation systems in urban culture vis-a-vis the advent of exchange systems like eBay that are based on commercial transactions.

At those times, the hopes and fears found in the disputes between architects, policy makers, engineers and planners are extended to a broader discussion about urban and societal change. Then, the central issue is not merely how to solve a specific spatial problem with the help of new technology. Rather, the debate starts to revolve around its possible impact on urban society at large. What does this new technology mean for urban culture, what impact does it have on how we shape our identities and live together in the city?

When those questions emerge, Dutch philosopher René Boomkens argues, the professional debate has turned ‘philosophical’.

The exhibition ‘Toward the Sentient City’ – running at the Architectural League NY until November 7 2009 – can be understood as such a philosophical enterprise. On display are five commissioned projects that make use of ‘sentient technologies’ or ‘ubiquitous computing’ – technologies that are currently ‘coming of age’ and promise to change the way we experience the city.

Yet, this exhibit is no World Fair where we are to marvel at the new new things, born out of the brains of our smartest engineers, flaunted on shiny pedestals, stirring up our imagination, arousing our desire, promising us an ever better future. Nor is it a disciplinary affair where architects and media designers exchange ‘best practices’ of how to best make use of new sensing and actuating technologies.

Curator Mark Shepard wants to ‘raise questions rather than pose answers’. The goal is not a peek into a future that is ‘just around the corner’. The exhibits should rather be understood as ‘conversation pieces’ that expose some of the hidden assumptions of a new engineering discipline and the way it is appropriated in social-technical situations. And rather than performing ivory tower criticism, the exhibition also lays bare alternative trajectories.

So if this indeed is a philosophical exhibition, let’s have a look at how some of the basic questions of that discipline are addressed. These being of course – to put it somewhat bluntly – : ‘who are we?’, ‘what can we know?’ and ‘what is the good life?’ – or in the context of urban culture ‘how are we to live together in the city’.

About sentient technology and Urban computing

Before we start answering those questions, I will have a closer look at the technology that is the centre piece of the exhibition. Increasingly, Shepard states in his interesting curatorial statement, it is the ‘dataclouds of 21st century urban space’ that shape our experience of the city. All over the city, ‘intelligent’ applications have started sensing what is happening around them and reacting to it – be it smart traffic lights or cctv camera’s whose images are computer analyzed for suspicious behavior.

Add to this the increase of tracking devices such as cell phones that most urbanites carry, and as a result the city has become ‘sentient’. Shepard explicitly refers to the Latin roots of this term to explain what he means with that term: ‘Sentience refers to the ability to feel or perceive subjectively, and does not necessarily include the faculty of self-awareness.’

Now of course it is not the city itself that perceives or even is sentient, but rather the combined apparatus of tracking and sensing devices – operated by different actors – that note what is going on in the city and output their impressions in all sorts of data streams. Neither is this emergence of the sentient city a singular movement driven by a centralized bureaucracy or company, established at a single address to which one could send a letter of complaint or e-mail a feature request.

The field of what could be called ‘urban computing’ consists of plural research traditions, performed and commissioned by divergent actors all with their own motivation and implicit understanding of what a city is or should be. They vary from government agencies that want to bring order to city space, politicians that would like to promote citizenship, companies that want to offer personalized services, community workers that hope to promote solidarity or mutual understanding, artists that want to criticize consumer culture and urbanites who may embrace, adapt or reject some or other of these offerings. (1)

The sentient city thus should be understood as an ‘assemblage’ of all those different actors that all employ their own logic. (2)

The subjective feelings of the sentient city

What then should we make of Shepard’s notion of ‘subjective’ perception? It is my guess that he has chosen this term to foreground that the data streams generated by the Sentient City may seem like an example of objective fact gathering, whereas in reality it is far from it.

For starters, the decision of which data to collect and which to ignore and how to classify it, is already a highly political choice. Next, the data generated by the Sentient City is interpreted by software algorithms and actuation devices, and there is nothing objective about that either. It is a highly normative process, where subjective values, legal codes and power relations are turned into software code on the base of which sentient technology decides, acts and discriminates.

This foregrounding of the normative side of the sentient city goes against the grain of the discourse of ‘ubiquitous computing’ that plays a dominant role in the debate on the sentient city. In ubicomp, an application is usually thought successful if it makes the computer disappear. While we carry on our daily routines, computation technology – calmly operating in the background – will make our live more easy, efficient or exciting – whatever way we would want it. Not only does it do away with the need to interact with those beige boxes on our desktops (which of course is not a bad thing per se), it also renders the subjective decisions at the heart of its social interventions invisible and presents them as natural.

Question 1: Who are we and who is acting?

Now, this brings up issues of agency, and thus leads to the first of our three philosophical questions: the ontological ‘who are we’. Does the way we employ new technologies alter the way we think of ourselves? Does it alter our relationship with the world around us and the objects in it? Does it create a shift in how we think about ‘agency’?

On a side note, a lot of interesting things could be said about the relation between sentient technology and identity. Anecdotical accounts of for instance Esther Polak’s installation Amsterdam RealTime (in which people are traced through the city with GPS-device) show that the collection of data could lead to a new type of reflexivity: the ostensible objective data about participants trajectories through the city at times clashes with their cultivated self-images (one might think of oneself as a urban flaneur, whereas the data now ‘proves’ that one has only travelled between the couch at home and the cubicle at the office).

Or what to think of services that based on their analysis of your urban trajectories assign you to a lifestyle profile that from then on is used to recommend places to go, activities to undertake and people to meet. Would you eventually subscribe to such a continuous lifestyle address made to you by your mobile phone? (see also my article on Sensenetworks)

Interesting as those questions might be, they are beyond the scope of Toward the Sentient City. This exhibition mainly brings up issues of agency, as well as our relation to the (natural) world around us.

For instance the exhibit Amphibious Architecture makes us aware of the invisible underwater world of the Bronx and East Rivers. When fish swim by, a floating collection of leds in the river emanates an undulating purple shine on the water surface. One can also inquire the fish by means of a text message about the quality of the water. Poetic and playful as it might be, as Shepard writes, this exhibit ‘encourages us to expand our view of what constitutes the city and its citizens.’

Not only does sentient technology may ask us to redefine our ontological categories, it also addresses the issue of agency within the category. Do sentient objects, like those in the project Too smart city have an agency of their own? Are they truly ‘intelligent’ as is sometimes claimed in the ‘smart city’ rhetoric that is part of the ubicomp discourse?

In this exhibit a moving city bench ruthlessly kicks off its users after its built in sensors and algorithms have determined the allotted quota of leisure time has expired. Now who exactly evicts the unsuspecting stroller from his lunch spot? The bench? Its programmer? The larger assemblages and discourses in which norms about appropriated city behavior are determined and encoded into the software? Is the bench – in the words of Bruno Latour – a mere intermediary that passes on rules and information that are shaped elsewhere? Or is it a mediator, an element that plays an active role in the constitution of those norms and values?

Question 2: What can we know?

A second and related philosophical field that Toward the Sentient City addresses is that of epistemology. Does the information gathered by the sensors in the sentient city lead to new ways of gathering knowledge and new insights?

The exhibit Trash Track by MIT’s Senseable City Lab actively addresses this question. For this exhibit, trash items such as paper cups are tagged with a gps-device and mobile phone chip.

After it has been disposed of, the item sends text messages with its location, so we can follow its track from recipient to waste disposal site. The hope expressed through this project is that knowing will lead to a change in doing: the fact that we know where our trash ends up should make us more aware of the problem we create by throwing things away.

Now, what is at stake epistemologically is not just a newly gained knowledge on the whereabouts of our lost keys, runaway dog or thrown away coffee cup that will make life somewhat more (dis)comfortable and may lead us to behave differently.

What indeed is new is the fact that data from many different sentient sources can be aggregated in real time and give us a grasp of what is happening in the city that we never have had before. Elsewhere Anthony Townsend (who has contributed to this exhibition with the project Breakout!) has argued that this shift in perception is comparable to the introduction of aerial photography. I quote at length:

‘if aerial photography showed us the muscular and skeletal structure of the city, the revolution in urban informatics is likely to reveal it’s circulatory and nervous systems. I like to call this vision the “real-time-city” because for the first time we’ll see cities as a whole the way biologists see a cell – instantaneously and in excruciating detail but also alive. … and as these capabilities become more widespread, the real-time city could become a place where everyone is an amateur urban planner, using urban informatics to understand the larger impacts of their everyday decisions. That, so fundamental a shift in our perception of our civilization seems to be something worth working towards’

This new ways of gaining knowledge about the city may have huge consequences for the way we perceive and act in the city, and Townsend even sees opportunities for democratization.

Yet could it also lead – if you will allow me another detour, this time through the work of Jane Jacobs – to a new form of architectural hubris? In the early 1960s Jacobs pronounced the ideology of modernist architecture dead on the ground that they had reduced urban life to too simple a formula. From their Olympian vantage point modernist planners had thought that they could calculate the exact needs of a population based on a handful of variables. Take the population number, divide it by a health rate and you get the number of hospitals needed per square mile.

The problem, Jacobs argues, is that modernists understood cities as problems in disorganized complexity, whereas they are problems in organized complexity – meaning that every change in a single variable doesn’t only change the outcome, but also directly influences the other variables at work.

The ‘health rate’ in this example is not a static given but dependent on many other variables: the number of parks, the means of transport, diet, etc. And all those variables are intricately related tot the value of other variables. Ville Radieuse, Jacobs claimed, was the ‘triumph of mathematical average’. Instead she argued we should think of the city as a ‘process’, and to understand the processes at work urbanists should look for the catalysts that speed-up or slow down social processes in the city. Their tool being the microscope rather than the telescope.

Now, I wonder what would Jacobs make of the urban information systems that for instance have come out of the Senseable City Lab? Would she embrace them as illustrations of the organized complexity of the city? Can we now finally take in all the variables at work? And if so, can we base our planning practices on this new found knowledge – also by reacting in real time to changing conditions? Or would she still be suspicious of the data, finding it too abstract to act upon? After all the many data streams we now have may reveal quantitative aspects of urban conditions, but what do they teach us about the qualitative experience people have of them? (see also Michiel’s report on a presentation by the Senseable City Lab at Picnic 08)

Question 3: How should we live together in the City?

Let us now leave the d-tour and turn back to the main path: the third and last stage of our philosophical quest. If indeed the sentient city produces new ways of thinking about ourselves and a new type of knowledge, the question that remains is an ethical one: to what aim do we apply these new found insights? What is our definition of ‘the good life’ that we hope to lead through the use of these technologies?

Again, Toward the Sentient City proposes alternative trajectories to some of the dominant developments in this domain. Many sentient city applications that are currently in development have an implicit idea of the city as a collection of services and infrastructures to be managed as efficiently as possible.

Alternatively they offer personalized versions of the city through search and discovery devices. Other initiatives depart from control and security-issues: they use sentient technology to prevent potential unrest or allow or deny access to certain users.

Combined, in a dystopian scenario, these appropriations of the technology might contribute to what Belgium Philosopher Lieven de Cauter has called a ‘capsular society’ – a city of privatized capsules with different functions – dwelling, shopping, consuming accessible only to those with the right rfid-chip in their wallet.

Are alternative trajectories thinkable? Yes, Toward the Sentient City states. The projects Breakout! and Natural Fuse propose alternative ways of thinking about urban culture.

Breakout! addresses the issue of the urban public sphere. The project problematizes the public sphere as a sphere that only comes into being if urbanites actively engage with the space and with each other. It is not just a space that is pronounced as such by a city government. So how can the urban public sphere be animated in an interesting way? And by whom?

How can we as urbanites take responsibility for it? How can we turn public spaces in the city in an inspiring meeting place, by means of grassroots organizational tactics? Break Out provides urbanites a toolset that addresses this question from the perspective of organized work. The project wants to promote exchange and cooperation between workers in the city by claiming public spaces in the city as an office and by providing structures to organize meet-ups and brain storming sessions for urban creatives.

Natural Fuse addresses the idea of the city as a commons – a space and resource shared by and accessible to all its citizens. The idea of the commons is based on the old British custom of the communal pasture where all herdsmen in the community were allowed to graze their cattle. The drawback of such a system is that it is prone to self-destruction, a process that Garett Hardin has labeled The Tragedy of the Commons. As he writes …

… the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited.

When every herdsman keeps on adding cattle, the commons soon will be overgrazed, and no one will be able to benefit from it any longer. Close personal social ties or traditions could perhaps keep the rational herdsman from prioritizing the appraisal of his individual benefit and from adding too many cattle. However in a modern society that has done away with traditional role-patterns and depends on more abstract interdependencies, such social restrictions seem much harder to enforce.

The concept of a commons thus assumes cooperation and mutual accommodation. Could sentient technology play a role in the allocation of limited resources between citizens? Could it lead to the emergence of some sort of peer-to-peer governance model, that could prevent overusage of scarce resources? (3)

This is the question that Natural Fuse addresses. This project consists of a city wide network of plants that are linked to electric devices. The central idea is that the CO2-digestion of the plants in the network offsets the CO2 emissions caused by the use of the electric appliances. Each individual chooses whether he wants to be selfless (conserve electricity) or greedy (use electricity). However, when the total consumption of electricity in the system surpasses its CO2-absorption capacity, the system will actively start to kill the plants.

Natural Fuse thus beautifully illustrates the opportunities of an ‘urban energy commons’ as well as the problem of the tragedy that bears the same name. It challenges our thinking about the viability of a networked urban commons.

Yet it does not provide any definite answers: Would creating awareness through direct feedback mechanisms about the impact of rational selfish behavior be able to prevent it? Or would we rather need complex reputation systems? Or perhaps sentient bookkeeping systems in which our allotted ratios are kept or traded? Can we do this through peer-to-peer technologies, or do we need central institutions that act as trusted third parties?

Toward the Sentient City thus doesn’t give us any emphatic leads about which way the technology will take us. It succeeds in bringing up many important questions and diverting the discussion on the sentient city from a path of technological determinism to an open ended affair, a concern not just for engineers, planners and architects but for all of us.

Toward the Sentient City is curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the Architectural League of New York. The exhibition is on display at the Urban Center, 457 Madison Avenue, New York, NY from September 17 to November 7, 2009.

(1) Ann Galloways PhD thesis A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing and Locative Media is highly informative in giving insight in different discourses around urban computing
(2) See Manuel de Landa A new Philosophy of Society for a theory of assemblage.
(3) In Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold has also written about technology and the organization of a commons

Cities have always been about providing frameworks of services to improve the quality of life for residents and businesses. How will social networks, mobile devices, reactive environments, and cloud-based data services transform the experiences of living in cities in the coming years? What new municipal infrastructure will evolve to meet the needs of citizens looking for the type of real time information and configurability they have come to expect from Internet applications?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/crossmediaweek/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

It was interesting to see three completely different takes on these issues. First Ben Cerveny of Vurb sketched an optimistic view of the ‘cloud city’ – a future scenario in which citizens could get easy access to urban informatics and use those as the foundation for a blossoming civil society. Greg Skibiski of Sense Networks provided another optimist vision – be it based on a different paradigm – in which urban computing is used as the base of offering ever more personalized information and localization services for urbanites. Adam Greenfield however argued that when taken up in a certain way, the rise of urban computing might do urban culture more harm than good. What is at stake, he argued, are some of the essences of urban culture.

Ben Cerveny / Vurb

Cerveny’s argument is centered on the premise that the city has always been an information system: it is a place where people come together, interact and exchange information, culture and goods. This process lies at the heart of both urban society as well as the market economy and leads to both (cultural) innovation as well as the continuation of urban society. This is not a process that is somewhere up in the air: over the centuries it has led to certain institutionalized practices. For instance in the seventeenth century Amsterdam was the birth place of the Broadsheet newspaper – an institution that started as an information tool on stock prices and shipping information (a ‘dashboard device’ in contemporary business terms) for business men and grew into an important pillar of the public sphere in democratic societies.

Similarly one can think of urban society as an ‘operating system’: specific practices and power relations have over the centuries been institutionalized in the laws that regulate how people are to interact and who has what rights in the city. They form the kernel of a civil society, so to speak.

At the same time, in the 20th Century cities had grown into sites of spectacle and consumption, epitomized by the skylines of New York – or even better: Las Vegas. The beginning of the 21st century however has shown a whole new dynamic: the informatization of urban culture, related to a number of developments:

• The rise of sensor networks that sense and track objects, people, institutional output and other sources (climate, energy use, etc.)
• The availability of this data in real time aggregated data flows
• The rise of actuation devices that can operate on either individual or aggregated data.
• Participatory affordances of digital media and its peer-to-peer distribution model that allow citizens to not just consume data streams, but produce and redistribute them themselves as well.

These combined phenomena lead to the rise of what Cerveny has coined ‘cloud city’: ‘The geometry of the city is no longer just the skyline. It now also includes the graph of its social networks.’ This new situation offers a range of new opportunities for civil society. (VURB’s website lists some of these in more detail).

• Responsive Environments – the environment starts to know what is going on. “What are the mechanisms by which these services are provisioned by the tasks that citizens utilize them for?”
• Urban Systems Literacy & Civic Information Systems – can data visualization of complex interactions in the city lead citizens to get a better grasp of what is happening around them (Like the newspaper did in the 17th century)?
• Collaborative Redevelopment- multiparticipant social models (analogue to for instance World of Warcraft) that allows people to interact socially on common goals.

Taken together, this leads to the formation of a new Urban Operating System, one that is not just written in the code of law but also in software code. This means that Urban Interface Policy becomes an important aspect:

In the smart city, what is written as programmatic software ‘code’ can easily become defacto ‘law’ as it imposes permissioning schemes and identity regimes on it’s participants. So far, the internet, and the open source software that powers much of it, has remained remarkably adaptable to the ideals of democratic and egalitarian societies. Every infrastructural advance, however, goes through a watershed moment where the governing design principles of the technology itself begin to influence the types of societal experiences they might produce.

Greg Skibiski / Sensenetworks.com

Greg Skibiski’s company Sense Networks is one of those institutions involved in bringing about the cloud city. The tag line of his company is ‘Indexing the real world using location data for predictive analytics.’

Whereas Cerveny conceptualized the city as the locus for both a civic society and a market place (of both commerce and culture), Sense Networks approaches the city from an individual point of view: how can we make everything the city has to offer more relevant for its users? (see also my review on the Handbook of research on Urban Informatics for this conceptual difference. A similar discussion on ‘what is a city for’ also came up in the Picnic Session on augmented reality. )

The way it is trying to do this, is by analyzing large sets of location data provided by operators of mobile phone networks. Every mobile phone user constantly beams his location to the network so that the network can find him or her when someone else tries to call. They have developped an appliction – Citysense – that  takes all this (anonimized) data, aggregates it and visualizes it. City Sense thus provides a map of San Francisco that shows real time traffic flows of people in the city:

Citysense shows the overall activity level of the city, top activity hotspots, and places with unexpectedly high activity, all in real-time. Then it links to Yelp and Google to show what venues are operating at those locations.

What they plan to do next is analyzing this data in ways similar to how Google analyzes the web: how many people that are now at location A have been at location B before? And how many of those will move on to location C rather than location D? Citysense uses this information to distill the behavior of different ‘urban tribes’, or in the words of Skibiski to compose a ‘lifestyle matrix’: people with similar spatial patterns and preferences for nightlife venues, restaurants or other urban amenities. This matrix can – this will be the next step that hasn’t been implemented yet – be used as the engine for recommendations.
So: while you move around the city with your mobile phone in your pocket, your phone company is drawing up a lifestyle profile of you, based on your geographical movement. This profile can then be used to get recommendations for restaurants, shops, people, etc – in an Amazon.com style. They call this a shift from ‘searching’ to ‘sensing’:

The application learns about where each user likes to spend time – and it processes the movements of other users with similar patterns. In its next release, Citysense will not only answer “where is everyone right now” but “where is everyone like me right now.” Four friends at dinner discussing where to go next will see four different live maps of hotspots and unexpected activity. Even if they’re having dinner in a city they’ve never visited before.

Adam Greenfield

Adam Greenfield took a critical stance towards developments in urban computing. In a similar fashion to Ben Cerveny he conceptualized the city as an ‘interface’ – a system that continuously brings different worlds together. Or more precise: ‘The city is creating the maximum of interfaces in a minimum area’, the city is a complex system that brings together different people with different identities, goals, cultural backgrounds etc and provides them the interface to interact with others in order to achieve their personal goals.

While they do that, on an aggregate level other processes emerge. To illustrate that, Greenfield referred to Jane Jacobs who found that safety on city streets emerges because a number of different people (shop keepers, visitors, playing children, neighborhood inhabitants on their way to work or doing groceries) find themselves together in those streets – basically to mind their own business. Yet at the same time, the presence of all those people creates what Jacobs has coined ‘eyes on the street’: enough people keeping an eye out to provide a sense of safety. While nobody has been ordered to act as a safe keeper of the street, its safety emerges from the many eyes on the street, brought together by the function of the street as a collection of interfaces for different social processes. This is also what theorists like Sennett argue: the city is an interface that brings us in contact with people who are not like us, and it is this interaction that makes the city interesting and leads to an enrichment of our personalities as well as to social processes that foster urban culture as a whole.

Now, the problem with urban computing or networked informatics is that it shapes the process of meeting and encounter in a different way: ‘Spaces become addressable and query-able. It allows me to give instructions like: Please find me a Vietnamese Restaurant within 10 blocks that has a liquor license and a good sanitation record.’ This is a conceptual shift that Greenfield has theorized as a shift from browsing to searching. However, the search is always based on personal preferences – it is usually based on ‘affinity’ and ‘like’. Greenfield fears that this threatens the function of the city as an interface that brings differences together. Of course it is pleasant and comfortable. But while browsing might lead to confrontations with the unexpected, searching runs the risk of never finding anything truly different. (See also the interview we had with Adam Greenfield last year at Picnic)

The shift from browsing to searching also brings up another issue and that is that of the cultivation of local knowledge in relation to (sub)cultural capital. Part of the essence of being an urbanite, Greenfield finds, lies in the fact that one has accumulated a body of local knowledge of the best restaurants, hidden record shops, club nights etc. It takes years and years of browsing the city to build such a body of knowledge, that then can become part of one’s identity. Yet what happens if all this knowledge suddenly becomes available by a simple search query? Of course it would be nice to instantly find the secret spots when we visit an unknown city. But doesn’t it take something away from the process of browsing and discovery that is at the base of urban culture? (See also my post on Local knowledge and subcultural capital)

I have always considered you as one of the pioneers in the field of architecture, urbanism and location based media. How have you seen the discussions in this field develop over the last few years?

The discourse you mention has evolved significantly since I began working in the field in the late 90s, with many people contributing to its development. When Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz and I began planning the Situated Technologies symposium in the fall of 2005, we were initially focused on how Mark Weiser’s vision for ubiquitous computing might apply to cities: what happens when computing leaves the desktop and spills out into the streets and sidewalks of everyday urban space? We speculated that this would likely shape (and in some ways already was shaping) the way we inhabit the city and the choices we make there. Yet if computing was becoming embedded in and distributed throughout the material fabric of contemporary cities, we asked, why weren’t architects more involved in shaping these technologies and their applications for urban architecture? While architects had been exploring the possibilities of, say networked computing or cybernetic systems in the 1960s and 1970s, this interest began to wane in the 1980s. Weiser’s vision for ubicomp, which was formalized as a research agenda in the late 1980s at Xerox PARC in Paolo Alto, California, was one where computing and computers would recede to the background, and physical space and the social interactions that transpire there would come to the foreground. Computing was to become environmental. Computer scientists and media artists–each in different ways–seemed to grasp the implications of this early on. Where were the architects?

During the three months leading up to the symposium, the Institute for Distributed Creativity hosted an email discussion list where people from different fields along with the symposium participants and organizers framed a set of issues for discussion. One discussion thread revolved around the Interactive City exhibition accompanying ISEA 2006 and the Zero One Global Festival of Art on the Edge that was happening at that time in San Jose, California. Organized by Steve Dietz, Joel Slayton and Eric Paulos, Interactive City was an important exhibition that brought together many media artists and creative technologists exploring the intersections of art, technology and urban space. For the Situated Technologies symposium, the idea was to bring together people from a range of different disciplines–architecture, art, philosophy of technology, comparative media study, performance studies, computer science and engineering–and attempt to find a common language by which we might identify and address critical issues concerning the technological mediation of urban life. One aspect of this had to do with avoiding default terms like “users”, “public space” and “technology,” for example. As Usman Haque, one of the symposium participants, proposed: Let’s not think of Users, but rather of People, Participants, Players, P-Individuals, all kinds of things that begin with the letter “P”. Let’s not talk about Technology, let’s talk about Instruments. And let’s not talk about Public Space, but let’s talk about the Commons. This was one of many threads that were explored over those three days in New York.

Now, following the symposium, there was a sense among many participants that we generated more questions than answers–which is usually a sign that things went well. At the same time, related conferences in Europe were developing similar lines of inquiry – both the Media City conference organized by the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar (2006, 2008), The Locative Media Summer Conference in Siegen, and The Mobile City conference in the Netherlands proved important conversations partners at this juncture, and suggested there was significant interest in these issues.

We thought it important to sustain this discussion, and decided to produce a series of pamphlet length publications that would address some of the key research vectors that were beginning to emerge. Published by the Architectural League three times a year over the course of three years, the series is structured as a succession of nine “conversations” between authors from various fields. Currently in our second year with the series, we are just about to release the fourth pamphlet on Responsive Architecture by Phillip Beesley and Omar Khan. Further, as you mentioned, I am curating Toward the Sentient City–an exhibition that aims to critically explore this evolving relation between ubiquitous computing and urban architecture. The exhibition is scheduled to open this September and is organized by the Architectural League, who has commissioned five interdisciplinary teams to produce urban interventions that attempt to provide concrete examples of some of the more abstract ideas that have evolved though these discussions.

Overall, I think one of the main aspects of this evolving discourse is the shift in focus away from specific technologies to the larger social, environmental and political contexts within which these technologies take shape and are situated.

I want to return to this idea of users/participants, technology/instruments, public space/the commons. The difference between those two sets of concepts to me seems to signal a shift in thinking, from – to paraphrase Robert Venturi – planning for mankind to designing for men. The terms public space, users and technology indicate a top-down way of framing urban space, where ‘users’ are relatively passively constrained by the spatial design of public space that the architects have deemed right for them, and where technology is seen as a force with an outside impact on reality. The alternatives you put forward seem to frame urban culture from a more ‘situated’ perspective, reminding me of the tradition of ethnomethodology and Paul Dourish. The focus is on the bottom up processes of people who from particular spatial and social contexts try to achieve particular goals, the processes that when taken together make up the city or urban culture.

That’s an interesting way to frame it. True, we were interested in the notion of the “situated” not just in the sense of being located in a particular spot or position, but also in terms of ‘situated actions,’ as Lucy Suchman discusses in her book Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication (1987). Suchman writes that every course of action is highly dependent upon its material and social circumstances, “an emergent property of moment-by-moment interactions between actors, and between actors and the environments of their action.”[1] Similarly the term ‘instruments’ refers not so much to the technology in itself but rather about its possible performance in a particular context. Here, performance is understood along multiple vectors: technological, social and organizational, each with their own criteria for evaluation (effectiveness, efficacy and efficiency, respectively). Finally, public space is a term that clearly needed revisiting. Much of the so-called of “public space” in New York City, for example, is quasi-public: “public” plazas and atria managed by “private” developers and corporations where effectively a security guard decides who is allowed access and who is not, what one can do within the space and what one cannot do. Here, public space is no longer the geography of the public sphere. The Public, publics, and public opinion are formed less through the physical geography of specific urban places and more through networked information and broadcast media systems – we have known this for decades. Public space thus has become an imprecise and weak term, it means both everything and nothing today.

So how is the concept of the commons helpful to reconceptualize urban public space?

The ‘public’ that is addressed in the public sphere tends to be defined as a unified mass. The term ‘commons’ is based on the idea of the bottom up appropriation of a shared resource. Rather than thinking of public space as something to be legislated by the city government from the top down, thinking through the commons allows for shared collective action, which is more horizontally distributed. The term refers of course to the central grassland in English villages that was owned by no one but could be used by all villagers to graze their cows. Built-in was the notion that everyone was to benefit equally from this resource. Now this was not unproblematic, as Garrett Hardin has pointed out in his essay The Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin reasons that for me as an individual it would be beneficial to add as many cows as possible. I would gain all the benefits of doing so, while the damage to the commons would be shared by everyone. Yet if everyone were to keep on adding cattle, the commons would become overgrazed. So we need some form of collective coercion that keeps individualist tendencies in check with the common interest.

Now, as with other aspects of the physical world such as land, water and air, the electromagnetic spectrum upon which contemporary wireless communications depend can be similarly understood as a shared and limited resource. Thus regulating it in ways that benefit everyone should be the objective. Hertzian Rain is a recent project of mine that that proposes a variable event structure designed to raise awareness of issues surrounding the wireless topography of urban environments through telematic conversations based on sound and bodily movement. Approaching the wireless topography of contemporary cities as a ‘commons’ makes much more sense than simply seeing it as public space, whatever that term may mean today. It provides a better framework for thinking about the sharing of scarce resources or our impact on the environment.

So far we have mainly discussed public space from an infrastructural perspective: the idea of the city as a bunch of infrastructures or collective resources that need to be distributed fairly or efficiently. Now, let’s shift this discussion a bit. A lot of the discourse on public space is not so much on the space itself, but rather on what happens inside these spaces, about our attitudes. Public space only comes into being if we choose to behave in a particular way, if we choose to be ‘public men’ so to speak, which means that we should not retract into our own social groupings but have to open up to the others with whom we share the city. Public space is thus also a highly ethical concept, it proscribes how we are to behave as ideal citizens. Should we update the concept of ‘public men’ as well, or is this public ethos as described for instance by Richard Sennett and Hannah Arendt still relevant?

I would be careful conflating Sennett’s notion of Public Man with Arendt’s concept of the Space of Appearance. Sennett laments the demise of physical public space as the space of social interaction, and sees a crisis in the retreat from more formally defined public life to more informal, individual, private, and intimate relations. Arendt’s Space of Appearance, on the other hand, is less a physical location than anyspace whatsoever where we come together in speech and action. “The polis, properly speaking,” she writes “is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.” [2] So the two are actually quite different regarding how they view so-called “public space.” Again, it is important to distinguish between public space and the public sphere. While historically they have been congruent, this is by no means the case today.

There is the idea that the direct encounter with the ‘other’ in the public sphere produces a democratic condition that breeds tolerance of the other, and through that we have a public society. To address how this plays out in our contemporary world of electronic networks, we need to understand what is happening in social space now that mobile media are becoming truly ubiquitous in urban environments. Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchen have suggested that these kinds of “code/space” need to be understood ontogenetically, that is, as a spatial condition that is brought into being through specific practices that alter the conditions under which the space itself is (re)produced. Building on the work of Adrian MacKenzie, they differentiate between technicity (the productive power of technology to make things happen) and its realization through transduction (the constant making anew of a domain in reiterative and transformative practices). These assemblages of code, people and space are thus brought into being through specific techno-social performances or enactments within the course of daily life.

These new social spaces complicate the traditional notion of the public citizen. Take Twitter, for example, where one potentially develops an ‘ambient’ awareness of the emotional state of hundreds or thousands of people. Now what kind of public is performed and enacted here? What kind of place is this, which engenders citizens with a different kind of ‘public-ness’ than that of Sennett’s Public Man?

Now, lets connect these new type of hybrid social spaces you mention with the notion of designing ‘instruments’ as you proposed five years ago. Over the last years we have seen a lot of location based media services and art projects that could be understood as instruments. The question of course is: instruments to what aim? To me it seems that they often remediate old notions of the city, rather than take the new situations you mentioned here into account. That is, they either make the use of the city more efficient (as in way-finders or recommendation services), or they provide instruments for the serendipity (also a central concept in public man-theory) that we might loose through the increased efficiency that these location based services offer. I am not unsympathetic to these projects, but I am also wondering whether rather than building instruments to restore older notions of urban culture, shouldn’t we be looking at instruments geared to a new experience of the city that is emerging?

Personally I think it’s always more interesting to invent than reproduce. And who wants an ever-more ‘efficient’ life anyway? It’s funny that you raise the notion of serendipity. I am working now on a project titled the Sentient City Survival Kit. The project explores the social, cultural and political implications of ubiquitous computing for urban environments. It takes as its method the design, fabrication and presentation of a collection of artifacts, spaces and media for ‘survival’ in the ‘near-future’ sentient city. One item in the kit is the GPS-Serendipitor, a way finding device that determines a route to a destination that the user has not previously taken. Given a culture obsessed with getting from point A to point B, it seems we’re losing sight of what happens along the way. Where I am now and where I want to be are the important points. Every week there is a wonderful article somewhere about how somebody’s TomTom has led them over a cliff or into an oncoming train. Just recently I read an article about how bad GPS coordinates led a demolition contractor to demolish the wrong house!. Are we losing our ability to navigate, unassisted, through physical space? What does it say about us when we need to download an application for serendipitous encounters?

In this respect I am very much attracted to Anthony Dunne’s definition of ‘critical design,’ an approach to design practice he poached from architects and the idea of the design competition. The goal is less to design a solution to a given problem but to provoke public discussion surrounding a set of current issues. In the context of technology, critical design involves looking a upstream into what the research communities in computer science and engineering are contemplating for the near-future, and try to tease out some of the more absurd assumptions, naive projections and hidden agendas at play there. The aim is not to get involved in the business of forecasting future trends, but to stimulate a public debate about what kind of future we want.

[1] Lucy Suchman Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication 1987 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press p. 179

[2] Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. pp. 198.

The workshop started from the notion that with the advent of urban informatics, it is now possible to collect large collections of data about the behaviour of people within the city. However:

… a large quantity of detail does not necessarily result in a great quality (and clarity) of meaning. How do we analyse this data to better understand the ‘city’ as an organism? How do the cells of the city cluster to form tissue and organs, and how do various systems communicate and interact with each other? And, recognising that we ourselves are cells living in cities as active agents, how do we evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes we observe in order to plan, design and develop more livable cities?

Although the presentations were varied, many presentations especially addressed the notion of urban public space: How is it characterized? What are the changing dynamics? How do we animate public spaces with new media technologies? These questions were also related to issues of agency and power (who gets access to public spaces on what conditions?). Another issue that came up was a contrast in approaches. On the one hand, some architects and governments apply urban media and ubicomp in a top down manner, designing ubiquitous computing services with predefined capabilities. This was contrasted to an open source approach where users (or participants) could take part in the design of services. Or where they would be provided with tools rather than closed and finished products.

Climate on the Wall & CO2nfesssion/CO2mmitment

Jonas Fritsch (also representing co-author Martin Brynskov) from The Center for Digital Urban Living presented two projects took part in staging in the Danish City Aarhus: Climate on the Wall, an interactive media façade where people could write their climate slogans with speech bubbles on the wall of an exhibition building. And CO2nfesssion/CO2mmitment, a video booth in which people could tell about their bad climate habits and also commit themselves to a more active fight for the climate. These videos were then broadcasted on screens attached to bus stops throughout the city.

I found the Climate on the Wall a really impressive example of an interactive mediafacade, based on the idea of ‘magnetic poetry’ (as found on your fridge door), where you can build sentences by dragging words in a particular order: ‘If a person stopped [somehwere along the projection], the word above the person would grow and turn into a speech bubble. This word could now be dragged to a different part of the facade. In this way, people were able to create and manipulate sentences relating to climate change.’

Both projects were meant as

an investigation of the relation between engagement and information. Inherent in this investigation is the question of how it is possible to design large-scale interactive urban systems that can spur concrete actions from the users in relation to a given subject.

They seemed to be based on an interpretation of the urban public sphere that focuses on its role as an arena for (political) discussion and engagement. The idea was that by playfully engaging people through these media-installations, this would lead to debate, discussion, awareness and or action.

The results were mixed. Both in the video booth and with the interactive media facade it was quite hard to provoke a serious debate. The interactive wall was designed to have a playful element, but this also meant that people liked to play with it rather than engage in discussion. Some started even to play in subversive ways. In both installations, people weren’t overly interested in serious argumentation. As Fritsch stated: ‘often people just wanted to drink a beer’.

Does that mean that the projects were a failure? I don’t think so. The research also showed that discussions on the topic did arise, just not always in the content the users generated in the installations themselves. Rather more informal discussions took place amongst people standing around the installations. People also did like the playful aspects of the installations.

For me this led to an interesting insight: Installations that aim to reconfigure urban public space into a space for debate and exchange, should aim to be a conversation piece rather than the conversation itself. They should focus on gameplay, not on rethorics. Of course the gameplay should be related to the theme, but it should present starting points for a conversation rather than that discussion itself. Could this be an interesting approach?

Cocollage

Joe McCarthy featured his project CoCollage – a series of screens to be displayed in places where people come together to socialize (or Oldenburg’s ‘Third Places’). The idea is to

[bring] the richness of online social software into a physical community space. The system shows photos and quotes uploaded to a web site by café patrons and staff on a large computer display in the café, providing a new channel for awareness, interactions and relationships among people there.

CoCollage from CoCollage on Vimeo.

CoCollage is meant to bring back some of the conviviality that disappeared from local coffeeshops when people started dragging along their laptops:

Although many cafés and coffeehouses are designed to encourage conversation and community, the growing proliferation of technology, especially laptops and mobile phones with wireless Internet access, is rendering many such places “physically inhabited but psychologically evacuated” [2]. Café patrons often use technology to tunnel out to their online social networks, while ignoring the physical community in which they are situated.

(see for a related discussion my earlier accounts of Starbucks Urbanism)

Cafe patrons can make up an account (and link it to existing social networks such as Facebook or Twitter). Whenever they use their loyalty card in the cafe, the display will start showing photo’s and texts from their profile. They can also vote and comment on other persons’ content. The system in currently in use in 24 places in Seattle.

CoCollage extends a notion of public space that reminded me of Jane Jacobs, Lynn Lofland and Claude Fischer’s theories coined in the 60s and 70s. They conceptualized public space not so much in terms of debate and discussion. Rather for them public space is a place where trust and public familiarity between different citizens can be built through repeated interactions in everyday life. People learn more about each other by observing each other over time, even if many of their interactions are the trivial every-day-life-kind-of-type. A similar process could be sparked by the on screen representations of cafe patrons. It would be possible to learn more about each other from the photos and texts on screen over time. (Of course patrons would have to be willing to engage in the digital data ecosystem of loyalty cards and online profiling sites which is not unprobelmatic by itself)

Two things could take off from there: people could discover similar interests, use the screen as a conversation piece and build up meaningful social relations.

It could also contribute to a type of urban community that Jacobs has described: this is a rather individualistic notion of community where we know just enough of each other so we feel comfortable to share places with each other, but not enough to become part of the scrutinies of social control that come with tighter and more collective forms of community. This line between privacy and publicity is a fine one, as Jacobs noted a few decades ago:

under this sytems is it possible in a city-street neighborhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offense, embarrassments respecting imposition or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligation which can accompany less limited relationships. It is possible to be on excellent sidewalk terms with people who are very different fro oneself, and even, as time passes, on familiar public terms with them.’

Although we could argue whether the Jacobsian notion is still valid almost half a century later, and what exact the role of ‘publicity’ is in our current age in the forging of communities and identities, it is interesting to note that McCarty found some similar observations. Although users like the system, some of them made it clear that they rather not want to get too close to the other patrons. There still seems to be a fine line of how much we want (or need) to reveal about ourselves to feel part of a community, and how much we rather keep private.

UbiCity / UbiOulu

UbiOulu (Finnish version) is a very ambitious and highly interesting research program from The UBI (UrBan Interactions) Research Program at the department of Electrical and Information Engineering of the University of Oulu, Finland. They are running a pilot in which they have build a ubicomp infrastructure for the City of Oulu that includes different communication networks (wifi, bluetooth, sensor networks) and 16 interactive touch screen displays throughout the city.

Their approach of the city and public space contains notions of both what I have called U-city and U-citizen. On the one hand, it contains a lot of practical tools that can make city life more efficient – such as bus time tables with real time information. On the ohter hand, there are also features that try to promote interaction between citizens and the shaping of a community.

There are two important notions behind this project. The first is that

open pervasive computing infrastructure in the public space [is] a prerequisite for conducting urban computing research with visible and lasting impact on the community

The idea of public space in relation to ubicomp means not only the development of particular services and tools, but also the development of an open infrastructure so that users and third parties can become co-developers rather than just passive users.

The second notion behind the project is based on a harsh critique of research and development in the field of ubiquitous computing. Researchers, institutions and funding organizations are too much focused on the new new thing, and not enough on developing sustainable models. Demos and prototypes abound, but projects that actually work and are practically usable are hard to find:

The research community values novelty over high-quality implementations and good engineering practices. This leads to ‘reinventing the wheel’ in tiny increments, which may be worth yet another publication, but very little else to the community, as they are not shareable due to their poor engineering.

They want to counter this trend by making a long time investment and rolling out the system, studying and developing it over a number of years.

The team has just started to roll out the project and the first presentation that Hannu Kukka (also representing professor Timo Ojala) gave at the workshop looked interesting, although my first impression was also that this is still a very technologically driven project (as also becomes clear from the project description):

The aim of the project is to build new ubi infrastructure, such as large displays, sensor networks and software related to them, in downtown Oulu and to bring modern technology closer to everyman. With the help of sensors and large public displays, new kinds of innovative multimodal user interfaces that compose e.g. of a mobile device, web, different kinds of sensors and a large public displays, can be executed. Sensors enable the collection of different kind of information and various interaction models with the virtual world and intelligent environment. The infrastructure enables the development of innovative applications and services and strengthens the R&D resources and competitiveness of the Oulu region. UbiCity is part of a broader UBI program that aims to concretely enhance the utilization of ubiquitous computing and the services and applications based on it in information society.

Now that the project has been rolled out, it would be really interested to see what kind of content, services and applications will come into being in the future.

Untravel’s portfolio includes terratives for the New England Aquarium and the MIT Campus as well as several tours in the Boston area, including a murder mystery that is still in production. Terratives can be lineair experiences – like audiotours, but they can also be more exploratory, including elements of gameplay and competition. Epstein believes that these forms of storytelling can engage audiences more deeply in certain urban issues, creating an experience that links a story with an actual location.

[terratives use] public places as stages for dramas and platforms for involving visitors in local issues. In our backyards and in the places we visit, social issues will not be confined to fleeting glimpses from moving vehicles or the city desk in the local paper, but will become readily accessible as a narrative overlay on the maps we constantly consult for driving, dining, and orientation.

For his presentation Epstein researched 4 ‘terratives’. How do you make these forms of locative media storytelling truly engaging? Epstein:’Many locative media storytelling projects seem really interesting at first sight, but after 5 minutes or so you get bored. Now how do you draw the audience into the story, and get them to advance through the story?’ The projects researched were Rimini Protokoll’s Call Cutta in a Box, Untravel Media’s The Greatest Neighborhood this Side of Heaven, PETlab’s Re:Activism, and Soundwalk and the Kitchen Sisters’ The
Ground Zero Sonic Memorial. (see here for the full paper)

Here are some of his findings:

Many terratives use a fictional character that leads the participants through the story, played by an actor. Some (as Rimini’s Protokoll’s Call Cutta) use actors that interact in real time with participants.

A good narrators frames the story, adds to the emotional stakes, and forges a conspiratorial bond with the audience. This approach can, at times, distance the narrator as audiences feel their presence less and, in certain cases, an actor may not really be connected to the issue at stake. … Overall, the development of guide voices, whether live or pre-recorded, is bound to evolve immensely as Terratives mature. Similar to the Greek chorus, whose outside, interpretive voice became unnecessary as audiences were became more comfortable with implied meanings in theater, so too might location-based narratives lose some of the instructional imperatives encoded into its guide characters.

Some terratives offer the opportunity for participants to actually meet some of the characters. For instance Untravel’s Greatest Neighborhood tour on the controversial redevelopment of Boston’s West End ends in the museum devoted to the neighborhood, and there one can interact with some of the storytellers. In another production that Epstein did in Venice, he included a number of locations that featured people that participants could interact with. The story brought them to a bakery and encouraged them to strike up a conversation with the baker.

In other terratives, the participant him/herself is the main character, he is exposed to a series of unfolding events to which he has to react, or game play elements are introduced – a scavenger hunt, challenges, puzzle solving, etc.

If the end goal of a story is get audience members more aware of and involved in a specific issue, presenting the message in an active (scavenger hunt, human landmarks, teamwork) rather than passive (television, film, radio) media form may lead to much
more engaged and affected audiences.

While this may work to draw the listener in, it is also problematic: you cannot really plan any character development as you could in a movie – so this perspective can also flatten the storyline.

Sometimes, competitive elements are introduced to draw people in. For instance in Re:Activism participant are invited to re-enact particular social struggles in New York City. In one of the games they have to approach strangers in Washington Square Park and try to get their signatures on a petition to the Supreme Court advocating women’s voting rights. ‘People were really getting into it’, Epstein recalled. At the same time they focused so much on the competative element, that they almost forgot about the content of the even itself. ‘They started approaching strangers hurriedly, to get as many signatures as quick as they could. They were so fanatical that the original aim – to get a discussion going on the topic, or at least to educate – got lost.’

In the end, most terratives need good storytelling with an arch that develops but also truly links events to places. A mistake often made is that the terrative becomes too much of museum guide experience, just describing several places in a particular sequence. Or if they are more interactive, they just give out plain assignment without wrapping it up in a story.

In her opening lecture, Eve Blau gave two interesting examples, one historical and one contemporary.

First she turned to the mutual exchange of ideas and concepts by modernist avant gardes such as architect Mies van der Rohe, artist/ filmmaker Hans Richter and painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, artists in different disciplines experimented with new modes of spatial representation brought about by cinema and photography. These experiments in turn made their way into architectural design.

Blau argued that the Tugendhat Villa in Brno designed by Van der Rohe – ‘the most cinematic architect of that era’ – was a manifestation of the spatial and sequential logic of film. There are no screens or moving parts in the villa, but Van der Rohe explores the idea of relational space in a way that, Blau argues, is reminiscent of cinema. The villa is layed out in a number of demarcated but linked spatial zones, such as the kitchen, the living room and the dining room. She imagined how the inhabitants, would move from one space on to the next as the rhythms of every day life would unfold. The rhythm of the spaces reminded her of the rhythms of Hans Richter’s abstract film experiments, and she connected the movement of time through the different spaces with a cinematic montage of shots.

In a similar way, in our time the computer and the internet provide us with new ways to visualize and conceptualize spatial relations. And also these new modes of thinking are making their way into architecture. This is best represented by the Toledo Glass Pavilion by SANAA, a museum building recently built in Spain.

As its website states, in this building …

… all exterior and nearly all interior walls consist of large panels of curved glass, resulting in a transparent structure that blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior spaces

The glass pavilion has incorporated the logic of digital media, not by assimilating it into the building, but by incorporating its logic: The glass structure of the pavilion inner and outer walls symbolize a new set of social relations, where everyone can observe and relate to everyone else anywhere in the building, and every piece of information is visible in multiple spaces. The space itself is not prescribed by the program, but open for multiple uses, its character determined not so much by its formal definitions, but by its uses. Even public and private spaces are not clearly demarcated, also this is a modality that is being defined by its usage rather than its programmatic function. Private space is being made by retreating, public by interaction and both can happen virtually anywhere in the building.

Semantic wayfinding is an approach to navigation media that takes human thinking, language and action as a starting point for the design of wayfinding technology and mapping interfaces.

The main goal of SemWay is to develop a methodology and models giving answers to the question how the process of human wayfinding can be supported by semantically enriched navigation systems in order to provide a meaningful interaction between wayfinders and the surrounding spatial environment.

Natural language
Right now most navigation software uses formal descriptions of space, but that is not how humans deal with their surroundings. For instance rather than drafting up a long list of formal instructions like ‘Follow the hallway for 20 meters, take a right turn, take the elevator down, pass the concierge desk, etc’, for most people the instruction ‘leave the building’ will be more than enough information – it will even be perceived as a much clearer instruction. Part of the research of Gartner’s group is focused on every day life descriptions people use to navigate through space. This way they hope to build up a taxonomy of ‘natural language’ that can be used in instructions.

Subjective landmarks
A second point is the inclusion of subjective landmarks. Wayfinding often refers to objective landmarks, clearly recognizable objects in space. Again, that’s not the way most people think of their city. Gartner: ‘Imagine a street in which all houses look exactly alike, but your girlfriend lives in one of those houses, than that is a landmark as well. Or if I get pickpocketed in a certain place, I will remember that place for ever.’ These subjective landmarks could be much more powerful for giving wayfinding instructions. This seems a promising approach, but it also brings up a lot of ethical issues. Do you want to be remembered of being pickpocketed at a certain place by your navigation software? And how would your navigation device know the subtle but important difference between let’s say a girlfriend and a mistress? What if the device refers to your girlfriend’s/mistresses’ house when your wife is in the car as well?

Behavioral context
Behavioral context is also an important factor that should be included in wayfinding, Gartner argues. For instance, there is a relation between maps and mode of transportation. Someone who is driving at high speeds needs a different interface to the geographic data than someone who is walking through the same area. A driver generally does not have much time to take a decision, so you don’t want his interface to be too cluttered. A pedestrian approaches the city from a different perspective, and has different needs. So how does that translate to a different grammar in mapping and locational services?

modalities or urban use
Similarly, there are also different ‘modes’ in which people use the city. One day you’ll just want to get somewhere as fast as possible, at another time you might be out for a recreational stroll. Obviously that ask for different routes and different kinds of contextual information. Can this type of contextual behavior be included in wayfinding algorithms?

Research done at Gartner’s faculty also shows that there is a clear correlation between certain demographic / lifestyle clusters and use of space. Researchers analyzed the spatial behavior of a group of people in a shopping mall in Vienna, and found very diverse results. One cluster of ‘users’ (mostly male and under 30) walks twice as fast as people in other clusters and hardly takes any breaks. Whereas another cluster (mostly female aged 30-35) doesn’t only walk slower, but also pauses more often. Now can information like this be used in algorithms in wayfinding devices? Would it be helpful? Or could it lead to awkward situations, similar to a spatial equivalent of obviously mistargeted Google ads showing up in your web browser, when somehow the algorithm erroneously ‘thinks’ that your pregnant or suffer from some kind of disease.

Semantic wayfinding and mental maps
So obviously, there are some issues to be figured out, but I think semantic wayfinding is a promising development. Gartner himselfs hopes that it might help overcome the ‘keyhole’ problem of current navigational interfaces. His research shows that people who use small screen navigation devices (for instance on the mobile phone) have a much harder time to make up correct mental maps of their environments than people who use old fashioned paper maps.

Part of the problem is that navigation software tends to make their users passive. If you follow the instructions of your navigation device, you often stop making a mental map all together. So when the software fails or crashes, people usually have no idea where they are.

The second problem is that the on screen maps are usually very small. Gartner compares this to looking at a scene through a keyhole. You cannot take in the whole scene at once, but have to mentally stitch the different fragments together. Gartner’s research shows that for most people, that is a hard cognitive task. Semantic wayfinding might make this task easier.

Alternatively, the knowledge Gartner’s research group gathers on the every day ways in which people make use of and describe space, could also lead to interventions in real space. ‘If you know at what point people are likely to make spatial discussions or are likely to get lost, you could place a kiosk there.’

So what exactly is urban informatics? Roughly said, the field includes a wide array of computation practices that are related to the shaping of city life. Topics vary from integrated software solutions that optimize high way traffic flows to the design of ‘smart public spaces’ to ‘citizen science’ projects that map pollution in a city neighborhood. Yet, urban informatics is not the same as urban computing. It is not so much about the technology (computing), but rather about its implications for (human) city life:

Informatics with its implied reference to information systems and information studies, slightly shifts the attention away from the hardware and more towards the softer aspects of information exchange, communication and interaction, social networks and human knowledge.

The book starts with a few more theoretical essays on ‘urban informatics’ which are followed by a broad range of accounts that describe experiences with designing and implementing urban informatics technologies. It also includes anthropological reports on how people appropriate these new technologies in an urban situation, or better: how people appropriate the city by using these new technologies.

When reading the book, two aspects struck me. The first deals with the implied urban ideals that can be found in many of the experiments described. What do we expect of a city, and how can these new technologies be employed in order to fulfill those ideals? The second aspect turns that question slightly around: how will our idea of what an ideal city is in the first place, change when many of these technologies gain prominence? Perhaps, urban informatics is not just about employing technologies to fulfill someone’s urban ideals, but rather its adaptation forces us to reconceive the idea of what a city could be.

Let’s start with the first. Different actors involved in the shaping of urban informatics use different – often left implicit – starting points from which they start designing, rolling out or using new technologies. In fact I encountered two different (though not necessary exclusionary) paradigms that could be called ‘U-City’ and ‘U-Citizen’. ‘U-City’ is short for Ubiquitous City, and was coined by the Korean government. It perceives the city mainly as a collection of infrastructural services geared towards citizen-consumers. The chapter that lays out this Korean vision talks about roads that know how many cars drive on them, tires that give off warnings when the pressure is too low, and personalized services like receiving a message when your children have arrived safely at school. In this framework, urban informatics is about developing a toolkit that makes urban life more efficient, and helps individual consumers to customize the city in their own image. The authors indeed speak of ‘The City as a Service’. A somewhat similar approach is found in an article about the Senseable City WikiCity project. The authors bet on a future in which real time data about the city can be coupled with a semantic toolset, so you can as ask your urban informatics device questions like ‘what is the best place – with regard to my current location, weather forecast, environmental conditions and other factors – to fly a kite today?

Many of the case studies in the book start from a different perspective that we could call ‘U-Citizen’. Here the starting point is the idea of the city as a community of citizens. Urban informatics is not employed to necessarily make their life more efficient (neither is this option necessarily excluded). Rather it is hoped that urban informatics can play a role in the formation of a better public sphere or strengthen the ties of a community. There is an article about using urban screens to promote discussion about and engagement with local community issues. There are also accounts of artists working with locative media to bring out local stories and memories. Eric Paulos a.o. contributed an article about the use of the mobile phone as a ‘citizen science’ measurement tool that can be used to collectively gather environmental data by activists and grass roots initiatives.

Of course, ‘U-city’ and ‘U-citizen’ are not necessarily binary starting points for the design of urban informatics technologies and services. Elements of both could also be combined. Yet I think it is interesting to explicitly bring out the often latent ideas on city life that are invoked in the design and employment of urban informatics.

This approach has been picked up by a number of researchers recently (See for instance Eric Paulos’ Manifesto of Open Disruption and Participation published on the centenary celebration of the Futurist Manifesto). In the Urban Informatics Handbook it is elaborated by Amanda Williams, Erica Robles and Paul Dourish. They find that many of the implicit assumptions of urban life are based on a number of philosophical discourses on urban culture.

One of the main ideas they came across is the understanding of the city as a ‘dense ecology of strangers. A social condition both liberating and alienating.’ This stance can be recognized in many locative media services. For instance many of these services try to promote the ‘serendipity’ of the urban experience, that hallmark of the modern industrial metropolis created by that dense ecology of strangers. Other location based services do exactly the opposite: they are employed to ‘tame’ the very unpredictability of the modern metropolis, by connecting you with your friends, informing you about the safety of a neighborhood, or telling you that some of the strangers around you are actually ‘familiar strangers’.

In discussions about these services, often tropes are invoked that emerged in discussions about the rise of the modern industrial metropolis, about a century ago. The theories and descriptions of the French poet Baudelaire, and German philosophers and sociologists Georg Simmel en Walter Benjamin are often taken as starting points. Especially the idea of ‘the flaneur’ is still popular amongst designers and artists. Although I find those auteurs still relevant for our understanding of urban culture, it is also refreshing that in this volume, Dourish a.o. critique the unquestioning adaptation of their theories for the development of current day technologies.

The ‘flaneur’ after all was an ideal-typical urbanite that emerged in a particular time in history: when Baron de Haussmann cleared the inner city of Paris to make way for his broad boulevards. As amongst others Marshall Berman, Scott McQuire, and in The Netherlands René Boomkens have pointed out, these boulevards should be linked to a whole range of parallel developments. Apart from political, hygienic and military motives behind their construction, the boulevards played a part in the scaling-up of the market-economy and the easy movement of the mass-produced goods to the new department stores. At the same time these boulevards also provided new ways to flaunt one’s identity or pass a leisurely Saturday afternoon. They led to new cultural practices for the emerging bourgeoisie, and even created a new type of public space where the bourgeoisie was confronted with the poor still living in the urban slums behind the boulevard’s stately facades. A whole new way of urban culture emerged as a byproduct of all these developments.

This brings me to the second aspect of Urban Informatics that took my interest. If indeed it is true that the Parisian boulevards in coherence with broader social movements created a whole new way of urban culture at the end of the 19th Century, than perhaps the arrival of urban informatics in combination with other societal developments will do something similar in our days. Rather than trying to employ urban informatics to remediate an urban ideal based upon the dense ecology of the modern metropolis, we should try to understand what kind of new forms of urban culture are taking shape. This is the path that scholars like Mimi Ito, Scott McQuire, Kazys Varnelis and others have been pursuing over the last few years.

A number of articles in Urban Informatics do address this point of view as well. Dourish a.o. for instance argue that rather than taking particular urban forms as a starting point for the study of urban experience, our understanding of the city could benefit from a situated analyses of individual experiences within cities. Andrew Townsend compares the rise of urban informatics with the advent of aerial photography. Both led to a new way of visualizing the city that had consequences for the way in which we understand it:

if aerial photography showed us the muscular and skeletal structure of the city, the revolution in urban informatics is likely to reveal it’s circulatory and nervous systems. I like to call this vision the “real-time-city” because for the first time we’ll see cities as a whole the way biologists see a cell – instantaneously and in excruciating detail but also alive.

Now most articles do not elaborate extensively on what exact new forms of urban culture are emerging through the deployment of urban informatics. That is only logical: much of these technologies are so new that we haven’t seen many mass adaptations yet. Most articles describe experiments rather than broad sociological shifts. This book thus gives a good overview of where things are heading, and from what latent urban ideals and perspectives urban informatics is employed in different disciplines and institutional contexts. It also made me realize that enough territory is still uncharted and that this is a promising starting point around which a new discipline could take shape.

Naimark talked about two different directions that map-making is taking. The first is perhaps illustrated best by Google Earth. Google is trying to construct a photo-realistic version of the globe. It does so by sending out ‘spycars’ to photograph street scenes. Google also takes in user generated pictures through its Panoramio-service. The catch is that only certain photo’s uploaded to Panoramio will make it to Google Earth. The acceptance policy explains that the following pictures will not be eligible for inclusion on their virtual globe:

• People posing, portraits or persons as main subject. Exception: photos where people are an unavoidable part of the place
• Events: exhibitions, concerts, parades…
• Car, plane or any machine as the main subject. Same exception as above.
• Pet or animal as the main subject. Exception: animals in their natural environment showing the background.
• Flowers and details of plants. Exception: forests, big trees and photos that show the background.

In other words, most of the things that make an abstract geographic space into a lived place are excluded. The goal is to make a more or less neutral base-interface. (Although of course on top of that, people can add subjective layers and maps through mymaps.google or other services.)

Naimark himself co-initiated an experiment called viewfinder to find a different approach: how can the objective reality of Google Maps be turned into a platform for more subjective experiences of those spaces. Or to put it in his words: ‘How to seamlessly Flickerize Google Earth’.

I think this experiment does bring out some interesting questions: If maps are becoming one of our prime interfaces, should they be as neutral or at least approach verisimilitude as much as possible? Or should we design purposely to include more subjective experiences, to include a sense of a lived, more visceral space into these maps?

(For more on screen culture at the Filmfestival, see also my article on urban screens at the Rotterdam Filmfestival)

The festival of course aimed to do more than just move cinema outside the black box of the movie theatre. The idea was that the filmmakers would make site-specific works. I found the experiment interesting and a welcome contribution to the debate, however with mixed results; only one of the three films (Nanouk Leopold’s Close-up) touched me. The other two films (Carlos Reygadas Serenghetti and Guy Maddin’s Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair did not convince me.)

Part of the problem was perhaps technical: the projections were not bright enough and confined to a rectangular space high-up on the buildings. This made it hard to see what was projected in the first place. May be it was because of this that Reygadas’ idea to contrast the urban landscape of concrete, glass and asphalt with images of a women’s soccer match filmed in a ‘surrealistic moutain landscape’ fell flat. But I felt it also had to do with the particular use of the urban screen, as just another ‘screen’ in the vast array of broadcast media we now have, yet another rectangular outlet not unlike the ubiquitous tv-screens found in so many bars, broadcasting distant sport events. Even thought the work meant to reflect on the urban condition, it did not really become part of the urban experience itself, it remained a screen showing something happening somewhere else, without forging a strong link to the here and now.

Photo: Jaccodotorg

I find urban screens much more interesting when they do exactly that and are programmed to become a part of the public space, when they engage the space or the audience around it more directly. Nanouk Leopold’s Close-up did that: it showed a six hour long film of a close-up of a human face that looked directly into the camera. The central traffic junction Hofplein now featured the huge face of a man looking down upon the passers by, directly addressing them directly with his gaze. This of course brings al sorts of connotations with it: who is it that actually watches over public space? Are we being watched? Are we watching ourselves?

Overall, I think that at this point in time it is outside cinema that we find more interesting urban screens experiments that engage the public (space) directly (and it was a pity the film festival didn’t connect her cinematic experiments with urban screen endeavors from the world of art and design). I think urban screens could actually play an important part in the making of our public spaces: if the small screen of the mobile phone or satellite navigator provide us with a personalized version of the city connecting us mainly with absent others, then perhaps the urban screen can address us on a more collective and connective level, visualizing for instance collective rhythms, connecting us in someway with a collective mood, or forging connections with those around us that are not in our personalized networks. Experiments with data visualization are a first step in this direction, they lead to artistic content for urban screens that somehow reflects the mood or variety of the public actually in the public spaces.

One work that even goes a step further and directly forges all sorts of public interaction was shown eight years ago(!) in Rotterdam, on the outside of the very cinema building that now hosts a large part of the Filmfestival. This work, Lozano-Hemmer’s now famous work ‘Body Movies’, consisted of pictures of shopping people projected in large format on the outer wall of the cinema on the main square of Rotterdam. These pictures were however barely visible, since a very bright flood-light projected from below washed out their projection. Only when passers-by would stand in front of the flood-light, the original pictures became visible in the shadows their bodies casted on the cinema wall.

I saw the installation myself a year later in Linz, and there people immediately started playing shadow games on the screen, revealing different parts of the pictures. They were even rewarded for that: when the contours of the shopping people depicted in the projections had become visible, a new slide was projected. This way a choreography emerged of people collaborating trying to fill up the outlines of all people in the image with their silhouettes. Could projects like this perhaps in a playful way connect the individuals immersed in their private ‘telecocoons’ in public space?

In two recent articles I have taken on this idea of urbanism as a special way of life. I have tried to update the concept for our current age, in which cities can no longer be conceived of as the high density physical aggregation of all those different people with different identities, backgrounds, roles and goals that Wirth discerned.

That is: all those differences are still there in the city. Yet, there are so much more means of organizing and connecting than through the means of the physical spaces of the city that the Chicago school saw as its business to map and demarcate. City space, after all, is by now a hybrid space, and this is the era of The Mobile City. So the urbanism of today is one of Boulevards as well as of MySpace, of the ghetto and of MSN, of city streets and mobile phones.

The first article is called Locative media and the city: from BLVD-urbanism towards MySpace urbanism recently appeared in Vodafone Receiver interesting themed issue Space is the Place. The second one appeared in the recently published volume Media Cities. Situations, Practices and Encounters, edited by a.o. Frank Eckardt, Jens Geelhaar, Ralf Hennih and Katherine Willis from the Bauhaus University Mediacity Project. This article is called From BLVD Urbanism towards MSN Urbanism. Locative media and urban culture.

Locative media and the city – from BLVD-urbanism towards MySpace urbanism

Great cities are not like towns, only larger, urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs observed almost half a century ago. But what then is it that makes a city into a city? Now that telecom operators, handset builders, and media companies are churning out new media technologies that promise to drastically alter our sense of place, this question has once again become very urgent. Whether we call them locative media, contextual media, or placed based media, these technologies promise to change the way we interact with our surroundings. Let me call this new way of experiencing the city MySpace urbanism.
When you’ll ask urbanists, city planners, architects, economists, sociologists or urban anthropologists about the essence of a city, you will probably get as many different answers as there are disciplines concerned with the study of the urban fabric; each answer somewhat cloaked in its own jargon. Yet, if you closely observe what scientists in all these different domains have written about the city, two common themes usually float to the surface: heterogeneity and density. The city is a place that brings together people with a broad variety of different backgrounds in a heavily built up area. People with different ethnicities, lifestyles, professions, economic status, outlook, religion, and etcetera – all find themselves cramped together on a few square kilometres.

It is exactly this diversity that leads to what has often been called “urban culture”. Already in the 1920s a scholar of the famous Chicago School of sociology observed that “it is characteristic of city life that all sorts of people meet and mingle together who never fully comprehend one another. The anarchist and the club man, the priest and the Levite, the actor and the missionary who touch elbows on the street still live in totally different worlds.” Yet, ideally, the city is not a mere collection of “urban villages”: isolated enclaves of the like minded. What makes a city a city is that these people with different backgrounds and identities observe each other, interact and are confronted with each other.
This process leads to a cross-fertilization of ideas and makes the city a stronghold of innovation, economists will point out. This is what leads to the creation of new lifestyles and identities, anthropologist will say. And this very eclectic mix of lifestyles downplays the effect of social control that had characterized traditional societies, sociologists have pointed out.

At the same time, some philosophers claim, the city also provides a spatial composition that enables all these different lifestyles to live together in spite of all their differences. The city, in their view, is a stage on which people display their identity, often unconsciously just by acting out their everyday life. Everyone is a performer and an observer at the same time, constantly making comparisons: are those people behaving in such and such a way like us? Or do they belong to other social groups. “We identify ourselves socially by continuously comparing ‘us’ with ‘them’”, writes Dutch sociologist Talja Blokland.
This process has different consequences: it helps us to define who we are ourselves, mixing and matching, rejecting and dismissing elements of lifestyles that we see around us. At the same time, this process could also produce a certain form of trust between citizens, even if they do not belong to the exact same lifestyle group. Some theorists have called this “public familiarity”: we’ve become familiar with unknown others in public places. “The trust of a city street”, wrote Jane Jacobs, “is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts”. Finally, this process could also produce a political community: we all share the same city space, so whether we like it or not, we just have to deal with each other.

Many of these accounts describe idealized (some would say nostalgic) versions of the city, and often refer to cities of a bygone era. It is the cafes lined boulevards and pedestrian passageways of Walter Benjamin’s Paris that is often evoked in these theories. Therefore, we could label these ideas BLVD-urbanism – referring to the broad Boulevards that formed the heart of public life in late nineteenth century Paris.

Over the last few decades, quite a few critics have pointed out that many of our cities have stopped to function as such due to different causes. Suburbanization and gentrification have isolated different lifestyles in their own enclaves, limiting the nodal contact points between different groups. The rhythms of our daily lives run less synchronously as well, so that haphazard meetings between different people become less likely. We drive around in automobiles to commercialized “non-places” such as shopping malls rather than stroll around on public piazzas. Yet in many accounts the ideal remains: the city as a site of physical exchange and interaction between citizens, that fosters different communities, enriches individual life, leads to innovation and creates what Dutch Philosopher René Boomkens has called a “community of strangers”.

The city of the digital natives

Most of these theories see the city as a purely physical space. So how do these theories hold up in the era in which the city is saturated with media networks such as – to name just a few – GPS, WIFI, UMTS, HSDPA, GSM? Now that mobile and locative media change our interaction with our environment? No longer do we just experience the physical city itself: we SMS and chat with distant friends who in our minds are near at hand. We can inquire about our location, or leave virtual graffiti for those who’ll pass by after us. We can withdraw our attention from our actual surroundings, and into the mediated spaces of these networks. Or we can actively engage with our surroundings through the screens of our mobile phones.

Recently, a range of discussions has arisen about these themes. Let’s have a look at some of the points that were brought up. One of the central tropes of BLVD-urbanism is the idea of the city as a stage for comparison, interaction, confrontation and innovation. As Mark Shepard , Danah Boyd and others have pointed out (amongst other places in this journal), at least for the generation of “digital natives” the urban stage has now broadened extensively with the rise of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Livejournal, Cyworld or QQ. There, identities are displayed through profiles, pictures and widgets, in two different ways. On the one hand, these webpages are performance-sites in the literal sense: Constructing a profile is akin to putting up a carefully directed stage act, or dressing up for a night on the town: what picture, what catchy status-update, what profile description matches best the image that the user wants to portray to the outside world?

On the other hand, new iterations of these sites can also display the unconscious rhythms of everyday (urban) life. It is easy now to add widgets to your profile that automatically show the last song that you listened to on your iPod, the last article you read, the last bookmark you made on Del.icio.us, and even your exact whereabouts in the real city. Sites such as Plazes or Bliin let users update each other about their physical location in the city. The places that one visits – tracked and broadcasted by mobile phones with GPS receiver – become automatically a part of one’s performed identity, both in the actual city as well as online.

On a personal level, these developments mean that we can continuously receive “status updates” from our friends. Adam Greenfield uses the term “the big now” to describe this experience. Through services like Twitter or Facebook on our mobile phones, we are in continuous touch with those we feel close to, even if they are on the other side of the planet. “For me, at least”, Greenfield writes, “it’s been difficult to see my New York through quite the same eyes, when every time I get my phone out I feel the entire planet’s deeper rhythms working themselves out.”

On a higher level, something interesting is going on as well: all these tracks and traces that we are leaving behind can be aggregated. These aggregates can be visualized and projected onto maps and portray a collective culture of what is happening where in the city. MIT’s Senseable City Lab and Citysense are early experiments with these new cultural forms that show us the city and its collective rhythms in new and possibly interesting ways. “Today’s intelligent maps don’t just represent spatial relationships”, Kazys Varnelis has written. “They reveal conditions in the city that were previously hidden in spreadsheets and databases.” They are not just maps in the old sense. They show us real time representations of events in the city – varying from a traffic jam to a gathering of our friends in a neighborhood bar. We can even adjust our own behavior in the city on these maps.

We could also use these maps to collaborate on assembling information about the city. During a lecture at a conference we organized in Rotterdam, artist Christian Nold showed the audience a collective map of gardens in Los Angeles that featured trees with low hanging ripe fruit, there for the taker nearby. Other wiki-style maps are currently emerging that can be updated right from a mobile device, varying from restaurant reviews, personal memories, and local news. This means that geographic visualizations – not necessarily the Cartesian grids that are the base of most of our current online maps – are becoming an important interface through which we experience the city.

The utopian promises of these technologies go even one step further. When social networks, and the traces we leave in the city are combined, mobile media might start to work as an enhanced “city guide”. Just like Amazon recommends you a book based on aggregated purchase patterns, mobile media might start recommending new places to visit and people to meet. The media will “filter” the city for its users and guide them to the places they would like to go. They could even help us to engage in new communities, or forge “smart mobs” – spontaneous get-togethers in real space with unknown others to achieve a common goal.

Adam Greenfield has called this a shift from “browsing” – where we just wander around in the city – to searching – where we are more actively looking for a particular area, function or person in the city. The buzzword language of the dotcom-industry takes the metaphor even one step further. We are not just searching for what we already know, industry pundits argue. These services will help us to “discover” places and experiences that we didn’t even know that we were looking for.

The city: OurSpace

Of course its easy to be critical about these utopian visions often put forward by marketing departments of commercial companies that want to sell these services. And certainly not all of these features will indeed become popular. Yet the general direction of these developments is taking shape right now, and we could label them MySpace urbanism.

This term refers first to the role of social networks, online profiles and tracking sites as spaces where we perform our identities, through which we connect and which could lead to interaction in the real city. Second, the term “myspace” also implies that these media can help us to personalize the city: to filter out the bits and connections that are of specific interest for us personally, to remake the city in our own image.

This way, locative and mobile media promise to make the experience of the city more pleasant, more efficient, more exciting and more manageable. Yet there are also critics who point out that these exact developments endanger one of the central concepts in BLVD-urbanism: serendipity. Serendipity means that it is never fully predictable what or who you will encounter in the city, nor are these unexpected encounters avoidable. It is exactly these inevitable confrontations with unknown others, this experience of “social seams” that is important: through these confrontations trust is build up, a community is forged, and (cultural) innovation is achieved. But when you start “searching” the city, rather than “browse” around, this quality might get lost.

Do these critics have a point? They might. In the most extreme negative scenario public space might evaporate. People will use locative media to filter out serendipitous encounters as much as possible. This is a very defensive interpretation of MySpace urbanism, where people use technology to demarcate their space and refuse to let anyone else in: this is my space, now get out!

But there is also another way in which MySpace urbanism can be interpreted. A space becomes “yours” when you engage with it. Not to claim it as solely yours, but to actively take some responsibility for that space; when you are actively (and collectively) taking part in its shaping. The collective maps mentioned above can be used as a platforms for exchange and confrontation. They could even help to make collective rhythms visible that until now had gone unnoticed.

In reality, we will probably see a combination of both scenarios. People who use mobile media often find themselves constantly shifting between different modes of being in the city. Sometimes they use their technology to withdraw from their actual surroundings, to form a private bubble, to demarcate TheirSpace. At other times, they will use the same devices for more public acts. They will engage in the space around them, and participate in OurSpace.

From BLVD Urbanism towards MSN Urbanism. Locative media and urban culture.

The goal of this article is to explore developments in locative and mobile media and connect these with reflections on ‘urban culture’. What could the introduction of locative and mobile media and the cultural practices through which they are adapted mean for urban culture? To get a grasp on these developments I have coined eight ‘urbanisms’ or particular manifestations of urban culture that are arising or could emerge from the social practices through which mobile and locative media are appropriated in society: MySpace Urbanism, Google Earth Urbanism, iPhone Urbanism, Starbucks Urbanism, Long Tail Urbanism, Ebay Urbanism and MSN Urbanism. For the sake of argument I will contrast these with BLVD Urbanism, a synthesis of a range of theories on urban culture in the pre-digital modern metropolis.

Before I start, I wish to express a word of caution. Many locative and mobile media services are in their infancy. If they already do work, they hardly ever offer the seamless experience that their commercial promoters usually promise. Although this is a very important point to make, in this article I will try to analyze current developments, research findings and trends. This approach is taken not to boost share prices of the telecom-companies and handset makers, but rather to start thinking through in an early stage what the cultural consequences of these developments could be. Another important point I wish to make is to warn against technological determination. These new technologies do not have an outside impact on society. It is through social practice embedded in an existing (urban) culture that these new technologies acquire their meaning and produce new cultural practices and perhaps new urbanisms. And last, the labels that I have chosen for these new urbanisms mostly refer to commercial brands. Again, this is not meant as an endorsement of these brands or their ‘coolness’, but rather meant to emphasize the fact that many of the new hybrid infrastructures and technologies are not public goods; rather it is mostly through commercialized services that we start to experience the city.

BLVD Urbanism

What exactly do we mean with urban culture? Although the term is used in different contexts, what many definitions have in common is the idea of the city as an ‘organization of differences’. Starting with the Chicago and German School, urbanists have pointed out that the modern city brings together diverse groups of people with diverse backgrounds and different identities, lifestyles and goals. As Robert Park wrote: ‘It is characteristic of city life that all sorts of people meet and mingle together who never fully comprehend one another. The anarchist and the club man, the priest and the Levite, the actor and the missionary who touch elbows on the street still live in totally different worlds.’ (Sennett, 1969: 117). Yet at the same time, others noted that urban culture it is not a simple antagonism of different groups with their particular spatial strategies and practices. Individuals can belong to different groups, loyalties change, (group) identities themselves are unstable and new identities can emerge through confrontation between groups or through lack of social control that had characterized traditional societies. ‘No single group has the undivided allegiance of the individual,’ wrote Louis Wirth. ‘The groups with which he is affiliated do not lend themselves readily to a simple hierarchical arrangement. By virtue of his different interests arising out of different aspects of social life, the individual acquires membership in widely divergent groups, each of which functions only with reference to a certain segment of his personality’ (Sennett, 1969).

Urban culture can be understood as the ‘interface’ – both geographically and culturally – that organizes these differences, that makes the city liveable, and that confronts these differences and/or reconciles them into a whole. It encompasses both top-down approaches of space-making (city-planning, policing, law-making), as well as bottom-up ones of appropriation and social spatial processes. So, urban culture is a complicated concept that deals with the relation between urban space and social and political processes such as identity formation and relations between groups. It is about ‘who’ lives ‘where’, and ‘who’ makes the ‘where’ and how the ‘where’ makes the ‘who’, and how the different ‘whos’ relate to each other.

In philosophy two concepts are related to the idea of urban culture. The first is ‘Wohnen’ or ‘Dwelling.’ Wohnen is not just about the address on one’s driver’s licence or tax forms. Wohnen is about the process of making or feeling oneself at home, the process in which local structures are appropriated or exerted to express or strengthen one’s (group) identity. My interpretation of Wohnen comes close to this one, given by Norberg-Schulz: ‘Der Mensch wohnt wenn er sich in einer Umgebung orienterien und mit ihr identifizieren kann, kurz, wenn er seine Umgebung als sinnvol erlebt. Wohnen bedeutet deshalb mehr als Unterkunft’ (One can only say to dwell (wohnen) somewhere, when in an environment one can find one’s bearings, and one can identity with one’s surroundings, or shorter: when one can experience his environment as meaningful. Thus dwelling is more than just having a roof over one’s head). (Quoted in Hennig, 2006: 126) .

When we look at the literature, there are different conceptions of Wohnen (Boomkens, 1998, Boomkens, 2006, De Cauter, 2004, Soja, 2000). One is a defensive one that is often linked to the suburbs, or the bourgeois-ethos of locking oneself up in a spatial capsule. According to this critique the subject tries to remake the world after its own image, trying to fully control it, overriding the contingency that is so characteristic of urban life. ‘Many suburbanites’, writes René Boomkens, ‘revel in a cult of quasi-authentic dwelling, exchanging the dynamics of modernism for a static sense of being guarded from [these dynamics]’ (Boomkens, 2006: 98) .

The second type of Wohnen is the ability to feel or make yourself at home in exactly that contingent urban condition. It can be traced back to theories by Walter Benjamin, who wrote “The street becomes a dwelling for the flaneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls” (Quoted in Varnelis and Friedberg, 2007).

The next concept that is related to urban culture is the German term Offentlichkeit, or the public sphere. This is the place and process of confrontation and exchange, of battles of representation, of clashes, innovation, political organization and cultural development. Also the idea of a public sphere can be understood in two different ways: some theories interpret the public sphere as a place for rational debate. This interpretation relies on Habermas’ idea of the public sphere, where citizens irrespective of their background (as long as they weren’t women or other excluded groups that Habermas overlooked) could engage in discussion with one another. Other theories on public culture acknowledge a public sphere that operates on a more subconscious level. It is a place not so much for rational debate, but for bodily performance, for encounter and confrontation with all kinds of means. As Amin and Trhift write: ‘The human body … is usually conceived as a centred cognitive being, as the chief source of agency in the city, setting plans and carrying them out. But in fact very few bodily actions require motive (attribution of intent, justification, accounting) Nearly all the activity of the human body takes place in what Lakoff and Johnson call the cognitive unconscious’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002). Public space thus becomes a stage where subjects acquire an identity through performance. In his interesting essay Drag Spaces Neil Leach refers to Judith Butlers theory on performance to make a similar point. According to him performance is a matter of remixing (bodily) citations and quotes that subjects copy from others through mimetic processes of confrontation and identification in public space. ‘Butler figures identity not as something interior – an essentializing given – but rather as something exterior, a discursive external effect. It is borne of acts, gestures and enactments that are performatively repeated’ (Leach, 2005: 175) .

Most of these theories on urban culture are not neutral analysis but rather ethical stances. Take for instance this quote from Richard Sennett: ‘Cities have the potential to make us more complex human beings. A city is a place where people can learn to live with strangers, to enter into the experiences and interests of unfamiliar lives. Sameness stultifies the mind; diversity stimulates and expands it’ (Sennett, 2001). In other words, it is imperative that we all become flaneurs and embrace an active public culture.

I will call this stance BLVD-urbanism, after the Hausmannian Parisian Boulevards that form one of the main icons of the centralized modernist metropolis, home to Habermassian coffeehouses and Benjaminian flaneurs, connecting the public space of the inner city with the more private dwelling area’s on the outskirts, while also stressing the powers of the central state in the process of place making. To sum up, BLVD-urbanism is the idea of the metropolis as a place where people with different identities live together. Traditional ways of life are exchanged for a more free floating modern experience that is both exciting and threatening. The public spaces of a city play an important part, these are where differences are confronted with each other. A well functioning urban society cannot do without these public spaces. As Boomkens writes, ‘Thanks to its public places, the city creates its own sphere in which individuals are more than just subjects of a particular state and at the same time also more than just anonymous and abstract actors in a worldwide market economy. … The city creates a community of strangers’ (Boomkens, 2006: 114). Yet, the mere existence of these spaces is not enough. It also requires that citizens do not entrench in their defensive dwellings. They should actively take part in a public culture.

Many discussions on contemporary urban culture claim that this BLVD-urbanism is under attack. The advent of the automobile, television, suburbanisation, the internet, neoliberalism, individualization, globalization have remade the city into a different entity: it is now an automobile dependent poly-nucleated amalgam of edge cities, more a product of the logic of the space of flows than that of a localized culture, full with uprooted cosmopolites, either cosmopolites by choice such as the creative class, or cosmopolites by necessity, such as the many migrants who have flocked to these cities (De Waal, 2007). Commercial forces turn public spaces into privatized non-spaces while consumers have now replaced citizens. As Sennett has written in The Uses of Disorder, urban culture is no longer about a ‘display of difference’ but a ‘play of difference’ (Sennett, 1970), that goes hand in hand with indifference towards each other. To put in the phrases of zeitgeist magazine Wired: Public culture is ‘tired’, defensive dwelling has become ‘wired’.

The scope of this essay doesn’t allow an in depth analysis of all these claims, but it should suffice here that there are four different critiques. The current metropolis can be characterized by a shift from citizens to consumers, from public space to private space, from space to non-space and from inclusive community to excluding ‘tribes’. Thus Manuel Castells concludes one of his essays on urban culture as follows: ‘Cities have always been communication systems, based on the interface between individual and communal identities and shared social representations. It is their ability to organize this interface materially in forms in rhythms in collective experience and communicable perception that makes cities producers of sociability, and integrators of otherwise destructive creativity … How to safeguard this Culture of Cities into a New Culture of Cities, geared towards the information age that may or may not create urban tribes rather than citizens?’ (Susser, 2002: 382) .

Locative Media

In the following part of this essay I will examine the part locative and mobile media might play in our contemporary and future urban culture. I will interpret the term ‘locative media’ in a very broad sense, in the same way as we did in the conference text for The Mobile City conference organized in Rotterdam in February 2008 (De Waal and De Lange, 2007). Insightful of our approach there was a quote by Julian Bleecker:

“Locative media that is of most immediate concerns is that made by those who create experiences that take into account the geographic locale of interest, typically by elevating that geographic locale beyond its instrumentalized status as a ‘latitude longitude coordinated point on earth’ to the level of existential, inhabited, experienced and lived place.” (Bleecker and Knowlton, 2006)

From this definition it is hard to make a true division between locative media and the broader category of mobile media. As different researchers (Bull, 2000), (Ito et al., 2006) have pointed out, mobile media such as the mobile phone or the personal stereo are often used in a way described by Bleecker: creating or appropriating a geospatial experience.

More abstractly, Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis see two categories of locative media. One is annotative – these are media technologies that allow its users to virtually tag (and consequently filter) the real world. The second is phenomenological – tracing the action of a subject in the world (Varnelis and Tuters, 2006). Another way to categorize these new media is between media that take an actual spatial context of a communicative practice as its point of departure (for instance a ‘mobile city guide’ that gives touristic information about a particular location) and media that provide a virtual but spatially organized interface related to an actual geography for communicative and informational practices (for instance a Google Map that is connected with traffic or crime information or live feeds from local weblogs). Combining these different points of view, we can differentiate between (at least) six ways in which locative and mobile media can transform our notions of urban culture.

• The use of spatially organized interfaces to information databases, for instance Google Earth-mash ups.
• The annotation of geographic places (and the attribution, construction and contestation of maps, meaning, and territories)
• The mapping or tracing of objects and persons and the use of locative media as tools for micro-coordination such as real time and real space social networking.
• The use of locative media as filtering devices: either selecting relevant places from the perspective of the subject. Or the other way around: systems that grant or refuse access to certain places.
• The use of locative media as a ‘space making devices’, altering the experience of a certain space through its use. For instance mobile phones or personal stereo’s or urban screens.
• The issue of address: framing space and/or subjects in a certain way, providing us with ontologic metaphors, starting to understand our subjectivities in other ways.

In what follows I will try to connect this perspective on locative and mobile media with the concept of urban culture and especially the notions of dwelling and public sphere. The basic assumptions of what I have called BLVD Urbanism are used as ideal-typical frames of reference. Not necessarily because I underwrite all the claims, of BLVD Urbanism, but to get a better grasp on what is different and what is not. Of course the risk of this approach is that we end up with urbanisms described as ‘horseless carriages’, or rather simplistic remediations of the old, rather than coming up with terms that accurately describe phenomena that are perhaps truly new. I will try to avoid this by summarizing the most striking shifts in urban culture in the last paragraph called MSN Urbanism.

Myspace-Urbanism

As I have mentioned above, in many discourses about urban culture, the city is described as a stage for identity formation. The city is a stage for bodily performances through which subjects shape their identities. In her book Goeie Buren houden zich op d’r eigen Dutch sociologist Talja Blokland shows how this process used to take place in the Rotterdam neighbourhood Hillesluis (Blokland, 2005). She describes how people used their daily routinely interactions in their neighbourhood to discern between different social categories. Performed behaviour of co-citizens showed them whether they were like themselves, or whether they belonged to other social groups. ‘We identify ourselves socially by continuously comparing ‘us’ with ‘them’. (Blokland, 2005), Blokland writes. The behaviour of people that ‘we’ like to identify with also provides a repertoire of behavioural codes, while the behaviour of ‘them’ could also function as frame of reference of how ‘we’ do not behave. Blokland uses the concept of ‘public familiarity’ (minted by Fischer (Fischer, 1982)), to describe this process. ‘[public] familiarity’ provides knowledge, and we can use this knowledge to make social distinctions.’ (Blokland, 2005: 92). Carlinde Adriaanse also uses the concept of public familiarity in a slightly different way: ‘Public familiarity emerges from recurrent encounters between people in public space that enables them to assess who they can trust and who they can’t.’ (Adriaanse, 2006). She uses a quote by Jane Jacobs to make her point: ‘‘The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts.’ (Adriaanse, 2006). Such ‘trust’ or ‘public familiarity’ can only arise when there are sufficient ‘social seams’ (another term by Jacobs) where people with different backgrounds can run into each other routinely.

Exactly that is one of often stated problems of our current era urban culture. Blokland has described how through many different processes the neighbourhood has lost its position as a collective stage or as meaningful social seams. Due to increased mobility, the neighbourhood has become a less important stage for everyday life. Second, lives of neighbourhood dwellers are lived less synchronously than before.

One of the issues up for debate is the question whether online and locative social networks can be understood as remediations of processes of public familiarity, social identification and trust-building. Can we speak of a nascent Myspace Urbanism? When looking for processes of public familiarity or trust building, it doesn’t take a huge conceptual leap to go from urban public space to online social networks. As Dana Boyd writes: ‘because the digital world requires people to write themselves into being, profiles provide an opportunity to craft the intended expression through language, imagery and media. Explicit reactions to their online presence offer valuable feedback. The goal is to look cool and receive peer validation.’ (Varnelis and Friedberg, 2007). Boyd describes how American teenagers use their profile pages to perform their identity. And through all sorts of widgets, they can also publicize their favourite music, their agenda, their favourite films etc. Thus Boyd concludes that ‘hanging out has moved online’ (Varnelis and Friedberg, 2007).

That however seems only part of the story. Online social networks also show many links to real life activities, for example through Facebook’s ‘Status Updates’ that enables users to tell their contacts what (and where) they are currently doing. A series of new mobile services has emerged around this idea: microblogging services like Twitter, or Jaiku let you update your ‘status’ from your mobile phone, services like Plazes or Bliin let your contacts know where you are in the city. It thus becomes possible to watch our contacts – or at least their representations on social networks – closely as their life unfolds. We can identify ourselves with their lifestyles, and use their behaviour as a series of cues for our own practices. Our lives may indeed be less synchronous both in time and space, microblogging makes the process of public familiarity and socialisation distributed.

These developments leave a lot of questions. The first is how ‘public’ this hybrid version of public familiarity really is, since we usually only follow the lives of friends and friends of friends. On most social networking sites it is even impossible to get acquainted with some-ones performance without authorization of that person. Will we thus be able to learn the subtleties in the behaviour of ‘others’ through social networking?

Another issue related to MySpace Urbanism regards social control. Is our increased visibility to friends and peers either liberating or increasing social control? Castells and others write how the mobile phone has changed socialization structures. Young people are less influenced by their parents, and more by their peers; the process of socialization has become more horizontal. (Castells and a.o., 2007: 141). In The Neherlands, similar findings have been reported in Jaarboek ICT en Sameleving: De Digitale Generatie (De Haan, 2006). Castells a.o. see the emergence of a ‘networked sociability’: ‘It includes, naturally, the Internet and mobile phones, but it can also be face to face. The critical matter is not the technology but the development of networks of sociability based on choice and affinity, breaking the organizational and spatial boundaries of relationships’ (Castells and a.o., 2007: 144). However within these groups, with all these media through which users can update each other on their ‘status’, social control could actually be on the increase. While the often lauded advantage of the modern city was the fact that its public urban culture provided a certain degree of anonymity, and liberated individuals from their traditional identities. Exactly this anonymity could be at stake.

Google Earth Urbanism

MySpace Urbanism is thus about the city as a hybrid stage in which performance in online social networks and real space are related to each other. The idea of Google Earth Urbanism is related to this concept, but works in a slightly different way. It is not so much about performing one’s identity, but about the traces these performance could leave behind in the city, either to claim a certain space or as an act of communication with known or unknown others.

There are two ways to do this: through ‘geotagging’ or through ‘life-blogging’. Geotagging is the process in which urbanites either add data to a particular place or add geographical metadata to existing information. In both cases it is about making a connection between information and place. Planting new pins on Google Earth and connecting them with photographs, webpages or other information is an example through which layers of information are added to physical locations.

Lifeblogging is a term used by the telecom industry that means that actions of users of particular devices are automatically marked up with (geographical) metadata and saved into an archive. For instance with the Dutch service Bliin users can save the path they take through a city, display it on online maps and share it with others. Photo’s taken along the route are also automatically placed on the map. One purposely records one’s traces in actual space and keeps a virtual record of them.

Of course, as Malcolm McCullough has pointed out, inscriptions are nothing new to the city. (McCullough, 2006) From monuments and frescos to graffiti and stickers, both authorities and users have been adding their particular tags to city space. However, new technologies potentially open up this process to larger groups of users. Locative media could thus provide the public with new tactics to appropriate space to counter the superimposed orders of city planning and commercialization etc, perhaps even creating urban ‘folksonomies’. We find a similar proposition in the work of William Mitchell.

‘Today a fundamentally new urban condition is emerging – one that was anticipated by [James] Joyce’s repeated sardonic reference to Dublin as Doublin, a city marinated in narrative, and inescapably bound up with narrative’s capacity both for reflection and for duplicity. Multiplying thousands of electronic eyes and ears continuously capture the city’s unfolding interwoven narrative threads and spin them out into cyberspace. Some of these threads are ephemeral and disappear instantly. Others sit on voicemail, email and other servers for a while, then are deleted or automatically fade away. Yet others accumulate permanently to form an expanding, long-term electronic memory trace.’ (Mitchell, 2003)

Such annotation or digital layers of collective memory may enable a process that Lily Shirvanee calls ‘social viscosity’. Through the use of locative media, user might become aware of memories, experiences or other data that they wouldn’t perceive without them. These tags might function as conversation pieces or symbols around which (imagined) communities are formed, experienced and performed. ‘This viscosity of space is perceived as a bond that may exist not only between people with established relationships who can find each other ‘on the street’ in a mobile context, but also between strangers, thereby inspiring a new community and, possibly, creating the potential for a more democratized public space.’ (Shirvanee, 2006)

In the examples above, the authors describe locative media as a potential positive force that enables citizens to name and claim their own spaces. However, at the same time we also see other trends, such as the emergence of a discipline like geodemographics. In this marketing discipline, software is used to analyze consumptive patterns and connect these to geographical area’s, effectively tagging these areas as the domain of certain lifestyle groups.

In their article Geodemographics, Software and Class Roger Burrows and Nicholas Gane describe how large marketing companies are gathering data about consumption patterns of individuals. They do this by aggregating data from loyalty cards, subscription databases, and other sources. It is a practice that is not very different from Life Blogging, yet with other purposes. From an analysis of these data, about 50 different lifestyle-types are drawn-up and connected to particular postal code areas. Different marketing companies use different lifestyle-types. Burrows and Gane have found amongst others ‘Happy Families’, ‘Burdened Optimists’,’Coronation Street’, ‘Counter Cultural Mix’, ‘Pastoral Symphony’, ‘Bungalow Retirement’, ‘Prudent Pensioners’ and ‘Blue-collar Roots’ (Burrows and Gane, 2006: 799).

These categories are tailored for the customers of these marketing organizations: other companies who want to know where their prospective customers might live. Categories are exclusive (one can only belong to one lifestyle type), and each postal code area is labelled by a select number of lifestyles. ‘You are where you live’, is the motto of the companies that collect and analyze these data. With Amin and Thrift, Burrows and Gane state that these categories are one more way in which the city is being fixed: ‘The map, the census, postcodes, area codes, license plates and other means of producing location have been joined to technologies like GIS, global positioning systems and so on … to produce spatial categorizations, so that the portion of human subjects dwelling in databases becomes increasingly determinate.’ (Burrows and Gane, 2006: 804) .

These datasets are not only used by companies deciding on new franchise locations, but are also accessible for consumers themselves. The popular Dutch real estate website Funda.nl connects each listing of houses for sale with the three dominant lifestyle categories found in the area. Burrows and Gane conclude that such ascriptions of identity to local areas might work in different ways. First they can produce feelings of belonging (or un-belonging): I feel at home in this neighbourhood, because people that live here are like me.[these services] ‘are successful with the consuming public because they are designed to make individuals feel at home somewhere, both socially and physically’ (Burrows and Gane, 2006: 809).

They might even become a sorting force in their own right. Prospective house buyers might decide to locate or not locate in a specific neighbourhood based on the lifestyle categories provided by these services. These services also stress consumption as key identity markers: ‘Now more than ever before, for example, the places in which we choose to live, eat, holiday, and more generally consume are key factors in defining who we, as individuals, are, and the social groupings to which we aspire to belong.’ (Burrows and Gane, 2006: 809).

Now, it is easy to see how locative and mobile media might attribute to this sociology-for-the-market. If customers agree, a lot of data can be automatically gathered and added to their databases. With lifeblogging and geotagging users are not only ascribing their own meaning to urban space. The same data could also be used to determine marketing lifestyle categories and fix these to specific locations.

iPhone Urbanism

Both Google Earth Urbanism and MySpace Urbanism are about a display of identity. iPhone Urbanism works the other way around, it is about using mobile and locative media to create a new private space within the public space of the city.

Being in the city means being in the crowd. That can be both an exciting and liberating as well as a threatening experience. Already in the beginning of the last century Simmel noted that contemporary urban culture ‘forces us to be physically close to an enormous number of people’. It would be impossible to deal socially with all these people and the solution described by Simmel is to objectify social relationships, i.e. to act as if the other does not exist (Bull, 2000).
Several researchers have written how mobile and locative media seem to perform a similar function. We see clear resonances of Simmel in what Ito, Okabe and Anderson call the ‘telecocoon’. The mobile phone is used to create a virtual ‘bubble’ in which one retracts while in public space. “One of the primary functions of mobile media that is carried in public and semi-private places is to provide a personalized media environment that is attached to the person and not the physical place. … [creating] a cocoon that sheltered them from engagement with the physical location and co-present others, a private territory within the confines of urban space, temporarily appropriating public space for personal use.” (Ito et al., 2007)

Fujimoto, in a study of mobile phone use by teenagers in Japan, describes the keitai – as it is called in Japan – as a ‘jamming machine that instantly creates a territory – a personal keitai space – around oneself with an invisible minimal barricade. With a keitai a girl can turn any space into her own room and personal paradise.’ Michael Bull, has studied how the Walkman and later the iPod changed our sense of place in a similar way. These technologies give their users an active role in the process of place-making: they can customise the soundtrack of their surroundings. “Listening to their own music gives listeners a feeling of control, it gives the world a known soundtrack that connects the dots between fragmented spaces and helps to exclude unwanted contingency. With their music, they ‘cloak the alien with the familiar’ (Bull, 2000: 74) .

These defense-mechanisms are somewhat different than the ones Simmel saw in his railroad and newspaper-days. Current tactics are not only defensive shields, or ‘space-makers’, they can also be understood as centring devices. There is a difference in hiding behind a newspaper and hiding beneath one’s earphones connected to an iPhone or other device that plays a customised soundtrack from one’s own personal library and allows private sms-messages from trusted persons within one’s own network.

One could even go one step further. Where once the suburbs where seen as the ordered safe haven alternative to chaotic city life, now the mobile phone can become a tool that brings order to the chaos. This however is a personal order, imposed on an individual or networked-group basis, just like the bottom-up folksonomies and tagging systems that now are supposed to bring order to the chaotic information spaces of the world wide web. The (virtual world) remains a chaos, but it becomes possible to reorder and customise the system instantly, over and over again. The mobile phone or the iPod can be seen as taming systems, that as Anthony Townsend writes, can make urban sprawl liveable and navigable. (Townsend, 2000: 89). Yet again there is a difference between retracting in the safe spatial surroundings of the suburb (defensive dwelling) and putting on earphones within the city: the earphones can easily be removed, one can easily shift between defensive and more offensive ways of dwelling. In fact one can do both at the same time, the juxtaposition between these two positions becomes more like a gradient than a binary one.

Starbucks Urbanism

Where iPhone Urbanism is about ‘space making’, or using networked information structures to domesticate the contingencies of the city, Starbucks Urbanism is about the physical consequences of this. At what kind of sites do we feel at home in the city?

The coffeehouse is of course one of the central tropes in BLVD-urbanism. It represents both Habermas’ thoughts on the public sphere, as a place where anyone can lay-off their subjective identity and participate as equals in the debate. And – if we include the outside terraces with a view of everyone who passes by on the sidewalks – it can also be seen as a central spot for the flaneur. It is in other words, it is a place where the seams of society can be experienced, a true public space. No wonder that some theories on today’s urban culture start off with scenes from today’s coffeehouses, the paradigmatic Starbucks. Yet this time the designer-coffee house is usually presented as an example of what went wrong with urban culture. In Starbucks people congregate not so much to communicate with one another. Rather they use it as a comfortable semi-public base in which they read a book or the daily newspaper, check their mail or from which they keep in touch with their personal friends or colleagues through the 3 and 4-letter acronyms that make up the network society: GSM, SMS, UMTS, WIFI. Coffee is not the base for a social ritual, but a caffeine-rich productivity booster. (Although no one goes as far to completely deny that people do use Starbucks to meet other people). As Marc Tuters writes in a key essay on locative media, this emerging Starbucks culture has often been described as antithetical to the public culture of the coffeehouses.

‘By contrast today’s ubiquitous Starbucks cappuccino bars offer the digital, mobile class a refuge from the pace of city, a space of introspection rather than random encounter. [these places] … form an archipelago of pseudo public spaces throughout the world’s cities. Particularly in the post-911 world, the function of these places to provide random encounter is practically eliminated in these insulted pay-access locations under the operative logic of ‘risk aversion’. Based on these observations, sociologists and urban theorists have developed a narrative of loss and decline in the contemporary literature on public space — Zukin (1991), Sorkin (1992), Hannigan (1998), in which contemporary public spaces are characterized theme parks, or walled gardens.’ (Tuters, not dated)

The Starbucks is described as a commodified non-place that sells customers the experience of public culture, but without the risk of true confrontation or unpleasant surprises. Moreover these places are not grounded in a local culture, but have the same design-interior and music-channel whereever you are in the world, they are non-places. (Auge, 1995)

Yet other more empirical research studies, such as Portable objects in three global cities: the personalization of urban places by Ito, Anderson and Okabe show that this binary opposition between public and private and place and non-space is too simplistic. In the article they describe a number of tactics through which people appropriate urban space. One of them is camping:

One brings a personal media device and works with it in a public space. Yet the goal is not to completely shut off public space, the public space is especially chosen because one finds it an agreeable location to work from. Like reading a paper in a café rather than at home. … They put down roots that have temporal limits, but are more extended than commuters who are simply passing through. (Ito et al., 2007)

Camping is not so much about shutting out the environment, it is slightly different from telecocooning: ‘people saw value in residing for a period of time in a desirable location. Just as people seek out beautiful campsites to set out there gear and reside for short periods of time, urbanites find attractive public places to temporarily set up camp with the help of their information technologies.’ (Ito et al., 2007) For campers Starbucks is not a proverbial non-place, but a local place they engage with, where they perform their identity, yet at the same time keep in touch with absent others, still being part of their ‘full-time intimate communities’.

As Ralf Hennig quite paradoxically writes in Tokyo Homezooms, it might exactly be their non-place character that makes places like Starbucks suitable as ‘campsites’. In his research on convenience stores in Tokyo, he concludes that in Tokyo places like 7-11 are perceived as extensions of the home, exactly because they are predictable elements in a heterogeneous cityscape. ‘Der Konibi [Japanese vernacular for convenience store, mdw] kann als Erweiterung des Hauses über seine eigentlichen Wände hinaus als funktionale wie auch psychosoziologische Erweiterung gesehen werden.’ (The Konbini can be understood as a functionele as well as psychosocial extension of the home beyond its walls) (Hennig, 2006), p. 123 And although one could argue that these Starbucks-like places – just like Habermas’ coffee houses – are not universal and neutral places but culturally coded and geared towards the neobohemian neoliberal bobo creative class ((Lloyd, 2005),(Zukin, 1982),(Brooks, 2001),(Florida, 2002) ) – I think Varnelis and Friedberg’s insight is much more insightful than just juxtaposing public coffeehouses with themed non-places. They argue that visitors of local Starbucks do develop a meaningful relation with that particular place. It is true, they state, that many people in Starbucks are communicating with absent others rather than with those sitting next to them. But that doesn’t mean they are connected to an a-historical space of flows. ‘We argue that culture is no longer localized in time and space, but neither is it non-place. Instead, individuals inhabit a physical world of simultaneous environments, of localized time and space as well as of multiple telematic worlds in which they can be co-present with others at a distance.’ (Varnelis and Friedberg, 2007)

Yet, this still leaves some questions. To what extent are the sites of Starbucks-urbanism semi-private dwellings rather than public spaces? And if they are mainly experienced as non-contingent home sites, to what extend is that a threat to urban culture? Are critics clinging on to old, nostalgic ideas about a public culture? Should we perhaps look at other places than the coffeehouse for social seams? Or could new locative media ‘discovery’ services introduce new forms of contingency into Starbucks Urbanism?

Long Tail Urbanism

Urban culture is thus a double process: on one side it is about crafting one’s own place in the city. And on the other hand it is about connecting or being confronted with others. What is the role of locative media in the latter process? Could locative media help in reinstalling some of the contingency that plays such an important part in BLVD Urbanism? Could Chris Anderson’s theory of the Long Tail provide any insight?

The Long Tail-theory claims that in the digital universe, new ways are emerging to introduce customers to a wider variety of content. This is done by analyzing the media use of a user and comparing it with that of others. A special algorithm then recommends new products. (Buyers of this book also bought … Your friends are listening to …). In the new media industry this principle is sometimes called ‘discovery’. While ‘search’ is about helping people finding what they are looking for, ‘discovery’ guides them to products or places they didn’t know they were looking for. Mobile phone and navigation companies are right now in the process of experimenting with such discovery services. Rather than new books or CDs to buy, these services help you ‘discover’ unknown places in the city, or set you up with people you might like to meet. For instance, the American service Dodgeball can recommend you friends-of-friends that have reported to be on a specific location near you in the city.

Can we understand such ´discovery´-processes as a remediation of the confrontations that are supposed to take place in the public sphere of BLVD-urbanism? Do services like this bring the contingency back into urban culture? Or should we understand it as a comfortable yet pseudo-contingency, since all the recommendations are ultimately based on your personal profile rather than truly contingent. They may even purposely filter out unwanted contingencies. In other words: does Long Tail Urbanism promote dwelling or rather public culture?

It is interesting to connect the idea of Long Tail Urbanism with the insights of Claude Fischer. In his 1975 article Towards a subcultural theory of urbanism (Fischer, 1975) Fischer writes it is likely that in large cities different subcultures will emerge. The density of cities accumulates critical masses of individuals with particular lifestyles who will be able to meet up to perform their particular subcultural lifestyle (Fischer, 2005). Cities, do not necessarily lead to anomy, as some Chicago School scholars would have it, but rather to cultural specialization.

The findings of Anthony Townsend three decades later provide an idea of how the mobile phone might have a similar effect. The mobile phone may lead to what he calls a speeding up of the ‘urban metabolism’. The mobile phone enables people to form their own decentralized networks, and to perform these spatially. This doesn’t lead to the annihilation of space through time, but rather to the possibility to appropriate even minute spatial differences: ‘The use of mobile phones offers an ever-finer level of identifying and exploiting minute variations in conditions between location, the micromanagement of space as a result of the micromanagement of time and the always-accessible individual’ (Townsend, 2000:100) . So rather than the coherent, universal modernist order of large institutions, we now have the co-existence of independently superimposed orders of individuals or groups of people. Spaces become heterotopic places, where meaning can become imposed through all sorts of virtual grids that can be superimposed on actual space. In other words, mobile phones, social networks and geo-annotation might lead to strengthen subcultures and connect individuals with the like-minded. Shirvanee’s viscosity might well be a subcultural viscosity, rather than strengthen urban culture in general. This might lead to a paradox: the total number of different lifestyles may increase, since locative media could enhance the cultural specialization that Fisher thought so characteristic of Urban Culture. They might even live very close together or use the same urban spaces, yet whether this will also lead to a growing number of confrontations and thus Sennett’s valued experience of complexity remains to be seen.

Ebay Urbanism

Where Myspace-urbanism deals with processes of identification through performance in both public space in the city and media networks, and Long Tail Urbanism is about connecting different subject with one another, Ebay-urbanism deals with trust amongst citizens. Will locative media enable new systems that can build trust amongst different groups within the city?

The reference to Ebay is based on the reputation systems that Ebay uses to build trust between buyers and sellers. After the transaction, both parties can leave feedback on the other’s behaviour. Did the seller really deliver the article as promised? Did the buyer actually pay?

Ebay functions as the institutional party that runs the reputation system. They have provided the software and the interface design. They have determined the behavioural categories that are to be rated as well as the algorithms that come up with the scores. They have set the rules and even an arbitration service to settle disputes. So what exactly will these reputation-systems – if they are ever to function properly – be used for in urban culture? And who exactly will provide the institutional embedding? Who will provide the categories, the rating-algorithms, the arbitration services? The government? Commercial providers? Citizens themselves?

Authors like Howard Rheingold start off with examples off simple possibilities to set up connections between citizens, like enabling ride sharing for commuters (Rheingold, 2002). Rather than picking up a stranger, the reputation system will provide you with a high probability that the anonymous will not run of with your car at the filling station. Similarly, reputation systems could be the base for Long-tail urbanism that introduces citizens to unknown others.

Reputation-systems are already in use in relations between customers and companies. Ito, Okabe and Anderson use the concept of ‘footprinting’ (Ito et al., 2007) to shows how consumers carry loyalty cards that are used by companies to discern between regular and loyal customers. Customers can earn points for each transaction, and they may reclaim certain benefits when a certain amount of points is collected. While earning points, they leave a trail of digital footprints (their transaction records). Currently this system works mainly through swipe cards, but in the future it could easily work through RFID-chips or mobile phones. Some people internalize the logic of these cards: they work their itineraries in the city out in such a way to maximize bonuses connected to the cards, their daily routines are adjusted in order to collect as many points as possible. Other users are more or less indifferent to them.

In their book Mediapolis Schuilenburg and De Jong take a critical approach of the trend in which rating systems become more prevalent. They connect this development to a broader cultural shift in which civil rights are no longer indefeasible, but have to be ‘earned’, or are related to your reputation. For instance, in some countries drivers loose their licence when they have collected too many penalty points. They see a trend in which these systems of accountability become more prevalent and are also connected with the tendency to militarize urban spaces. They call the latter phenomenon the urban container: capsular spaces that look like public spaces, but are in effect private spaces such as shopping malls or atria. Access to these spaces is granted by the owners, and this right can be abolished at any time. Access could be tied to reputation systems, where citizens with too few or too many points are simply kept out. ‘In the culture of control accountability systems will arise that will coerce us to live up to their unwritten rules. We are no longer born with unalienable and fundamental rights but we will have to earn them by performing or refrain from certain acts’ (Schuilenburg and De Jong, 2006: 46) .

Conclusions: towards an MSN-urbanism?

In an article on Seoul, Anthony Townsend describes how the mobile phone is a great match for life in an Asian Metropolis:

‘The challenge of living in a large Asian metropolis is eased through the convenience and flexibility provided by mobile phones. … [it] provides a way of organizing a modern life across the many public and private rooms – for moving, working, eating, playing, and resting – that define life in the Korean metropolis. The all-important social ties to groups can be frequently reinforced through conversation and messages while ornamentation of devices and the freedom from parental supervision provides some outlet for individuality to manifest itself.’26 (Townsend, 2007)

We could wonder whether this analysis of life in Seoul is also becoming applicable to life in western cities. From what I have written above it follows that home is no longer a secluded place to retract into from the wild and dangerous city, a place to foster one’s private identity. Rather the idea of ‘home’ should be understood as a mode of being. It means ‘feeling at home’ rather than being at a certain location that bears one’s home address. Locative and mobile media stretch the idea of homeliness even to unknown territories. They can be used as territory-machines, or as ‘magic wands’ to tame the urban contingency, or to ‘discover the familiar.’

That doesn’t mean that physical urban space don’t matter anymore. Rather the mobile phone guides us to places where we feel at home, because the interior is familiar, or the crowd is like us. And if we are really adventurous, it could guide us to truly unknown places. The practices in which people use mobile media create networked urban spheres. It connects parochial spaces with social networks.

At the same time within these spaces, presence is becoming a hybrid experience: one can be present in one location, and be connected with people at other locations. The mobile phone, Ito e.a. conclude, ‘is a membrane between the real and the virtual, here and elsewhere, rather than a portal of high fidelity connectivity that demands full and sustained engagements’ (Ito et al., 2006: 29). The boundaries between being in public or in private soften. It is not so much where you are, it ‘s more like being on MSN or Skype: a green icon means: ‘I am up for a chat’; a red one says ‘don’t disturb I am not really here.’

However, these same media devices can also be used for sharp delimitations, providing or preventing access to physical spaces, thus producing a ‘splintering urbanism’. (Graham and Marvin, 2001) Just like you can ‘ban’ people from your MSN-account, and form your own personal network where strangers are not allowed, some locative media practices lead to a similar spatial effect. In his Splintering Urbanism and Software Sorted Geographies critical geographer Stephen Graham claims that the city as an urban interface for the organization of differences now has competition from software interfaces and their algorithms. (Graham, 2005) For example locative media might be used to grant or prevent access to certain spaces. ‘Smart’ places might analyze who is coming in, through rfid, biometrics or algorithms analyzing images taken by cctv software, and may sound an alarm when people without the right reputation try to enter, or when ‘abnormal’ behaviour is detected – where abnormal is encoded into the software. Software also plays a role in a shift that Graham sees from the Keynesian welfare state to a neoliberal economy. In the first, cities can be understood as sets of infrastructures that are rolled-out on basis of equality for all city-dwellers. In the latter, infrastructure is sold as urban service to consumers on a pay per use base, for instance through electronic toll charges on highways. (Graham and Marvin, 2001) These locative technologies address their users in a new way: they are not addressed as equal citizens, but as private consumers. This might in the end undermine the whole concept of a public sphere, and lead to the further production of a splintering urbanism, where people start seeing the city not as a community but a range of services they can or cannot consume, and where the production of those places is geared towards those consumers and their consumption patterns.

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