Hybrid City is an international biennial event dedicated to exploring the emergent character of the city and the potential transformative shift of the urban condition, as a result of ongoing developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and of their integration in the urban physical context. After the successful homonymous symposium in 2011, the second edition of Hybrid City has grown into a peer reviewed conference, aiming to promote dialogue and knowledge exchange among experts drawn from academia, as well as artists, designers, researchers, advocates, stakeholders and decision makers, actively involved in addressing questions on the nature of the technologically mediated urban activity and experience.

Check out the program here >>

Below the abstract of my paper and talk. It explores the potential role of affect in the smart city. IMO this is a largely ignored domain when it comes to rationalized interventions with the aid of ‘smart technologies’ that are aimed at efficiency and optimization.

As a work in progress the paper itself, which I’ll post here after the event, kind of drifted away from the abstract a little.

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The city you love to hate: exploring affective approaches to the smart city

Michiel de Lange

This contribution wishes to contribute to the present controversies and discussions about smart cities by sketching a framework for the affective smart city.

Looking back to how the city has been understood as a hybrid form, we can identify three more or less successive conceptual foundations. In the first, which I call the ecosystem view, the early modern metropolis is theorized as a distinct socio-environmental combination that mediates people’s behavior and mentality. The second, which I call the phenomenological view, tries to bridge spatial and mental domains by focusing on people’s sensory and cognitive experiences of cities. The third, which I call the affective view, shifts attention to emotional relationships between people and hybrid techno-urban environments.

Emblematic of the first approach is the Chicago School with its biological vocabulary. The city is conceived as an ecosystem with distinct spatial qualities (high density and layout), and demographics (high numbers of socially heterogeneous people). The city serves as a more or less closed container for a wide range of ‘species’ – frequently birds of strange feather like hobos, taxi-drivers, ballroom dancers, street-corner boys – to compete for scarce resources and struggle for survival, while engaging in relationships of dominance, symbiosis, succession, and so on.

Exemplary of the phenomenological approach are Kevin Lynch’s work on ‘The Image of the City’, and De Certeau’s oft-cited work on ‘the practice of everyday life’. As electronic media became ever more widespread, sensitivity for mediated visions also of the city was growing. In many ways Simmel and Benjamin prefigured this with their writings about the mediated urban experience and mentality. Other than the ecosystems view this approach emphasizes human agency, but almost entirely on the level of conscious, rational cognition. Moreover, the focus on experience is driven by extrinsic motivations: better urban navigation, developing a counter-political urban tactics.

Recently, the city is increasingly often conceptualized in affective terms. We see this view emerging in locative media art and its tight intellectual ties with actor-network theory, as it seeks to trace and map complex relationships between places, people, technologies in ‘emotional cartographies’ (Nold 2009). Ubicomp and urban informatics researchers are developing similar ideas about city possessing some form of ‘sentience’ (Shepard 2011). Affect is also central in recent explorations of how digital media can strengthen citizen engagement by fostering feelings of ‘ownership’ (de Lange & de Waal 2012). Contemporary experimental urban design interventions frequently target this affective realm, oftentimes by stirring emotions and desires though play and gamification, or through poetic and cinematographic ‘sense of place’ projects. In the affective view the city no longer is a passive backdrop for social behavior, or a canvas on which urbanites paint their everyday mental experiences. It becomes an active agent in a hybrid mesh of human-techno-socio-spatial interdependencies.

In the slipstream of an avant-garde of media makers, artists and academics, a very different yet powerful new vision of the ‘smart city’ takes hold in cities worldwide. In close collaboration with technology companies and university technology and engineering departments, cities are developing smart city policies to optimize urban processes by deploying a variety of technologies. The smart city is touted to help solve a wide range of pressing urban issues and therefore to improve people’s quality of life in the city. While different cities obviously face different problems, these issues include vacant buildings and wastelands, shrinking cities, sustainable food and energy production, (youth) employment and social equity, mobility, environmental quality, safety, bridging the gap between citizens and policy, and so on.

Smart city policies may be criticized for ignoring the active role of citizens and for proposing ‘technological fixes’ to complex problems. The argument I wish to develop here however goes a step further: the smart city also strips the city itself of its barely conceived agency and capacity to affect people on an emotional level. On the surface the notion of the smart city appears to attribute the city with the power to actively intervene. However, I argue that in fact this smart city paradigm involves a return to the systems perspective of the city as a passive backdrop for action. At best, if indeed there is a more developed perspective on citizen experience and engagement, it assumes people as rational deliberative agents. It is rather telling that smart city experiments are often incubated in that most sterile and rationalized of all environments, the (living) lab. To me that doesn’t seem like a good place to study potential solutions for urban issues on the plane of affect.

How then can an affective viewpoint contribute to tackling these issues and create better solutions? If we look at mobility issues for example, some scholars and artists have emphasized that mobility is not simply about traveling from A to B as efficiently as possible. Moving has its own affective connotations, which depends to a large degree not only on the spatial context and social situation but also the affective qualities of the transport- and communications media that are part of being on the move nowadays. Any smart city proposal that wishes to solve congestion and mobility problems must take this emotional experience of movement into account.

In the near future we start a collaboration with them in a project about urban gaming and vacant buildings. More about this project soon here on this blog.

Dutch version of the article (pdf 95 kb)
English version (pdf 90 kb)

Rezone the game: playing for urban transformation

Introduction

How do you tackle a pressing and complex urban issue like vacancy of buildings and underused land? Especially in times of economic decline it is hard to reach solutions through conventional means. Traditional parties involved in urban development are not inclined to invest and instead wait for others to make the first step. The Bosch Architecture Initiative (BAI) and Digital Workplace (DW), two cultural organizations from the city of Den Bosch in the Netherlands, came up with an innovative intervention: Rezone, an urban game that challenges players to ‘fight blight’. At first it may seem strange to tackle a serious and actual problem by means of a game. After all, playing games appears to have little to do with the work of urban professionals. How then can a game like Rezone contribute to involve stakeholders in developing their city? We shall see below how Rezone offers unsuspected potential to address urban issues.

About Rezone the Game

In the game Rezone (rezonethegame.wordpress.com) players must keep the city safe from deterioration and vacancy by salvaging real estate from decline. Participants adopt one out of four possible stakeholder roles. In the case of vacancy these roles include proprietor (owner of real estate), mayor (representing the municipality), engineer (urban designer) and citizen (neighbors). The challenge is for players to not just pursue individual self-interest but to strategically collaborate in order to defeat the system, which is programmed to let the city descend into decay.

Rezone is composed of a physical board game with a number of 3D printed iconic buildings that represent the neighborhood, an augmented reality layer of real-time information about these buildings projected on a screen, and a computer algorithm programmed to induce vacancy. When the game begins all buildings are fully occupied. Then at alarming speed they spiral down towards total abandonment. A vacancy meter on the screen indicates the level of occupation from 4 (completely occupied) down to 0 (abandoned). Empty buildings act like a contagious virus that infects neighboring buildings too.

To turn the tide each player has two pawns that they can move to a building where the problem starts to run out of control. Players need not wait for their turn: acting swiftly is key as the tempo is high. However, pawns must be placed in the right order, like in the ‘real world’. An engineer cannot just upgrade a building before getting permission from the proprietor and a permit from the mayor. In the end the citizen will have to start using the building to turn the tide for good. The proprietor takes the initiative by being the first to put a pawn near a particular building where vacancy looms, thereby upgrading the score from 0 to 1. A mayor can reinforce this upgrade by adding a pawn and bring the score to 2. The designer can keep a building out of the danger zone for a long period of time, whereas the citizen can intervene for a shorter stretch. When all buildings are out of the danger zone the players have defeated the abandoned city.

A camera above the game board monitors QR codes on the pawns in real-time and registers the players’ moves. The game engine continually adapts to changes in the game. It is possible to program the game with scenarios for specific neighborhoods and buildings. In the case of Den Bosch, for example, the policy of stimulating creative industry facilities in the periphery has resulted in an increase of vacant buildings in the inner city. This substitution or waterbed effect can be programmed into the game.

Initiators

Rezone is a collaboration between Rolf van Boxmeer of the Bosch Architecture Initiative (BAI, www.bai-denbosch.nl) and Tessa Peters of the Digital Workplace (DW, www.dws-hertogenbosch.nl). BAI aims to contribute to the spatial quality of the city of Den Bosch and organizes activities for both citizens and urban professionals. The Digital Workplace is an art and culture center that organizes artistic expositions and large-scale urban festivals.

Development of Rezone

The idea for Rezone emerged from the question how cultural organizations like BAI and DW can contribute to developing their city, despite the fact they cannot build themselves. Their intuition was to use digital media technologies and engage new audiences in designing the city. The initiators observed that the use of play and games in professional domains like healthcare and education advanced but lagged in the world of architecture and urbanism. At BAI the 2012 program theme was “Reset the City”. This connected the concrete theme of repurposing the city to the use of digital media and play. Rezone, as the to-be-developed game was dubbed, was developed with a starting grant from the Netherlands Architecture Fund (now Creative Industries Fund). The initiators got in touch with the department Game Design and Development at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU, gi.hku.nl). Under the supervision of Lies van Roessel, six international students in their third year have designed the concept and developed Rezone in 3-4 months fulltime. Rezone was tailor-made for the neighborhood Spoorzone, just west of Den Bosch central railway station, an area suffering from blight. Additionally, the Expert Center Games and game-design (www.expertisecentrumgames.nl) helped to define target groups and formulate the question. A distinction was made between people who would play the game (local stakeholders between 18 and 50 years old) and people who would be interested in the outcomes of the game (urban policy makers and developers).

Launch of prototype and future

In less than a year the prototype of Rezone was realized. This period included the distinct phases of ideation, concept design, developing a prototype, and public launch. On December 14 2012 Rezone went public during the Playful Arts Festival (www.playfulartsfestival.com), a festival for play and games in urban space. This three-day festival took place in the Spoorzone area in Den Bosch. The intention was to test the prototype during the festival in order to make improvements. Several lessons were garnered from players’ feedback. Players thought the game was particularly relevant to people who have an interest in particular areas that suffer from, or risk abandonment. Another lesson was that the game has a learning curve and therefore needs to be played with a fair degree of attention instead of casually. The software too needs further improvement. At the moment Rezone is fully under construction. The ambition for 2013 and beyond is to improve Rezone based on these lessons and stakeholder feedback, and to play the game on locations together with stakeholders.

Context: connecting to three trends

Now that we have a better view of Rezone we can address the question how this applied game can help to solve complex urban issues. To do so we shall look at three interconnected trends.

First, Rezone fits in the trend that digital media technologies increasingly intersect with urban space. Ten years ago the computer was a rather clunky device on or under the desk at the office or at home. Now it has become portable and blends together with mobile communication in the form of the smartphone. Digital media technologies no longer constitute a separate virtual realm but are increasingly woven into everyday life. Today’s city has become a media city. Media technologies shape urban relationships: how people relate to physical space, how they initiate and maintain social ties, and how they experience the city on cognitive and affective levels. Until now most digital applications attempt to make life in the city easier and more efficient for individuals. Rezone by contrast is a project in which digital technologies help to engage citizens with each other and their living environment.

The second trend Rezone connects to consists of a broad range of societal changes in, among others, the relationship between professional and layman, between politics and citizen, and between producer and consumer. Professional expertise is no longer self-evident. Driven in part by digital media and online culture, networked citizens now want to do it themselves. This DIY mentality and open source ethics of collaborating and sharing can be seen for instance in online ‘community curated works’ like Wikipedia or the Linux kernel. Groups of people spark innovations based on a shared sense of ownership. In people’s own neighborhoods and communities too many of these networked bottom-up initiatives spring up: from the collective sharing of private resources like cars and tools to starting a cooperative energy enterprise. In a time in which architecture is under pressure – financially but also with regard to the legitimacy of professional expertise – it is important that new processes are developed that allow citizens to become shared owner of the processes and outcomes of urban interventions. Rezone is an attempt to establish this sense of ownership through intrinsically motivated play and contribute to livable and lively cities.

Third, Rezone fits in a number of recent developments in the game design world where game are not just made and played for their entertainment value but also for a more serious purpose. These developments are known under a range of labels: serious games, games for change, applied games, gamification. It takes too far to address differences in nuance. It appears very promising to use games and play principles for specific purposes in order to contribute to solving a problem. In designing such games, proper balances must be struck between tensions like the intrinsic pleasure of playing and reaching a goal outside of the game itself, between simulating ‘real world’ complexity and simplification.

Games for social innovation

According to Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, author of the seminal work Homo ludens (1938), play is not part of culture but at its origin. Play spawns culture because it offers safe spaces for experimentation, innovation and new cooperations without failure directly having serious consequences. The use of games like Rezone in urban creation processes thus contributes to the creation of culture. In play citizens are not merely passive users of their city but can become active makers. By playfully engaging in co-creation they become ‘owners’ over their environment. Citizens then generate their own urban culture instead of leaving it up to others like governments, corporations and design professionals. Playful creation processes shape existing and new relationships between people and space, among different people, and ultimately between people and their selves. Games thus may be fuel for new maker identities.

In play various stakeholders can meet each other in a playful atmosphere instead of a serious negotiation table. By playing together without direct consequences, trust between stakeholders can be forged. The game itself is pleasurable to play and acts as a catalyst for potential follow-up actions on complex issues like vacancy. What makes a game like Rezone so interesting is that it is a simplified artificial setting in which real emotions can emerge that seep through the game boundaries into the ‘real world’. While playing something is at stake. Players feel emotionally attached with both the activity of playing and with the outcomes of the game. Moreover, Rezone invites people to assume temporary roles, to stand in their adversaries’ shoes. This may lead to better understanding of mutual standpoints through embodied experience instead of mere rational arguments and deliberation.

Concluding

Rezone is not a game for everyone (although everybody can play). It is an applied game for specific areas in development and particular stakeholders who have a real interest in a neighborhood. A process that is stuck can be approached from another angle through a game and be put back on the rails. Like almost any game Rezone is a radical simplification of a complex issue. Rezone itself does not provide solutions. What it can do is to put an issue on the agenda, convene various stakeholders around an issue, and allow them to discover horizons for action for themselves. And when people craft their own solutions, they will have a much stronger sense of ownership over complex questions like urban vacancy.

Photo: Masha Matijevic

Thursday 29 November 2012 the event Ruimtevolk Expedition 2012 took place. Ruimtevolk (‘spatial folk’) is a well-read Dutch online platform for spatial and urban design professionals. Venue Trouw Amsterdam, one of Amsterdam’s cultural hotspots, was packed with urban professionals, policy makers, and researchers. The event theme was “new ownership in spatial planning”. Since The Mobile City has done research, published, spoken, and organized events about ownership, and the notion now is appearing elsewhere more often, we obviously were very keen to find out how ownership is informing urban design professionals.

Key points I took from the event

This is a summary of some of the main points that I took home from this day, in relation to our own work:

• Architects, planners, city servants and policy makers feel the urgent need to reformulate their own role and added value in the context of multiple crises and chances: financial crisis, a decline in expert knowledge, increasingly vocal clients who want to have an active role in the design process, no more easy one-off interventions, the perceived need put corporate and social responsibility in practice.
• In a rapidly changing playing field urban design professionals must search for new business models, new processes, new products, new publics, new tools, and so on.
• There is an increasing acknowledgement among professionals of doing people-centered design rather than space-oriented design of cities.
• New stakeholders have to be found and mobilized to collaborate in solving and managing urban issues (creating what I would call ‘unlikely coalitions’).
• Questions of representation and power must be addressed: who represents and what is represented in current urban design practices? Who are the people we are building for? Who can have a say in this and in what ways? Whose ideal city is it?
• There is a growing sensitivity for digital media technologies and online ethics as potential ways to strengthen citizen ‘ownership’ over their urban environment, yet there is still little critical discussion about smart cities.

Morning Session: New Entrepreneurship

Following the morning keynote talks there were a number of (rotating) breakout sessions about themes like: new entrepreneurship, new social challenges, from living consumer to prosumer, temporariness as permanent chance, sustainable neighborhoods, creative coalitions in rural areas. I dropped in near the end of the session about new entrepreneurship (unfortunately I could not attend the plenary morning talks by Willem Schinkel and Ronald van den Hoff due to teaching obligations). Five speakers briefly talked about their project or research, followed by discussion.

Sebastian Olma made a passionate argument that we should stop using new technologies to further automate work and optimize business revenues but instead use these technologies to create new meetings and elicit serendipity. As founder of a think tank on urban development Olma has been exploring the concept of urban interfaces to talk about working environments that act as catalysts to kickstart innovation power in other economic sectors.

Olma did a research about Seats2Meet, a creative flexible workspace initiated by Ronald van den Hoff (one of the other speakers in this session). In Olma’s own words, “S2M … is the most successful Dutch provider of coworking spaces based on a rather unique business model: coworkers do not pay for their workspace financially but socially, i.e., by sharing information, knowledge, expertise.” Calling S2M a “serendipity machine”, Olma concludes that the concept seems to work well in bringing together individual freelancers and strengthen creative entrepreneurship through creating critical mass. This reminded me of the problem that large public ICT projects are never commissioned to small and medium businesses but to large companies, which arguably means unfair competition (at least that was the case in the Netherlands a few years back, I don’t know about the situation now). Legalities for procurement need to keep pace with changes in work. Networked ways of working can aid small-scale entrepreneurs in forming ad-hoc consortia that often are more flexible and knowledgeable than top-heavy companies.

In this conversation about technologies Simon van Dommelen, one of the people behind the Noorderparkkamer (perhaps best known for the awarded Noorderparkbar), a DIY initiative in the underused Noorderpark in Amsterdam, made an important point by saying that we shouldn’t rely too much on high-tech in neighborhoods where many low-educated people live. In his view it is rather elitists to talk about various new media interventions when a large portion of the population is left out, either because they have no access or not possess the media literacy to use these media in useful ways. The issue of representation – both in the sense of who represents, and what is represented? – remains ever relevant as we turn to digital media as potential tools and solutions for urban issues.

Simon further told that a group of people are working to establish an organization run by local citizens, the Noorderpark Trust. This Trust tries to turn the Noorderpark into a permit-free zone, which means that within certain limits the Trust is free to develop activities like building (temporary) constructions, organizing events, and publicly serving food and drinks. That could be made possible because the Trust is in fact an initiative for and by the people. Precisely because of this loosening up of clearly defined ownership, many more bottom-up initiatives are possible.

An interesting point I picked up from this session was Simon’s remark that Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk (whom we interviewed for our ‘Ownership in the Hybrid City’ study) refuses to apply for ‘livability’ subsidies because that is ‘charity money’ from municipalities and housing corporation without real strings attached. Her social design projects help to increase the value of real estate in a particular neighborhood, and therefore constitute a veritable business model for urban development instead of being mere social aid, so she wants to get funded through that route (see for example her recently awarded project in Liverpool).

In this session it also became clear that municipalities are struggling with their own role. How can they reposition themselves in this fast-changing field and shifting relationships? One of the speakers suggested that governments should act as brokers between various stakeholders, instead of managing processes in a top-down way. This also means letting go of control. The speaker pointed to recent publication by Trancity about urban design as a transformative force (see here – in Dutch).

Session Open Stage

Johan Vellinga, director of Início office for urban innovation and management, told about a crowdfunding project they developed for housing corporation Havensteder in Rotterdam. All renters from Havensteder get a quarterly cheque worth €5 to €10. Together citizens can save up and use these cheques for a collective event or service in their neighborhood. First, they need to activate the cheque; second, they have to organize the backup of others and develop a plan to save for; third, they have to organize an event for which they get real money if it complies with the conditions of the project fund. According to Vellinga about 35% of people are saving and using their cheques. Advantages of this project are that it stimulates civic participation by allowing people to organize themselves around projects, it creates transparency in budgeting, and sets up a database of inspiring projects that can be followed by others elsewhere. Vellinga pointed out a very important issue, to which none of the attendants had a ready answer. How to deal with the minority standpoint and not just let majority rule?

Despite Vellinga calling the project “crowdfunding for civic participation” I wondered whether receiving ‘free money’ in the form of cheques are really the way to go to strengthen citizen commitment. ‘Free’ does strange things to people, behavioral economist Dan Ariely notes in Predictably Irrational (2008) [1]. On the one hand, “things that we would never consider purchasing become incredibly appealing as soon as they are FREE!” (p. 50). Cheques then could indeed be a way to entice citizens to commit to their neighborhood. On the other hand Ariely observes that ‘free’ may lead to a substitution effect: “The critical issue arises when FREE! becomes a struggle be­tween a free item and another item—a struggle in which the presence of FREE! leads us to make a bad decision.” (p. 52). This tension suggests that there could be a risk that the ability to spend ‘free money’ becomes a placeholder for more in-depth and intrinsically motivated involvement with the neighborhood. Ariely says free is attractive because there is no risk of loss (p. 54). Applied to this case free money could mean there are no strings attached. When nothing is at stake gratis could take away a sense of urgency. Getting involved is not a risky endeavor and therefore may not be challenging and satisfying. Well, these are just assumptions I am making. It would be interesting to develop a method to research how various interventions actually affect different modes of citizen engagement. Up to now I guess many if not most of the claims (including our own) that digital tools can strengthen ownership rest on rather flimsy evidence.

Afternoon Session: Temporariness as Permanent Chance

This session was organized by Knowledge Platform Tussentijd (“in-between time”) (see this Ruimtevolk post in Dutch), a coalition of urban planners and artists who all work on temporary uses of space. Iris Schutten, one of the initiators together with Sabrina Lindemann (who we invited as an expert for our Designing Social Cities of Tomorrow workshop), introduced the session by asking “how can we design cities not just with the factor space but also with the factor time?” Philosopher Govert Derix, author of Temporariness as Future (in Dutch) made a plea for temporariness as the new permanence. In his view planning should be about keeping as many roads to the future open as possible. Not designing for temporariness and failing to take changing uses of space into account lead to perversions, he said. Derix spoke about “relational planning” to indicate that through shaping our environments we shape ourselves: who we are and want to become. He briefly ran through ten propositions about temporariness:

• Every area is permanently ‘under construction’.
• Human and space are intertwined: planning and landscape produce one another.
• Relational planning entails the liberation form a yoke.
• Relational planning is surfing on uncertainty.
• Well thought-out temporary destinations are the main road to sustainability.
• Temporariness always has a duration.
• Every destination is a temporary destination.
• The practice of temporary use is a matter of civilization.
• Temporarily planning differently points to a new treaty between human and place.
• If all goes well, temporariness is always in: temporariness always has the future.

I wondered how powerful the notion of temporariness is when it is not opposed to permanence but used as a catch-all phrase for uncertainty, open-endedness and temporal dynamics. If everything becomes temporary, does temporariness become temporary too? If I recall correctly Derix replied that temporariness acts as a testing and selection mechanism: what works stays, what doesn’t work goes away.

Another presenter in this session was Tom Bergevoet from Temp.architecture, whom we worked with for our Designing Social Cities of Tomorrow workshop. Bergevoet began with a historical perspective on temporary use of space in Amsterdam. A few centuries ago the construction of the Amstel church was halted due to a financial crisis. Out of necessity it became the later much praised Amstelveld, a large empty square in the city center. Another case is the temporary airport ELTA that was built in 1919 to the north of the city in Buiksloterham. From 1920-1936 it became the factory of Fokker aircrafts. At this moment it is a creative workspace. Similarly, unfinished new neighborhood IJburg only became well-visited and popular thanks to temporary urban beach Blijburg.

Following years of expansion the city is now imploding, Bergevoet said. Empty spaces emerge. Traditional goal-oriented planning (‘eindbeeldplanning’) looks at the final picture, requires large one-time investments, replies on prefixed zoning plans, and tends to think on a large scale. All this should be traded in, according to Bergevoet, for a process-oriented planning strategy that uses the factor time and departs from small steps within a predefined bandwidth that opens up room for improvisation(‘startbeeldplanning’). It makes failure less costly and speeds up innovation. Shifts in supply and demand can quickly be dealt with, and factors in planning like finance, legal issues, participation and spatial interventions can be better accommodated. Bergevoet gave the case of the project Open Lab Ebbinge in Groningen. This is an empty space at the edge of the city center next to a shopping mall suffering from a decline in attraction. When local shopkeepers initiated a plan to do something temporary with that space, municipality facilitated this by issuing out a temporary building permit and subsidizing finances. The location sported pavilions, bars and restaurants, a playground, an urban beach and a space for ad hoc events. The project faced the question of legal ownership: who owns the land, who can have access to it, how public is this space really? According to Bergevoet 5 years was too short to earn back investments (prompting the remark by civil servant Jurgen Hoogendoorn that the space should have been squatted, since no-one is going to force you to leave).

In my view temporariness is a sensible point of departure for urban design. It can be a way to overcome one of the main challenges that we observed a few years back: the vastly divergent temporal dynamics between the worlds of urban and digital media developments. Temporariness is a given in digital media development where every innovation is in a state of ‘perpetual beta’. The iterative release cycles commonly found here of rapid prototyping, releasing early versions, harvesting user feedback and making frequent incremental updates and upgrades can be an interesting model for the urban design world to experiment with.

Closing talk: a silent revolution in urban design?

Jan Rotmans – professor in transition management at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and co-founder of Urgenda - closed off the day with a talk about systemic change. In his words we don’t witness an era of change but in a change of eras. Occurring once everyday 150 years the process of rapid modernization was the last total systemic change we had. This present change involves the structure or fabric of society and the erosion of (semi-)public institutions, which creates the breeding ground for radical innovation. Rotmans sketched a broad picture of a series of radical transformations in the way we conceptualize, organize and manage society: from linear to cyclic, from vertical to horizontal from top-down to bottom-up. This shift affects all tiers of society. On a macro level there are crises in finance, energy, resources, climate; on a meso level there are crises in regimes and institutions; on a micro level there are crises in professional expertise. According to Rotmans these crises are a blessing in disguise. Creative citizens are creating a silent revolution where they are breaking out of the system and engage in alternative social experiments. Like standing in the eye of a hurricane, many people are not aware of these developments or are downplaying them. Rotmans then turned from this broad outline to specific examples of what he has been working on in the world of real estate. He made a plea for new criteria to establish the value of neighborhoods that include green places and clean air. In some of his projects multiple definitions of value are combined, for example turning unused urban surfaces into mixed solar panels/aerosol absorbents/advertising spaces (see some of his projects).

While Rotmans’ sweeping introduction certainly was inspiring, it remains debatable whether such a revolutionary change is actually occurring. Furthermore, will these series of changes come to replace the status quo or merely be a (slight) modification of it as just another reincarnation of capitalism? Rotmans himself in any case did not seem to notice the irony of the fact that he himself and his projects are very much part of the very same ‘old’ institutional way of working. He is a professor at the university, former employee of the governmental National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), who is closely collaborating with large investment companies, European Union, state departments and municipalities. Frankly I do not see anything radically new in the process of urban design here. The processes and products Rotmans showed seem a far cry from the whole bottom-up DIY/co-creation/maker revolution he sketched out.

Conclusion: what about the smart city?

photo from http://ruimtevolk.nl/blog/ruimtevolk-jaarboek-2012/

Although Ruimtevolk Expedition 2012 paid little direct attention to digital media technologies as potential drivers of new ownership, the themes addressed implicitly rested on many of the changes associated with digital culture. Surprising to me – but then again I’m biassed – was that there was hardly any talk at all about the smart city. Strange, considering the fact that many cities across the globe are reallocating budgets to that area. This should concern urban design professionals. Spatial folks too need to be part of the discussion about smart city making, instead of leaving it up to the technology folks.

Briefly about smart cities: more and more cities develop ‘smart city’ policies as part of their (economic) agendas. In collaboration with technology companies and knowledge institutions, cities attempt to efficiently organize urban processes like energy and water supplies, mobility patterns, air and environmental quality, and public decision making by using sensor and network technologies. These visions promise to improve the quality of urban life by delivering more efficient, convenient and personalized services with the aid of digital technologies. But as we noted elsewhere, smart city visions have spawned much criticism, among others for being a top-down approach and ignoring the role of citizens as driving agents and neglecting ‘ownership’ of other stakeholders.

Luckily there’s a short contribution by Roy van Dalm that casts a critical eye on smart cities in the Ruimtevolk Yearbook 2012 (pp. 164-166). The yearbook was handed out to all participants at the event closing and is available for free here. In his article Van Dalm presents two current controversies about Smart Cities. The first is what he calls “Big Brother Versus Jane Jacobs”. On the one hand there is the top-down master-planning, risk control and surveillance in smart cities. On the other hand – and smart city visions tend to forget about this – there is the spontaneous self-organization from below that Jane Jacobs wrote about. I agree with Van Dalm’s criticism, yet I feel it is a partial story. Ironically, I believe that on a deeper level Jacobs’ fascination with systems thinking is shining through in today’s smart city visions. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jacobs famously calls cities “problems in organized complexity” with many “variables… interrelated into an organic whole” (p.433) [2]. Both views thus rest on the same (modernist) preoccupation with considering cities essentially as problems of maintaining order, although obviously their definitions and approaches differ. The first departs from tech to manage functions and services, the second departs from people’s self-organization. The question that needs to be asked is what other possible views of the city are left out? Attempts to capture the singular essence of cities risk ignoring the innate multiplicity of urban life. In addition to the focus on order, the city can for example also be understood as a place for experimenting with different identities, a place for meeting strangers, for public deliberation and forming collectives beyond old sociological categories, as well as a place for sensory stimulation, playfulness and emotional affect. Those views are largely ignored in smart city visions. This is why the debate needs to be broadened to include the perspectives of urban anthropologists, artists, designers, architects and so on.

The second controversy, which Van Dalm calls “Space Versus Place”, is the one between order and messiness. Referring to Adam Greenfield and Ajit Jaokar, he says that people like messy places with character, not abstract spaces [3]. I guess this is yet another lesson that urban professionals could take from the world of digital media: the future of urban design may be about designing for messiness [4].

Read another report about the event by ArchiNed (in Dutch) >>

Read Ruimtevolk’s report of the event, including presentations and video (in Dutch) >>

(Thanks to Simon van Dommelen for providing additional information; also thanks to Freek Liebrand for pointing me to some factual errors in the report.)

notes

[1] Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.

[2] Jacobs, J. (1992). The death and life of great American cities (Vintage Books ed.). New York: Vintage Books (originally published in 1961).

[3] This view of space as abstract and place as concrete is problematic however, see e.g. Massey, D. B. (2005). For Space. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE.

[4] For example Chalmers’ et al. make a case for ‘seamful design’ (pdf) in ubiquitous computing; and Dourish and Bell pay attention to the ‘messiness’ of computing.

Introduction
A while back I was invited to give a talk and host a small workshop during the 2012 edition of Urbanism Week. This is a yearly event organized by Polis Platform for Urbanism, the study association for Master’s students in Urbanism in the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology. This year’s theme was “Second Hand Cities: rethinking practice in times of standstill”. The organizers put together a pretty impressive program filled with interesting speakers. The workshop I gave was called “How to engage citizens with the help of digital media”. Here’s an impression.

Program
12:30 − 12:45 Introduction Michiel de Lange
12:45 − 12:50 Form teams around issues
12:50 − 13:00 In teams, identify main issue to tackle (analysis phase)
13:00 − 13:10 Analyze stakeholders are involved and take a perspective (analysis phase)
13:10 − 13:30 Generate ideas (brainstorming phase)
13:30 − 14:00 Select one idea and start developing a rough prototype (prototyping phase)
14:00 − 14:30 Plenary presentations

In a handout (pdf) to the workshop participants I described the aim of the workshop in the following way:

The overarching aim is to use digital media technologies and principles in whatever form in the proposed design. The challenge is not only to use technologies but also to find out how to port collaborative principles from online culture to urban situations!
This can be in the process of gathering (new types of) information, in the creation of new networks of collaborators, enabling citizens to become active creators, in finding new financing, as part of the creative design process, as part of the proposed product or outcome, in the communication strategy, as a way to deal with maintenance, repair and repurposing, or in any other possible way you can think of.

I started the workshop by giving a short introduction about engaging citizens with digital media:

Cases
After the introduction it was time to start working on a number of complex urban issues with the help of digital media. Five teams of about 5 to 6 people were formed. They had to start by choosing one of six possible cases I had prepared in advance:

- Vacant buildings
- Wastelands
- Shrinking Cities
- Sustainable Food and Energy Production
- Mobility
- New Business Models

See the end of this post or the pdf handout for full case descriptions.

Results
Interestingly, the five teams all chose a different case to work on, which was good. For example, one of the teams looked at mobility not just as a problem but also as a source of pleasure. They proposed an app called “the mobile footprint” that not only visualizes one’s carbon dioxide impact but also allow people to share travels and turn it into something social. This would playfully engage people with the issue of mobility instead of in a patronizing way. The team that took up wastelands proposed to create a social network of parks, tied together with attractive routes. This hybrid online/offline network was meant to connect poor and rich neighborhoods, and enable people to program their own events there during the weekends and share these with others.



(photo credits: Manuel Félix Cárdenas)

The team that worked on shrinking cities figured that in the Netherlands this occurs mostly in the catholic south. The church remains an important community center. The challenge then seems to reuse churches in order to connect people and to recount local narratives, which after all still remain a source of pride and identity for people living in those areas. The team proposed to use the church windows as public urban screens where community announcements can be uploaded and published. The team that worked on new business models came up with a proposal called Lastchancespace.nl. This was quite an intricate proposal that paired the present incentive to redefine what architects and urbanists do, and initiate new types of collaborations with other professionals, with the issue that many office spaces are empty and need repurposing. If I remember correctly (I’m writing this from memory and a few pictures made of the presentations) they proposed a network of pop-up offices for young starters with cheap rent that should act as incubators and matching sites. In their view new business models rely on networked ways of working. This proposal, like the others, combined online and offline elements in tackling the issue at hand.

Conclusion
Considering the very short time they had, I was pleasantly surprised by the originality and quality of their proposed interventions. It seems a whole new generation of city makers is on the rise who naturally think of media technologies as potential parts of the design process and solution. None of the teams presented their urban intervention with digital media as a mere technological fix. Instead media technologies were enmeshed in more complex socio-spatial interventions.
However I believe that progress still can be made when it comes to equipping city makers not only with an understanding of media tools but also with the appropriate vocabulary to think about the media city. For example, in the closing discussion of the day the moderator asked about the new balance between concentration and dispersal. I remarked that urban designers might want to explore new concepts to think about the city. How useful is it to cling to well-known spatial concepts like density or scale, when these terms may have lost some of their conceptual power in the present network age? If we start thinking for example in terms of networks with (dis)connections, hubs and nodes, hops, routing, redundancy, and so on, we may see newly emerging urban patterns with more clarity and be ready to design the media city.

Full case descriptions:

Vacant buildings

In many cities we find abandoned former schools, offices, factories and so on. While many cities attempt to create new locales for the creative crowds this does not always succeed.

Assignment: Can you think of possible strategies to rejuvenate these large empty buildings with the aid of digital media? Decide on an actual or imaginary case and develop a concept. Consider elements like stakeholders, type/character of the building, traffic, safety, embedding in neighborhood, relationship to similar projects, temporariness or long-term sustainability of concept.

Wastelands

Almost every city has barren wastelands without a clear destination. The top-down Dutch planning tradition of forming consortia between governments, investors and developers has entered a stalemate, so nothing is going to happen with most these plots anytime soon.

Assignment: Can you come up with alternative approaches for developing these lands? Consider elements like stakeholders, legislation, financing, how to attract new groups/individuals, mix between private and public uses.

Shrinking Cities

According to statistics the worldwide urban population continues to grow. Yet many regions in western and eastern Europe, and north America, face projected or actual decline op urban populations. In the Netherlands it is projected that by 2025 over half of the municipalities will have a shrinking population.

Assignment: Can you think of ways to use digital media to address this issue? Consider elements like stakeholders, availability of urban services, economic livelihood, social contact, repurposing built environment.

Sustainable Food and Energy Production

Adequate water, food, and energy supplies are crucial resources for people in cities to thrive. Yet many cities have problems providing these services reliably. Attempts are made at experimenting with alternative, more active modes of production like urban farming, cooperative energy production.

Assignment: Pick a particular city in developing country and one specific resource, and come up with a proposal for organizing an alternative resource production and distribution. Consider elements like stakeholders, existing or new infrastructures and logistics, pricing schemes, engaging people with ‘low interest goods’.

Mobility

Cities are about movement and flows as much as about more sedentary places like homes, offices, squares, and leisure settings. Almost all cities have to cope with pervasive traffic jams and concomitant loss of economic value, air quality, playing grounds and so on; but also uncertainty involved in investing in expensive public transport infrastructures.

Assignment: develop a strategy for a particular situation to help tackle mobility issues. Consider elements like stakeholders, individuality and personal spaces, visualizing environmental impacts, behavioral change.

New Business Models

The present financial situation is rather dire for most architects, planners and urbanists. Old ways no longer generate income so new modes of developing projects have to be found. Some offices are experimenting with alternatives, often unsolicited, not commissioned. For example they look for alternatives to organize the design process, involve new parties, forge consortia with other professionals, tap into new financing e.g. crowdfunding, and so on.

Assignment: If you were to start your office tomorrow, what business approach would you like to explore in order to adapt to changing circumstances? What new way of working is most fit for what specific type of case? Consider conditions like shifts in acknowledging expert knowledge, changing roles of stakeholders like municipalities, investors, developers, banks, entrepreneurs, citizens/’prosumers’, and so on.

See the whole Urbanism Week photo set by Manuel Félix Cárdenas on Flickr here >>

The workshop is part of a series of Summer at Strelka workshops aimed at a practical change in the city’s microrayons. The microrayon where we did research and development is Yuzhnoye Medvedkovo (south Medvedkovo).

This workshop aims to help create an actual long-lasting change for the better in an urban neighborhood in Moskow. This is done by bringing together creative workshop participants and various neighborhood stakeholders (citizens, local government, businesses, neighborhood organizations, and so on). The workshop aims to find out how these different people can communicate better with each other, by making a prototype for a product, an event, or a service that acts as a catalyst for conversation.

The workshop also aspires to create a methodology for activating citizens with the aid of digital media technologies that could also be applied elsewhere. How can we design a process that allows people to feel ‘ownership’ over their living circumstances, and actively participate in making their environment a better place?

Read the reports of the six workshop days on the Partizaning.org weblog.

• Designing for Ownership – day 1: introduction
• Designing for Ownership – day 2: research
• Designing for Ownership – day 3: analysis + ideation
• Designing for Ownership – day 4: prototyping 1
• Designing for Ownership – day 5: prototyping 2 + testing
• Designing for Ownership – day 6: presentation

The workshop “Designing for Ownership: digital media and urban change” is developed by The Mobile City’s Michiel de Lange together with Marc Tuters. It takes a similar approach as the Social Cities of Tomorrow workshop we have done earlier in 2012. The workshop aims to create an actual long-lasting change for the better in the district Yuzhnoye Medvedkovo in north Moscow. This is done by bringing together creative workshop participants and various neighborhood stakeholders (citizens, local government, businesses, neighborhood organizations, and so on). The workshop wants to find out how these different people can communicate better with each other by making a prototype for a product, an event, or a service that acts as a catalyst for conversation.

We are happy to collaborate with the wonderful Partizaning.org as a local partner in this workshop.

We will keep you updated on the progress and results during and after the workshop.

More information >>

Txt and the city
Michiel de Lange

Scope

Today’s cities are pervaded by a variety of visible and invisible media technologies, like mobile devices, rfid chips, wireless networks, GPS positioning, urban screens, media facades, sensors, CCTV cameras, and so on. The boundaries between distinct urban domains like work, home, travel, meeting, leisure become less clear. Social behaviour previously confined to one sphere is blurring. People are using social networks like Facebook or Twitter at work, receive work-related calls at home or during travel, listen to music or keep their eyes fixed on the mobile screen in public places, and so on. What does that mean for people’s behaviour in the media city? And what are the implications for brands?

Sociologist Erving Goffman pointed out that people in public situations engage in ‘impression management’ (Goffman, 1959). They play varying roles in different situations to convey particular impressions (caring father at home, cheerful colleague at work, successful businessman in public, generous mate in the pub). This situation-dependent behaviour functions as a membrane of the self. In its porous state the membrane allows the self to diffuse and encounter new places, connect to other people and express self-identity. In its solid state it acts as a safety shield to protect the self from leaking too much personal information and to block an overload of outside information.

Goffman’s view underlines that for communication to be perceived as genuine is less about facts than about effects: does it work? Credible communication is not simply an action but an interaction that involves the audience as much as the actor. Blurring social roles are both liberating and challenging. On the one hand people have to be less worried about conforming to restricting etiquettes and social expectations. On the other hand they need to manage their selves on multiple online and offline stages simultaneously without having a clear view of who exactly their audiences are. How can brands enable people to navigate the complexities of this shifting urban landscape?

The search for relevance

For brands, the blurring of situations and roles means that it is more difficult to communicate by simply associating their products with clearly legible settings. As situations and social roles become more fluid the notion of ‘relevance’, which is always contextually defined, changes too. Urban apps are a response to the ongoing quest for relevance. Sensing apps and location-based services measure and visualise data and tie that information to places. These services are touted as allowing people to make situation-specific optimal choices. Where are places of interest nearby? Who recommends this restaurant? Where are my friends now? Is the air clean enough to go out? Is the traffic not too dense? Have I burned my 2500 calories today? What about the crime rate in my new neighbourhood?

The problem however with many mobile services is that they are designed for location-based relevance rather than social relevance. Even though these apps augment physical place with digital information, they limit and pre-script the roles for people to play. Way-finding and location-based services, digital signage, customer loyalty cards, and individualised search algorithms stimulate a culture of personalised consumption. Mobile screens, portable audio devices, and untethered access to one’s familiar inner circle enable people to retreat from public life into privatised capsules. Recommendations favour sameness instead of difference and induce people to dwell in the known instead of stimulating serendipitous encounters. By making the city smaller and more predictable, urban apps limit the bandwidth for behaviour to consumption and cocooning. Solidification of the social membrane – a ‘filter bubble’ – is neither good for lively cities that thrive on diversity, nor for brands that thrive on diversification and diffusion.

New tech, new social roles

Luckily, these same technologies also contribute to the emergence of new roles for people. With mobile media citizens start to take the organisation and design of their cities in their own hands. Key is that apps are designed to grant people ownership over urban issues (“this is my problem too”) and a high degree of agency (“I can do something about it”).

A first step is when people acquire new insights in urban issues. An example is the Trash | Track project by MIT’s Senseable City Lab. Location-aware rfid tags were attached to items people wanted to discard. At various stages the trash was tracked and its route, which in some cases spanned across the USA, visualised. By using pervasive technologies the project attempted to take a bottom-up approach to urban resource management and promote recycling as a behavioural change.

A step higher on the ladder of involvement is when citizens actively contribute to help solve collective issues with easily available technologies. Crowdsourcing and citizen science are terms often used for this type of distributed participation. In Boston for example citizens can help to map street bumps with a specially developed mobile app and contribute to improving road conditions. Citizens in this case have a signalling role, while fixing the street is left to the responsible authorities.

Another step up is when citizens become true co-creators. In the Dutch project Face Your World by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk and architect Dennis Kaspori, young people adopted the role of urban designers and collaborated on a plan for a park in their neighbourhood. Simulation software allowed them to contribute ideas and deliberate over design choices. Local government was persuaded to abandon initial master planning for the park and execute the bottom-up plan instead.

Finally, people who participate in media art projects or urban games often invert or transgress scripted ‘normal’ behaviour, and engage with people and places in unexpected ways. Koppelkiek is a social game made by game developer Kars Alfrink that was played in the Dutch city of Utrecht. Players earned points by making pictures of oneself together with someone else in a specific physical situation, for instance together with a number. Opposite to the ‘gamification’ of individual achievements, this game was explicitly designed to reward playful social interactions.

Insights and opportunities

Everybody is a stakeholder in liveable and lively cities, including brands. In the cases above technologies are used to make cities more lively and social instead of only more personalised and efficient. Urbanites take on roles that are all about forging renewed relations with the environment, other people, and ultimately with the self. Following the logic of digital media as relational tools for more social cities, businesses that enable people to establish and maintain relations are in a privileged position. This is what market researcher Cova calls the ‘linking value’ of products and services (Cova, 1997).

By becoming actors in this field brands can contribute to a diversity of social roles and interactions in today’s media cities. That means doing credible impression management. There is nothing inauthentic about that. Everybody does. Through social interactions effects occur that are genuine. Real relations are not one-way but reciprocal. One gives and one receives. So if governments open up their data to become collective resources, why can’t brands do the same? Think Google’s Trends and Zeitgeist. Sure, public and private organisations have different aims. Yet there is a clear parallel with Goffman’s impression management, where an overly protective attitude toward private information signals that someone likes to keep the membrane closed. By contrast, opening the membrane by sharing private information invites new connections and makes existing ones deeper and longer-lasting.

Brands can also enable people to act on collective issues. They can help people to identify important issues. They can put in their weight to involve other institutional stakeholders. People should be allowed to not only contribute ideas (like the Philips + challenge in Indonesia) but to make actual decisions about their urban environment and co-create. Further, brands can give people experiences to share and stories to tell. Narratives act as blueprints for identity construction, and in turn people tell who they are through stories. A wide variety of available stories thus strengthens diversity. Brands can also stimulate chance encounters with unknown people and places. This can be elicited by play in the true sense, i.e. done for its own sake rather than extrinsically rewarded. Finally, brands can think of alternative measures of economic value. Local currencies and collaborative consumption turn transactions from impersonal one-time only events into durable and reciprocal interactions.

Why should brands? Well, it’s good for cities. If we think of cities as complex ecosystems, more behavioural variation means more capacity for adaptation and innovative approaches to existing and future problems. It’s also good for profit. Diverse cities are places that catalyse a variety of interlocking and mutually reinforcing processes. Such cities attract creative people, foster creativity and innovation, generate cultural liveliness, increase demand for high-value products and services, educate citizens, and breed out-of-the-box innovators, who in turn design the products and services of tomorrow. Brands as much as anyone benefit from social cities.

Sources

Cova, B. (1997). Community and Consumption: towards a definition of the “linking value” of product or services. European Journal of Marketing, 31(3/4), 297-316.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

The article was originally published on Canvas8 here:

http://www.canvas8.com/content/2012/01/09/txt-in-the-city.html. Republished with kind permission.

In the study we explore how digital media can strengthen ‘ownership’, that is, citizen engagement with collective urban issues and the capacity to act on them. The notion of ownership then is about inclusiveness, access and agency rather than exclusive proprietorship. Collective urban issues can have a global scope, like sustainability and social equity, or be locally specific, like shrinking cities and empty spaces. They are commons questions that involve multiple stakeholders, frequently with conflicting interests, and with divergent short and long term interests. The question therefore is: how can digital media be used to promote durable changes in citizen involvement, beyond being mere technological fixes?

The research started by compiling a longlist of cases. The list includes both international and Dutch examples. From the list several themes emerged. The themes share an underlying formative principle for stimulating or organizing ownership. In a series of two posts these are presented with examples. Note that many websites are in Dutch only.

4. Story-telling: a sense of place

Narratives are important mediators of personal and collective identities. People engage with their environment and with others when they recount and share stories and memories. With digital media normally hidden stories can be made public. The nature of storytelling itself changes too. Quite a lot of Netherlands examples exist.

Dutch examples

- Onder Anderen - http://www.onder-anderen.nl. ‘Among Others’ is a digital archive on an interactive map composed of the memories of people who lived in the Professorenbuurt, a neighborhood in Delft between 2007-2009.

- Geheugen van Oost – http://www.geheugenvanoost.nl. One of the first neighborhood website that allowed people to share stories and memories of living in Amsterdam-east. A project by Amsterdam Museum, Mediamatic and Dynamo, in collaboration with Buurtonline.

- Care-Taker – http://www.care-taker.nl. A history of the Amsterdam neighborhood Indische Buurt told by a Care-Taker who temporarily went to live in the neighborhood, helped people with small affairs, and reported about it on his weblog. By Dennis Kaspori and Jeanne van Heeswijk.

- Boven Tafel – http://boventafel.nl. ‘Above the table’ is an art walk based on the memories of inhabitants of Het Franse Gat, a neighborhood in Veenendaal.

- Laurenskerk, a monument full of stories – http://www.kossmanndejong.nl/projects/view/98. Multimedia project by Kossman.DeJong in the Laurens church in Rotterdam, to make stories visible in architectural space.

- Amsterdam Realtime – realtime.waag.org. A project by Esther Polak and Waag Society. Different Amsterdammers were equipped with a GPS device and mobile data connection, which sent location info to a central server in realtime. In the exposition space a map slowly emerged out of the physical movements of the participants. They in turn reflected on their own mobility patterns, thus narrating and sharing their personal experiences of city life.

5. Meeting in public space

Gatherings and interventions in the urban domain aim to tease out people onto the streets, connect to strangers and experience one’s environment anew. This may happen by using urban screens, media installations, urban play and games, flash-mobs organized with social media, or otherwise. Although some of these interventions center around specific issues they often are apparently pointless or seemingly silly in a Situationist tradition in order to open up room for spontaneity and avoid specifying in advance how people should behave and interact. In their yearly trendwatch our friends at The Pop-Up City note the rise of serendipity apps. Further, cities all over the world have seen so-called “pop-up” events (pop-up cafés, pop-up clubs, pop-up shops), often organized with a collaborative DIY attitude with the aid of social media. Their unexpected appearance and temporariness underline the transient nature of urban places. Yet the question is how durable these interventions remain after they disappear, and whether they aren’t catering to a disposable mentality towards novel urban services (‘swarm intelligence’ may easily become a locust plague when people rapidly graze a new resource to depletion and then turn to the next newest thing in town). Other projects aimed at meeting in public space are longer-lasting, for example neighborhood urban farming projects that use new media to organize and monitor affairs, and tap into the implicit knowledge of resident citizens.

International examples

- Flashmobs worldwide – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashmob.

- Fallen Fruit – http://www.fallenfruit.org. People map and share ripe overhanging fruit trees in LA neighborhoods (municipal law allows picking outside private fences). This can be a way to meet with residents.

- Foodprint Project – http://www.foodprintproject.com. A “collaborative exploration of food systems. Our goal is to bring together people with diverse backgrounds and expertise to start a conversation about using food as a design tool to make our cities more resilient, sustainable and healthy”.

- Subtlemob – http://productofcircumstance.com. Project by Duncan Speakman that lets people undergo a cinematographic experience on the streets through a soundtrack. See also the complete portfolio of his projects at http://productofcircumstance.com/portfolio/.

- Projects by urban design studio Civic Center – http://civiccenter.cc. Often low-tech and playful interventions that spur meetings.

- Tate Trumps mobile game – http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/information/tatetrumps.shtm.

- Pavement to Parks – http://sfpavementtoparks.sfplanning.org. San Francisco’s “Pavement to Parks” projects seek to temporarily reclaim unused swathes and quickly and inexpensively turn them into new public plazas and parks.

- TranquiliCity http://www.tranquilicityapp.com – One of the many serendipity apps.

Dutch examples

- WIMBY – http://www.wimby.nl. Welcome in my backyard is a project from 2007 by Crimson Architectural Historians and Felix Rottenberg in the Rotterdam neighborhood Hoogvliet. Aim was to elevate the large-scale restructuring of the neighborhood through various interventions together with inhabitants.

- Go for IT! – http://www.go-for-it-game.nl and http://go-for-it-rotterdam.nl/. This project by The Patching Zone is an urban game for and by inhabitants of Feijenoord, a neighborhood in Rotterdam. Pavement tiles were equipped with LEDs and sensors, which enabled playful interactions between people.

- Koppelkiek – http://whatsthehubbub.nl/projects/koppelkiek/. Social photo game developed by Kars Alfrink for the problem area Hoograven in the city of Utrecht. Designing simple social assignments made people come together in spontaneous ways.

-  .dotwalk – http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/dot-walk/. This psycho-geographic project by Wilfied Houjebek applies a very simple computer algorithm as a prescription for urban walks in an attempt to stimulate serendipity and encounter.

- Dropstuff – http://www.dropstuff.nl. Interactive art wall using a huge screen. It connects the digital world to urban public space, and allows people to control the screen through their mobile devices.

- Storylines – http://www.sndrv.nl/nff. “”Storylines” turns a citycentre into a 3D surround film-set of a ‘movie’ happening in augmented reality. Using the smartphone app “Layar” a world of scenes and storylines can be explored. Dialogues are still hanging in the air, as the geo-located textual remains of movie scenes which occured throughout the city.”

- Moodwall – http://www.illuminate.nl/outdoor-media/projects/16/moodwall-bijlmerdreef-amsterdam-zuidoost.asp. A 24 meter long media facade aims to improve people’s sense of security in a pedestrian tunnel in the south-east of Amsterdam, by displaying various interactive projections. Designed by Jasper Klinkhamer (Studio Klink) and Remco Wilcke (CUBE architects).

- Play Real – http://www.creatieve-innovatie.nl/page/1208/nl. PlayReal is an online/offline augmented reality game, that uses a global social network, coupled with real world assignments. PlayReal hands its players (10 – 16 year olds) tools and skills to engage in local problem solving of global environmental and societal issues. Initiative: Ahead of the Game: Claudia Rodiguez Ortiz, Alex de Jong and Minne Belger. Development partner: The Beach / Diana Krabbendam

- The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour – http://kkvb-cfwn.blogspot.com. A participatory project by the Slovene artist and architect Marjetica Potrč (b. 1953) and Wilde Westen, a group of young designers, architects and cultural producers, combines visual art and social architecture to redefine the village green. Community vegetable gardens become a tool by which the residents of Amsterdam Nieuw West reclaim ownership of their neighborhood at a time when demolition and redevelopment are causing many to feel uprooted.

- Nu Hier – www.nuhier.org. A project by Ester van de Wiel. “NU HIER is an initiative that links vacant sites with users from the neighbourhood, schools, clubs, corporations, and associations. Their cooperation and combined entrepreneurship is the engine behind what in this case is a project on the periphery of the centre of Rotterdam”. Using principles from e-culture, the project taps into local ‘Pro-Am’ knowledge http://nuhier.mmmmx.net/article/971/diy-do-it-yourself/.

6. Peer-to-peer economy: social currencies and collaborative consumption
A main concern in any attempt to ‘govern the commons’ is how people can be persuaded to prioritize long term collective benefits over short term individual profit. Reputation management is a social enforcement mechanism to counter the ‘free rider’ problem and strengthen trust. Social currencies can keep track of, and disclose individual contributions to the collective good. In the present so-called ‘economy of free’ this can be a way to monetize contributions. New currencies can stimulate stronger relationships between consumers and local entrepreneurs. While alternative currencies predate the widespread use of digital media, these media make keeping bookkeeping and trust management much easier. Bridging the gap between production and consumption, crowdfunding provides investors with a sense of ownership of the product they support and forges connections with other investors and a more direct relation with the producer. Not surprisingly, crowdfunding initiatives frequently display multi-tiered and publicly visible donations lists. Collaborative consumption attempts to move away from a strictly market view of social interactions as economic transactions. It is a hybrid model for consuming resources that reconciles private ownership with collective use by creating semi- common-pool resources (CPRs) out of privately owned property. In this peer-to-peer economy, digital media technologies enable the realtime sharing of scarce resources, whether parking spaces, cars, plots of land, tools and machinery, energy, food and meals, couches, and so on. These developments thus redefine ownership from possession to access, or from proprietorship to usage rights (much in the same way as the Turntoo concept developed by architect Thomas Rau aims to save scarce natural resources by promoting performance-based consumption instead of property-based consumption).

International examples:

- ParkatmyHouse – http://www.parkatmyhouse.com/uk/. ParkatmyHouse is the world’s largest online parking marketplace created to connect home and business owners who would like to earn money from renting their space with drivers in need of a convenient, safe and cost-effective place to park.

- Landshare – http://www.landshare.net. Landshare brings together people who have land to share with those who need land for cultivating food via the website and a location-based mobile app.

- Funding revolution – http://www.forumforthefuture.org/project/funding-revolution/overview. A guide to establishing and running revolving funds for community energy generation and renewal and carbon saving, based on a different ownership model.

- Hey, Neighbor! – http://heyneighbor.com. Share tools or help a hand in your neighborhood.

Dutch examples:

- Bijlmer Euro – http://www.bijlmereuro.net. Project by Christian Nold to develop a social currency that expresses and visualizes the relations between inhabitants and local businesses. Nold also helped develop the Lewes Pound and the Brixton Pound.

- I Make Rotterdam http://crowdfunding.imakerotterdam.nl. Crowdfunding intiative for a temporary pedestrian arial bridge at Hofplein in the centre of Rotterdam. An intiative of ZUS architects in collaboration with Hofbogen B.V., within the framework of the 5th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR). “Crowdfunding allows the bridge to be financed in an alternative way, namely directly by the public. This means that construction can start decades before it is planned.The necessary improvement in the quality of the area is therefore no longer fully dependent on policy plans and real estate developments”.

- WeGo – http://www.wego.nu/en/. A community car sharing platform.

Conclusion

Digital media are used to address a wide variety of collective issues at the city level. In part 1 we have seen that sensing data can be opened up as new resources. We have looked at new ways of organizing and managing collective action by making urban issues public through sensing and visualizations, and even more actively in DIY urbanism. In part 2 we have looked at ways of strengthening people’s sense of place through story-telling and how unexpected events, playful activities or appealing to their latent knowledge can be ways to get people together and meet. And we looked at new economic models that redefine ownership, and turn from a transactional view of social relations to a reciprocal view in which mutualism prevails.

Despite their differences, the above examples have one thing in common. They share a fundamentally relational view of city life, in which individual components – places, people, organisations, infrastructures, technologies; information and matter – are deeply intertwined. Simple ‘technological fixes’ will not do to help solve urban issues that are by nature complex. In most examples it is not the technology that is central but the collaborative spirit from e-culture that is ported to urban questions. That implies new roles for citizens. Citizenship becomes less about individual rights and obligations vis-a-vis state institutions, but more about generating awareness, trust and responsibility needed for collective governance. Only then can our cities truly become more social.

In the study we explore how digital media can strengthen ‘ownership’, that is, citizen engagement with collective urban issues and the capacity to act on them. The notion of ownership then is about inclusiveness, access and agency rather than exclusive proprietorship. Collective urban issues can have a global scope, like sustainability and social equity, or be locally specific, like shrinking cities and empty spaces. They are commons questions that involve multiple stakeholders with sometimes conflicting interests. The question therefore is: how can digital media be used to promote durable changes in citizen involvement, beyond being mere technological fixes?

The research started by compiling a longlist of cases. The list includes both international and Dutch examples. From the list several themes emerged. The themes share an underlying formative principle for stimulating or organizing ownership. In a series of two posts these are presented with examples. Note that many websites are in Dutch only.

1. Data as a new resource: open data and open government

Governments and other institutions are opening up data they have collected and generated with the aim to stimulate creative reuse. Open data itself can be seen as a resource, a ‘data commons’. This entails a conceptual shift in the notion of ownership from possession to the right to act. In addition to a mentality change among organizatons, the challenge is how these data can be opened up to useful ends. The conceptual difference between data, information, and knowledge is important here. What data is potentially valuable information? How can that information lead to new knowledge and stimulate the capacity to act among urbanites? Countless open data platforms and projects exist. The Netherlands seems to lag compared to other countries, particularly the US and UK. Interestingly, cities are spearheading innovative approaches to open data efforts more than national governments.

International examples

- United States Government open data – data.gov. USA open gov data sets, aiming to create a more participatory democracy and empower people.

- UK government open data – data.gov.uk. UK’s open gov data sets.

- European public data – publicdata.eu. Especially from the UK. A project by the Open Knowledge Foundation http://okfn.org. A work in progress overview of open government data is maintained here: http://lod2.okfn.org/eu-data-catalogues/. This foundation is also involved in the List of European Open Data Catalogues http://lod2.eu.

- European Public Sector Information (PSI) Platform – epsiplatform.eu. European initiative to allow creative reuse of government data and to strengthen community, and stimulate action.

- France gov open data data.gouv.fr (in development).

- Paris open Data – http://opendata.paris.fr/opendata/jsp/site/Portal.jsp.

- New York City open data – http://www.nyc.gov/html/datamine/html/home/home.shtml.

- Datamarket.com – Data portal to visualize statistics of public and semi-public organizations, like the UN, World Bank, Eurostat, Gapminder.

Dutch examples

These are specifically Dutch examples to open up government data. Note how each project has a different focus.

- Open data portal Dutch national government – http://data.overheid.nl. Can also be found via http://nl.ckan.net. An initiative by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

- Rotterdam Open Data – http://www.rotterdamopendata.org. Rotterdam Open Data is a collaborative initiative of Hogeschool Rotterdam, Rotterdam business, and Rotterdam municipality to make information by, about and for the city of Rotterdam accessible and intelligible. “Because we believe that this contributes to the freedom of Rotterdam urbanites to get information and make choices, because it strengthens the connection Rotterdammers feel with the city and each other, and because it enables them to better help build the city in which we live.”

- Apps for Amsterdam – http://www.appsforamsterdam.nl. Apps for Amsterdam is an initiative to make as much data from the Amsterdam municipality accessible for everyone. We do this by calling upon developers and students to translate these statistic information or Open Data into successful applications for smartphones, web or Facebook. Apps for Amsterdam is a collaboration between Waag Society, Amsterdam municipality – economic affairs, and Hack the Overheid.

- Apps for Eindhoven – http://www.openeindhoven.nl. Open Data Eindhoven is a platform for data producers, data processors and data users. The contest Apps for Eindhoven connects to an international development of governments, programmers, designers, businesses and researchers who consider Open Data as an important impulse and fundamental factor in the quality of the information society. The development of Open Data in Eindhoven is supported by the platform Open Data Eindhoven, which exists of private persons (e.g. programmers, creatives), (representatives of) cultural and social organizations, companies, Eindhoven municipality, RHCE, Noord-Brabant province, TU/e, Fontys.

- Realtime air quality measurements by the Amsterdam GGD – http://www.luchtmetingen.amsterdam.nl.

2. Making urban issues public: sensing, data visualization, citizen science

Visualizing normally invisible urban processes can be a way to make complex urban life intelligible to people and create public issues and collectives. Projects about the urban living environment for instance use data visualizations to involve people and possibly even stimulate behavioral changes. Some ‘citizen science’ projects crowdsource the gathering of data to people themselves. In some cases the question is whether crowdsourcing is limited to a signalling role for citizens without allowing the agency to act on issues. Another question is where lies the boundary between engaging citizens and throwing institutional responsibilities over the wall?

International examples

- Trash|Track (MIT’s Senseable City Lab) – http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack. How can pervasive technologies expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability. Can these same pervasive technologies make 100% recycling a reality?

- The Daily Pothole – http://thedailypothole.tumblr.com. NYC government offers citizens the opportunity to signal potholes in the road and tell about it.

- Street Bump -http://www.newurbanmechanics.org/bump/. The same idea exists in Boston, now by using a smartphone to ‘see click fix’ potholes.

- Green Watch – http://www.lamontreverte.org/en/. Project by Daniel Kaplan, involving Parisians in environmental measurements and mapping.

- In the Air, Medalab Prado – http://www.intheair.es. This is a somewhat similar project to Green Watch, in which air quality is measured and visualized.

- Hollaback – http://www.ihollaback.org. Hollaback! is a movement dedicated to ending street harassment using mobile technology. The project tries to enhance urban livability.

- Ushahidi – http://www.ushahidi.com. A platform for collecting, visualizing, and interactive mapping of various data worldwide.

- FixMyStreet – http://www.fixmystreet.com. Small issues in one’s immediate environment can be reported to responsible institutions in the UK.

- Open Ideo – http://openideo.com. A crowdsource platform by design office Ideo with regular contetsts and prizes.

- Stimulus Projects Spot Check – http://projects.propublica.org/spotcheck. Project by journalists to monitor the status of US gov financed transport projects.

Dutch examples

In the Dutch context similar projects exist:

- Verbeterdebuurt – verbeterdebuurt.nl. The Dutch version of FixMyStreet, which also has an augmented reality app for the mobile phone.

- Geluidsnet – www.geluidsnet.nl. People living in the vicinity of Schiphol Amsterdam airport do their own noise measurements using cheap technologies as a way to counter official measurements that they do not trust.

- Waag Society SensorLab – http://creativelearninglab.org/nl/evenementen/sensorlab-op-picnic-young-2010. A workshop organized by Waag Society’s Creative Learning Lab and GLOBE Netherlands at PICNIC 2010 about the possibilities of sensor technologies in education.

- DEvLab – http://www.devlab.nl/?projecten. Research about wireless sensor networks and platforms (examples of projects: MyriaNed, Atalanta).

- Urbanode project – http://www.vurb.eu/2010/04/09/the-urbanode-project/. The mobile phone has become a remote control for the city. VURB and partners will enable a set of environmental services in the Trouw building to be ‘discoverable’ by mobile devices, and controlled by citizens/users through applications on their smartphones. One of the most interesting aspects to investigate about these types of contexts will be the social dynamics of resource sharing.

- Sense/Stage -  www.nescivi.nl and http://sensestage.hexagram.ca/workshop/. Marije Baalman is a Dutch artist and developer who works with interaction and sound, using code and electronics. She has been part of Sense/Stage research project with Chris Salter at Concordia and McGill University in Montréal from 2007-2010 and is currently developing a Sense/Stage sensor network kit for distribution.

- Transitiekaart – http://www.richardvijgen.nl/. This project visualizes spaces in the city that are in transition on a big interactive screen. The project aims to study the possibilities for temporary uses of spaces.

- Overlastdagboek.nl – http://www.meldwoonoverlast.nl/pages/overlastdagboek. People can report nuisances in their living environment.

3. DIY urbanism: knowledge sharing, e-participation, and co-creation

An increasing number of projects are founded on principles and modes of organization found in e-culture, like knowledge sharing, participation, co-creation, peer-to-peer networking. In such projects (part of) the actual design and the execution of a transformation lies with citizens themselves. This is a step further on the ladder of participation than crowdsourcing existing issues where people only have a signalling role and/or a role as generators of ideas but their right or capacity to act remains limited. What is a workable balance between a top-down and a bottom-up approach? Or is peer-to-peer organization a kind of third way? Further, who are reached by these projects? Are these the people who are already technologically savvy and know how to work with digital media technologies? Or are new publics reached too? NIMBY-ism is a concern as well. To what extent do these projects support or reinforce a “not in my backyard” attitude of a closed in-group of people? A substantial number of projects rely on game principles to persuade people to participate. Discussions about the ‘gamification’ of urban life then come into play as well.

International examples

- Natalie Jeremijenko’s environmental health clinic – http://www.environmentalhealthclinic.net. New Yorkers who have particular environmental health concerns can make an appointment and walk out with a prescription for actions, like local data collection and urban interventions directed at understanding and improving environmental health, plus referrals to specific art, design and participatory projects, local environmental organizations and local government or civil society groups.

- Betaville – http://bxmc.poly.edu/betaville. Betaville is an open-source multiplayer environment for real cities, in which ideas for new works of public art, architecture, urban design, and development can be shared, discussed, tweaked, and brought to maturity in context, and with the kind of broad participation people take for granted in open source software development. Pilots in lower Manhattan en downtown Brooklyn.

- IBM CityOne game – http://www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/innov8/cityone/. Like other tech companies – Cisco, Philips, Fraunhofer, HP – IBM focuses more and more on using technologies for the design of so-called ‘smart cities’. This is a serious game used for urban design.

- DIY City – http://diycity.org. DIY City is a website where people from all over the world think about, talk about, and ultimately build tools for making their cities work better with web technologies, a kind of ‘wiki-city’. Mostly US based.

- Commons The Game – http://www.commonsthegame.com. In Commons, compete to do good, while problems in your city get fixed. Report a problem or recommend an improvement in your neighborhood that you think deserves attention and resources. Vote on the best reports and improvements, and see what’s most popular in the hood. Go on short missions around town to earn bonus points, and unlock City awards to level up through the game. With Commons, share the things that you care most about fixing and improving in your neighborhood, and discover new ways to explore your city.

- Open Street Map – http://www.openstreetmap.org. Collaborative open source mapping project.

- Tools for actions – http://cca-actions.org. Exposition in the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal with 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world.

- Howtopedia – http://en.howtopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. A collaborative platform for practical knowledge and simple technologies that are easily explainable and usable by individuals or small communities for a sustainable and ecological future.

- Open Farm Tech – http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Main_Page. Wiki for sharing knowledge about  open source and low priced DIY farming technologies.

- Hub2 – http://nms.sagepub.com/content/13/1/75.abstract?rss=1. Academic article by Eric Gordon and Edith Manosevitch describing how they used a simulation environment – Second Life – in the design process of a public park in Boston. The application of participatory game principles for ‘real life’ social ends is called ‘augmented deliberation’.

Dutch examples

- Face Your World – http://www.faceyourworld.nl and http://classic.skor.nl/artefact-1114-en.html. A project by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk and architect Dennis Kaspori (2005) that took place in among others Amsterdam and Rotterdam. By participating in an artwork that combines urban development, computer technology and creative thinking, young people and neighborhood dwellers adopt the role of urban designers and make a plan for the new Staalmanpark in Amsterdam. The interactor, as the simulation software used is called, allows them to manipulate, recombine and reuse their environment in order to shape an innovative vision on their city. With this collaborative plan the Van Heeswijk and Kaspori managed to persuade the local government to abandon the initial plans for the park and execute the new one instead.

- Baas op Zuid – http://baasopzuid.nl. The online game ‘Boss on South’ allows inhabitants of old Rotterdam neighborhoods Pendrecht and Zuidwijk to take (virtual) policy decisions and help think about the regeneration of the area. A project by BBVH Architects.

- Wireless Leiden – http://www.wirelessleiden.nl. A good example of a bottom-up knowledge sharing project is Wireless Leiden, in which citizens of Leiden build and maintain a citizen wireless network, and offer a range of services to local parties and organizations.

- Scan je Buurt – http://www.bendeburgers.nl/?p=153. The project ‘Scan your neighborhood’ aims to let young people, policy makers, and politicians to create common policies by using an interactive map with geo-tagged multimedia from the neighborhood.

- De Amstel Verandert – http://www.deamstelverandert.nl. (‘The Amstel is changing’) How does the future look of the Amstel (the river Amsterdam was built next to)? As broad as possible a group of people from Amsterdam and surroundings share their ideas on a website and during four meetings.

- Stadsdialoog Delft – http://stadsdialoogdelft.nl/. In ‘City Dialogue Delft’ inhabitants of Delft informed and inspired urban planners in three conversations and via an online platform.

- Indemann – http://studio.driezesnul.nl/maurer/2009/07/maurer-united-builds-indemann/. Indemann is a watchtower in Germany, designed by Maurer Architecten United. It has a LED media facade where neighborhood inhabitants can upload their own content in order to co-design the building. Maurer Architects distinguish between “sculptural architecture, which is used as a reference point in the organisation and branding of a city, and social architecture, which challenges users to engage in social interaction”. See also http://studio.driezesnul.nl/maurer/2009/09/indemann-_pics/.

- Rotterdam Index – http://www.digitalepioniers.nl/projecten/Rotterdam-Index/93. Rotterdam Index (RIX) is an online neighborhood  game. The idea is that participants get a virtual monetary budget to invest in Rotterdam neighborhoods. By playing, i.e. trading in stocks of specific neighborhoods , players implicitly give their opinion about these neighborhoods. The game registers the sentiments in the city with the aim to increase involvement of inhabitants with their city and in turn involve local governments with citizens. A project by Jeanne van Heeswijk, Dennis Kaspori, and Joost van Eeden.

- Design for Emptiness – http://www.designforemptiness.nl. Many Dutch cities face the issue of empty shops and office buildings. In Heerlen this problem is even more urgent because of a shrinking population. Lively inner cities are vital as the entry card and visual identity of inhabitants. This project involved the challenge ‘Design for emptiness’, in which the winning idea received €10.000 to help realize it.

Social Cities: how to engage citizens with digital media

Michiel de Lange – The Mobile City

The increasing growth and complexity of cities raises the question how we can use digital media technologies and principles from online culture to design livable and lively cities. How can digital media aid citizens to engage with their environment, with fellow urbanites, and with issues at stake in their cities? Most mobile and location-based apps are about personalized consumption and sharing preferences with an in-group of like-minded people. Can we use digital technologies to help solve collective problems in the city too?

Some collective issues have a global span, like social equity, environmental sustainability, and water, food, and energy provisioning. Others, like shrinking cities, aging populations, or empty buildings, are locally specific. Many cities also face issues like the perceived loss of publicness, safety, social cohesion, and the gap between citizens and government. Typically, complex urban issues like these are not exclusively ‘owned’ by a single party. They are commons issues that involve multiple stakeholders who often have incompatible interests, and therefore they need collective forms of governance.

Cities collect huge amounts of data. Until recently these data often disappeared in the vaults of (public) institutions. These data could become new resources that provide valuable knowledge about urban processes and citizen behavior – a data-commons. In the Netherlands cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Eindhoven experiment with open data initiatives and collaborate with developers to see what interesting apps and services they can build.

Using municipal open data, the website Buurtvergelijker (‘neighborhood comparer’) allows people to compare statistical information from different neighborhoods.

In what is known as reality-mining these new resources provide insights in what is happening. Information can be used to provide people with consumer recommendations based on shared patterns (Citysense), but it can also inform design programs better tailored to citizen’s needs (Twitterhouse). In the data-commons scarcity takes on another meaning. The challenge is to design interventions where individual use does not deplete the commons but instead adds value to the whole. For example, the more people use location-based services like traffic reports, and feed information back into the system, the more accurate the service becomes.

For decades policy makers, institutions and architects have tried to persuade people to actively participate in shaping their cities. Often these remain top-down trajectories. The bottom-up extreme is a community model rooted in proximity, shared interests and similar lifestyles. Yet this denies the nature of cities as places of heterogeneity and the fact that many urbanites shiver at the thought of village-like parochialism. With digital media new networked publics can be activated, beyond top-down or bottom-up but peer-to-peer and distributed. An illustration is Verbeterdebuurt (the Dutch take on Fixmystreet). This is a mobile and web app that allows citizens to report problems in their neighborhood, but also to suggest improvements and vote on each other’s ideas, and therefore assemble others around collective issues.

In the small Dutch town of Hoorn, young people successfully used the platform Verbeterdebuurt.nl to get a skate ramp built in their neighborhood (photo: Stijn van Balen).

Digital media thus allow citizens to co-design their own environment. An interesting project in Amsterdam is Face Your World by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk and architect Dennis Kaspori. Young people and other people living in this neighborhood collaborated in designing a city park using a 3D simulation environment. With this crowdsourced plan they managed to persuade the local government to abandon the initial plans for the park and execute theirs instead.

In Face Your World people co-created a neighborhood park by using a digital environment in which they could upload their own images and ideas to debate amongst each other (photo: Dennis Kaspori).

Cities worldwide (like Amsterdam) are embracing smart city policies in close collaboration with tech companies and academia to optimize urban processes. These policies are technologically driven and despite claims to the contrary tend to ignore an active role of citizens. If we truly want engaging cities, it is urgent we start exploring how we can make our cities more social rather than more high-tech.

—

From February 14 − 17 2012 the international conference and workshop Social Cities of Tomorrow takes place in Amsterdam, NL, organized by The Mobile City, Virtueel Platform and ARCAM.

The book is divided in three sections. In the first section D&B sketch the outlines of existing ubicomp research, and propose to cross-fertilize this research with ethnographical theory and methodology. In the second section they explore the potential contribution of ethnographical theory and methodology in four domains: infrastructures, mobility, privacy, and domesticity. The concluding chapter weaves together the various threads spun in the earlier chapters into a proposed framework for future research.

Section 1: combining ubicomp and ethnography

After a short introduction, D&B revisit Weiser’s influential writings on ubicomp, present an overview of spin-off research in US and UK research labs, and discuss some critiques and amendments. All this with the aim to investigate “how new futures get to be imagined and incorporated into a research agenda such as ubicomp” (21). Weiser had portrayed ubicomp as a paradigm shift in computing, a third phase after the mainframe and desktop. Yet his vision remained firmly tied to traditional notions of the workplace. It pictured existing US middle-class computer users. And it raised normal paradigmatic design and engineering challenges. They show how Weiser sought to extend computer research to a broader field that should not only included technological research and design but also the humanities and social sciences. D&B reinterpret his well-known assertion of “getting computing out of the way” as not intended to make computing physically invisible but to have it play a role in agendas originating elsewhere (19). Curiously, in my view D&B do not pursue this thought to its logical consequence, that is, explore how ubicomp can also inform ethnographical research. Instead they do only the opposite: how can ethnography inform ubicomp? This is despite their own clearly stated intentions: “[t]he question at stake here underlies any interdisciplinary effort: the difficulty of achieving a true synthesis or mutually constituted discursive arena, rather than degenerating to a case in which one discipline is essentially in service to the other” (71). I return to this ‘one-way street’ point below.

D&B distill three framing points that recur throughout the book. First, an emphasis on the ‘proximate future’ keeps placing achievements out of reach while ignoring that this future is already here, albeit in a different shape. D&B reiterate the point made in earlier publications that the ubicomp vision fairly accurately describes present-day mobile media technologies. “Arguably [...] our contemporary world – in which mobile computation and telephony are not just central aspects of Western commercial endeavors but also facets of everyday life in a range of different countries and cultures – is already one of ubicomp, albeit in unexpected forms” (25) [1]. Second, combined with a narrow focus on engineering challenges this absolves ubicomp researchers from looking at complex and varying socio-cultural settings and practices. Third, the envisioned singularity of its seamless future ignores the messiness of everyday life. Frequently, “cultural and social practices privilege disconnection, seams, and discrete distinct realms of activity and action” (22).

Following an intermediary chapter with a layman introduction to anthropology, ethnography and cultural studies the book really takes off. In chapter 4, D&B note that ubicomp research tends to treat ethnography as a kind of delivery service for vivid empirical case material. This material then is used to suggest ‘implications for design’ (65). Adopting the empirical method of participatory observation just to find out “what users want” (64), means that other powerful contributions of ethnography get lost. First, the instrumental use of ethnography marginalizes the ethnographer’s own role in interpreting, revealing and explicating. By ignoring how relationships between ethnographer, subjects and settings are shaped by subject positions and power relations, it fails to concern itself with a deep understanding of ‘context’ (which after all is what ubicomp is about). Second, the ‘implications for design’ model positions designers as gate-keepers in shaping new technologies, thereby effectively placing ethnography and the people under study outside the design process. Third, and I think most important for the issues we are raising with The Mobile City, it assumes that people merely adopt and appropriate newly designed technologies into their everyday lives, instead of understanding technologies as sites for everyday social and cultural production and meaning (73). Ethnography teaches that culture is not a stable set of values and properties of people. It is generated through everyday practice, and at the same time produces everyday experiences (53/54). The conceptual distinction between a domain of everyday practice and a domain of technological design – the ‘social-technical gap’ (Ackerman, pdf) – therefore does not stand up. They are mutually constitutive. The gap then needs no closing, it is “where all the interesting stuff happens” (73).

Such is precisely the problem with the line of reasoning we find in most accounts of ‘smart cities’ or ‘intelligent cities’. By merely seeking to employ technologies as plugins or add-ons to solve the problems cities face (more efficient energy and transport use, less wasteful water and food supplies, and so on), they fail to see how urban space and city life itself is constructed and understood through the range of technologies that urbanites use on an everyday basis. Technology and the city are not exclusive domains. Urban life is a technologically mediated life; and technological practices are intimately tied to urban situations and experiences.

D&B forcefully argue that by adopting its theory and methodology, ICT research can benefit from ethnography in a more profound way:

[T]he ethnographic engagement is not one that figures people as potential users of technology and looks to uncover facts about them that might be useful to technologists (or marketers). Ethnographic engagements with topics, people, and field sites instead are used to understand phenomena of significance to design, and the implications arise out of the analysis of these materials. (85)

This engagement has implications for issues like responsibility and representation, and the distinction between designers and users. Being a cultural anthropologist by training myself, I found this fourth chapter the most stimulating and original part of the book. Read that one if you have little time.

Section 2: ubicomp and everyday life

In the second section D&B put on this cultural lens. Building on ethnographical material, they show how infrastructures, mobility, privacy and the domestic realm are indeed far messier than the ideal of homogeneous and orderly spheres that can be catered by seamless, calm technologies. By infrastructures D&B mean not just the technologies that underlie various networks. Instead they outline a socio-cultural understanding of space and spatiality. As computing leaves the desktop and moves into spaces beyond, ubicomp researchers need to consider that these spaces are already inhabited. Through people’s practices space is produced and experienced as a series of infrastructures: of naming conventions, movements, types of social interactions, and so on (108). Pervasive computing must take into account the physicality of wireless infrastructures, the situatedness of mobile services, and the cultural framing of space. Moreover, technical infrastructures fail. This messy reality means that designers should focus on the fact that people give social and cultural interpretations to technological infrastructures, that architecture is all about boundaries and transitions (Chalmer’s ‘seams’, pdf), and that new technologies inherently cause people to reencounter space (115). All this is supported by ethnographic material, among others about Aboriginal central Australia (104-106).

This socio-cultural perspective again weaves through the chapter about mobility:

Patterns of connection arise around forms of movement and mobility; our sense of spatial organization emerges from the patterns of movement of everyday life, as made visible in Kevin Lynch’s study (1960) of people’s “egological maps” of their cities. […] Mobile technology is not, then, simply operating within a specific environment; it is implicated in the production of spatiality and spatial experience. (120)

Early ubicomp research mainly focussed on the mobility of office workers in workplace settings. Nowadays, with publicly available wireless networks, the city itself becomes a major concern for the emerging field of ‘urban informatics’ (120). I am not sure whether a depiction of urban computing as the pureblood offspring of ubicomp is accurate. It doesn’t matter. More interesting is the question how ubicomp can continue to inform this quick-paced field to avoid being sidelined as the eternal promise. D&B propose to look at how “we start to encounter the spatiality of the city through the range of services that might be available there, especially when such services are deployed selectively”, and how “we think about personal mobility and urban movement in the context of technology design” (122). They call attention to mobility as a social practice, to the moral connotations of the landscape, to spatial imaginaries, and mobility in history.

Across all these instances, what we find is that the encounter with space is framed by cultural logics, or a series of collective understandings through which space, spaces, and their representations take on particular kinds of meaning. These logics are themselves social products; they arise out of our actions and interactions as we move around in and make sense of the world (Lefebvre 1991). The cultural logics shape, and are shaped by, patterns of movement and action in space. […] What is especially of interest here is the ways in which information technologies provide sites and occasions for the development of new forms of environmental knowing. How does the presence of technological infrastructures such as GSM or Wi-Fi shape or respond to patterns of movement and activity in space? (130-131)

D&B unconvincingly suggest to trade in ‘mobility’ for ‘fluidity’, on the ground that mobility presupposes fixed boundaries and relations between discrete places, objects and activities among which we move. Fluidity, by contrast, emphasizes adaptation to continuous variability (134). I don’t believe that many involved in mobility studies will follow suit. A ‘new mobilities paradigm’ has been called into life precisely to counter stable sociological notions, while not losing sight of the fact that fixating boundaries and protocols (not necessarily ‘fixed’, they may be unstable and temporary) are continuously produced, maintained and indeed needed [2]. Fluidity conjures up all sorts of post-modern sweeping generalizations of a supposed boundary-less world, the ‘melting of solids’, nomadic subjectivities and the fragmentation of identities, etc. That seems a step back to me, especially when one is interested in an ‘on the ground’ view of the messiness of ubicomp or urban computing practices.

After a chapter about privacy, D&B turn their attention to the domestic sphere as a new arena where information systems are deployed. This complements Weiser’s prime emphasis on the office. The home is not a spatial category but a social category imbued with emotional and moral values. They present a lengthy analysis of the shed as the edge/margin/fringe/periphery of the domestic, to scrutinize technological conceptions of the ‘smart home’. Their shed analysis resuscitates classical anthropological notions like Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner’s ‘liminal space’ (173), Erving Goffman’s ‘spoiled identities’ (174), Lévi-Strauss’ ‘bricoleur’ (174), Van Gennep’s ‘rite the passage’ (175), Mary Douglas’ ‘purity and danger’ (175-180), and Malinowski’s ‘gift circles’ (181). As one term tumbles over the next, I couldn’t help but wonder whether this is all a bit too much for the novice ubicomp researcher of good will. More troublesome still in my view is that they ignore how ubicomp research can be good sport and give something back to anthropology, perhaps by refining old concepts with current insights. This could have been a fine opportunity to indeed achieve “a true synthesis or mutually constituted discursive arena” (71). How? For example, ‘liminality’ (limen = border in Latin) seems to no longer describe clearly spatio-temporally confined zones where everyday norms are suspended or inverted, as in the ‘primitive societies’ that Van Gennep wrote about [3]. Technologically mediated interactions – e.g. mobile communication as a ritual type of gift exchange [4] – are more tightly woven into everyday interactions. Debates in the ubicomp field about ‘seamlessness’ vs. ‘seamfulness’ then could inform a deepened anthropological/sociological understanding of notions like ‘copresence’, and help to re-conceptualize the term ‘liminality’.

Section 3: a future agenda for ubicomp

In the final chapter D&B again declare that for them ubicomp “remains a fertile, productive site of inquiry” (187), both as a research and design project (myth) and as a mundane element of everyday life (mess):

It is one of the few interdisciplinary hubs at which the intersections of new technologies and social practices can be theorized, built, and evaluated, then theorized all over again. This is possible in ubicomp through the deep entwining of social and technical in its most fundamental proposals, its close attention to emerging practice alongside technical innovation, and its embrace – always partial but nonetheless significant – of social, cultural, and humanistic inquiry alongside the technoscientific. (187)

In this ‘interdisciplinary hybrid practice’, cultural phenomena are prior, not consequent, to design (189-191). It involves asking not what things people might want to use, but asking what people do and feel and how technologies then can play in a role in this (192). This means a shift in emphasis from things to people (not unlike Nold & Kranenburg’s recent plea for an “internet of people” rather than an ‘internet of things’, or my argument in this post).

D&B propose three orientations for future ubicomp inquiries, aiming to add complexity rather than wishing it away. These are: legibility (how people read places, technologies and actions), literacy (how information is represented), and legitimacy (attention for culturally variable forms of ‘environmental epistemologies’) (D&B, 2011: 192-200). These strike me as precisely the themes that locative media projects frequently seek to address. Nevertheless D&B do not pay attention to the locative media field, which seems an odd omission in this light.

Digital technologies can render the everyday world collectively legible in two ways, D&B say. Panoptic legibility involves centralist modern planning. It is a view from above that seeks to eliminate differences in favor of a coherent ordering. Local legibility looks at the heterogeneity of objects and actions. It reflects how people in practice engage with the world and emphasizes individual differences. Not surprisingly, D&B talk about “making the invisible visible” in location-based systems, social networking and data-mining (195). In their view sensing technologies order the world rather than describe it (195).

With literacy D&B draw attention to the ways ubicomp represents objects and activities in everyday life. Again unsurprisingly, they turn to cartography and mapping. Here too they distinguish between top-down and bottom-up practices. In contrast to the standardizing Mercator projection, ‘occasion maps’ or ‘mud maps’ consist of just the information needed for that situation. When people draw out directions to someone they narrate a journey instead of representing space as a homogeneous Cartesian container (197). Cultural knowledge is performative rather than representational.

A focus on legitimacy shows that on-the-ground forms of ‘environmental knowing’ are not always compatible with the dominant technical rationality that underlies the modern worldview. Data-analysis and ‘management by the numbers’, as for instance found in neoclassical economics and macro-economic modeling, not only describe the world but quickly come to act as prescriptions that organize the world. Struggles for the legitimacy of alternative worldviews may arise around issues like land use. “As scientific and computational accounts of the social and natural world are the basis of industrial and governmental practice, they inevitably come into conflict with the alternative epistemologies that they displace” (198-199). This made me doubt whether alternative forms of spatial knowledge are necessarily displaced (substitution scenarios are all too common in new media theory..) or simply survive in the background. In their effort to connect the seemingly remote disciplines of ubicomp and ethnography, they overlook the proximate field of locative media that often exposes those hidden local narratives by using media technologies. Locative media has its roots in artistic practice rather than computer research, and invariably uses cartography as a visual medium. As in reflexive modern art the medium itself becomes scrutinized, legibility, literacy and legitimacy of mapping and spatial narratives are by nature part of locative media practices. (A point to be made somewhere else..)

Nonetheless D&B raise valuable points here, with some interesting (more philosophical) implications also for urban culture. For instance, from an organizational standpoint the recent surge in open gov/open data and citizen science projects appears to break with singular institutional proprietorship of information. Yet from a critical viewpoint, its underlying episteme continues to be a ‘management by the numbers’ and calculative rationality. The supposed democratic appeal of open data then merely serves to discursively legitimize the quantification of almost any aspect of urban life. More concretely, the question arises whether the good city is one where every possible variable is set, measured, visualized, and therefore can be acted upon. Examples abound. Is the air clean enough to go out? Check! Is the traffic not too dense? Check! Is the house party across the street not producing more noise than allowed by policy? Check! Is the crime rate in the new neighborhood low enough (for my insurance)? Check! Have I burned my 2500 calories today? Check!

So what’s wrong with this ‘quantified city’? Isn’t all this great!?! Sure, but it also raises new concerns. For instance about representation, both as in who represents and as in what is represented. Who sets the norms? Who does the measuring? Who have access to those technologies, data sources and enough skills to do something useful with it? What is actually represented, what is being left out? What problem is being fixed and for whom? Steven Johnson for example asks in Wired whether these data and apps can do more than solve clearly definable problems. “The question is whether these platforms can also address the more subtle problems of big-city neighborhoods – the sins of omission, the holes in the urban fabric where some crucial thread is missing” [5]. In other words, how to measure and visualize things that are not there or solve problems for those who don’t speak? And what about urban issues that are too complex or impossible to quantify? Courtney E. Martin asks in Next American City magazine: “how do these tools handle complex urban challenges like gentrification, teenagers with nothing to do, or mental health issues affecting the growing homeless population? It’s noble to empower citizens to ‘see, click, fix’ when they spot broken potholes, but there are larger, more intractable looming problems that require far more nuanced and complex systems of engagement” [6]. In other words, will a break with institutional proprietorship result in a broadly felt ownership of the city? An ethical question to finish: to what extent will these systems nudge or force us into homogenizing regimes of quantified normalcy? (“You’ve reached the average/maximum/minimum .., do you wish to continue?”) And what does that mean for urban public life as an ongoing negotiation of conflicting values and differences? Too bad D&B only look at ubicomp in relation to mobility and the domestic sphere and do not pay attention to publicness. Dealing with differences in public space seems to me one of the more interesting concerns for situated computing.

Concluding remarks

In Divining a Digital Future D&B reiterate many arguments made in earlier work, provide them with more flesh, and formulate some future directions for ubicomp. To be sure this is not a bad thing, neither for those who wish to read a book on the current state of affairs in ubicomp, nor for ubicomp researchers who wish to enlarge the scope of their own practice. The book attempts to foster an anthropological sensitivity among its (presumed) CHI readership. Fundamentally, their proposition to approach technology (and urbanism) through an ethnographic lens is highly relevant in my view. Imagine what the future of our cities look would like if it were the sole concern of coders and engineers? Indeed, we should never forget Jane Jacobs’ lesson that livable and lively cities are about people.

I also appreciate their relational view of ubicomp as intricately bound up with the messiness of everyday life, their concern with its multiplicity of forms and shapes, and their attention for fringes (edges, periphery, margins). Important too in my view is that D&B implicitly question the notion of ‘the everyday’. The everyday does not consist of stable pre-given categories (home, mobility, etc.) that can be supplemented with ubicomp. It arises from socio-cultural performances and is continuously negotiated. Still, they could have stated this even more explicitly, because ‘the everyday’ is so often unproblematically assumed as a self-explanatory term in both technology and urban studies [7].

That being said, D&B’s focus is too much directed inward in my view. D&B dish up insights from urban ethnography, sociology and human geography to a ubicomp audience. The ubicomp crowd may find this refreshing; those more familiar with these ‘soft’ disciplines will already consider such insights well-accepted. As said above, what I feel is lacking from their approach is a clear vision how ubicomp can reciprocate to an understanding of the intricacies of techno-urban practices. What can ethnography and urbanism learn from ubicomp? D&B point out that:

the operation of the cultural logics we have explored is conditioned by the technologies through which the landscape may be encountered and navigated … Similarly, information technologies are deeply implicated in the operation and emergence of these logics, and in the form of collective encounters with space. (131)

Surely these are familiar insights to (urban) sociologists and anthropologists. There is nothing particularly ubicomp about them. If ubicomp’s added strength indeed is bringing in the design part (see the previous quote, 187), I would have been curious to learn about an actual case of successful ethnography+design synthesis where both sides are mutually constitutive.

Moreover, there is a certain circularity in the argument: we encounter space through cultural logics; these logics are created by our movements through space. Here’s another typical example: “Legibility is a product of a social and cultural encounter with the world; in turn, it structures and shapes those encounters” (195-195) [8]. D&B’s closest answer to this question of ‘mutual shaping’ (134) is to say: “[t]echnologies provide us with ways to narrate space, to describe and articulate it, but narratives have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies as accounts of everyday life become sedimented as understandings, expectations, and predictions” (135). Here’s where their frequent metaphorical use of the (cultural) lens comes in (e.g. 53, 58, 78, 94, 106, 120, 123, 134, 135). D&B continually point out how ‘cultural lenses’ mediate people’s experiences of space and place, and their use of technologies. Metaphors however conceal as much as they intend to reveal, so the cultural lens is problematic for at least two reasons. First, it does not give an account of how culture itself is internally divided and subject to change. The lens is a rather static metaphor. Second, it implies that people can only wear one lens at the same time. It does not take into account that an increasing number of people move between various cultural settings, or are brought up in multiple cultural contexts, and therefore are accustomed to multiple – often conflicting – lenses. Questions like these should be posed as well in order to forward the work on computation that is truly contextual.

Read more book reviews at The Mobile City >>

Reviewed book:

Dourish, P., & Bell, G. (2011). Divining a digital future: mess and mythology in ubiquitous computing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Notes

[1] Moran, T. P., & Dourish, P. (2001). Introduction to This Special Issue on Context-Aware Computing. Human-Computer Interaction, 16(2-4), 87-95 (p. 87); Bell, G., & Dourish, P. (2006). Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Notes on Ubiquitous Computing’s Dominant Vision. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11(2), 133-143 (p. 135).

[2] See for instance: Hannam, K., Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings. Mobilities, 1(1), 1-22

[3] Van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage. London: Routledge & Paul (originally published in 1908) (p. 115).

[4] See for instance: Taylor, A. S., & Harper, R. (2003). The Gift of the Gab?: A Design Oriented Sociology of Young People’s Use of Mobiles. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 12(3), 267-296. (indeed, closing with a section “Design Suggestions”!); or my own analysis: De Lange, M. (2010). Moving Circles: mobile media and playful identities. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam. (pp. 203-213)

[5] Steven Johnson (2010). What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York. In: Wired, November 1 2010

[6] Courtney E. Martin (2011). Hope? There’s No App for That. In: Next American City magazine, Summer 2011 issue.

[7] See for instance: Ehrmann, J., Lewis, C., & Lewis, P. (1968). Homo Ludens Revisited. Yale French Studies (41), 31-57. Ehrman criticizes the unquestioned assumption of an a priori realm of the everyday, the ordinary, reality, as somehow separate from play.

[8] The structure vs. agency problem is a well-known chicken and egg question in the social sciences to which a number of solutions have been advanced, like Giddens’ praxis, Bourdieu’s habitus, or Latour’s escape from it altogether with actor-network theory.

Last week I attended the meeting “Chances for the enterprising architect” (PDF, announcement in Dutch). The evening was organized by the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce in collaboration with innovation network Syntens and the Royal Institute of Dutch Architects (BNA). Topic of the evening was how the profession needs to change under the influence of the financial crisis. Hard times mean that architects need to reconsider their professional practice:

New work is not up for grabs at the moment. Construction plans have been frozen or are executed in phases. Especially for the smaller offices it is difficult to squeeze oneself in. Nevertheless, we believe that there are more opportunities that may appear at first sight. We want to inspire them to recognize, create and utilize these chances.

We have repeatedly claimed with The Mobile City that new media technologies profoundly change urban life, offer new challenges and opportunities to the design of cities, and that therefore architects should ‘critically engage’ with these developments (see here, here, here, and here). This evening should therefore give some insights into the question if and how architects are indeed doing so. I’ll give my conclusions of this evening right away. It turned out that architects are indeed taking notice of new media. Two of the six parallel sessions that took place explicitly dealt with media and technologies (one about social media, one about BIM). At the same time there is still a world to explore. For instance, the session about social media hardly ventured beyond their use as instruments for communication strategies. Almost no attention was being paid to digital technologies as instruments to design with-, or as an integral part of a concept (to design for-).

Architects must make choices

First plenary speaker was Jan Griffioen from Griffioen Architects, an allround mid-size bureau. Griffioen is also a commission member of the BNA research fund. In this age, Griffioen argued, architects must search for clarity and redefine their position. Architecture has become a very diverse and increasingly muddled field. It is time to make choices, Griffioen insisted. These choices need to be made at the four levels that are part of a well-developed business plan. (1) First, architects must define their vision and mission. Instead of trying to do everything, they should establish their unique position in the field by formulating an answer to questions like what kind of architect am I?, where do I position myself in the field?, and where can I add the most value?. (2) Second, architects must define their approach. This means answering questions like how do I want to work?, what kind of business do I want to run? (e.g. with friends or family; formal or informal?), what external partners do I want to collaborate with? (e.g. a traditional company or a networked organization of freelancers?). (3) Third, architects must concern themselves with marketing & communication. This means exploring the question how do I make myself known to the world? Architects must choose their preferred methods and media for communicating about their work. (4) Fourth, architects must choose what activities they will be doing. This involves defining what am I going to do?, what annoys me, what do I want to improve?, and who do I want to address?

Griffioen observed that many architects feel that they have been robbed of their traditional specialties. Sketching, modeling, construction, execution, and so on are increasingly outsourced to others. What is left for the architect? New technologies also provide new opportunities, he says. For instance, thanks to Building Information Modeling (BIM) architects can oversee and coordinate the collaboration between all parties involved.

After this “just do it!”-type talk, it was time to move to the breakout sessions. There were two rounds of six sessions each. I opted for those that explicitly dealt with media and technologies (social media and BIM).

How can social media help architects?

The first session I attended was the social media session. Speakers were Elly van Wattingen (Syntens), and Carl Kerchmar (StudioNUM and Portal To Your Dreams). Elly raised the question “how can architects use social media effectively?” According to her, architects should use social media to interact with their peers and be visible to the outside world. It is very important not to use social media for sending only but also to interact with others.

She presented a large number of examples. HM architects put a moodboard on their website for customers. Unexpectedly, customers put it Facebook and shared it with friends, thus spreading the name of the office. Heijmans Real Estate uses a Facebook page to communicate about their projects as a way of “image building”. The Netherlands Architecture Institute has developed an augmented reality app that unlocks Rotterdam’s past, present and future (realized or imagined), and can also be used as a platform to present plans to clients. The website Projektplek offers a secured and collaborative online project space. Linkedin can be used to build up a network, and follow and participate in relevant groups. Architects can also maintain their own weblogs, a great way to share knowledge with others and acquire a reputation as an expert. One example is Architect 21 by Anette van Apeldoorn. Another example is Anet, a network of architects maintained by Bjorn van Rheenen. One can use Twitter to interact with others, like BNA’s Fred Schoorl, or to coordinate affairs  between a project group (“hey, where are my drawings?”). Or Twitter can be used in innovative new ways to harvest information, like XML’s Twitterhouse.

Second up was Carl Kerchmar, a media developer and technology trendwatcher. He talked about a concept for a business area enhanced by media technologies called CloudMrkt, which he is developing together with an architect (see StudioNUM). CloudMrkt proposes to deliver a crowd sourcing toolkit for a local business area. The idea is that multiple entrepreneurs can tap into and contribute to a common pool of resources, from sharing internet connections and software (thus reducing costs) to sharing physical meeting spaces. This could be a way to augment otherwise unattractive commercial areas, like Amsterdam’s Westpoort. The concept is still under development. This seems an interesting attempt to explore new opportunities for urban development with the aid of digital media technologies. We’ll keep an eye on how they develop this plan in the future.

There were some pretty skeptical questions among 20-30 architects or so present, especially among the older generations. Why should I use it? What’s the use of connecting with someone via a network? How do I cope with the torrent of information? Isn’t this a waste of time? Why should I be interested in someone’s private affairs? The speaker had a hard time explaining the change in mindset needed to engage with social media.  Older architects in particular seemed to be largely unconvinced of social media as a way to communicate about one’s work and share information. To come up with creative and innovative new ways to use social media as part of the design process itself then appears an even bigger leap. I couldn’t help getting the impression that many architects remain unwilling to engage with new media in their profession. In that sense, little progress seems to have been made since our 2009 talk at the Day of the Young Architect, when just half of the young architects indicated that they recognized the profound influence of new media on their profession.

BIM: the gamification of architecture?

In the second session Aart van der Vlist from VDVZ architects presented the possibilities and challenges involved in designing with the aid of BIM (Building Information Modeling, read more here), a software-based 3D modeling environment. The main advantage of BIM, he asserted, is that all phases of the building process can now be overseen and managed. BIM is a comprehensive method to integrate the design, the execution, and the actual facility management. Time planning now also becomes part of an architect’s work (“4D planning”, he called this). BIM offers a number of advantages:

• Collaboration: databases are interchangeable between stakeholders and between various software packages; cloud storage services exists for easy cooperation between multiple parties.
• Risk management: the software has advanced error checking built in. Moreover, in each phase a validation moment can be built in and progress can be discussed with the client.
• Cost reduction: bypass the middleman and directly deal with factories that deliver materials and products.
• Environmental benefits: BIM minimizes the loss of material, time, and energy by much more sophisticated calculations of needs.

There are also a number of (potential) problems. A contractor may not yet use the software, files easily get very large, synchronizing and version management between multiple parties is tricky, and local legislation is not yet integrated into the software. Moreover, some in the audience raised a concern for protecting their intellectual property: what if someone runs away with your ready-to-make files?

Van der Vlist argued that BIM is not only useful for big, complex projects and big agencies, but also for smaller projects. Very precise instructions can be given to the lumber factory, so that the craftsmen at the building site merely need to assemble from pre-fab elements (a further blow to Sennett’s craftsmanship?). Van der Vlist noted that older architects have a hard time learning how to work with BIM, whereas young people – who are used to 3D gaming – have no problem at all. With BIM, urban design increasingly takes place in a simulation environment. At some point I asked Van der Vlist in what way his work was any different from that of game modelers. He answered that architects and game designers have a lot in common, and that he himself considered game design an inspiring example. Of course architects in the end build things for the physical world, but the virtual and physical are definitely intersecting, he said. What’s more, BIM allows architects to play with a host of design parameters and uncertain outcomes, whereby each change leads to a new configuration. In that sense it can be argued that architecture too becomes part of a broader cultural shift towards ‘gamification’, i.e. the application of game principles outside a bounded game environment (albeit without the instant gratification of earning points).

Conclusion

Is a new generation of architects truly arising, as a Dutch television series (in Dutch) is currently looking into? The organizers could have done better by inviting a younger generation of architects to present some best practices. At past events organized by The Mobile City, innovative young architects have presented work in which they explore how information derived from social networks can be fed back into the design program, or how the balance between producers and end-users can be tilted by using social media for user-specific architecture. These new opportunities were largely ignored this evening. As said above, the need to rethink one’s own profession was felt profoundly among those present. The downside of this ‘inner turn’ seems that many remain too myopic to look outside their own frames and consider how other professional fields can help lift the next wave of architecture.

This book from 2008 had been on my desk for quite some time but finally I got around to do a review. It is listed in a recent overview of a decade of writing about digital cities. Three years earlier, one of the editors Alessandro Aurigi wrote the monograph “Making the Digital City: The Early Shaping of Urban Internet Space”.

The main question of this edited book is how enriched media environments, ubiquitous computing, mobile and wireless communication technologies, and the internet are modifying city living and the fruition of urban spaces. A familiar stance by now, the editors argue against a clear boundary between the digital and the physical:

“in the augmented city, ‘virtual’ and ‘physical’ spaces are no longer two separate dimensions, but just parts of a continuum, of a whole. The physical and the digital environment have come to define each other and concepts such as public space and “third place”, identity and knowledge, citizenship and public participation are all inevitably affected by the shaping of the reconfigured, augmented urban space” (p. 1).

The stated aim to strive for an interdisciplinary “contamination of perspectives” is attested to by the fact that Aurigi is an architect/urban planner and De Cindio a computer scientist. The contributing authors are a mixed bunch in both disciplinary and cultural background, although most have an academic affiliation. Architects, urbanists and geographers go side by side with new media and information- and communication researchers. Contributors hail from (or work in) Italy, USA, Canada, Brazil, Australia, South Korea, UK, and South Africa.

The book is structured in three main sections: Augmented Spaces, Augmenting Communities, and Planning Challenges in the Augmented City. I will not discuss all contributions but pick out those that I found most interesting.

Part I: augmented spaces

In his introduction to part I, Alessandro Aurigi points out that urban ICTs can be very visible, like urban screens, or partially hidden, like mobile phones, or largely invisible as geo-references in databases. Further, the ‘everyday character’ of the physical-digital intersection exists on the global level but also on a very local scale. Another tension is between a positive connotation of digitally enhanced space, as enabling connections and a sense of belonging to place, versus a negative view, as becoming controlled by the network and increasing uncertainty, disorientation and displacement. This intertwining of spaces and information is not something radically new. Cities have always been inscribed with layers of information. The question then is: how does ‘augmentation’ as a quantitative property (more, faster, better) also become a qualitative change of urban life (and perhaps even results in ‘less’ of other things) (p.6)? Despite their separation for analysis’ sake in the book, Aurigi stresses that space, community and design are deeply connected issues. At the same time he argues for a bit of modesty in addressing augmented urbanism. Maybe it is less a question of finding completely new rules and theories than reframing existing ones.

In her chapter “Places, Situations and Connections”, Katharine Willis questions how citizens experience and occupy urban public spaces through invisible mobile and wireless technologies. Her paper is split in two: a theoretical section, and a case study of how the presence of Wi-Fi nodes in London affects the use and perception of public space. Willis observes that visual presence is a requirement for authenticating our experience of the environment and social life. This visual preoccupation may explain the present attention for data-visualizations in this age of invisible telecommunications. Drawing on Kevin Lynch’s notion of ‘imageability’, and Lakoff and Johnson’s work on spatial metaphors in organizing interactions, Willis argues that place and space are fundamental elements for meaningful social life. Willis distinguishes between metric Euclidean space and place, and social space and place (what Erving Goffman has called “social situations”). To this I would add the experience of space/place, following John Agnew’s tripartite definition of place as geometrical location, social locale, and mental sense of place [¹].

According to Willis, technologies are (implicitly) designed around this relationship between environment and activities that take place there. In Euclidean terms a building is an enclosed space with a particular function. But in social terms it consists of links and nodes in a social network. For example, churches or classrooms are designed to support a radial topology of communication, while cafés are designed to support interconnected clusters of interaction. New media modify the conditions for communication, Willis says. They “reconfigure Euclidian spatial frameworks framed around spatial proximity and bounded-ness, in a manner which is fundamentally different from the PC internet” (p.15). Frames that are reconfigured are: separation, bounded-ness, presence, linkage, and temporality. Separation (either being displaced or sharing the same space for communication) is now partly defined by varying ranges of wireless media protocols like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Bounded-ness (collectively defining boundaries) becomes part of mobile communication, for instance through the typical practice of establishing location on the mobile phone by asking “where are you?”. Presence is no longer merely defined in physical terms but can also mean co-location in a shared media space, although “flesh meets” do take on a high level of importance. Linkage and the potential for collective action is intensified and multi-layered. Temporality and synchronicity become matters of (inter)personal evaluation rather than depending on clock time (p.15-16). Wi-Fi networks in public space for instance are not visible structures, and therefore not perceived as a visuo-spatial mental image. Instead, they exist in a manner similar to our concepts of social networks: as possible relations separated only by a switch to a network connection, as structures not defined by physical distance but by limits of access and usability (p.23).

In my view Willis offers an interesting perspective of the built environment in informational/communicative terms. How does architecture enable or constrain certain social interactions? Her two topologies of church and café fit snugly with John Durham Peters’ two communicative ideal-types: one-way dissemination and two-way dialogue [²]. It also counters monolithic conceptions of public space as either a neutral homogenous meeting ground or a mosaic of differences. A network perspective of space made up of ‘nodes’, ‘connections’ and ‘borders’ opens up a situational and multi-layered view of urban publicness as spaces of friction between sameness and selfhood, similarity and difference.

Heesang Lee draws on a large body of (mobile) media literature to make a similar argument, namely that under the influence of mobile technologies (public) space can no longer be defined by spatial and temporal coordinates. Instead, mobile networks produce relative and relational networks between bodies and spaces (p.45). They create a “micro-network society” in which ordinary bodies themselves become nodes (p. 44). With the mobile phone the Cartesian unity of the human body becomes extensible and divisible, as people can now exist in multiple places at once. And the spaces around the body become multiple and eversible. A simple phone call between two people traveling knots together multiple spaces: the physical transit space between the two places they move between, the space of the other person, the cloud space where their phone numbers are stored. In spite of the idea that mobility and multiplicity cause people to become detached from their original territories, mobile phones are highly bound to local places, Lee argues. His survey shows that people use the mobile phone for communication with those they frequently meet in their everyday lives, while reserving e-mail for those they did not meet often.

Like his keynote talk at the first The Mobile City event in 2008, Malcolm McCullough is as interested in continuities and parallels as in the usual emphasis on rupture and change in the present media city (in fact, his approach is to look for familiar themes in the history of urbanism in order to highlight current differences). Starting from the observation that cities have always been inscribed or ‘augmented’ with information, he asks who has the right to mark up the city? Participatory web 2.0 culture has spilled over to urban markup: the tagging, mapping, linking, and sharing of one’s environments with the aid of locative and mobile media. Still, in the city not everything can be personalized. You cannot go around and place your own street signs and road markings. An intriguing question McCullough poses is whether the augmented city, aside from information pollution, will leave valuable archeological traces for posterity? The place par excellence where mechanisms of selection and information architecture occur is the library. When more and more people are now editing and publishing themselves, information access, collection and preservation become particularly urgent matters. The library has to find a renewed balance between the ‘mob rule’ of the most popular productions and focusing on quality control and educating the public. Our present age of media urbanism requires new mechanisms of selecting and preserving our cultural commons.

Marcus Foth and Paul Sanders study how ‘publicness’ in neighborhoods and local communities can be designed, by comparing three urban renewal projects in Australian inner-city residential architecture. They observe that approaches towards neighborhood development are based on utopian objectives to revive a collective community spirit (p. 84). This ignores the tendency for “urban tribes” to gather in peer-to-peer and private ways, partly physical and partly virtual (p.83). So how can this behavior be accommodated in urban design? The authors suggest three pathways. First, one may try to elicit serendipitous encounters. Second, one may attempt to strengthen socio-cultural animation by allowing residents to initiate and organize collective actions. Third, conditions can be created for digital augmentation by allowing residents to develop community networks that complement physical public spaces. For this, cross-disciplinary exchanges between urban designers, computer scientists, and urban sociologists need to be established.

David Murakami Wood presents a thoughtful discussion of work about privacy issues in the “pervasive surveillance society”. He pays particular attention to “spatial protocols”, the new codes and rules that govern our society that is increasingly dependent on technology-mediated forms of surveillance. This focus on ‘code’ has to be taken quite literally (he calls computer programmers “a new priesthood for the digital age” (p. 101)). Murakami Wood argues that social scientists have tended to neglect the codes embedded and politics involved in standardizing protocols like TCP/IP networking, XML data formatting, and MPEG multimedia content encoding. Drawing on the work of Agustin Arraya, he identifies several problems with the idea of pervasive computing. First, when computerized surveillance recedes into the ‘background’, as Weiser famously envisioned, a loss of the ‘otherness’ of things occurs. We can no longer see he mechanisms of surveillance. Second, when our environments become responsive and even anticipatory, the world turns into a manipulable artifact. This allows for military precision surveillance in which nothing is ever forgotten. Third, pervasive computing simplifies agency to rational choice and reduces human need to the objectives of corporate capitalism and the neo-liberal economic agenda. In the new ‘spatial protocol’ there is still territoriality. Yet it is not merely the ‘outside’ of physical public space but also the ‘inside’ of databases and networks. Similar to Willis’ argument, Murakami Wood proposes it would be better to talk about topologies than about space. In computer science topology refers to the physical patterning of connectivity of elements in networks determined by protocols.

Part II: Augmenting communities

In her introduction to the second section, Fiorella De Cindio raises the question whether augmented space enriches networks of local social relationships or annihilates them. The very nature of the city as “an impulse toward community” by transforming an urbe into a civitas is challenged (p.107). Digital technologies make the walled city with its concentrated populations permeable, she writes. Of course we should doubt the validity of this typical container view of the traditional city De Cindio assumes here. Was the city indeed such a closed and local entity? Weren’t there always multiple relations to ‘elsewhere’: with the rural hinterland that provided food and raw resources (and labor in the industrial age), with other cities in trade relations and migrations, and even as a virtual ‘imaginary elsewhere’ with the power to represent and/or identify with (Babel, Atlantis, Jerusalem)? This takes some of the sting out of this question. Nevertheless the issue remains: can new media contribute to lively ‘hybrid communities’? The continuous present verb in Augmenting Communities suggests that, unlike with perfect present ‘already-there’ of Augmented Spaces, the authors themselves feel there is still some way to go.

And indeed, the contributions in this section tend to be less solid than in the previous section, and more speculative. For instance, Gary Gumpert and Susan Drucker somewhat ease their way through with the notion of a “permeable walled city” (p. 120). As media technologies make city boundaries more porous, communication and identifying with communities become matters of choice rather than based on physical proximity. Trust and authentication in media practices are the reincarnations of the old city walls, they suggest. Personally I found it a bit disappointing that this section contains so many articles about how community network websites help to sustain a local or interest-based sense of community and civic participation. This is a well-trodden area of research done years earlier (notably by Wellman & Hampton in a series of publications about ‘Netville’), and therefore does not shed new light on the interplay between technology and the city in the age of mobile media. And when authors indeed do study the use of mobile media, as Mark Gaved and Paul Mulholland do with OpenStreetMaps as a case of grassroots activism, it unfortunately remains too short and sketchy to add much insights.

One paper in this section did offer me new insights. Natalie Pang, Tom Denison, Kirsty Williamson, Graeme Johanson and Don Schauder explore the idea of a “knowledge commons” as an essential resource for community building and participation in the information age (p.186). They make an interesting distinction between three notions of ‘ownership’ (a theme we will be focussing on in the near future with The Mobile City). Res privatae refers to the right of individuals, families, or institutions to own private property. Res publicae refers to the services for which responsibility has been transferred to a legitimate authority (usually the state). Res communes – the English ‘commons’ – refers to the governance of resources free (as in speech) and common to all, such as natural resources [³]. The latter two are usually conflated. But the authors assert a difference between these notions. A res publica is not the same as common property. As an example, we may think of McCullough’s remark about not being allowed to place you own street signs (luckily we have given the state a monopoly on that!). A further link with McCullough’s contribution is the attention these author pay to the public library as a center for sustaining this knowledge commons locally.

The conceptual distinction between three notions of ownership connects to present developments in the field of open data/open gov (although not touched upon in the article). See for instance the Rotterdam Open Data initiative. To what extent should the information that public institutions and we ourselves are willingly or unwillingly generating and scattering be considered a ‘data commons’ over which we should be allowed a measure of ownership? (This is something my colleague Martijn de Waal is working on in his dissertation). Another reason why this tripartite distinction is important in my view is that it offers a potential solution to a recently voiced concern by the Institute For The Future in their roadmap “a Planet of Civic Laboratories: the future of cities, information, and inclusion”. The IFTF observes that governments and public sector institutions are happily tapping into the pool of engaged citizens under the moniker of a more collaborative and participatory approach to the delivery of public services (p.4). But this ‘crowdsourcing’ also means that the public sector is “offloading” its formal responsibilities. The distinction between res publica and res communis helps to redefine the boundaries of what our governments should do and what citizens themselves may take up. Likewise, we can use it to ask the question why so many res publicae in our cities – like public safety and security – have been turned into res privatae: outsourced to private companies that often are not subjected to the same mechanisms of supervision and accountability (and those are res communes in a democratic civil society).

Part III: Planning Challenges in the Augmented City

In the last section, Aurigi notes that, perhaps paradoxically, computing technologies are complicating rather than simplifying place-making jobs. Formal planning is complemented with all sort of informal urban ICT uses. Aurigi asserts that up-to-date knowledge of changes in city life and a clear planning strategy are prerequisites, and at the same time he calls for a dose of modesty in developing radically new theories. “[W]e might not need new theories for planning the city at all, but we should ‘augment’ the ones we already know…. ‘Augmented’ planning will have to operate within a yet more strongly interdisciplinary and multi-actor arena…” (p. 218).

Anthony Townsend provides a culturally sensitive view of Seoul as a networked city. He flips around the usual question about the influence of mobile media on public space, and instead asks “what about public space has changed that led to the rise of these technologies?” (p. 219). (Still, this presupposes a division between the two that may no longer be tenable). Two trends underlie the integration of virtual and physical spaces: ubiquitous mobile communications with their ‘functional telepathic capabilities’ that allow people to choreograph activities in urban space, and the deployment of material sensing in urban space, “driving a whole new set of feedback loops that govern the management and operation of public space” (p. 220). From the second World War on Seoul has know rapid economic growth. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis Korea set its stakes on broadband as a new platform for development. Powerful drivers for its expansion were cybercafes, wireless networks, and urban cyberculture. Local internet cafes (bang) became de facto public spaces (p. 225). Wireless networking allowed people to access services outside of fixed locations like home or office. The synergy between an always-on lifestyle and a well-managed transportation infrastructure led to an unprecedented mobile culture among young people, allowing them to coordinate their movements between the many public and private rooms that make up modern life in the Korean metropolis. The integration of broadband in public space has strengthened Korean identity, Townsend holds. Its specific shape reflects deeply held values and norms. For example, the density of neon-glow visual information of Seoul’s streets has spilled over into the design aesthetic of Korean webservices. Korean ‘urban visual literacy’ thus underlies the rapid adoption of new technologies. However there are also challenges to the urban public domain, he notes. People may either retreat into virtual cocoons: games or web portals that allow them to escape unpleasant environments. Or they cope with anxiety in public space by contacting their familiar social network, rather than striking up a conversation with strangers. Combined, this may lead to reduced interest to improve badly designed public spaces.

Annalisa Pelizza offers an urgent take on issues of urban fear, security and (dis)order. Pelizza begins with a quote from Latour, in which “politics is defined as the progressive composition of collective life…” (p. 235). She notes two opposing attitudes towards physical public space: the demand for security and ‘civility’ versus (artist) initiatives to reclaim the streets for heterogeneous purposes. The former feeds a “state of perpetual emergency” and the imposition of a “logic of warfare” on otherwise non-criminal social behavior (p. 236). New geographical, social and cultural borders are erected inside the city. We have come to accept the privatization of public spaces. The latter is visible in the many installations, video works and performances by artists and media-activists in contested public spaces, as attempts to counter the politics of fear. Urban ICTs are deployed in both directions. They are used to erect borders and increase security by sorting people according to singular definitions of identity and risk. But they are also used to open up urban life as a meeting space. In the latter category Pelizza further identifies two different regeneration strategies for cities and communities. The first attempts to reinforce the traditional idea of community as a small-scale local Gemeinschaft (the contribution by Foth & Sanders points to the same phenomenon). The second departs from “instable communities where the use of ICT is not supposed to help identify pre-built subjects, but creates them through the same process of communication” (p. 237). The remainder of the chapter discusses examples of defensive (e.g. crime-mapping) and provocative uses of ICTs (e.g. urban markup projects). She concludes that any planning attempt that uses ICTs as mere tools to analyze and solve spatial problems is founded on a reactive control attitude that holds citizens as passive subjects who are classifiable into singular categories. Instead of “planning with lines” we should plan “with borderlands”, thick open zones that create the conditions for communication (p. 251). Although obviously still a (deliberately) vague design imperative, I found this a thought-provoking image. Many, many others have stated similar guidelines (from the formal “less is more” to the functional “under-specify”). To see this conclusion once more being reached with sound conceptual underpinnings is a good thing.

Nancy Odendaal’s chapter about informal urbanism in Durban, South Africa, and the use of ICTs reaches a somewhat similar conclusion. Informal cities are characterized by housing and land-use outside government-sanctioned parameters, unregulated micro-enterprises, and unregistered labor and informal networks (p. 258, 260). Mobile phones support informal African urbanism on all these levels. By contrast, web-based community networks – featuring prominently in Euro-American ‘community informatics’ literature – tend to enhance more formally organized associations. Odendaal makes a useful dual distinction between explicit and implicit manifestations of digital technologies in physical space. On the one hand there are explicit translations of digital technologies into physical spaces, such as internet kiosks, phone shops, and so on. On the other hand there are implicit interfaces between physical and digital space, as in the information-sharing between informal workers about good places to work, police raids, etc., networking between multiple trading parties, negotiation and bargaining, and advocacy for common causes. Planning the informal city is hampered by the difficulty of identifying actors and tying them to territories. But it will have to take the implicit and informal relationships into account.

The last two contributions are more practical. Romano Fistola presents his use of GIS mapping as an aid in planning digital urbanism developments in Naples, Italy. Rodrigo J. Firmino explores how William Mitchell’s idea of a “recombinant architecture”, in which technologies are an integral part of the construction of space, is translated in the planning strategies of medium-sized Brazilian cities. He follows the work of Thomas Horan (2000), who tried to ground Mitchell’s theory by emphasizing the need to improve “social actor’s awareness of the symbiosis between dataspace and physical spaces as well as the direct and indirect consequences for every aspect of their normal everyday lives” (p. 318). From the results of a survey, Firmino sadly concludes that planners in five of Brazil’s medium-sized cities have hardly taken notice of ICTs. Some initiatives exist, such as municipal portals, electronic government, public internet access, the use of GIS in planning, and public space surveillance. But there are little or no strategic views of urban-technological developments (p. 322). Some structural limitations are: lack of knowledge, lack of interest, lack of actual debate in municipal administration, lack of ability, and lack of proximity between the spheres of planning and ICT development (p. 327).

In his epilogue, Aurigi notes that urban spaces can get augmented in spontaneous or in planned ways, quantitatively or qualitatively (although ‘augmentation’ is of course a quantitative term). When we make the city more digital are we really improving its augmented spaces, he asks (p. 338)? He too observes that the use of ICTs in urban design often is merely an add-on instead of part of a holistic strategy. He concludes with two reflections. First, the importance of place-making in urban design: ICTs need to contribute to the “humanisation of the environment” (p. 341). But this cannot be planned in deterministic ways. Second, urban design needs to critically engage with urban ICTs in order to ground projects in place-making debates and practices, and contribute to the design of such projects in a “place-wise” way (p. 344). We must neither see ICTs as fragmenting and de-localizing cities, nor try to use it to strengthen some authentic sense of place. Aurigi suggests that ICTs may be used to make urban space more ‘permeable’: to improve people’s awareness of the choices available. He is optimistic that ICTs can ‘augment’ the four key attributes of successful public spaces: comfort and image, access and linkage, uses and activity, and sociability (p. 345-6).

Conclusions
Finally, a few brief and more critical thoughts to conclude this review. Notwithstanding the many interesting individual contributions, which I have tried to highlight in this review, as a whole I felt a little disappointed with this book. While we should acknowledge that this volume is from 2008, that the process of editing takes a long time, and that developments in this field go extremely rapidly, I feel that this book is a little boring as a ‘state of the art’ overview, and that it lacks a strong conceptual approach. Many articles get stuck in older discussions about neighborhood ICT networks. With a few exceptions, scant attention is given to the exploration of new techno-urban territories that surely existed already years ago, like mobile communication, location-based technologies, city sensing, pervasive gaming. Moreover, in my view the editors haven’t put enough efforts into knitting various contributions together into a coherent whole. The book is a collection of ‘articulations’, as the subtitle promises. But it lacks a coherent framework for addressing the ‘augmented city’. Most attention goes out to urban public space, while other urban spaces receive little consideration (home, work, leisure, travel). The point of departure is still a physical ‘container-view’ definition of the city and public space that is consequently ‘augmented’ by ICTs (or threatened, as is repeatedly noted). If the issue is the changing city, then why not look at other domains too? If the issue is urban publicness, why stick to a spatial concept of ‘public space’?

I believe they have picked an unfortunate title. The whole collection of papers inevitably points to the uselessness of a strict separation between the city and technology. But the chosen title prevents the discussion to move beyond binary concepts (and of course their refutations; but what else?): city – technology; physical – digital; local/proximate/community – global/placeless/disorientation; walled – permeable; space as empty void – place as lived; changes that are quantitative (more – less) or qualitative (better – worse); design that is top-down or bottom-up. Oh well, it takes some searching to come up with ‘hybrid city’.. .

Further, nowhere do the editors explicate if and how an ‘augmented city’ can become a better city. When Aurigi suggests that public space must be made more permeable to improve people’s awareness of the choices available in the augmented city, he does not wonder for instance about information overload, the ‘tyranny of choice’ (PDF), and what it means to be constantly addressed as a (rational) choice consumer in urban public spaces.

It is partly a language issue that makes this book not exactly an exiting page-turner. The book is littered with inelegant formulations (“Local space is the locus from where transnational and global frameworks are tapped into for enhancing opportunity in the local”, p. 262), and grammatical errors (“Arraya identified many of these problems with the pervasive computing”, p. 97).

But not all can be attributed to saving on a corrector. Authors who begin their chapter with Pierre Levy’s assertion that the virtual is not opposed to the real but to the actual, and on the very same page write about the “interplay between actual (or ‘offline’) and virtual (or ‘online’) worlds”, seriously need to think twice about what they are actually claiming (p. 139). The sum of little annoyances, which frequently center on fuzzy, erroneous or lacking specifications of concepts, make reading the book a less then enjoyable experience. So would I recommend this book? What I appreciate is that contributions in this book are more culturally and professionally diverse than, say, Graham’s Cybercities Reader (2004). But if you are looking for a book that enters this field with a stronger and more coherent conceptual basis, leave this one on the shelf.

Read more book reviews at The Mobile City >>

Notes

1. Agnew, J. A. (1987). Place and politics: the geographical mediation of state and society. Boston: Allen & Unwin. (p. 28)

2. Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: a history of the idea of communication. Chicago, Ill. ; London: University of Chicago Press. (pp. 33-62)

3. The authors purport to base this distinction on an article by Elizabeth Depalma Digeser (alas, not a ‘knowledge commons’…). However, Digeser nowhere explicitly mentions this tripartite distinction (at least not in that paper). Their description is actually an almost literal (but unreferenced) citation from this (free!) 2005 article by David Berry, “The Commons as an Idea—Ideas as a Commons”.

Is it worth it? Many of the problems that the internet of things is supposed to solve actually have simple, non-technological solutions. Google likes to boast that your smartphone can tell you the ratio of men and women in any given bar. But there is actually a much simpler solution: you can look through the window! Many of the wonders of the internet of things fall into this category. Sensors can tell you when a baby’s nappy is full. There is a perfectly reasonable old-fashioned solution to this problem. Sensors can turn the stem of an umbrella to glow blue when it is about to rain. You can always listen to the weather forecast. […] In health care, above all else, technology is a poor substitute for the human touch.

These silly examples may be meant as tongue-in-cheek satire on the tendency to uncritically laude the ‘technological fix’ for all sorts of non-existing problems. Still, as this is The Economist, not The Onion, I’ll bite.

First of all, the writer has no eye for existing projects that actually contribute something new, like making visible what otherwise would remain invisible. Let’s look at some counter-examples from the domains Schumpeter mentions as most promising: environment and health care. Cases that come to mind are environmental projects that measure air quality and pollution in urban settings (In the Air by Medialab Prado, the work of Eric Paulos and team), noise levels around airports (Geluidsnet), the experience of stress in busy urban environments (Christian Nold’s Biomapping), and so on.

Further, in the quote above Schumpeter wrongly seems to assume that the internet of things acts as a substitute for human perception and interaction. This neglects the emergence of promising new developments in healthcare, where sensing and visualizing personal data is combinated with social networking. Studies indicate that harnessing the power of social networks, mobile communication, and using mobile phones as sensors in order to ‘nudge’ people into healthy behavior (a kind of benevolent paternalism) yields positive results.

This is why in fact the term ‘the internet of things’ may be misleading. The word ‘things’ suggests a world of abstract and autonomous networked objects that constantly emit data without the need for human intervention or interpretation. More likely however, the ‘internet of things’ is going to develop in profoundly social ways, whereby informational objects are going to solicit new kinds of human interactions and behavior. Think the Pachube model versus the Daytum model. The word ‘internet’ suggests the intentional search for information and the exchange of communication online, while the healthcare examples above point to the intuition that such interactions and behaviors are not solely or primarily internet-based, or involve rational and intentional deliberation. This is also an argument in favor of neologisms like ‘spimes‘ and ‘blogjects‘ as a way to detach ourselves from sedimented understandings of certain technologies. On a more theoretical level there have been pleas for revaluing the agency we attribute to ‘things’ (e.g. actor-network theory, and Bruno Latour’s plea for a Dingpolitik).

Few of the examples mentioned above are corporate projects. This brings us to another issue. Schumpeter disregards how technological innovations work. Innovations are not solely driven by corporate interests but frequently as much, if not more, by hackers, media activists and artists who through their design interventions seek to criticize, modify or disrupt such developments. Schumpeter attended a business event and the silly examples he mentions may attest to the often stated observation that corporations are often slow to react to innovations and sometimes even pretty clueless.

A final issue I have concerns Schumpeter’s rhetoric of ridicule. It is a well-known theme in media and technology studies that early commentators frequently dismiss new technologies as useless and trivial. In the case of the landline telephone, Claude Fisher recounts that as soon as rural women in the USA started socializing via the fixed telephone to overcome their social isolation, men began to ridicule the frivolity of their telephone chatter [¹]. And Sidney Aronson describes how early critics were quick to diagnose the dreaded malady of ‘telephonics’ in ‘telephone fiends’ [²]. Such perceived ‘trivial’ uses do not rule out the possibility that interesting and valuable new uses may unexpectedly emerge. Let’s see if the hype is justified.

notes

¹ Fischer, C. S. (1992). America calling: a social history of the telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press. (pp. 82, 231)

² Aronson, S. H. (1971). The Sociology of the Telephone. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 12(3), 153-167. (p. 157)

About Twitterhouse
Saturday March 27 2010 I attended the public presentation of the project TwitterHouse at Center for Architecture Arcam in Amsterdam. This project, initiated by Max Cohen de Lara and David Mulder of XML Architecture, Research and Urbanism, explores the potential of new media in the architectural design process. As part of their final assignment bachelor architecture students of Delft University had to follow one Amsterdam-based ‘tweep’ (someone who twitters) who regularly uses the platform and also posts more or less personal messages. The students had to analyze his/her lifestyle from these ‘tweets’ without actually getting in touch with this person. Based on this analysis the students designed a house for their ‘virtual clients’ who initially were unaware that they were part of this project. At the end of the assignment the virtual clients were informed that they unwittingly were part of this project. They were invited and several of them actually attended the presentation. From the announcement:

Twitter, Facebook, Hyves, Flickr, MySpace, Linkedin.. We increasingly organize our lives online and share it with whoever wants to follow. What is the potential of these parallel online and offline lives? How do online networks, so eagerly called ‘social media’, organize offline social ties, and the inverse? And what is the effect of this on the collective spaces of the city? To what extend do new forms and meanings of public and private spaces arise from these exchanges?

In the fall of academic year 2009/2010 architecture students at Delft University researched these question under the guidance of XML.

A part of Amsterdam’s historical center was divided into 500×500 meter quadrants. Each student was assigned one quadrant to find a fitting location for a house of about 130 m2. They had to follow two rules: nothing could be demolished, and the house had to fit in the existing urban fabric. Because an interesting living space only comes into being in dialogue with an interesting client students were coupled to a ‘virtual client’. Eleven inhabitants of Amsterdam were selected who share their lives online via Twitter (and Facebook, Linkedin, and so on). These clients did not know they were part of an assignment to design a house for them.

Durting the ten weeks of the assignment an increasingly personal picture arose of the lifestyles of these clients from following their lives online. Twitter revealed were and how they drink their coffee, whether they prefer to stay on the couch or go into town, where their children are at school: in short, the personal lifestyle and life sphere of the virtual client. On the basis of this Twitter analysis a program of demands was developed that was specifically targeted at the virtual client. This program was translated into a architectonic concept for the chosen location which fitted the lifestyle of the virtual client.

During the presentation at Arcam the students showed their final work (maquettes and collages) and presented their research in short 3-minute ‘pitches’. Almost all students departed from an analysis of how their client organizes the day temporally and spatially, and on ‘reading’ their personality from the tweets. The majority of students focussed on spatial divisions in someone’s life: between public and private life, between work and home life, between order and chaos. In the case of most tweeps the students found these distinctions are very blurry. These persons they tweet a lot of private information. They often also work at home, and interact with friends while at work. In some cases however, particularly when the tweeps were more or less public figures (like @vkoblenko and @fatimaelatik), students concluded that these people would want to shield themselves off from prying eyes and need a vestige to retreat from public life. Most students also realized that what someone shares via Twitter is not necessarily the full picture of his/her life. Yet they did get a sense of getting to know the person better by following him/her online.

Accommodating or offering an alternative?
The difficult part was how to translate little chunks of information about someone’s life schedule and lifestyle into a physical design for a house. I discerned a broad division of proposals at the level of the ‘content’ of the ideas. The majority of proposed concepts were designed to accommodate the individual lifestyle of the client, and a minority of interventions were deliberate attempts to subvert or offer an alternative to the client’s lifestyle. An example of the former was the project for @covergirlsunny, a female DJ in a trendy nightclub with an outgoing personality who enjoys showing herself to an audience. The student following her concluded she needs a podium to show herself to the outside world. The idea developed was based on the typology of the theater with a big transparent frontstage lifted up from the ground where parties and fashion expositions can take place, and a small backstage area below ground level. An example of the latter was the project for @arjanduffels, a male entrepreneur who likes luxurious things, to consume, and often goes out to restaurants and bars with friends. Almost all of his social functions normally take place outside of the home domain. The proposed idea was to design a communal home which combines various functions internally and were he can live together with some of his friends.

How to move from concept to form?
Another broad distinction I saw was at the level of the ‘form’ of the ideas. How to translate someone’s lifestyle into a physical shape? Some projects chose a form that reflected the unique individuality of the client. One such project was a home for fashion designer @jolinejolink. She says she wants to be “unknown yet famous”: her brand should be recognizable but she herself wants to stay away from the spotlights. The proposed home tried to reflect the sculptural qualities of her work and be recognizable as the ‘brand Joline’. There was also a little studio space in the house and room for showcasing her work, but at the same time it offered a shelter for her to retreat. By contrast, other concepts in their shape tried to capture the social dynamics and mobilities of the client as an embedded part of wider networks and – perhaps, in my interpretation – their identities as a ‘distributed self’. Projects for @paulsebes and @marjolijn departed from the idea of ‘living’ as rooted in a fixed home. The last project in particular came up with the radical idea of temporary living spaces or “hubs” scattered throughout the city. Each of these special locations (a climbing wall, an old attic, etc.) can be leased for a limited period of time. Together they offer a “collage of experiences” of the city.

Addressing online identities
This research raises questions about ‘impression management’ via new media. Twitter messages of course do not reflect the ‘whole’ of someone’s personality. In Goffmanian terms social media platforms appear a stage for radical ‘frontstage’ behavior in presenting a public face to an audience. However, in practice the distinction between a public frontstage and a private backstage is blurring. Often people engage in semi-private one-to-one messages with other people which can be ‘eavesdropped’ by others. The role of the audience has shifted from being physically present and complicit in the performance to being largely invisible and unknown. Some of the tweeps who received notice that they were part of this experiment said they felt shocked. Moreover, an individual is less and less able to control his/her public face online. Even though he imposes a media ‘code’ on himself, others may not abide and for instance put ‘incriminating’ photos and messages online. The project itself shows that stuff people share online can end up in very different contexts that it was originally intended for (juridically it is questionable whether people’s uploaded photos are allowed to be republished in the project book..).

Some projects struggled to go beyond too literal or gimmicky translation of a person’s lifestyle to a concept. (Should a politician who is actively involved in the theme of migrant integration live under a roof with red tiles that ‘integrate’ well in a block with other buildings? To the credit of this student, he had other ideas as well that in my view were definitely good). Still, I believe the project as a whole is an interesting exploration of the potential of new media technologies (and social media in particular) in urban design. The project took up the glove to translate social processes, which now to a large extend happen via new media, into physical design interventions.

Relations between urban design and new media
After our talk at the Day of the Young Architect we have been working on possible approaches to the relation between urban design and new media. One version that departs from technologies and/or an underlying normative view of the city has been posted recently. An alternative – less poetic, more rigorous – framework distinguishes between (1) Urban design with new media: how new media can be used in various ways as instruments in the design of cities; (2) Urban design for new media: how new media technologies and practices can be integrated in the actual design of spaces; (3) New media design for urban culture: how new media can be designed in order to contribute to a lively and healthy urban culture; (4) Applying urban design to new media: how architectural spatial knowledge can be employed to design informational spaces in intelligible ways. (More about this analysis will follow in an announcement we will make shortly). TwitterHouse clearly fits best in the first category. It has been used mostly as a tool in the design process. Interestingly, the idea of ‘educating the client’ which we developed in our talk may require rethinking. Who are the clients anyway? Do new media – and social platforms in particular – have the potential to change how design assignments are commissioned, and in its wake change the notion of ownership? But then the question arises why not interact with the virtual clients?

Conclusions
TwitterHouse raises several other questions. First of all, in most cases the virtual clients active on Twitter are without children and relatively young (aged 20-40). What about the changes in someone’s life patterns when he/she gets older? Will the house grow along and offer room for adaptation? Will it sell to someone else? Further, the focus on designing a house according to the inferred lifestyle of one individual may have caused the most poignant aspect of social media platforms – changes in how we organize social relations – to be ‘lost in translation’. To what extend is the social character of these media platforms acknowledged in this assignment which predominantly focussed on building a home for the individual lifestyle of a tweep? Perhaps it would have made more sense to use Twitter for the design of a more public place, a meeting space? Also, none of the students took a very critical look at the role of social media platforms in shaping urban life itself. Some of the well-known (well-worn?) themes are how such media not only afford individuals to organize their lives more flexibly but also puts various kinds of pressure on them (e.g. to be always available, the crumbling of work/leisure boundaries); how social platforms make interacting with the people we already know much easier but often at the expense of meeting strangers; and how new media may ‘optimize’ the use of urban spaces and services at the expense of surprise encounters and loss of privacy. In my view only a few students got to the heart of the question: is the (social) practice of ‘living’ still the same, and therefore should a house still be a house as we know it? If indeed it is not, as some concluded, should architecture uncritically accommodate to these developments (e.g. the nomadic living proposal) or should it offer an alternative, a commentary that ‘critically engages’ with these developments? The practice of architecture itself could have been questioned, but instead was left open. But then again, as one of the students confided to me afterwards, architecture must not overstate its importance in shaping social processes and the urban fabric. Sometimes a house is just a house.

==update==

See the talk by XML Architecture, Research and Urbanism at ‘Designing the Hybrid City’.

We have been making maps for centuries, to establish territorial borders or mark safe routes. A map is a model of reality, and the terrain of a fascinating branch of science: cartography. Maps represent social and political choices, which start forming their own truths. For example the Persian Gulf is not the Persian Gulf everywhere, the world on its head or with China in the middle all of a sudden looks very different, and maps today seem less complete because of an increasing number of ‘white spots’…

Some of the issues addressed this evening concerned the relation between model and reality, the consequences of new map-making media technologies for society and politics, and – unavoidably it seems in such popularizing science discussions – the question whether new developments are good or bad? I was invited to talk about the influence of mobile and locative media and cartographic representations.

Cartographer Ferjan Ormeling started the evening with an overview of cartography as a professional scientific discipline. He defined cartography as “the transmission of spatial information for decision-making”. In a few slides he walked through cartographic history, mainly from a western perspective as the attempt to explore and chart unknown territories, with ensuing overseas trade and later colonization in its wake. Some of the interesting topics he touched upon included the fact that cartography is always subjective and culturally determined. Dutch maps for instance often leave out ditches because they are everywhere, whereas in Belgium they are included on maps. The world maps we know today are clearly Euro-centric, placing other territories in the periphery of Europe. Maps were hugely important for an upcoming sense of nationalism (a point made by Benedict Anderson in his well-known work “Imagined Communities” 1991). Nation-states were now drawn in monochrome colors, clearly separating them from their neighbors. Further, names on maps are often surrounded by controversy. For example in the 1970s attempts were made to modernize the spelling of Dutch town and city names. This met with fierce opposition from local government, because this meant some places would lose their name-based exclusivity (Veghel sounds more chic than Veggel, ditto for Wijchen – Wijgen). Map-making therefore always involves selection, manipulation, and generalization. What is displayed? What is left out? Where are borders drawn? What is on the map and what lies outside of the map? Ormeling closed his talk by assessing the relevance of new technologies like Google Maps. Here it became interesting, since Ormeling tenaciously clung to the idea of the unique professional expertise of cartographers. While digital technologies certainly are useful, Ormeling argued, the role of cartographers remains important because they are the ones who “fill in” these satellite images, and “give meaning” to those satellite views. Sure, there are interesting attempts by amateurs to engage map-making (such as Openstreetmap). But there are lots of things professionals can and amateurs can’t do, like accurately mapping a rugged coastline.

Then Henk van Houtum and I joined the discussion. Van Houtum argued new geographic technologies like TomTom and Google Maps turn all of us into geographers. But very uncritical geographers. We unwittingly feed all kinds of information to search engines. Van Houtum worries about the loss of personal autonomy as we are surrender ourselves to various digital search and control systems. But on the more positive side, new technologies enable far more people to engage in place-making and representing spatial knowledge. The old monopoly of mapmaking by geographers under the auspice of the nation-state is crumbling, and that is a good thing.

I argued that under the influence of mobile and locative media, cartography has changed from being a predominantly geographical medium in which the representation of space and place is central, to a social medium in which online social networking acquires a cartographic element. Our mediated social relations are now being ‘rooted’ in physical places. A good example of such a locative social network is Bliin, a project by Selene Kolman, who was in the audience, and Stef Kolman.

This has in part been a response to our perception of the internet as placeless, and broader social and spatial shifts often grouped under the name ‘globalization’. Further, New technologies offer people the opportunity to write space and place with their own experiences (e.g. by ‘geotagging’ places), rather than just reading the maps made by others (see e.g. Greenfield & Shepard about “read/write urbanism” p. 12-13). This means cartography is no longer the prerogative of professionals but indeed, as Henk van Houtum said, we have all become geographers. Already in 1946 geographer J.K. Wright proposed in front of the Association of American Geographers that the earth had been largely mapped by conventional geographical method. The time had come to map our earth all over again. Wright called upon geographers to map folk knowledge of places, and more aesthetic experiences of our environments. This would vastly expand the terrain of classic geography to include what Wright called ‘geosophical’ knowledge. Wright would probably have been thrilled to see how his plea is being realized today… A third change is that maps now consist not only of mostly spatial information but also temporal information. The historicity of place as a process is made visible by the range of micro-narratives that are attached to places through locative media. Maps become far more dynamic representations of spatial and temporal knowledge. A nice example is the project Droombeek, by Edward Mac Gillavry, who was also present this evening, and Peter Dubois.

In this project inhabitants of Roombeek, an area of the city Enschede which was destroyed in 2000 by a huge fireworks disaster, recount their memories and stories of their neighborhood. These stories are made available to others by taking a GPS-walk. A fourth change is the database structure of geographical knowledge captured in maps. We can now query items through maps. Most of these searches are about simple properties like categories of places and proximity, such as finding restaurants nearby. However while we still can’t search for sadness in New York (PDF 2,4 MB; Russell – Headmap Manifesto – p. 31), we are already awfully close.. Fifth, new cartographies alter our subjective experiences of space and place. For instance, locative media can inform a more aesthetic experience of space and mobility. Someone who is working on GPS-based cartography as a new form of landscape painting is Esther Polak, who also joined this evening – just back from a trip to Nigeria. And what about the fact that in many locative media views the ego is the center of the map? You no longer have to first find your position on the map. Rather, the environment revolves around you. Does this literally lead to a more ‘ego-centric’ worldview? Finally, maps are increasingly often used as a way to visualize and transfer increasingly complex datasets. Maps are becoming metaphors to represent information, and for thinking. An organization that has been doing this for while is Informationlab by ‘information architect’ Auke Touwslager, who also attended the evening (yes, good crowd present..). To summarize, under the influence of locative media mapping tends to shift from mostly objectifying representations to highly subjective, from general to thematic representations, and from visualizing topological rather than topographical information. I wanted to raise some more ‘political’ issues of these developments but – alas – time was running short… (I couldn’t even bring in half of the above).

It was interesting to see how the audience, and ‘old school geographer’ Ormeling, reacted to this new media story. Ormeling himself did not feel these developments had much to do with his profession as a cartographer, apart from being handy new instruments. This strikingly parallels the dominant reaction of another professional audience: architects and planners. New media technologies as instruments yes, but investigating the consequences of these technologies for the professional practice itself… no. In the audience, meanwhile, someone wondered in exasperation “this is al very nice but who actually wants to know all the time where their friends are?”. Indeed only one or two people raised their hands. Although the predominantly white middle-aged male audience perhaps might not exactly be representative of very active mobile media users, this question of course is a legitimate one. All talks about new representations of knowledge and new ‘participant audiences’ or ‘networked publics’ in spite, who are “we” (we – the people more or less professionally dealing with geo-locative media) actually representing in our talks and thoughts? The majority of people, at least during this evening, seem very skeptical about these developments. The discussion immediately turned to the pervasive influence of mobile media themselves in everyday life and all sorts of ethical discussions, rather than pausing for a moment to look at media developments and their influence on cartography. Too bad this somewhat fell of radar at the end of the evening. Luckily, columnist Jelle Reumer restored this by evoking the poetics of maps. Looking at maps above all brings up half-forgotten memories of the places one once was and where beautiful or sad things happened. Maps also stir the imagination about places one would perhaps never go. I thought Reumer’s short talk was a nice closure of the evening, which put matters in a broader perspective. Aside from their obvious differences (differences that do matter, as I’ve tried to show here), to what extend does it matter whether such imaginations occur by holding a map made of paper or by looking at a handheld screen?

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.

In this article I discern five possible ‘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. For each of these ‘levels’ I raise some relevant questions.

You can read the article here >> or download a PDF of the article (1,6 MB).

There are a number of other interesting contributions. See the journal’s table of contents.

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.