Since 2009, the Living Labs Global Award has worked together with cities in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas to present major societal challenges affecting more than 125 million people. In response, more than 800 solution providers have in the past two editions responded with often ground-breakingtechnologies, ready to meet those challenges.

Winners of the Living Labs Global Award are invited to implement a pilot of their solution to evaluate impact, provide input into product development, and improve procurement or regulatory decisions by cities later on. This has transformed the way waste management is planned in Barcelona, the way venture capital is provided to social entrepreneurs in Cape Town, or community healthcare is delivered in New Taipei City.

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)

The first reports of the expert meeting ‘Designing the Hybrid City’ are available now. These reports were written by architect Daan Roggeveen and journalist Michiel Hulshof (Go West project).

=edit=

Videos of the sessions are now online as well. Audio quality is so-so however, so be warned…

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.

augmented reality

Augmented reality (from now on: AR) adds one or more layers of – mostly visual – information to physical space. Other than Virtual reality (VR), which tries to supplant the everyday experience with an immersive virtual experience, AR’s ideal is to blend virtual information more or less seamlessly into what people are normally seeing. AR has evolved from clunky head-mounted displays, to glasses, to even integration with contact lenses. However, in actual practice information is now often projected on screens, e.g. the car windshield or on the most ubiquitous screen we carry with us all the time: the mobile phone. For a read-up on AR see Lev Manovich – “The Poetics of Augmented Space” (2005) (MS Word alert).

Under the name Augmented City Lab, Waag Society, 7scenes, and Layar organized a plenary morning session and afternoon workshop, moderated by Ronald Lenz (Waag Society & 7Scenes). Speakers in the plenary session were: Frank Kresin (Waag Society), Raimo van der Klein (Layar), Kevin Slavin (Area/Code), Rick Batelaan (City directorate for transport, Amsterdam), Ben Cerveny (Vurb).

speakers

Frank Kresin

Frank Kresin posed the question how do you bring cultural heritage to people who don’t visit musea? One possible answer is to use the urban landscape itself as an exhibition space. The city is already rich in content and physical landmarks. Why not use these elements to “create a unified experience”, a “new active and social space with on-demand info for city residents, ‘culturists’, and tourists”? Kresin gave an overview of some of the ‘creative learning’ projects already done by Waag Society and 7Scenes which use some form of AR. He finished by summing up a number of practical challenges in order to meet such aims as “deepening experiences, improving accessibility of content, expanding audiences, and stimulating entrepreneurship”.

Although AR is in its infancy, there is potential for learning experiences. As a more critical remark, it seems that the idea of turning the city into a ‘unified experience’ contradicts the city’s inherent heterogeneity of both places and people. The target groups Kresin mentioned are al very different in how they see and use the city. How to make one “unified experience” for individual people, let alone for all urbanites at once? Why would you want that in the first place? This may be a problem of AR in general: who’s reality is augmented? And what kind of informational objects are inserted into everyday reality?

Raimo van der Klein

The second talk was by Raimo van der Klein, one of the founders of Layar, an AR app for Android phones. He positions AR as a playful “experience medium” for marketing purposes. According to Van der Klein, involvement is the preferred method of current marketing, above tell and show. Van der Klein tells how AR induces a certain skepticism about ‘realness’, making people wonder whether what they are seeing is real or not? He further announced a new version of Layar, which now includes 3D modeled objects. Later I joined a demonstration on the large grass field of the Westerpark. On the screen of an Android phone you could see large windmills turning, an airplane passing over, and a 3D version of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’.

Kevin Slavin

Kevin Slavin is critical of augmented city assumptions that more information is always better. AR will never win in terms of ‘polygone count’. It will never make the augmented city look as real as its physical counterpart. This is called the ‘immersive fallacy’ (a term coined by Salen en Zimmerman). Moreover, there are other senses than just vision. An interesting example Slavin mentions is a project by Columbia University called SiteLens (2009) (PDF). This project presents the presence of toxic substances as a digital visualization. It does not try to integrate these visuals into reality but clearly demarcates its separation from reality by using bright visuals. Slavin further warns for the ‘uncanny valley’. This is a term used in robot research. When robots become too human-like we tend to feel eeriness. Same thing with AR: it’s there but it isn’t there. AR developers must avoid this uncanny gap and games are a way out. Games have been ‘augmented’ from the start. When we are playing we know we are playing.

This is interesting in the light of discussions about ‘hybrid space’: the idea that social processes in the physical and digital realm merge. But do they really become indistinguishable, mixing to grey? Or are boundaries between them still present and important?

Rick Batelaan

Next up was Rick Batelaan form the municipality of A’dam. He presented a trial of the Personal Travel Assistant, an application promoting public transport by delivering real-time location-based personalized travel information. Depending on where you are, what time, were you are going, and your personal preferences, you get a targeted travel advise. You can also share your travel plans with buddies, enabling you to travel together.

This type of application is not strictly about adding new experiential layers over reality, yet is certainly ‘augments’ mobility with on the fly info. To me it seems a good example of a very pervasive idea underlying many location-based services: optimizing the individual experience of the city. The city is implicitly seen as a hindrance that has to be overcome in order to get form A to B. Urban space is taken as a space for moving through, not for dwelling in. This view seeks to minimize ‘lost’ moments, moments of pause, potential situations for serendipitous encounters and contemplation. One might also wonder whether in the longer run such a shift works against people who don’t use the city as a site for optimizing personal mobility, but for lingering.

Another interesting issue is the shifting perceptions of clock time these services may involve. Instead of depending on precise location and time schedules (12:30 pm at the central station) this service approximates duration and range (still 15 minutes to cycle the last 1000 meters to catch your train). It has been argued public transport made the time schedule necessary in the first place, and the automobile partially undid this fixation on scheduled time. Mobile media technologies are shared among the technologies that bring about a weakening of time schedules. Will mobile services like the Personal Travel Assistant extend this ‘weakening of time’ to what might be one of the last strongholds of scheduled clock time: public transport mobility?

Ben Cerveny

The last speaker, Ben Cerveny, gave a whirlwind overview of the history of cities. Cities began as isolated cells along favorable points. Then these cells became connected networks. For instance Amsterdam as a trade city in the Golden Age (17th c.). This gave rise to the metropolis. Cerveny explored the idea that when urbanites express their individual experiences via networks, these experiences can be aggregated into an image of the city, which can then be fed back into people’s experiences. Cerveny then jumped from individual urbanites to the city as a whole. He argued online data sets about flows of resources, products and citizens in cities, when aggregated and recombined, form a kind of self-awareness of the city. This ‘sentient city’ can perceive its own environments, and interact with other cities. Cerveny further criticized the fact that AR is mostly location-agnostic. It brings information to places, but not according to the ‘personality of the place’. Cerveny is interested in somehow showing the “moods of the metropolis”, close to Ben Russell’s 1999 future vision of being able to find sadness in NYC (see his Headmap Manifesto – PDF). Cerveny also wants to trace social networks of cities. Some cities share more with other cities abroad than with towns in their own country. How do these networks look?

Inspiring as it seems, I do wonder what Cerveny’s idea of awareness entails? For one, doesn’t awareness need some sort of intentionality invested in agents (i.e. human intelligence)? Then who designs intentional agents for the sentient city? What political deliberations and processes underly city sensing projects?

discussion

The talks and ensuing discussion brought up a number of interesting issues dealing with AR’s place in the city. One thing is ‘attention’: AR is meant not to replace one’s primary view of everyday reality but only add certain layers of information to it. Yet in practice when people are presented with screen-based information they tend to focus their attention on the screen and not their environment. Cerveny argued AR should not replace your primary view but exist on the side, as a ‘glance’, something when applied to your social network is also called ‘ambient awareness’.

Another question raised is what happens to publicness? Cerveny proposed to redefine the notion. There is already broad ‘media literacy’ about the public domain in digital space but not in physical space. Maybe this should grown. With this proposition Cerveny comes close to the idea of understanding public space in terms of a physical, urban commons for which we collectively carry responsibility (see the interview with Mark Shepard posted on this blog).

As a final general remark, this session made me rethink the merit of stacking ever more informational layers on everyday reality. As already said, AR and location-based services often depart from the wish to optimize individual experience and choices. This is frequently described in quantitative words: more, better, ‘enriching’, and so on. But not all mediation of the city just adds. The can also act as filtering devices. Instead of phrasing these developments solely in terms of ‘augmentation’, one can also think of them in terms of subtraction: a ‘diminished reality’. This needn’t necessarily be understood in moral terms: what is being lost through AR? what does it take away of everyday reality? It may also be an aid in achieving what city dwellers have always been doing: make their city smaller and more manageable.

Read more about this workshop in Assia Kraan’s report.

In The Cybercities Reader (2004) Stephen Graham – at that time Professor of Urban Technology in Newcastle – bundles a great number of seminal texts about the intersections of digital media technologies and urban life. Some articles were written especially for this reader. Others were previously published. The book departs from the premisse that “[t]he so-called ‘information society’ is an increasingly urban society. The ‘digital age’ is an age which is dominated by cities and metropolitan regions to an extent that is unprecedented in human history” (p. 3). Thus the starting proposition of this book is “the irrefutable reality that the twenty-first century will be a century marked by both the deepening urbanisation of all parts of our planet and a growing reliance on fast-advancing information and communication technologies” (p. 22). In his introductory article Graham argues against two related ideas that were dominant between the 1960s and 1990s. The first is that the physical domain of cities and the digital domain of ICTs are largely separate realms. The second is that ICTs are a substitute for urban life, and undermine the city. Throughout the book the main argument is that ICTs and the global city are not substitutes but complementary, and often modify each other in qualitative new ways. In the competitive global economy, ICTs support specialization and concentration of ‘innovative milieux’ in urban centres, while the demand for ICTs is largely an urban affair, driven by growth of metropolitan regions.

First Graham sets out to tackle the “anything-anywhere-anytime dream” of ICTs as transcending urbanization. It was long held that new technologies would overcome the need for spatial proximity in cities, ushering a “post-urban age”. Graham distinguishes four strands of ‘post-urban’ thought. First, there have been utopian visions of Cyberspace as a parallel universe that would overcome the ballast of filthy material reality. Second are the pervasive ideas about the ‘death of distance’ and ‘friction-free capitalism’ thanks to ICTs, in which cities no longer played a significant role. Third are the disembodied hopes of Cyberlibertarians that ICTs would create inherently democratic and egalitarian communities without the restraints of (urban) geography. Fourth, there have been visions of new kinds of transparant citizenship and telepresence that would replace the ‘city of atoms’ with the ‘city of bits’.

Graham then forwards six weaknesses of these “anything-anywhere-anytime dreams”. 1) They are empirically wrong since they ignore actual trends of global urbanization and mobility. 2) They ignore the material geographies of ICTs, which consists of real wires, severs, satellites, towers, etc., and the unequal spread and socio-economic organization of ICTs throughout the world. 3) Theoretically, a weak spot is that they overgeneralize the ‘impact’ of technologies as being the same everywhere. 4) Another theoretical flaw is that over-stretching the binary opposition between ICTs and urban life grants too much power to ICTs for change, and underestimates existing physical practises of co-presence. Ideas about the city influence our perceptions and use of ICTs, just like the inverse. 5) On a political level, utopian visions of the liberating capabilities of ICTs act as a cover-up for neoliberalism and the proliferation of global inequalities. Not everyone benefits from ICTs. Rather than equalizing geography, (corporate) ICTs often exploit differences between places and regions. 6) A further political weakness is that these ideas imply that transformations of urban life are more a technical matter than a political one. The potential for policy innovations at urban, regional or national levels in shaping and harnessing ICT developments is underplayed.

In contrast to these technological determinist visions of technologies as replacing (substituting) urban life, most of the studies collected in this volume show a multitude of ‘remediations’ of ICTs and the city.

The book is divided into three parts and nine sections. Each part, section, and article or book excerpt is meticulously introduced by Graham, often up to the point where reading the actual article becomes unnecessary. Graham also provides the reader with many references for further reading.

The first part – Understanding Cybercities – consists of theoretical explorations and conceptualizations of the cybercity. The first section Cybercity archaeologies consist of articles that together counter the idea that cities are only now transformed by ‘revolutionary’ technological developments. Graham argues that historical continuities exist. Cities have always been infused by technologies. The second section Theorising cybercities consists of articles which follow two broad approaches to the interrelationships between cities and ICTs. The first approach is that of substitution: new technologies somehow replace existing urban space, place, and social relations based on co-presence. Graham already criticizes this view in his introductory article. The second approach is that of coevolution: urban space/place and electronic space are produced together and mutually shape each other. This view is mostly associated with neo-Marxist thinkers. It runs the risk of oversimplification (by regarding both city and technology as singular entities) and determinism (by radically separating the global from the local and seeing the first as the unavoidable conqueror of the later). The third section Cybercities: hybrid forms and recombinant spaces comprises articles that follow a third approach: recombination. This approach – to which Graham is most sympathetic – applies actor-network theory to the interrelations between cities and technologies. It takes “a highly contingent, relational perspective of the linkage between technology and social worlds” as composed of multiple heterogeneous networks (p. 69). Cities are composed of hybrid spaces on multiple geographical scales from local to global. This makes it far less clear what a city actually is (p. 113).

The four sections of the second part  – Cybercity Dimensions – cover various domains in which ICTs and the city influence each other. The sections in this part are called Cybercity mobilities, Cybercity economies, Social and cultural worlds of cybercities, and Cybercity public domains and digital divides. The mobilities section addresses the complementarity of ‘digital mobility’ with physical mobility. It also addresses the ‘power geometries’ of unequal mobilities. The economies section addresses the ways urban economies move between centralization and decentralization, tie cities together on a global level, and remediate urban consumption through e-commerce. The social and cultural worlds section addresses three issues: the tensions between distance and proximity; challenges in representing the cybercity (esp. its invisibility); and political biasses of urban ICTs (esp. surveillance issues). The public domains section addresses the question whether and how digital media technologies can create new public domains. Hurdles are the invisibility and individual use of ICTs, their appropriation for narrow commercial interests both local and global, tendencies among the affluent to both extend their reach beyond the local and seclude themselves, and the centralization of ‘electronic power’ on a small number of people, institutions and places.

The third part – Shaping Cybercities? – explores the ways in which urban policies have been and can be deployed to shape the new reality of the cybercity. The section Cybercity strategy and politics contains a cross section of existing policy cases from various cities throughout the world. In the final section Cybercity futures Graham return to his original question about the persistence of “end of city” scenarios. He briefly introduces both utopian and dystopian urban future predictions, and exposes the influence of  cyberpunk novelists on both modernists and critical urban social science. There is a crisis in technical rationality and in the legitimacy of future predictions. Challenges for future scenarios are: exposing the role of ICTs in and between cities at various scales; revealing the role of ICTs in non-deterministic ways; and developing new and powerful – even utopian! – notions for future urban thinking. Governments and social movements need to deal with pressing issues of our urbanizing planet: “neoliberal economic restructuring, migration and multiculturalism, sprawl and environmental crises, the privatisation of public space, endemic inequality, social fragmentation and capsularisation, and the widespread disillusionment with mainstream democratic politics” (p. 391).

This collection of articles may be the first comprehensive attempt to collect the current state of thinking about cybercities. And it’s a very broad and thorough one. It can be read as a baseline work for further inquiries into the interplay between digital media technologies and the city. Since its appearance in 2004, many of the developments described in this book have intensified, withered, or changed directions. One of the main characteristics of urban ICTs for instance, their invisibility, has been subject to change. Graham writes “[e]very urban landscape crosscuts, and interweaves with, multiple and extended sets of electronic sites and spaces. Most of these remain invisible. Many are simply unknowable” (p. 113). This visualization or materialization of “Hertzian space” is precisely what many locative media projects are now actively addressing. In addition, new developments have taken place. Examples of recent developments which (obviously) do not feature in the book are – from a technological side – GPS-based navigation and mobility, location-based services and contextually relevant information technologies, the use of locative media for urban annotation, social proximity, mapping and urban story-telling, pervasive games and urban play, distributed sensing and measurement projects in ‘urban computing’ (e.g. Pachube). From a more urban perspective for instance more recent developments are an increasing interest in urban ecology and urban farming, alternative sustainable mobilities, practises like ‘smart/flash mobs’, and so on.

Does this book have any weak points? Partly due to the varying quality of contributions by individual authors, one of the weak point of this compilation is that – in spite of its intention – a dominant picture arises of the ICTs – city relationship as a one-way street. Far more attention goes out to the working of ICTs on the urban domain than how ideas about the urban shape ICTs. The book predominantly focusses on very particular, often quantifiable, changes in urban life in the cybercity ‘caused’ by ICTs. It gives far less attention to various new ways of imagining the cybercity. Further, with a few exceptions the book consists almost entirely of academic contributions. Fields of practises which have long occupied themselves with either or both the city and new media technologies – e.g. architecture and urban planning, (media) design, the arts – are largely left out. This is regrettable, since these field often contribute very interesting new ideas to our understanding of ‘cybercities’. Another point of critique is that although the book contains cases from all over the world, the bias is mostly on north America and Europe, with some examples from south-American and Asian cities. Africa is completely left out and again remains the forgotten continent. Finally, the book does not give an overarching new framework for understanding the cybercity. No overarching broad analysis is given of how ICTs differently ‘affect’ various cities and regions worldwide. Although this might not be the main task of a reader (especially when it tries to put “urban ICT studies” on the map as an emerging field of research) the lack of overarching theory feels like an omission. To show that there is no longer a clear urban essence defined by neat boundaries, Graham uses terms like multiplicity, heterogeneity, complexity, diversity, hybridity, and so on (e.g. pp. 113-114). However, I feel such abstract notions in themselves are hardly illuminating for the formation of theory about cybercities. In my view it confuses implicit pre-understanding or methodological points of departure for actual theory. It seems to take epistemology (how can we know things?) for ontology (what is the nature of things?). Such obfuscating notions further widen the gap between ‘grand theory’ about cybercities on the one hand, and ‘on the ground’ analyses of actual ‘hybrid’ urban practises on the other hand.
This raises the question what the state of affairs is five years later. Have there been significant developments in theorizing cybercities since this book? I am very much looking forward to an updated version of the Cybercities reader, say in 2014, ten years after this version…

Read more book reviews at The Mobile City >>

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

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

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

Climate on the Wall & CO2nfesssion/CO2mmitment

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

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

Both projects were meant as

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

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

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

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

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

Cocollage

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

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

CoCollage from CoCollage on Vimeo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UbiCity / UbiOulu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Anne Helmond

As MoMo is a kind of trend-watching event, the main emphasis of this MoMo#11 was on the emerging field of augmented reality. Of course this vision has been around for a long time. Yet prototypes have mostly been very clunky head-mounted displays, or relied on some flat surface to project things on. As our mobile devices have by now arguably become the most ubiquitous technology humans ever carried with them (becoming a third skin, like our clothes are a second skin), they appear the ideal platform for all kinds of new forms of augmented reality in new and unexpected ways. This arguments of course echoes the argument made by Bell and Dourish (“Yesterday’s tomorrows”, PDF) that the vision of ubicomp has in actual practise taken shape in a different way on the mobile phone. Below some of my notes and impressions of MoMo#11.

speaker 1: Alan More – Social Marketing Intelligence (video)

Alan More claims in the future there will be wars about information. In the past identity had been shaped externally. Now there is “psychological self-determination”. The main question in this individualized age then becomes: how to reconnect to other people? In medieval times there were many festivals. Communication = communion (being together). According to More, we are a “we-species”. So new media must be participatory, More argues. Or in Rheingold’s terms “technologies of cooperation”. For mobile marketeers this means that they have to make “search” contextually relevant, because “we live in a world of search”. However, there are privacy issues involved in data scraping. More mentions a number of examples in his talk. Ushahidi in Kenya is a citizen journalism project about political crisis; Japanese link-up service Otetsudai; Japanese girlwalkers.com is a “community of interest” network to buy fashion via mobile phone; BMW winter tires campaign using MMS to remind people to put on winter tires.

Not a brilliant talk but nevertheless interesting to see what marketeers are thinking about when they try to involve mobile media in their strategies.

speaker 2: Jamais Cascio – Mobile Intelligence (video)

Cascio is the writer of Hacking the Earth (available on Lulu). Cascio raises the question what “augmenting the future” could mean. Does it involve wearing augmenting glasses? Taking smart drugs? But it could also mean just taking portable books – like Amazon’s Kindle – with us to make us ‘smarter’ on demand? Cascio sees Twitter as extension of processing knowledge. Cascio gives an example from his own experience, when he got an earthquake message first via Twitter and only after that he felt the earthquake for real. Urbanisation, he says, is also an organization of collective intelligence. Augmented awareness is increasingly based on a combination of sensors in the city and mobile networked technologies. Augmenting reality can also mean blocking out people (a “bozo filter”), or filtering information.

This is were I think it becomes interesting. Because this filtering could also mean filtering away ‘the stranger’, or ‘the serendipitous experience’ of city life. Is that a desirable development? As with most new media technologies, augmented reality brings up the tension between freedom and force. Augmenting reality can on the one hand be seen as a liberation from constraints, e.g. spatio-temporal, social, lack of information and knowledge at hand. Yet on the other hand there is new force involved. To what extend do we have to follow, for instance taking smart drugs when everyone else does, as Cascio himself brings up? Technology is political, Cascio closes his interesting talk. It is a manifestation of our desire to affect change in the world.

I posed a question: “augmenting intelligence” somehow suggests a quantitative improvement in our intelligence. But could it also lead to a decrease of intelligence, for instance our capacity for navigation? Cascio’s answer was something like: we ourselves decide, if we choose not to, then it won’t happen.

speaker 3: Andrew Grill – mobile & advertising (video)

Grill is working on a book “Twitter for non-dummies”. He points to ubiquity of mobile devices, and how it is even more personal(ized) than wallet. Grill mentions various branded applications on the iPhone as playful ways to get a brand on the most personal device people carry with them. Examples are a Gilette beard growing app, Carlsberg beer app, BMW Z4 racing app. he also talks about in-game advertising. The integration of a compass into mobile devices offer new possibilities. An example is the locative/augmented GeoVector: pointing in a direction to see what’s there. Grill finishes his quite commercial talk by saying mobile marketeers should mind the three Ps in mobile marketing: permission, privacy, preference.

speaker 4: Joe Pine – Infinite Possibilities (video)

Pine, co-author of the hugely successful book “The Experience Economy” reiterates that “we were into things, but now into experiences”. This includes the mobile phone. [Although the thing is grossly underestimated in my opinion when it comes to for instance the role of the mobile phone as an artefact for status enhancement in many countries.] Pine refers to Stan Davis who coined term “mass customization” in his book “Future Perfect“. Time and space have become resources instead of existing ‘out there’. Pine takes this idea and moulds it into a 3D model of various realities along axes of matter – no-matter; time – no-time; space – no-space. He calls this model “the multiverse”.

Photo by Anne Helmond

Pine has a term for each of the eight quadrants in this model.

real

• reality (time – space – matter)
• augmented reality (time – space – no-matter)
• alternate reality (no-time – space – no-matter)
• warped reality (no-time – space – matter)

virtual

• virtuality (no-time – no-space – no-matter)
• augmented virtuality (no-time – no-space – matter)
• physical virtuality (time – no-space – matter)
• mirrored virtuality (time – no-space – no-matter)

Although quite an impressive exercise in analysing the various types of spaces that are brought about by new technologies, I did have my doubts. This model departs from a vision of original space as objective, Euclidian space. This is the domain of (what we used to call) “reality” and it used to have “virtuality” as its opposite. I wonder whether this complex model isn’t reinstating the old binary distinctions between real-virtual, matter (atoms) – non-matter (bits), space – non-space, which recent theories are trying to overcome? I posed the question whether it wouldn’t be better to talk about “hybrid reality” instead, in order to understand how these domains actually blend? Pine answers that his model is an ideal type and that they almost never exist in isolation.

speaker 5: Howard Rheingold – Smart Mobs (video)
Rheingold departs by saying that mobile technologies lower the threshold for collective action. Although he says he doesn’t want to repeat the argument made in “Smart Mobs“, he does exactly this during his otherwise very pleasant talk with many real-world examples that are a real treat after many stretched cases infused with marketing-buzz and hopes. Smart mobs emerge when media amplify cooperation. They can have both beneficial and destructive impact. They are where the PC was in 1980 and internet in 1990. Mobile media are used to harvest collective intelligence and computing power. Rheingold refers to “collective action theory” by Mancur Olsen. Rheingold brings up many examples of collective intelligence being tapped by means of new technologies. One I found interesting in particular. In China the web is “harmonized”, which in Chinese sounds like the word for “river crab”, so many people have put up a picture of a river crab on their websites. This is a nice example of ludic behavior, subversiveness within limits, in relation to new media technologies.

Rheingold feels that the idea of a public sphere is reinforced through social media. But it is not all rosy. There are also nasty examples, like racists organizing via their cellphones to go out beating up non-whites on Brazilian beaches. Rheingold is involved in a new project called cooperationcommons.com.

Under the name “The era of sentient things” Rheingold proceeds by sketching a future world when chips are in everything, information is delivered to places, and the mobile phone acts as remote control, a “window on the world”. Information becomes augmented, situated, and social (Pat Rawlings – SAIC). Some examples Rheingold geives: Wikitude; mobile phone as a metal detector; Pachube, a project harvesting information by using the mobile phone as a sensor; mobiles to track diseases (EPI surveyors); the Grameen phone whereby fishermen in India getting best price (mentioned in Smart Mobs book); open mobile consortium doing Ushahidi; an idea by Intel called ‘Clone Cloud‘ (scroll halfway down or look here) for facial recognition via mobile phones using cloud computing power.

A question from the audience was: is this any good for us? Answer by Rheingold: it depends on who knows what. Does multitasking degrade human attention? What we need is access, media literacy, and participatory culture.

speaker 6: Robert Rice – The Future is calling (video)
The final speaker boldly claims “mobile is dead”. According to Rice, mobile communication is still pretty much 1-to-1 comm. Even Flashmobs have to be started by one person in a top-down fashion, he adds. ‘Smart phones’ mean the convergence of PC and telecommunications. To bring new functionality to the handphone like augmented reality it has to be more immersive. [here I immediately though how this relates the often mentioned property of casualness of the mobile phone: using it while doing something else, see chapter by Fujimoto about nagara in Ito, Okabe, Matsuda (2005) - Personal, Portable, Pedestrian.]. Augmented reality blends the virtual and the real, like in the General Electric commercial. According to Rice, media can be characterized according to whether they are passive, active, interactive, dynamic, or meta. Like journalism, augmented reality has to ask the questions who, what where, why, and how (5Ws+H)? Immersiveness is still being investigated with huge masks and weirds suits. We should also ask: what can go wrong (e.g. isolation)? So what are the “money scenarios” of augmented reality, asks Rice? Micro-transactions, augmented virtual goods, advertisements. “Augmented reality is something entirely different, and will change everything”, Rice claims. Rice calls Sixth Sense by MIT a good idea but the wrong implementation. We have to get away from projecting stuff on flat surfaces. We have to wear glasses!

In conclusion, this Momo#11 meeting was an interesting overview of how some of the main people in the field are thinking about the future of mobile and augmented reality. It made me think about how augmented reality relates to everyday life. Augmented reality has the same hurdle to take as ubicomp, namely that it has to somehow infuse and blend into our everyday reality, yet it can only exist because we can recognize it as not being reality. In this sense, I guess what we have to do is not to try to capture and define its essence, but to think about it as a kind of border-play. Such a ‘ludic approach’ to conceptualizing these developments may shed new light on how these technologies interact with the mobile city.

In this book, Lynch argues that people in urban situations orient themselves by means of mental maps. He compares three American cities (Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles) and looks at how people orient themselves in these cities. A central notion in this book is that of legibility (also called imageability and visibility). Legibility means the extend to which the cityscape can be ‘read’. People who move through the city engage in way-finding. They need to be able to recognize and organize urban elements into a coherent pattern. “In the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual. This image is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action” (p.4). Lynch proposes that these mental maps consist of five elements: (1) paths: routes along which people move throughout the city; (2) edges: boundaries and breaks in continuity; (3) districts: areas characterized by common characteristics; (4) nodes: strategic focus points for orientation like squares and junctions; and (5) landmarks: external points of orientation, usually a easily identifyable physical object in the urban landscape. Of these five elements, paths are especially important according Lynch, since these organize urban mobility.

A clear mental map of the urban environment is needed to counter the always looming fear of disorientation. A legible mental map gives people an important sense of emotional security, it is the framework for communication and conceptual organization, and heightens the depth and intensity of everyday human experience. The city itself is thus a powerful symbol of a complex society, argues Lynch. An environmental image has three components: identity (the recognition of urban elements as separate entities), structure (the relation of urban elements to other objects and to the observer), and meaning (its practical and emotional value to the observer). It is important that these urban elements are not hermetically designed into precise and final detail but present an open-ended order. Urban inhabitants should be able to actively form their own stories and create new activities. Lynch presents his work as an agenda for urban designers. They should design the city in such a way that it gives room for three related ‘movements’: mapping, learning, shaping. First, people should be able to acquire a clear mental map of their urban environment. Second, people should be able to learn how to navigate in this environment by training. Third, people must be able to operate and act upon their environment.

In my view this book is an incredible valuable work to understand how people perceive, inhabit and move around in the urban landscape. It shows that urban space is not just composed of its physical characteristics but equally by representations in mental images. Mobility is not just (the potential for) free-flowing movement but heavily relies on structuring and identifying the environment through the aid of mental maps. Lynch’ work has been influential to many. Theorist of postmodernity Fredric Jameson (1991) for instance refers to Lynch when he argues that the cognitive map is a means to cope with societies complexities by bridging ‘objective’ and abstract representations of space, and subjective existential experiences of ‘lived space’. Lynch can also be seen as a precursor to the influential thesis by Henri Lefrebvre from 1974 that space is not just ‘out there’ as a mathematical entity or a priori category but always socially produced. Lynch’ work has many implications for urban design and raises various questions about the present role of mobile and locative media technologies in the urban context.

One such question is the extend to which our way-finding shifts from orienting ourselves to mostly ‘objective’ urban elements to become increasingly subjective by means of locative media technologies. We are far more able than ever before to “write” the city with our own subjective experiences and share these with other people through mobile media. A recent post by Martijn de Waal discusses this issue of ‘semantic way-finding’. The element of visibility is crucial here. Lynch is talking about elements of the city that are publicly visible to all people. But what happens when people increasingly rely on private and idiosyncratic points of orientation through their portable devices? Locative media add invisible layers of social meanings to the city that are only visible through a different interface (the mobile screen), accessible to others elsewhere, although often only to those who are members of that service or community. What does this mean for notions of general legibility, the public and private character of mental images, and social inclusion/exclusion?

In addition, Lynch’ emphasis on clear legibility of the urban environment poses some critical questions about the current tendency to saturate the urban landscape with information. What happens to the overall legibility of the city when every building, object, and place wants to communicate and announce its existence to us by yelling “I Am Here, Look At Me!”? To what extend will mobile and locative devices come to act as filters for coping with the torrent of information, or actually become part of the problem itself?

Another issue brought up by Lynch’ work is the eternal question of (the end of) serendipity, so often discussed in relation to mobile media and location-based services. Are locative services undermining the potential for exploration and unexpected encounters with new places and people, when our movements are guided and goal-oriented? Lynch himself feels that disorientation is the cause of fear and anxiety, and already claims that “[t]o become completely lost is perhaps a rather rare experience for most people in the modern city” (p. 4). Yet under controlled circumstances he acknowledges that “there is some value in mystification, labyrinth, or surprise in the environment” (p. 5).

Lynch work also introduces a question that is especially relevant nowadays. Is our capacity for orientation and way-finding something we learn (and thus can unlearn as well when we externalize this to our GPS navigation devices, see earlier posts on this blog here, here, here, and here), or is it innate to people as well as other animals? Lynch takes a clear stance when he says “it now seems unlikely that there is any mystic “instinct” of way-finding” (p. 3), but that seems to be countered by recent biological evidence about for instance bird migrations.

Finally, some more critical remarks. Lynch primarily emphasizes the role of the visual sense. He says how people find their way in the city by relying on vision. Other faculties such as hearing and even smelling are lacking in his work. Some later authors have stressed the role of sound in experiencing the city (e.g. Paul DuGay about the Walkman; Michael Bull about the mobile phone as an audio device; Caroline Basset, and De Jong & Schuilenburg in a special issue of Open Magazine about sound). A related omission in Lynch’ analysis of the urban experience is the role of media in general and text in particular. This is odd since Lynch so prominently uses the term legibility in his work. Of course it could be countered that media did not play such a big role in the urban context at the time of writing of this book (1960) but this misses the point that cities from their inception have been inscribed by signs and media, as Malcolm McCullough so clearly demonstrated in his keynote speech at The Mobile City 2008. An early modern writer such as Walter Benjamin for instance already looks at the relation between print media and the city, and emphasizes that the modern city is increasingly being dominated by “script-images”. “Script – having found, in the book, a refuge in which it can lead an autonomous existence – is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos”, he says in an essay called “Attested Auditor of Books”.

Still, “The Image of the City” is a classic work and can be reread as a fresh work in this age. Lynch’ division of mapping/learning/shaping can well be applied as important questions that can be posed for each locative media project. To what extend do locative media accurately or insightfully map our (experience of) environment? To what extend do locative media teach us to see and experience our environment? To what extend do locative media enable us to shape and modify our environment?

Read more reviews at The Mobile City >>

Recently I stumbled across two examples that explore its very edges. The first is a fascinating map of the remotest place on earth.

The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel. Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What’s more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city – around the same proportion as Canada’s Quebec province.

(image source)

The map is created by researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank. It is part of a research that measures urbanisation from the new perspective of travel time to 8500 major cities. Key findings are:

• we passed the point at which more than half the world’s populations live in cities around the turn of the Millennium (2000) – much earlier than the 2007/8 estimate;
• more than half of the world’s population lives less than 1 hour from a major city, but the breakdown is 85% of the developed world and only 35% of the developing world;
• 95% of the world’s population is concentrated on just 10% of the world’s land; but
• only 10% of the world’s land area is classified as “remote” or more than 48 hours from a large city.

The map beautifully shows just how incredibly connected the world has become – not only via telecommunications but also by physical mobility – and how even the remotest regions are now closely tied to the urban sphere. The fact that 10% of the world is more than 48 hours from a large city raises questions about the definition of ‘urban’, as states the news release. More nice maps here.

A second example is the Reuters news that a Nepali telecom firm is planning to expand its mobile phone service to the top of the Mount Everest. The Mount Everest is one of the busiest high mountains. Each year hundreds of climbers attempt to reach the summit. Until now they were dependent on expensive satellite telephones to call family and friends from the top. Now even the highest peak on earth will become connected to the worldwide communication networks.

The question of course remains whether this potential for mobility and connection to ‘the global’ actually contributes to a worldwide “imagined community”. What this map does not indicate is that mobility and connections are unequally divided. Doreen Massey has called this “the power-geometry of time-space compression” (see article). While for global and digital ‘neo-nomads’ the world may indeed seem one homogeneous ‘smooth space’, for others it remains firmly divided by barriers and obstacles.