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.

Using digital media technologies for collective urban issues
Our everyday lives are increasingly shaped by digital media technologies, from smart cards and intelligent GPS systems to social media and smartphones. How can we use digital media technologies to make our cities more social, rather than just more hi-tech?

This international conference brings together key thinkers and doers working in the fields of new media and urbanism. Keynote speakers such as Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko will speak about the promises and challenges in this newly emerging and highly interdisciplinary field of urban design. The keynotes will be accompanied by presentations of ‘best practices’ from various disciplines, such as architecture, art, design, and policy.

Join us in February 2012 at Amsterdam’s Westergasfabriek to explore how urban designers, interface developers, app builders, policy makers, housing coorations, artists, scientists and others can use digital technologies to organise citizen engagement, and to contribute to our social cities of tomorrow.

Visit the event website here: www.socialcitiesoftomorrow.nl

The Ideas and Ideals in Urban Media Theory

Over the last decade a new set of media, technologies, software, and cultural practices has emerged that changes how we experience the city and shape our urban culture. They range from the mobile phone to GPS navigation; from iPhone apps to “smart”systems that optimize traffic circulation; from listening to an alternative soundtrack on an mp3 player to using a smart phone to locate friends or nearby sites that matchesone’s interests.

There is no single name or discourse for these technologies. Labels range from“ubiquitous computing” to “locative media,” from “ambient intelligence” to “theInternet of things,” and from “the sentient city” to “urban informatics.”1 Nor do thesetechnologies have a single point of origin or trajectory of deployment—althoughmany do have their genesis in military research programs.2 Some are rolled out bygovernment agencies that want to bring order to and control urban space. Others aremarketed by profit-driven telecommunication companies trying to provide their customerswith personalized services. Sometimes community workers take up the technology,hoping it can enhance mutual understanding between different culturalgroups. There are even artists who work with these very technologies to critique theirrole in promoting a consumer based society or bringing about a “society of control.”And then there are the actual users of the technologies that often appropriate themin slightly different ways than intended by their designers or marketers.

What all these urban media—the catchall term that I will use in this chapter—havein common is that they no longer adhere to the anything-anytime-anywhere-newmediaparadigm of the 1990s.3 Rather, they are centered on location-sensing capacitiesand aim to intervene in or add to a specific here-and-now. Their exact interventionsdiffer, but as the examples given above show, urban media are making deep inroadson a diverse range of activities of place making—be they the top-down deploymentby government agencies or the bottom-up appropriation by urbanites in their everydaylife.4

In relation to the main theme of this book—the opportunity and challenges forsocial participation and engagement—two different ways of theorizing urban mediaurge themselves on us. One would be to focus on the affordances of urban media andwhat these could mean for civic life.5 The main question then would be, How doesthe utilization of these urban media—as the outcome of an intricate process of designand appropriation—reshape our urban society?

In this chapter, however, I would like to turn that question more or less around.Rather than looking at the way technology reshapes urban culture, I want to investigatehow ideas and ideals about the city also reshape technology. What role do ourideas of what a city should be play in the design and appropriation of urban media?Technological and Urban ImaginariesThe shaping and appropriation of technology in relation to society represents acomplex process that involves many different actors—from designers to governmentpolicymakers and investors, as well as users—all of whom have their own preferencesand interests. The material characteristics of the technologies themselves factor intothis relationship as well. Here I want to point to one specific yet important elementin these complex assemblages: the performative role of what I will call the urbantechnologicalimaginary.

As Ann Galloway has convincingly shown in her. “A Brief History of the Future ofUrban Computing and Locative Media” (2008), it is impossible to reduce the introductionof new technologies to a single idea by a single actor or institution that is rationallyrolled out, step by step. Galloway points to different “forums for negotiating”that play a part in deciding “what we want and what we don’t want,” among whichshe numbers open markets, institutional regulation (courts, government agencies,NGOs), special-interest groups, and grassroots activism.In this negotiating process, Galloway explains, expectations play a very importantpart. Differing visions on technology—deliberately utopian or dystopian—are utteredin this process, and these may become performative. These visions, hopes, and fears—rational or irrational, fact based or emotionally appealing—may directly affect governmentpolicy decisions, design criteria, investment by venture capitalists, people’sstances toward a new product, and so on. Similarly, Flichy has called these performativeexpectations the “technological imaginary” (Flichy 1999; Marvin 1988).In the field of urban development we find similar “imaginaries” at work. Is not thewhole history of urban planning—from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities to Disney’sgated community, Celebration, in Florida or Korea’s “smart and sustainable city,”Songdo—a history of (sometimes misguided) attempts to turn imaginary urban utopiasinto forms and volumes, bricks and mortar? “Urban imaginaries,” writes Jude Bloomfield(2006, 46), “focus on sensory and emotional experience and practices, on theimprint of collective memory on imagining how the city could be, on the different,often conflicting social constructions of the city’s future.”

In the development of urban media the technological imaginary and the urbanimaginary come together to form a technourban imaginary. Central issues in thedebates in which the technourban discussions are shaped include: What exactly is acity? How do we expect it to function? Who has which rights? How should we ascitizens—with all our differences—live together in an urban society? How can we usetechnology to realize these ideas? Or how do new technologies jeopardize these ideals?More formally, the technourban imaginary is shaped around both ideas of what acity is (Is a city primarily a bunch of infrastructure or should it be understood essentiallyas a community?) as well as around urban ideals (What kind of community dowe want the city be; how and to whose advantage should the infrastructure bemanaged?). Technourban imaginaries often combine these two framings in a particularapproach of what a city should be.These particular technourban imaginaries play a role in the design of many urbanmedia technologies. Sometimes they are made explicit in the discussion around theirimplementation. At other times they are left implicit. Often they relate to particulardisciplinary framings of technology and society, and they almost always build on (orexplicitly want to counter) historical framings of urban culture. In the rest of thischapter I would like to bring out a few of these technourban imaginaries at work inthe design and appropriation of urban media and investigate how they relate to participationand citizen engagement.

U-City

The first technourban imagination I want to discuss here can be found in a designapproach called “u-City.” This term—short for “ubiquitous city”—has been coined bythe Korean government in an attempt to promote an industry around the design of“smart cities.” The central idea is that urban computing should make urban life morecomfortable, efficient, and easier to manage. The focus is on systems of smart trafficmanagement, or smart objects such as tires that give off warnings when the pressureis too low. Another interest is the development of personalized services like receivinga message when your children have arrived safely at school. Hwang (2009) calls thisidea “The City as a Service.”

We see similar promises in other discourses on ubiquitous computing, uttered atconferences, through advertising, and in professional publications, where new technologiesare brought to the market to either increase efficiency or help personalize thecity through friend finders or recommendation systems. The goal is to put people incontrol of their surroundings. Ubiquitous computing, it is argued, will create “seamlessexperiences” where computers operate calmly in the background.6This particular way of understanding the city can be linked to a historic modernistidea of urban technology in which the city is envisioned as a collection of efficientlymanaged, ever-improving technological infrastructures whose successive rollout willbring us a better life. In their book Splintering Urbanism (2001), Stephen Graham andSimon Marvin trace this idea back to the mid-nineteenth century and connect it withthe scientific positivism of that era. Dazzling new technologies like electricity or moremundane ones such as sewer systems would lead the way to a better life. Ambitiousmunicipalities, they write, wanted their cities to be a “blaze of light,” “rearing out ofthe darkness of the surrounding non-electrified regions” (p.46).7These discussions on the benefits of the new infrastructures were held in concertwith the first debates on the ills of the modern industrial metropolises that gave birthto the discipline of urban planning. This new professional field hoped to solve socialproblems like slumming, bad hygienic conditions, and the threat of social revolt bythe emerging underclass by bringing a new unitary spatial order to the city. Howexactly that was to be carried out varied according to which urban imaginary theseplanners subscribed to. Ebenezer Howard envisioned garden cities with a cooperativepolitical and economic structure, whereas Baron de Haussmann wanted to bring orderto the existing city with his broad boulevards that simultaneously were to increasehygiene as well as the authorities’ ability to assert military control over the masses.At the same time, and on an important point, the u-city discourse of the twentyfirstcentury also differs from the modernist infrastructural movement of the nineteenthcentury. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin point out that in the modernindustrial city, the ideals were universal access to infrastructure networks such as theelectrical grid or the road system. These infrastructure networks integrated all citizensinto the same technological system on the same level. Perhaps the most importantaspect of Haussmann’s urban imaginary, they state, was the idea to use infrastructuralinterventions to create a unitary city.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, utilities and infrastructure are nolonger seen as public services equally accessible by all, or as integrators that hold allthe smaller elements together in a bigger system. Rather they are seen as marketablecommodities sold to specific consumer groups. The modernist unitary ideal has givenway to a post-Fordist and neoliberal one. For instance, a “smart toll road” will adaptits pricing scheme to demand: the busier the traffic, the higher the toll.Such technological systems might make the city more efficient and tailored toindividuals, yet these systems also address their users very differently. Whereas themodern infrastructure addresses its users as equal citizens, these personalized infrastructuralservices address them as “individual customers.” This could create newforms of inequality. Graham (2005) speaks of an emergence of “Software Sorted Geographies”and Lieven De Cauter (2004) warns of the emergence of a “Capsular Society.”Such developments could even create a shift in the relations between citizens and thecity. Do people still see themselves as citizens—with all the rights and duties involved?Or are they starting to think of themselves as customers, which sets up a differentrelationship between the “customer” and the owner of the system as well as betweenusers themselves?8

Although this critique is valuable, driving it to extremes also risks overlookingopportunities that dynamic pricing systems and flexible services may allow for civicengagement. The problem that Graham and Marvin have diagnosed is not so muchthe technology itself, but the urban imaginary of a neoliberal city of services. Yetcouldn’t these same infrastructural technologies also be deployed in the service ofother urban imaginaries—for instance, an environmentally sustainable city?Take for instance the Smart Cities project at the MIT Media Lab. The way the cityis framed is again as a collective of infrastructures: “Buildings and cities can usefullybe compared to living bodies. They have skeleton and skin systems that provide shelterand protection to their inhabitants, metabolic systems that process inputs of materialsand energy to support daily life, and now artificial nervous systems consisting ofsensors, networks, and ubiquitously embedded computational capacity.”9 Yet here theapplication of ubiquitous computing is applied to making the city environmentallysustainable. The project includes a design for a new city car that can be rented througha dynamic pricing system. Popular routes and times of day are more expensive thanother times and routes. The goal here is not to maximize profit or to provide exclusiveservices to the rich, but rather to allocate scarce resources such as natural resourcesand mobility as efficiently as possible.

Urban Flaneurs and Situationists

The second technourban imaginary that I want to discuss here is one often found inthe world of locative media art (Tuters and Varnelis 2006). In this imaginary, two oldurban tropes play an important role: Walter Benjamin’s flaneur and Guy Debord’sSituationist International movement.Over the last decade, many artists and designers have criticized the commercialapplications of urban media, such as those based on the ideal of the u-city. They pointout that the urban-technological imaginary of a personalized city tailored to one’sprivate preferences, while blocking out undesired places or people, endangers some ofthe essences of their own urban ideal: a city in which play, serendipity, and curiosityplay an important role.

On the centennial celebration of the Futurist Manifesto, American researcher EricPaulos published the “Manifesto of Open Disruption and Participation” (2009), whichmade the case for such a conceptualization of urban culture: “We claim that the successfulubiquitous computing tools, the ones we really want to cohabitate with, willbe those that incorporate the full range of life experiences. We want our tools to singof not just productivity but of our love of curiosity, the joy of wonderment, and thefreshness of the unknown.” In the domain of locative media art10 we have seen anumber of experiments that match Paulos’s call and have turned the urban imaginaryof efficiency and personalization inside out. The project You Are Not Here—A DislocativeTourism Agency, for instance, lets its participants experience the city space in anextended way. In this project a map of Baghdad is projected on the city grid of NewYork and participants are invited to make their way to a number of “Baghdad touristspots” through the streets of New York. When they arrive at the corresponding locationin Manhattan, they will find a sticker with a phone number. When dialed, theywill hear a story about Baghdad.

The recent interest in “psychogeographic” artist interventions like this one is alsoapparent in art festivals that have emerged over the last few years, such as the Confluxfestival in New York that wants to investigate “everyday urban life through emergingartistic, technological and social practice. . . . Over the course of the long weekendthe sidewalks are literally transformed into a mobile laboratory for creative action.With tools ranging from traditional paper maps to high-tech mobile devices, artistspresent walking tours, public installations and interactive performance.”11As Dimitris Charitos, Olga Paraskevopoulou, and Charalampos Rizopoulos (2008)have pointed out, projects like “You Are Not Here” clearly reflect the ideals of the1950s–1960s Situationist International. This group of artists, writers, and architectscentered around Guy Debord worked to counter the rationalist city models tailoredto the consumerist logic of the “society of spectacle” with an approach centered onsubjective experiences of the city, including areas and experiences marginalized in thedominant way of thinking about urban culture.12

Williams, Robles, and Dourish (2009) have pointed out that the Parisian poetBaudelaire and the German philosopher Walter Benjamin also form an importantsource of inspiration for many urban media practitioners. Here the image of the“flaneur” is often invoked as the “solitary and thoughtful stroller” that wandersaround the city casting his glance at the turbulence of the crowds, picking up itsidiosyncrasies as seeds for his own thoughts and feelings. Or as Kracauer has put it:“To the flaneur the sight of the city were like dreams to a hashish smoker” (quotedin McQuire 2008, 42). Williams, Robles, and Dourish (2009) note a similarity betweenthis fin de siècle mode of being and a design approach encouraged by Paulos andBeckman, who write: “We marvel at mundane everyday experiences and objects thatevoke mystery, doubt, and uncertainty. . . . How can we design technology to supportsuch wonderment?” (quoted in Williams, Robles, and Dourish 2009, 7)?

Although a design approach based on the principles of wonder, surprise, confusion,or dislocation may indeed enrich the experience of the city, it is not without its critics.Williams and colleagues (2009) find the position of the flaneur too detached. Onewonders from a safe distance about urban phenomena, but the flaneur is never reallyengaged or called into action. Flanerie “privilege[s] passive voyeurism and imaginationtending towards illusion. The alternate mobilities, inhabitations and appropriationsalive in the city (homelessness and immigration, among other things) are left for examinationby someone else” (Williams, Robles, and Dourish 2009, 7). Kazys Varnelis (2009)has attacked the rise of interest in Situationism on similar grounds by suggesting “Situationism’sfatal flaw is that . . . its goal was always to valorize individual experience overthe collective.” There is thus a fine line of which designers working from this approachshould be aware. While indeed locative media could aim to provide alternative experiencesin the city, there is also the issue of how to truly engage the user.

The City as an Operating System

The third technourban imaginary I would like to bring out makes use of a metaphorin which the city is compared with computer systems. Here, the city is understood asan “operating system” or an “information processing system.” This approach to citiesunderstands them as complex systems in which the city mainly functions as a marketplacewhere people exchange goods, information, and cultural practices.13Agency is usually located at the level of the individual who is driven by his or herown goals and desires, yet on an aggregate level particular customs, legal codes, orinstitutions may emerge over time, thus hardening specific practices and power relationsin stone, law, or today, software code. Once emerged, these same customs, codes,or institutions may enable or restrain future actions and goals of urbanites.14 Theyform the kernel of a civil society, so to speak.

Although the metaphor of the operating system itself is new, this way of framingthe city also has its roots in earlier debates on urban culture. It is for instance relatedto the thoughts of Chicago School researcher Louis Wirth. In the late 1930s, in hisinfluential article “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938), he laid out how the density ofthe city leads to cultural specialization, a spatial segregation of lifestyles, and a breakdownof rigid social structures.

Now, critics claim, a new urban operating system is on the rise. Wirth’s OS wasbased on a combination of high density and the spatial proximity of different groupsof urbanites who, for the most part, remain strangers to each other. The “urban OS”of our time is written in software code, can sense individual actions in real time, andcan aggregate these into data that can be used to actuate all sorts of actions. This,Anthony Townsend (2000, p5) claims, changes the metabolism of urban life. Forinstance, through the mobile phone “decision-making and management of everydaylife is increasingly decentralized,” which means that the city system becomes “morecomplex and less predictable.” Townsend call this new complex system the “real-timecity” “in which system conditions can be monitored and reacted to instantaneously[and at a distance].”

This idea of the city lies behind much of the work of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab. Inmany projects, the labs make use of the tracking affordances of urban media, tracingthe whereabouts of people, city buses, or other objects throughout the city. This datais fed into a system that aggregates this information in real time and can be used indifferent contexts. For instance, public transport could be adjusted to real-time movementsof people in the city. Here the city is conceived as an operating system that—through various real-time sensor networks—generates all sorts of (aggregated) datastreams. One of the goals of urban media designers is then to build relevant services—for either consumers or citizens—that make use of and build on these real-time datastreams.

In the future these developments may lead to semantic knowledge bases. In anarticle on the SENSEable City WikiCity project, the researchers project a future inwhich you can ask your urban informatics device questions like “what is the bestplace—with regard to my current location, weather forecast, environmental conditionsand other factors—to fly a kite today” (Calabrese, Kloeckl, and Ratti 2009)?Now that may seem like a somewhat trivial affair, but of course this depends onthe sort of questions you might use to personalize the city. Change the questions, andthis approach may even empower new groups. Over the last few years, reports havesurfaced about African farmers who receive market prices at different locations fortheir produce by SMS and so are able to negotiate better prices. Small shopkeepers—again in Africa—order their supplies by SMS rather than driving to bigger cities, or usethe phone to schedule appointments with clients. People who work in the informalor semiformal economies can organize their life and their use of the city more efficientlyand increase their knowledge of social processes and market conditions.

The City as a Commons

A fourth technourban imaginary frames the city as a commons—a set of resources thatbelong to the collective of citizens. Technology is then brought in to provide tools forcitizens to collectively take care of their city. Examples are the use of wikis to allowfor collective planning exercises (see Schuilenburg and De Jong 2006), or the use ofreputation systems that allow for trust in collective action with unknown others (seeRheingold 2002).

Artist Usman Haque’s installation Natural Fuse is an interesting example that bothillustrates and questions this approach. Participants in Natural Fuse receive a flowerbox equipped with watering equipment as well as with a bottle of vinegar. They alsoreceive an electrical appliance such as a lamp, radio, or fan. The flower boxes andelectrical appliances are linked to each other and (via the Internet) to the similar setsbelonging to other users.

The central idea is that the CO2 digestion of the plants in the network offsets theCO2 emissions caused by the use of the electrical appliances. If all the participants inthe network use less energy than their plants compensate for, the system will waterthe plants and they will grow. However, if all users in the system consume more energythan can be compensated for, the system will start to kill plants by releasing thevinegar in the soil of the plants.This means that if individuals use too much energy, other people’s plants will bekilled. On the other hand, if they choose to conserve energy, that means someoneelse in the system may make use of the CO2-absorption capacities of their plants,allowing others to temporarily use more energy. A switch on the set illustrates thischoice. Users can set their system to “selfish” and thus consume more energy thanthey offset with their plants, or they can set the switch to “selfless.”Natural Fuse thus turns the energy management into a commons—a space andresource shared by and accessible to all participants. The idea of the commons is basedon the old British custom of the communal pasture where all herdsmen in the communitywere allowed to graze their cattle.

However, the collective management of a commons runs at a great risk. It will onlywork if participants are willing to cooperate and allow for mutual accommodation. Ifparticipants only follow their own rational self-interest, the commons risks overgrazing.As Garrett Hardin (1968) has written, “The rational herdsman concludes that theonly sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. Andanother. . . . Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compelshim to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited.”Can we thus conceive of an urban media system that promotes the collective wellbeing?Could we conceive of some sort of peer-to-peer governance model that couldprevent overuse of scarce resources?

This is (as I have demonstrated elsewhere) the question that Natural Fuse addresses;it illustrates the opportunities of an “urban energy commons” as well as the problemof the tragedy that bears the same name. It challenges our thinking about the viabilityof a networked urban commons. Yet it does not provide any definite answers: Wouldcreating awareness through direct feedback mechanisms about the impact of rationalselfish behavior be able to prevent it? Or would we instead need complex reputationsystems? Or perhaps sentient bookkeeping systems in which our allotted ratios arekept or traded? Can we do this through peer-to-peer technologies, or do we needcentral institutions that act as trusted third parties (De Waal 2009a)?

The City as a Community of Strangers

The next technourban imaginary that I would like to bring out is the idea of the cityas a community of strangers. Since the rise of the modern industrial metropolis, theoristssuch as Simmel, Sennett, Jacobs, and Lofland have pointed out that the maincharacteristic of urban life is to be surrounded by strangers who will remain strangers.Yet at the same time, one has to share resources and live together with these strangersand relate to their differences in some way or other (Simmel 1969; Sennett 1969;Lofland 1973; Jacobs [1961] 2000; McQuire 2008).Both Jacobs and Lofland have demonstrated how the working of the city streetscan build trust between strangers. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobsdescribes how out of the many trivial repeated interactions of everyday life, a senseof trust between strangers is built up over time. Waiting together at the bus stop,exchanging small talk in the corner store, it is these kinds of interactions throughwhich people become “familiar strangers” to each other. Jacobs states that “the sumof such casual, public contact at a local level . . . is a feeling for the public identity ofpeople, a web of public respect and trust and a resource in time of personal or neighborhoodneed” (p. 67).

Jacobs has been critiqued for a nostalgic take on her cozy West Village city life,whereas such mechanisms in the city at large were thought to be impossible to maintain.Social geographers and urban sociologists such as Blokland and Ray (2008) haveconvincingly shown that such public familiarity is indeed a lot harder to find todaythan a few decades ago (also see Blokland 2005). Urbanites have become more mobileand their patterns of daily life are less synchronous, decreasing their opportunities forrepeated interaction.

In the domain of urban media there is, however, a large interest in remediating ortranslating the idea of public familiarity with the help of digital media. In a way socialnetworks like Twitter and MySpace do allow a sense of public familiarity even thoughone is not in the same place or same time. On the other hand, it could be argued thatsuch networks are mainly made up of people who already know each other and thusdoes not do much for the building up of public familiarity—even though it is technicallypossible to “follow” or “befriend” strangers based on a geographic location.Perhaps one of the best-known examples that builds on this idea of public familiarityis the project “Familiar Strangers” and the Jabberwocky application that came outof it. Jabberwocky is a mobile phone application that allows users to see if any familiarstrangers are around—people that one has encountered before at other times andplaces. The authors of the paper hope that in this way a sense of feeling at home oreven trust and solidarity can be promoted: “We believe that the extensions to thisrelationship using small personal wireless objects and applications on existing mobilephones can allow individuals to more acutely gauge their social relationship to people,places and the crowds around them over time. We also believe that such tools arecapable of encouraging community solidarity, even transitory solidarity” (Paulos andGoodman 2004, 3).

The City as a Public Sphere

The last technourban imaginary I would like to discuss is the idea of the city as anactive public sphere. This imaginary too departs from the notion that the city consistsof strangers who must live together: the focus is now on how the city allows them tobe confronted with each other, to exchange ideas, and to debate the future of the city.Often this ideal is juxtaposed with the suburban ideal of homogeneity. Urban citizensamong others, Richard Sennett claims, should not retreat to their comfort zones, butinstead should embrace the complexities, differences, and conflicts that urban lifebrings about (Sennett 1970, 1977, 1990, 2001).

Over the last decade we have seen many urban media projects that in one way oranother seem to answer Sennett’s call (albeit sometimes indirectly). There is forinstance a whole range of geoannotation projects that allow citizens to mark up urbanspace with their own ideas, histories, or thoughts. Often the hope is expressed thatthese projects will lead to an exchange of insights.In an article in the 2006 Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Lily Shirvanee expects that thesharing of experiences through locative media could lead to what she has called “socialviscosity.” The stories collected could work as crystallization points for (imagined) communitiesor starting points for processes of exchange, deliberation, or contestation.Shirvanee suggests that “this viscosity of space is perceived as a bond that may exist notonly between people with established relationships who can find each other ‘on thestreet’ in a mobile context, but also between strangers, thereby inspiring a new communityand, possibly, creating the potential for a more democratized public space.”An example is the project Textales that uses an urban screen to bring about a sitefor contestation in the city. The initiators organized workshops in which participantswere asked to make pictures of political issues that affected life in their neighborhood—such as housing inequity. These pictures were shown on an urban screen inthe neighborhood and passersby could comment on the pictures by sending a textmessage that would be displayed on the screen. In an article on the project Annayand Strohecker (2009) directly refer to theories on democracy and deliberation andhope that a project like Textales can help to form “issue publics” around particularconcerns in which a “collective epistemology” might arise “that helps us to considerour own viewpoints and those of our fellow citizens.”

Conclusion

I have now shown six technourban imaginaries at work in both the design and appropriationof urban media. This list is not meant to exhaustive. Rather I wanted to bringout a number of different and sometimes conflicting perspectives on what the cityshould be and how technology is thought to bring that ideal about. I wanted to showthat whereas we often focus on the impact of technology on urban culture, the reverseis also true. Many urban media are purposely designed to remediate traditional ideasabout urban culture.

Also, the neat categorization I have made here serves an analytic purpose only.Several of these technourban imaginaries could be combined. In fact, it could beargued that projects whose main focus can be reduced to a single framing of what acity is are often problematic. For instance, advocates of the city as a set of personalizedinfrastructures might miss important points about the fact that a city is also a communityand thus contributes to the balkanization of urban culture.

Similarly, many art projects that do address the city as a (political) community havetheir own critics. Many of these projects are noncommittal. Their duration is oftenshort, their audience is a small self-selected crowd, and only seldom is there follow-upthat might turn these art projects into a more sustainable addition to the experienceof the city. Could they be integrated in the infrastructure of the city in a more durableway? In short, designers of urban media would do best to address several framings ofthe city at once. This criticism—although important—does not mean that these artprojects are meaningless. What many of them at least do well is tease out the technourbanimaginaries at work in the shaping of urban media. These can be valuablecontributions to the general debate.

Only by bringing out these often-implicit urban ideals can we engage in the discussionof how these urban media can best serve society. That is what I have tried to dohere. By highlighting the urban ideas and ideals at work in discussions on urbanmedia, I hope to show that the process in which these technologies are designed andappropriated is an open one. And even though one or two of these urban-technologicalimaginaries may dominate the debate and design of new services, there are alsoalternatives.

NotesThis contribution builds on and elaborates some of my earlier work on this theme, especially De Waal 2009b. I also build on the notion of latent ideals in urban media as described in Williams, Robles, and Dourish 2009.1. See for instance Galloway 2008 for an extensive list of different labels.

2. An important impetus for the development of urban media was the decision of the U.S. militaryin 2000 to make an unscrambled version of the GPS system available to the general public.From then on, the signal has been accurate enough to pinpoint users of GPS devices on streetlevel rather than somewhere in a neighborhood. Many Location Based Media now make use ofthis location-sensing technology.

3. This shift from “placelessness” to “situatedness” has been theorized by Tuters and Varnelis2006, Varnelis 2008, as well as Shepard and Greenfield 2007. On a formal level, Mark Tuters andKazys Varnelis (2006, http://networkedpublics.org/locative_media/beyond_locative_media) havepointed out two main characteristic affordances of what they call “locative media” that enablethis shift from “placelessness” to “situatedness.” One is the capacity to annotate places, “virtuallytagging the world.” The other affordance has a phenomenological quality that enables “tracingthe action of the subject in the world.”

4. As Lefebvre has shown, the experience of place is always a negotiation between the physicaltop-down design and ordering of space by governments, architects and developers, and thepersonal trajectory of its inhabitants—their history, memories, and symbolic interpretations ofthe space. Urban media can thus be understood as an extra layer somewhere between Lefebvre’stop-down representation of space and his bottom-up representational space.

5. Hutchby (2001) has defined affordances as the “functional and relational aspects which framewhile not determining the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object. In this waytechnologies can be understood as artefacts which may be both shaped by and shaping of thepractices humans use in interaction with, around and through them.” The term affordances“stress[es] that the range of possibilities for interpretation and action is nowhere near as openfor either ‘writers’ or ‘readers’ as the technology as text metaphor implies. . . . We have to acceptthat technological artefacts do not amount simply to what their users make of them; what ismade of them is accomplished in the interface between human aims and the artefact’s affordances”(p. 450).

6. Mark Weiser’s influential article “The Computer of the 21st Century” (1991) and his publicationco-authored with Seely Brown, Designing Calm Technology (1995), are often referred to inthis debate. See also Anne Galloway’s (2008, 113) take on the history of ubicomp, in which sheexplains how “the desire to have computing so seamlessly and efficiently embedded in our dailylives is grounded in a profoundly utopian vision connected to cultural and historical notions oftechnological ‘progress.’” At the same time she argues that Weiser’s claim has often been misunderstood.Although he argues for an “invisible” technology, he also stresses the importance ofseamful experiences.

7. Graham and Marvin (2001) connect this positivist outlook on urban infrastructures withbroader social developments. For instance, the urban reform movement inspired by this idea“was led by sanitarians, engineers, urban planners, and the growing middle class” and they“equated the efficiency of infrastructural systems with the quality of the entire civilization”(p. 44). The regulation of water for instance played an important part. The scientific discoveryof bacteria and the privatization of bodily hygiene played was important for the ideas about thesanitized, hygienic city, and the emergence of underground waterducts.

8. See also my earlier contribution about this debate (De Waal 2009b).

9. William Mitchell, Welcome!, http://cities.media.mit.edu/.

10. The term “locative media” started to surface around 2003 as a label for art projects that usedlocation-based technologies such as GPS receivers. Genealogies of locative media often trace theterm to an artistic workshop organized in 2003 by Marc Tuters and Karlis Kalnins together withthe RICX Media Centre in Latvia (see http://locative.x-i.net for a description of the workshop).The phrase “locative media” was initially invoked to demarcate this technological art practicefrom two other fields. The first was the artistic practice of “net.art” that focused on the placelessexperience of cyberspace through the computer terminal. Locative media art was to break downthe barrier between the physical world and a virtual world. It aimed to use technology to connectthe database world of the Internet with the experience of real places. Second, the term “locativemedia” claimed the use of these technologies for art practice rather than for commercial servicesthat had started to develop under the name of “location-based services.”

11. See the Conflux website, “About,” http://confluxfestival.org/2009/about/.

12. Others also point out links with Constant’s infrastructural urban utopia New Babylon orArchigram’s advocacy for using technology to empower people to shape their own urban infrastructure(McQuire 2008). Similarly, the experimental interest of locative media art can also belinked to the vocabulary of 1960s architects such as Team Ten, who “were the first to seek a kindof town planning and architecture that could bring about pleasure, uncertainty, relaxation . . .and even disorder” (Rouillard 2007, 17).

13. See for example Anthony Townsend (2009, xxiii): “In the pre-electronic era, face-to-faceproximity and the clustering of functions was the most efficient means of replicating, transmittingand searching for information in social and economic networks. Over time, new toolsaugmented this function, but in a sense the city itself is our original greatest informationtechnology.”

14. This vision is brought forward in De Landa 2006.

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More about the Book:

From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen

Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement

Order the book: Amazon

Marcus Foth, Laura Forlano, Christine Satchell and Martin Gibbs

Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis, and photo sharing and social networking sites, have made possible a more participatory Internet experience. Much of this technology is available for mobile phones, where it can be integrated with such device-specific features as sensors and GPS. From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen examines how this increasingly open, collaborative, and personalizable technology is shaping not just our social interactions but new kinds of civic engagement with cities, communities, and spaces. It offers analyses and studies from around the world that explore how the power of social technologies can be harnessed for social engagement in urban areas.

Chapters by leading researchers in the emerging field of urban informatics outline the theoretical context of their inquiries, describing a new view of the city as a hybrid that merges digital and physical worlds; examine technology-aided engagement involving issues of food, the environment, and sustainability; explore the creative use of location-based mobile technology in cities from Melbourne, Australia, to Dhaka, Bangladesh; study technological innovations for improving civic engagement; and discuss design research approaches for understanding the development of sentient real-time cities, including interaction portals and robots.

About the Authors

Marcus Foth, Founder and Director of the Urban Informatics Research Lab, is Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow with the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology.

Laura Forlano is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University.

Christine Satchell is Senior Research Fellow at the Urban Informatics Research Lab.

Martin Gibbs is a Lecturer in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne.

Starting point for our conversation was a theme that was very familiar for us at The Mobile City:

Our cities are increasingly becoming data-rich environments. The ecology of apps, visualizations and location-based or context-aware media and information systems generated around urban data environments, have the potential to radically transform the way we understand, inhabit and build our cities.

In addressing this theme, the EJC posed a crucial question, that is also one of our main research questions: ‘How do we design infrastructures that help support active citizen engagement?’ Or in other words: how do we engage new media technologies in urban design in such a way that they make our cities more social rather than just more hi-tech?

I was particularly impressed by the way Eymund Diegel of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science addressed this question during his talk. The Public Laboratory is an initiative that is inspired by the citizen science movement, and they develop open-source tools and practices that allow communities to ‘identify, redress, remediate, and create awareness and accountability around environmental concerns.What is further important is that these tools are inexpensive and accessible, and have a high hands-on “Do-It-Yourself”-ethics.

One of these accesible technologies Diegel showed us was a methodology for balloon and kite mapping. It’s a very basic approach: connect a cheap digital camera to a kite or a balloon and you are able to do your own aerial photography. Why you want to do that? Google maps is great if you live in the US or Europe, Diegel explained. But in countries like Peru there are no street-level maps. And besides, these Google maps do not allow you to collect information on issues that you yourself find important. For instance, the balloon and kite mapping technology was used to map oil spills on the Us Gulf Coast, and in Lima Peru to to measure the health of vegetated areas. The data thus assembled can be used in two ways.

First, it gives activists access to data they have assembled themselves, so they no longer have to rely on the willingness of governments to publish data. Especially when they want to put pressure on other parties to act (improve the climate of the vegetated areas, stop or clean up oil spils) it is important to have such data to support their demands.

Second, the pictures (which can be beautiful and even poetic) can also be used as tools to engage a wider audience, to convince people in a neighborhood that the issue at stake is also theirs, in other ways to forge a sense of ‘ownership’ of the issue in a wider community.

Diegel himself used the kite mapping technology in a conservation project set up for the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. The Canal is an old system of tidal creeks in Brooklyn that during the industrial revolution grew into a maritime and commercial shipping hub. By the beginning of the 21st Century, the canal had grown into a heavily polluted and almost lifeless pool of water.

Several community organizations have engaged themselves with the canal, and the kite and balloon photography has helped them in the clean-up and restoration of the Canal, as well as bringing about a wider awareness of the enviromental problems. For instance, the kite photography was used to detect illegal oil spills. The photo’s were also be used in an attempt to trace the historical paths of the creeks – parts of which had been turned into landfills. By overlapping balloon-photo’s of the area with historic maps, hints were found as to where the original sources of the creek could be found. On the very same places where they were found on the original map, on the balloon made maps weeds showed up that had started to grow between cracks in the concrete that is now covering parts of the area: a possible proof that underneath the concrete there might still be a water source. Finally the photo’s themselves have become poetic statements that can be used in awareness campaigns. They have for instance photographed the canal in various seasons, and some of the pictures are quite beautiful.

What I found interesting about Diegels presentation was that he showed how a cheap mapping technology such as kite photography can be used to gather information, not as an end in itself, but as a starting point for further action and wider engagement. For instance, in Brooklyn Diegel works together with the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. When they were hypothesizing about the sources of the creek – with the help of the balloon map – they went out with their canoes to take samples of the water close by. The canoe club is also part of a broader awareness campaign, in which they take high school students on trips to show them ‘the dirtiest canal in New York’. And perhaps that is the most important lesson: in projects like this, it is not so much about the technological design, but also about the much wider social design: how do you build communities around the technologies, and enable a network of various groups to participate.

How do we design urban technologies that engage and empower ‘publics’ (groups of people) to act on communally shared issues? That is the main theme of a new study (in Dutch) launched by The Mobile City and Virtueel Platform.

The study was launched today  at Picnic, in a session hosted by Tracy Metz that also included  a presentation by Verbeterdebuurt.nl. The study is now available for download:

Unfortunately, at this time it is only available in Dutch, but this is what it is about: The “Smart City” paradigm in urban design promises a future in which our cities will be more efficient and sustainable through the use of digital media technologies. That’s great, but are cities really all about calculation and efficiency?

In this study we present “ownership” as an alternative design approach. How can we employ new technologies to keep our ever more complex cities livable and lively for humans? How can we design cities where citizens feel they belong, and feel the city belongs to them as well… where they have the power to act on communally shared issues? In short: how can digital media aid in strengthening a sense of “ownership” among urbanites?

Interested in this theme? In February 2012 we will organize an international workshop and conference on Ownership in Amsterdam. More details on this website and our Twitter-account soon.

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.

Making public space with urban objects

Caro van Dijk is one of the co-organizers (together with Archis and Vurb) of an upcoming workshop on the internet of things and architecture. She introduced the design-approach that they would like to use as a point of departure for the workshop (presumably to take place during picnic 2011, here in Amsterdam in september.

This approach is based upon Yiri Engestroms notion that:

people don’t just connect to each other,

they connect through a shared object

Whereas Engestroms is concerned with the role of social objects that can be shared through social networks, Van Dijk looked back into the history of architecture and found inspiration in Aldo van Eyck’s playgrounds. After the second world war this Dutch Archtiect designed more than 700 playgrounds for the city of Amsterdam which transformed numerous open and often derelict city spaces. These playground consisted of bare, geometrcial shapes functioning as sandpits and climbing frames.

These interventions did two important things, Van Dijk Explained. First, because of the use-value of those objects for kids, they turned underused spaces into public spaces, where people started to hang-out, take notice of each other, interact, meet up. In other words: these objects brought about an urban public sphere. Perhaps as important is that they were able to do this because of the bare structure of these objects. The use of these objects wasn’t prescripted, but afforded an open sense of play. Kids could use their own imagination and use the tools as props in their own stories or events. (A similar claim for the design of open ended play was made earlier that evening by Kars Alfrink of Hubbub, see also here)

Van Dijk compared this approach with Primal Source, a project by Usman Haque, that was carried out at the Glow-festival in Santa Monica in 2008. This installation consisted out of colorful projections on a waterscreen. The shapes, colors, rhythms and intenstiy of these pojections were determined by software analyses of the reactions of the public picked up by 8 microphones. This provoked the audience to start singing, yelling, and clapping, sometimes individually, sometimes in concert. Thus, a public that shared a communal experience emerged out of the collective, interactive use of the art-installation.

Primal Source (video documentation) from haque d+r on Vimeo.

Can we now make use of new media technologies to design urban interventions that do something similar? That work as virtual/physical/hybrid objects around which (temporarily) urban publics can form, thus calling an urban public sphere into being? That is indeed an interesting starting point for a workshop.

The Algorithmic City – a techno-utopian scenario

A second presentation that I wanted to highlight here was held by Edwin Gardner who presented his ongoing research work on the algorithmic city.

Gardner asks the question what happens to urban planning when we add algorithms to the urban planning process? How can we use algorithms to make planning and urban design a more generative, adaptive process, that works in the interest of citizens rather than that of project developers or investors?

So far algorhithms have shown up in ‘parametric design’ where all kinds of parameters can be tweeked that the computer will then turn into a design for a building or even a complete city. Gardner is not so much interested in this approach. The problem is that there is no relation between the paramaters, the shapes generated and the society that is going to make use of these shapes. Social or ecnomic data are hardly used as parameters and the result is ‘a fetishism of easthetics’, at best beautiful to look at, but completely meaningless.

Gardner instead takes inspiration from Christophers Alexander‘s A Pattern Lanugage, a book that was based upon:

… the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets and communities. This idea… comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people”

A Pattern Language therefor gave an overview of various planning ‘problems’ and provided patterns that could be used as a solution, it was a catalogue of planning tools, that could be used to structure the city. These patterns or design-objects could be used to draw-up a city, the indiviudal elements combined into a ‘language’. Later, Alexander would say the pattern language had three essential features:

First, it has a moral component. Second, it has the aim of creating coherence, morphological coherence in the things which are made with it. And third, it is generative: it allows people to create coherence, morally sound objects, and encourages and enables this process because of its emphasis on the coherence of the created whole.

Although A pattern language was first aimed at both architects as well as ordinary people who wanted to prove upon their enviromnent, in the 1990s Alexander turned to computer scientists. Could they design software algorithms that would help generate cities based on patterns that were livable and adjusted to a human scale?

Gardner picks up this question and looks at three levels in which algorithms could play a role:

1. Building Code
Building codes (code as in law) can be understood as the program that currently generates the city. Its restrictions and prescriptions determine the parameters that planners and architects must design within. Now, Gardner asks: what if we turn building code as in law into a building code as in computer software: ‘How can we turn building code around from a bureaucratic obstacle, to an open standards object-oriented programing platform with an ecosystem of API’s and apps empowering civlilans and city authorities, both amateurs and professionals?’ Can we use models of the city such that are currently used in BIM-software as living models, in which all sorts of sensor-assembled data about the city is constantly fed back into the model, and that can be used to develop the city further?

2. Algorithmic Masterplanning
Building upon that, can such a system be used to plan a city more organically? Now master-planning is mostly a ‘shock-and-awe’-discipline, especially in countries like China where complete cities are drawn from scratch. But what if we can make use of a living city model that anyone could add upon, that would enable incremental urban growth initiated by smaller parties?

3. Algorithmic zoning
Can we design systems that can temporarily adjust the use of existing urban spaces to human needs, rather than to the logic of investors? For instance, could we think of an algorithm that detects long-term vacancy of office buildings and comes up with alternative uses?

I found all three provocative ideas to think about, even though, as Gardner himself admitted in the subtitle of his talk, they are still very much techno-utopian.

At the same time, a presentation of James Burke showed that such a future might be not that far off. He is currently working on an app that would make use of social networking to address the problem of empty office space and the resuse of such urban places. Can a system be designed that allows citizens to temporarily make use of such places? The discussion learned that perhaps the sofware code is the easiest part of this problem (bringing people, ideas and empty spaces together). The harder part will be dealing with legal codes such as contractual regulations, and zoning uses that are related to tax-regimes that may prevent owners from participating in such a system.

As you may have noticed, over here at the Mobile City we have recently shifted the focus of our program somewhat. Rather than addressing the role of digital media in cities in general, we decided to focus on a number of issues that we feel are particularly urgent in urban design. One of them we have labeled ‘ownership’. For us ‘ownership’ is about bringing about a sense of engagement with urban life and providing citizens with opportunities to (collaboratively) act. How can we design or employ digital media in such a way that they may contribute to such a sense of ‘ownership’?

We are very happy to address this question in a partnership with Virtueel Platform who has asked us to conduct a study on this issue (to be published at some point later this year). Last friday Virtueel Platform also organized an expert meeting that addressed the theme of ‘ownership’, and here I’d like to share my thoughts.

The City as a Platform
The meeting started with a presentation by Beth Coleman and Howard Goldkrand who are working on an idea they call ‘The City as Platform’. The central idea is that the city is generating all sorts of data. Now how can we tap into this wealth of data in a meaningful way? How do we create an API for the city that allows us to make use of the city in a better way? Currently we are seeing a lot of projects that have started to visuzalize these data, sometimes in impressive ways. But, Coleman and Goldkrand ask: So what? These mappings may create beautiful pictures and perhaps allow us to grasp some processes in the city that may have been invisible. Yet,
how do we move beyond ‘mapping’, beyond pretty pictures and allow for data uses that allow us to act?

Design Approaches

Coleman and Goldkrand presented a number of design approaches, as counter strategies to the dominant design paradigm in urban media. Most of the innovation in this field comes from commercial companies who either offer you personalized services and / or try to monetize the use of digital media. For instance, Goldkran pointed to a recent deal between Foursquare and Groupon. We risk that are cities are turned into open air versions of the Mall of America: sanitized and commercial spaces, he claimed. Yet are cities could be so much more than providing citizens with digital coupons on mobile media, based on their location and individual preferences. Therefor, he suggested, designers should depart from three design-approaches (that can be used in combination), he and Coleman call:

• Public Space For Coleman and Goldkrand, Public space is (in my own words) about creating places of contact or zones of friction. How can we design for a co-presence of people, enabled through digital media?
• The Civic: whereas public space is just about bringing people together, The civic dimension is about designing tools for people to act and participate in affairs with regard to local communities
• The Poetic is about bringing a poetic dimension to urban media design that enchants, engages, and carries the interaction experience beyond the merely functional. How can we design ‘Rabit Holes’ in the urban world that allow us to temporarily disappear in magic worlds with different logic and stories?

In addition when designing for one or more of these domains, they encourage to take an approach to participatory culture that comes down to ‘activate-particiapte-celebrate’. For instance: how can we design social media where status-updates go beyond a mere: I am here, but ask the question: what can we do together? How do we inspire people and make room for cultural experiences?

Their presenation included numerous examples that have departed from these criteria. Varying from ‘unwired’ examples such as graffiti-art to ‘cross-reality’ approaches such as Tidystreet.org, interventions by the Jejune Institute as well as transmedia-storytelling projects as the ARG Goldkran co-designed for the American television series Dexter.

Loosing Ground

In her presentation, Ekim Tan stated that architects (‘the proud makers of the city form the last century’) are starting to admit that they are ‘loosing ground’. They used to see themselves as the main designers of urban environments, but now see their position challenged by designers working in other disciplines such as mobile apps. The way people experience and make use of urban space, as well as the way they organize themselves socially and spatially now partially takes place through the interfaces of digital media.

Facing this new condition, she took inspiration from Manuel de Landa. When designing cities, designers should first investigate the relation between stakeholders and try to translate those into urban patterns, rather than the other way around. To do this (and thus trying to give several stake holders a sense of ‘ownership’ in the design process), Tan has designed a number of city games. Currently she is running World of City Craft in Amsterdam Noord.

World of Citycraft is an interactive real-time real-agent city generation game. World of Citycraft is the medium to craft a city besides decision making and designing. Citycraft is dependent on the individual agents and evolving local decisions based on real urgencies and needs more than the artificial and stylistic obsession of designers and/or planners.

The goal is to use an intricate game structure to “introduce a participatory urban planning and create a transparent planning process that enables citizens to react on early initiatives instead of leaving them to protest at ‘inspraakavonden’”.

Gamify, bleh …

Another interesting presentation was given by Alper Çugun, of Hubbub and Monsterswell. He gave a short version of Kars Alfrinks wonderful talk at Futureverything in which he addressed the issue of ‘gamifcation’. There is this idea circulating around that urban life can be made more interesting by turning mundane tasks into games. For many things you do you can now earn points, badges, and rewards.Perhaps, is the idea, this can even enable a sense of ownership in particular issues, such as the virtual plants that grow on the Hybrid Ford Fusion dashboard, indicating your contribution to ‘saving the environment’.

While some of these playful designs may be able to create poetic experiences of the everyday and mundane, Çugun and Alfrink do takes issue with this development:

One, gamification forces people to play. And two: it indiscriminately slaps reward systems on tasks both shallow and deep. It risks hollowing out intrinsically rewarding activities. It’s also the case that whereas true play is always engaged in voluntarily, many gamification designs leave you with no choice. You are confronted with a system you must use for utilitarian reasons, and now you are asked to jump through additional hoops so that you will be more “engaged”. You do not play a gamified system, this system is playing you.

They propose an alternative approach. Urban games should be designed for open ended play rather than for pre-scripted ones, and allow for emergence, like lego-blocks that allow players to make their own creations. Games should give humans agency rather than merely trying to force them to do things. Çugun gives two examples he likes: Chromaroma and Fitibit. Chromaroma is a game than can be played with your Oyster Card in the London subway. Fitibit is a small device that measures the calories you burn on a day. It doesn’t give you any points per se or encourage any particular behaviour, but the data it generates can become part of a game between friends or the starting point for discussions.

[Note: If you would like to read more on some of these issues, see also an earlier post on The City as an Interaction Platform, as well as my contribution to the Sentient City book, that builds upon the issue brought about by Benjamin Bratton and Nathalie Jeremijenko: how to move beyond mapping and design 'interfaces'?, as well as this article Cisco’s Urban Ecomaps and Medialab-Prado’s In the Air: How to move from awareness about environmental problems to action? For more on designing Urban games, see: Some notes on the design of pervasive games]

Recently I contributed a chapter to the book Sentient City
Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space edited by Mark Shepard. On May 14 2011 we will also take part in the book launch event in Rotterdam.

At certain points in the history of architecture and urban plan­ning, the disciplinary debate on how to apply new technologies surpasses the boundaries of the professions involved. At those times, the hopes and fears found in the disputes between architects, policy makers, engineers and planners are extended to a broader discussion about urban and societal change. Then, the central issue is not merely how to solve a specific spatial problem or improve a construction method with the help of a new technology. Rather, the debate revolves around its possible impact on urban society at large. What does this new technol­ogy mean for urban culture, what impact does it have on how we shape our identities and live together in the city? When those questions surface, Dutch philosopher René Boomkens argues, the professional debate has turned ‘philosophical’. [1]

The discourse on ‘Sentient Cities’, that has arisen over the last few years can be understood as such a philosophical enter­prise. [2] What is at stake in the debate is not so much the issue of how to engineer smarter buildings that sense — and adapt to — our daily routines or idiosyncratic preferences. Rather, our in-car navigators, friend finding ‘solutions’, location based information systems and other urban sensing technologies may very well force us to rethink some of the core concepts through which we understand and value urban life.

Here I will show that the debate about the Sentient City can be understood as a dispute concerning the urban public sphere. On the one hand, the rise of sentient technologies is said to contribute to the (already on-going) demise of urban public spaces such as town squares, multifunctional streets and public parks. On the other hand, there is a hope that those same sentient technologies could enable new forms of publicness and exchange. These are no longer based on bringing people with different backgrounds and opinions spatially together (as in cof­feehouses or town squares), but on the organization of publics around particular issues of concern.

The Sentient City

Before I delve into the debate on the relation between sentient technologies and the urban public sphere, I first want to spend a few lines on the term ‘Sentient City’ itself. What exactly do we mean when we invoke the emergence of a ‘Sentient City’? The artist and architect Mark Shepard puts it this way. He states that increasingly, it is the ‘dataclouds of 21st century urban space’ [3] that shape our experience of the city. All over the city, ‘intel­ligent’ applications have started sensing what is happening around them and reacting to it – be it smart traffic lights or cctv camera’s whose images are computer analyzed for suspicious behavior. Add to this the increase of tracking devices such as cell phones that most urbanites carry, and as a result the city has become ‘sentient’.

Now of course it is not the city itself that perceives or even is sentient, but rather the combined apparatus of tracking and sensing devices – operated by different actors – that note what is going on in the city and output their impressions in all sorts of data streams. Neither is this emergence of the sentient city a singular movement driven by a centralized bureaucracy or company, established at a single address to which one could send a letter of complaint or e-mail a feature request. The Sentient City should be understood as a collection of plural research traditions, performed and commissioned by divergent actors all with their own motivation and implicit understand­ing of what a city is or should be. They vary from government agencies that want to bring order to city space, politicians that would like to promote citizenship, companies that want to offer personalized services, community workers that hope to promote solidarity or mutual understanding, artists that want to criticize consumer culture and urbanites who may embrace, adapt or reject some or other of these offerings.

The concept of the Sentient City is not an arbitrarily chosen stock term for these developments. In a definition drawn up by Mark Shepard, he explicitly refers to the Latin roots of this term to explain what he means with that term: ‘Sentience refers to the ability to feel or perceive subjectively, and does not neces­sarily include the faculty of self-awareness.’ [4] This emphasis on subjectivity foregrounds the fact that the data streams gener­ated by the Sentient City may seem like instances of objective fact gathering, whereas in reality they are far from it. For start­ers, the decision regarding which data to collect and which to ignore and how to classify it, is already a highly political choice. Next, the data generated by the Sentient City is interpreted by software algorithms and actuation devices, and there is noth­ing objective about that either: it is a highly normative process, where subjective values, legal codes and power relations are turned into software code on the base of which sentient technol­ogy decides, acts and discriminates. [5]

This foregrounding of the normative side of the Sentient City goes against the grain of the discourses of ‘ubiquitous comput­ing’ (or ubicomp) and ‘urban computing’ that play a dominant role in the debate on the Sentient City. In ubicomp, an appli­cation is usually thought successful if it makes the computer disappear. While we carry on our daily routines, computation technology – calmly operating in the background – will make our live more easy, efficient or exciting – whatever way we would want it. Not only does it do away with the need to interact with those beige boxes on our desktops (which of course is not a bad thing per se), it also renders invisible and presents as natural the visions of what a city should be and for whom these social interventions are enabled. The conceptualization of the Sentient City can thus be understood as a deliberate move in the debate on the role of computers in urban society.

The Sentient City, Urban Culture and the Public Sphere

In many of the debates that foreground the possible impact of sentient technology on urban culture, sentient technologies are linked up to the role of the public sphere in urban society. The quintessential characteristic of urban life, as urban theory since Simmel has pointed out, is that urbanites are to live together with strangers who not only will remain strangers, but may also have a completely different outlook on life. Yet somehow, all citizens have to find a way to work things out. The public sphere plays an important role in this. It is here that strangers are confronted with each other, become aware of one another and have to come to terms with each other. [6]

The most famous proponents of this notion of the pub­lic sphere are Hannah Arendt, Richard Sennett and Jürgen Habermas. Although their exact positions differ, the central idea is that a society needs a place in which these differences are brought together. The notion of a public sphere is contrasted to the private sphere. In an ideal public sphere, participants are able to distance themselves from their private identities and focus on a common interest. [7] As Frei and Böhlen have pointed out in, the public sphere in an Arendtian sense is ‘the site of col­lective performance that brings together those who are different from one another precisely because they are different. …. The collective that acts in the public realm is not a uniform entity such as a class, a nation, or a mass. What brings people together here is exactly what separates them from each other; in other words, according to Arendt, the public realm is like parentheses that hold together the differences between people.’ [8] Most theories describe the urban public sphere as a physical site, it consists of actual, physical places where people are confronted with one another. Although Habermas interestingly notes that already in the 17th Century media did play an important role as well. In the Coffee Houses that for him were the quintessential example of the emerging public sphere of that time, newspapers played an important role. They were sometimes read aloud and discussants would often send letters to the editor after they had discussed the articles over a cup of coffee, or in real life as we would say today. This way the discussion could be continued in other coffee houses, with the newspaper forging the link between the instances in which a public sphere came into being during the conversations in the coffee houses. [9]

This ideal of the public sphere has been said to lie under attack ever since it has been conceived. Privatization, paro­chialization and intimization are the main culprits, or more concretely: the suburb, the automobile, the television and – in more recent years – the mobile phone. Both Sennett and Arendt have argued that the new wealth of the middle class has enabled them to segregate themselves socially, to physically surround themselves with people of their own liking, and thus retract from public life into their own parochial domains. This may in due time erode the capacity to empathize with others and the soli­darity necessary to upkeep an inclusive urban society. [10]

The Sentient City as Threat or Saviour of the Public Sphere

Some theorists fear that the affordances of sentient technolo­gies reinforce this demise of this public sphere. Many sentient applications that are currently in development are based on the implicit idea of the city as a collection of services and infrastruc­tures to be managed as efficiently as possible. Alternatively they offer personalized versions of the city through search and ‘dis­covery devices’. These latter services follow users’ whereabouts through the city and use that information to draw up a profile of every user. These profiles are compared to each other and used to make recommendations to visit a restaurant or a bar. The goal is to have the user ‘discover’ places in the city that are both new to him, and where he can immediately feel at home at the same time. Other initiatives depart from control and security-issues: they use sentient technology to prevent potential unrest or to allow or deny access to certain users.

Sensing technologies thus have the affordance to sense who or what is near them and filter this data according to the preferences of its users. For them the city may turn into a patch network of parochial spaces. If they live up to their promises, these technologies promise that urbanites never have to leave the comfort of being surrounded by like minded people. The other way around: access to certain urban places might only be given to authorized people recognized by embedded sensors.

Combined, in a dystopian scenario, these appropriations of the technology might contribute to what Belgium Philosopher Lieven de Cauter has called a ‘capsular society’ – a city of priva­tized capsules with different functions – dwelling, shopping, consuming accessible only to those with the right RFID-chip in their wallet. [11]

There are also more optimistic accounts. As Stephen Graham and Mike Crang amongst others have pointed out, many artists have embraced locative media to re-activate the urban public sphere. For instance geoannotation (software through which people can mark-up particular urban places with stories, photo’s or video) makes it possible for passers-by to ‘sense’ alternative stories, points of view or issues related to the places they visit. The idea behind many of these projects is to have urban space function once more as a site of exchange and com­munication between citizens. Only this time, they don’t have to be there physically present at the same time. They can learn about the visions and stories of other citizens who have passed by earlier through locative media annotation services. [12]

Toward a different public sphere?

What both critical and optimistic scenarios mentioned above have in common is that they still depart from the idea of the urban public sphere as a physical site in which differences are to be brought together. There is also a number of theories and art projects that point to an alternative and new conceptualiza­tion of the public sphere. In this vision, the public does not come together in a physical site, but rallies around an issue of con­cern, that is raised through sentient technologies.

One of the clearest descriptions of this shift from public spheres to publics can be found in Frei and Böhlen’s previously mentioned pamphlet. They draw on Latour’s Parliament of Things, a theory that in turn builds upon Dewey’s notion of issue publics: publics that (temporarily) form around specific issues in which they have taken a certain ownership. This public assem­bles – as in Arendt’s notion of the public sphere – not because everyone agrees but because they disagree and need to come to terms in some way or another. [13]

Publics can form around shared issues of concern for which people feel some form of ownership. The infrastructure of the sentient city itself can form such a shared issue of concern. Frei and Böhlen describe a number of ways in which ‘micro­publics’ might form around communal urban infrastructures or institutions such as schools, parks, water plants. Whereas these are all conceptual blueprints, Laura Forlano points out that such publics did emerge around a number of wireless networks she has studied in several cities around the world. They succeeded – at least temporarily – in bringing people with different identities and backgrounds together. [14]

Publics may also gather in a different way. One of the promises of the rise of sentient technologies is that things, objects and issues can record their own ‘biographies.’ [15] The project Trash Track by MIT’s Senseable City Lab demonstrates this affordance. For this exhibit, trash items such as paper cups are tagged with a GPS-device and mobile phone modem. After it has been disposed of, the item sends text messages with its location, so we can follow its track from recipient to waste disposal site. The hope expressed through this project is that knowing will lead to a change in doing: the fact that we know where our trash ends up should make us more aware of the problem we create by throwing things away.

In a published conversation Bratton and Jeremijenko point out that there is a lot of hope that the data gathered by the sentient city will lead to engagement with important issues of our times. The collection and visualization of data about environmental pollution might become a ‘thing’ – an issue of concern – around which a public might assemble. [16] Similarly, Laura Forlano points out that with new sensing technologies, it becomes possible to point your mobile phone (for instance) at a product in the supermarket and immediately learn whether it has been manufactured in a sweat-shop or in an environmen­tally unfriendly way. [17]

It is, however, not as simple as that. A beautiful visualization of data gathered by sentient technologies might be just that – an aesthetically pleasing work of art decorating a museum wall. Bratton and Jeremijenko point out that many of such mappings do not really lead to the formation of active publics. They don’t change who is asking what kind of questions, they do not show alternatives, or give anyone a sense of agency.

“And so, do these projects change who is asking the ques­tions? Are these designers now asking the question of how this pollutant is made, who made it, where is it coming from, where is it going, what do we do about it, or not? … Who collected [the data] and under what conditions. That is, what does the data actually represent?” [18]

It makes a difference whether the information received about issues is collected by marketing agencies or institutions that are by law obliged to register and publish such data, or whether a group of local activists who have a completely different inter­est in the issue of concern has programmed the sensors and algorithms involved. In short, Bratton and Jeremijenko argue, we do not need mere mappings, we need interfaces that allow the public not just to take note of a dataset, but that also provide it with an agency to actually get involved.

As Bratton has observed, our urban societies are no lon­ger restricted to their administrative territory, bounded by the dashed lines on the map. Instead, we live in cities ‘where flows move in and out of geographies, where territories are occupied by multiple collectives at once, and where the procedures, networks, and assemblages of objects and things are vastly distanced from our own capacities to perceive them.’ [19] It is exactly for that reason that bringing people together spatially may no longer be a viable idea for maintaining a public sphere. Rather, we should start thinking about how we can move from an ‘Internet of things’ to a public sphere centered around things.

That is not just a philosophical shift. It is also a practical matter. How to design interfaces that go beyond mere mapping of things could become one of the most important design chal­lenges of our times for everyone concerned with the role of the public sphere in a democratic society.

Notes

1. R. Boomkens, Een Drempelwereld: Moderne Ervaring En Stedelijke Openbaarheid (Rotterdam: NAi Uitgevers, 1998).

2. Over the last few years, the term ‘sentient city’ has come up in a number of publications, exhibitions and events. For instance Stephen Graham and Mike Crang wrote an article in 2007 in which they speak of ‘environments that learn and possess anticipation and memory’ and relate this vision to three different takes on the city, varying from ‘market-led visions of customized consumer worlds’, ‘military plans for profiling and targeting’ and ‘artistic endeavours to re-enchant and contest the urban informational landscape of urban sentience’. The term is also used in the title of the exhibition Toward the Sentient City, organized by the Architecture League in New York in the fall of 2009 and curated by Mark Shepard. Here the theme and framing of the exhibition are related to a series of publications called the ‘Situated Technologies Pamhplets’, published by the Center for Virtual Architecture, The Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), and the Architectural League of New York. In another example the term ‘Sentient City’ is sometimes also used by the Senseable City Lab from MIT, a research institution that ‘explores the “real-time city” by studying how distributed technologies can be used to improve our understanding of cities and create a more sustainable ways of interacting in urban environments.’ The term is related to similar labels that also describe the increasing role of computing technologies in the con­stitution of everyday urban life, such as The Real Time City, Urban Informatics, Urban Computing and others. Each stems from its own disciplinary modus operandi and brings a different approach to computing and urban society to the table.

3. Mark Shepard, “Curatorial Statement,” The Architectural League NY, http://www.sentientcity.net/exhibit/?p=3.
4. Ibid.
5. See for instance Stephen Graham, “Software-Sorted Geographies,” Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 5 (2005)., Steven Graham and Mike Crang, “Sentient Cities : Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space.,” Information, communication & society 10, no. 6 (2007)., Nigel Thrift and Shaun French, “The Automatic Production of Space,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27, no. 3 (2002).
6. Amanda Williams, Erica Robles, and Paul Dourish, “Urbane-Ing the City: Examining and Refining the Assumptions Behind Urban Informatics,” in Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City, ed. Marcus Foth (Hershey, New York, London: Information Science Reference, 2008)., Boomkens, Een Drempelwereld : Moderne Ervaring En Stedelijke Openbaarheid.
6. Boomkens, Een Drempelwereld : Moderne Ervaring En Stedelijke Openbaarheid.,
7. Hans Frei and Marc Böhlen, Situated Technologies Pamphlet 6: Micropublicplaces, ed. Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, Situated Technologies Pamphlets (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 2010)., Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991)., Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1958)., Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (New York: Norton, 1970); ———, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopff, 1977).

8. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.

9. Sennett, The Uses of Disorder : Personal Identity and City Life , Frei and Böhlen, Situated Technologies Pamphlet 6: Micropublicplaces.

10. Lieven De Cauter, De Capsulaire Beschaving. Over De Stad in Het Tijdperk Van De Angst (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004). see also Marc Schuilenburg and Alex De Jong, Mediapolis (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006).

11. Graham and Crang, “Sentient Cities: Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space..”, see also Lily Shirvanee, “Locative Viscosity: Traces of Social Histories in Public Space,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 14, no. 3 (2006), http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n03-04/toc.asp., Ann Galloway, “A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing” (Carleton University, 2008)., Williams, Robles, and Dourish, “Urbane-Ing the City: Examining and Refining the Assumptions Behind Urban Informatics.”

12. Frei and Böhlen, Situated Technologies Pamphlet 6: Micropublicplaces., Noortje Marres, “Zonder Kwesties Geen Publiek,” Krisis, no. 2 (2006)., Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: An Introduction,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and P Weibel (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005).

13. Laura Forlano and Dharma Dailey, “Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy,” in Situated Technologies Pamphlets 3: Situated Advocacy, ed. Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, Situated Technologies Pamphlets (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 2008).

14. Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

15. Benjamin Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko, “Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces,” in Situated Technologies Pamphlets 3: Situated Advocacy, ed. Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, Situated Technologies Pamphlets (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 2008).

16. Forlano and Dailey, “Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy.”

17. Bratton and Jeremijenko, “Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces.”

18. Ibid.

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.

The first one is the design process itself. Architects can make use of software to design in new ways (e.g. cad/cam and parametric design). They can also make use of new digital tools such as social networks to change their relationship with their prospective clients, and use these tools to gather data about or input from their target groups.

Second, digital media are changing spatial practices. Mobile phones, locative media and GPS-navigation have changed the ways people make use of urban spaces. Can (and should?) spaces be designed differently to accomodate these changes? And how can digital media be included in the design of physical spaces to actively change the way people experience that place?

Third, I looked at the field of urban experience. Urban design is not just a matter of shaping buildings and spaces, but perhaps increasingly also includes the design of apps and interfaces that allow people to personalize spaces, find people and places in the city, change their experience of a certain place, share those experiences, connect and collaborate with others etc. This is a domain that is beyond the scope of traditional visions on architecture, planning and urban design but is increasingly important for the experience of cities.

The full article is posted below, alas, it is written in Dutch. 

De rol van digitale media in het stedelijk ontwerp

In de stad van de toekomst, zo dacht een avant garde van architecten in de jaren zestig, zou de computer een belangrijke rol gaan spelen. Interactiviteit, was daarbij het modewoord. Architecten als Constant Nieuwenhuys, Cedric Price en de leden van Archigram filosofeerden breeduit over steden die door haar gebruikers (al dan niet automatisch) aangepast konden worden aan hun tijdelijke behoeftes.[1]

Een spraakmakend installatie – getiteld Seek en in 1970 tentoongesteld in het Jewish Museum in New York – maakte die aspiraties tastbaar: In een glazen bak krioelden woestijnratten door paden die waren afgebakend met zilveren bouwstenen. Hijskranen met grijperarmen pakten die blokken zo nu en dan op, om ze elders weer neer te leggen. De instructies daarvoor kwamen van een computerprogramma dat het gedrag van de beestjes analyseerde en de plattegrond van de tijdelijke knaagdierstad daaraan aan wilde passen.

In de jaren tachtig ebde de belangstelling van ruimtelijk ontwerpers in interactieve systemen weer weg. De feitelijke ontwikkeling van nieuwe technologieën bleef ver achter bij de hooggespannen en utopische verwachtingen. Om dit opnieuw –ietwat luguber – te illustreren aan de hand van Seek: een aantal van de woestijnratten sneuvelde nadat de interactieve bouwstenen boven op de beestjes terecht waren gekomen. Het zou nog zeker drie decennia duren voordat digitale technologieën een groot publiek zouden bereiken.

Inmiddels spelen mobiele telefoons, GPS-navigatie, mobiel internet en allerhande sensortechnologieën een belangrijke rol in het alledaagse leven. Er is zelfs een nieuwe discipline in opkomst –Urban Informatics – die zich met de wisselwerking tussen stad, software en digitale netwerken bezig houdt.[2] Grote technologiebedrijven als IBM en Cisco hebben onderzoeks- en consultancyafdelingen op dit gebied opgezet. Ook bij interactie-ontwerpers, interface designers en telecommaatschappijen zijn erbij betrokken. Opmerkelijk genoeg blijft de belangstelling van ruimtelijk vormgevers nu achter. Architecten en planners tonen vooralsnog mondjesmaat interesse.

Sterker nog: de consensus onder een grote groep architecten – al verandert dit langzaam– luidt dat digitale media en ruimtelijk ontwerp weinig met elkaar te maken hebben. Architecten gaan over de stenen en het cement, andere disciplines over de software en informatiestromen. Dat is logisch, redeneren ze, want het duurt vaak jaren voor een ontwerp is gerealiseerd. Een architect kan in zijn ontwerp wel rekening houden met bijvoorbeeld de manier waarop stedelingen Twitter gebruiken, tegen de tijd dat een gebouw of plein in gebruik genomen wordt, bestaat Twitter misschien wel niet meer. Een plein moet zo niet eeuwig dan toch wel enkele decennia mee, de ontwikkeling van digitale technologieën heeft een geheel andere omloopsnelheid.

Daarvoor valt iets te zeggen. Tegelijkertijd is het ontegenzeggelijk dat digitale technologieën een blijvende rol spelen in het alledaagse stedelijke leven. En dat is een ontwikkeling die voor alle disciplines die zich met stedelijk ontwerp bezig houden interessant kan zijn. Stedelijk ontwerp en de opmars van digitale media raken elkaar dan op drie verschillende manieren die hieronder verder zullen worden toegelicht. In de eerste plaats verandert het ontwerpproces zelf. In de tweede plaats kunnen nieuwe mediatechnologieën geïntegreerd worden in het fysieke ontwerp. Tot slot veranderen nieuwe mediatoepassingen ook het gebruik van stedelijke ruitmes.

Digitale technologieën in het ontwerpproces

Ik begin met de rol van digitale mediatechnologie in het (stedelijk) ontwerpproces. Al geruime tijd maken architecten gebruik van ontwerpsoftware die bekend staat als Computer Aided Design & Manufactering, kortweg CAD/CAM. De introductie daarvan leidde tot een nieuwe manier van werken– de tekentafel werd ingeruild voor het beeldscherm – maar ook tot een nieuwe architecturale grammatica. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan de glooiende lijnen en afwisselende geometrische vormen in de gebouwen van Frank Gehry. De laatste jaren maakt ook ‘parametrisch design’ een opmars door, een manier van ontwerpen waarbij computeralgoritmes onderdelen van het ontwerp ‘uitrekenen’.[3]

Digitale media spelen daarnaast ook een toenemende rol bij het verzamelen van gegevens die in het ontwerpproces gebruikt kunnen worden. Mobiele telefoons en GPS-ontvangers maken het gemakkelijk om het gedrag van mensen in de stad te registreren. Iedereen met een mobiele telefoon laat bij zijn provider een spoor achter van de plekken waar hij (of in ieder geval zijn telefoon) is geweest. Tel die gegevens van alle gebruikers bij elkaar op, en planners krijgen – een voor hun revolutionair – inzicht in hoe mensen zich door de stad bewegen. Verschillende onderzoekscentra houden zich hier inmiddels mee bezig.[4] In Nederland liet bijvoorbeeld het project CurrentCity zien – met behulp van data van het KPN-netwerk – hoe verschillende plekken in Amsterdam op verschillende tijdstippen werden gebruikt.[5]

Verder zien we de laatste tijd ook een aantal projecten waarin digitale media worden ingezet om het publiek te betrekken bij het ontwerpproces, zoals bijvoorbeeld in het werk van het Nederlandse architectenbureau space&matter.[6] Zij deden in Eindhoven en München via onder meer Facebook onderzoek naar lokale groepen met specifieke interesses. In München ontdekten ze een publiek van ongeveer 2000 skaters die internet gebruikten om zich in te zetten voor de bouw van een skatehall. Voor een studie naar het hergebruik van een oude energiecentrale in het Eindhovense Strijp-gebied, gebruikten ze sociale netwerken om verschillende doelgroepen te identificeren (varierend van skaters tot klimmers) en erachter te komen welke behoeftes deze groepen precies hadden.

In weer een ander project combineren de architecten van space&matter sociale netwerken met nieuwbouwprojecten. Potentiële kopers kunnen elkaar via sociale netwerken vast leren kennen of ook het ontwerp van hun huis aanpassen. Een dergelijke tool maakt het ook mogelijk voor groepen met bepaalde voorkeuren (bijvoorbeeld liefhebbers van muziek, of mensen met een ecologische interesse) om gezamenlijk een opdracht te verlenen aan een architect. Zo’n ‘collectief particulier opdrachtgeversschap’ (CPO) kan de traditionele ontwerpketen veranderen. Doorgaans doen projectontwikkelaars onderzoek naar woonwensen en levensstijlen, en laten vervolgens ‘producten’ ontwikkelen die daarop aansluiten. Via speciale software kunnen groepen zichzelf – al dan niet met behulp van de architect – bottom-up organiseren en hun woonwensen kenbaar maken, een subtiel maar belangrijk verschil.

Digitale technologieën en het ontwerp van de stad

Hoe kunnen ruimtelijke professionals in het stedelijk ontwerp zélf inspelen op de opmars van digitale media? Hierbij zien we twee verschillende benaderingen. In de eerste spelen ontwerpers in op nieuwe ruimtelijke praktijken – door de opkomst van wifi, mobiele telefoons en GPS gaan stedelingen anders om met de ruimte om hen heen dan voorheen. In de tweede plaats kunnen architecten digitale technologieën integreren in het te ontwerpen object. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan het gebruik van sensors die al dan niet toegang geven tot een gebouw of aan het gebruik van digitale schermen of mediafacades.

Hoe kunnen ruimtelijk ontwerpers inspelen op veranderend ruimtegebruik? Die vraag is in een meer abstracte en meer concrete manier te beantwoorden. In abstracte zin is er in de architectuur een benadering die flexibiliteit voorstaat. Architecten en planners moeten ruimtes niet ‘overdetermineren’, maar juist zo ontwerpen dat ze op verschillende manieren gebruikt kunnen worden. Een voorbeeld is het ontwerp van Japanse. Waar in Europa in de afgelopen drie eeuwen het huis steeds meer gespecialiseerde ruimtes kreeg (de slaapkamer, de salon, etc.), hebben de meeste moderne Japanse huizen nog altijd minstens één ‘tatami’-kamer. Die is ingericht met meubelstukken die op verschillende manieren gebruikt kunnen worden. Dezelfde kamer kan worden benut als sociale ontmoetingsruimte, of juist als privéplek om je even terug te trekken.[7] Een dergelijke benadering brengt wel een specifieke uitdaging met zich mee. Een openbare ruimte die zo is ontworpen dat alles mogelijk is, kan juist daardoor ook angstvallig leeg blijven.

Een voorbeeld van deze benadering is het Stata Center, een door Frank Gehry ontworpen universiteitsgebouw op de campus van MIT in Cambridge. Overal in het gebouw is wifi aanwezig. Daarbij zijn de gangen van het gebouw bewust breed gemaakt en uitgerust met stoelen en tafels. Daardoor zijn de gangen niet alleen een doorgangsroute naar de lokalen, maar ze zijn ook een ontmoetingsplek. Sommige studenten werken er op hun laptop, anderen maken er een praatje, terwijl verderop studentenorganisaties passerende studenten van hun nobele doelen proberen te overtuigen. Het precieze gebruik van de ruimte is niet voorgeschreven, maar de aanwezigheid van wifi, samen met de tafels en stoelen, de brede ruimte, en de context van de universiteit maakt het mogelijk dat die ruimtes op verschillende manieren benut worden.

Het is ook mogelijk meer concreet in te spelen op stedelijk mediagebruik. Het voert te ver om hier uitgebreid op in te gaan, maar het volgende voorbeeld zullen velen inmiddels herkennen. Uit onderzoek van Mimi Ito blijkt dat informatiewerkers – vaak werkzaam in de creatieve industrie – vaker buitenshuis (of buiten het kantoor) zijn gaan werken. Ze vinden het prettig om in een (semi-)openbare gelegenheid zoals een café of bibliotheek te werken. Ito noemt deze praktijk ‘camping’. Net als kampeerders zoeken informatiewerkers een prettige plek op een mooie plaats om tijdelijk hun tentje op te zetten. [8]

Deze nieuwe praktijk is om te zetten in een ruimtelijk ontwerp. Een pragmatisch voorbeeld: een bibliotheek zou minder oppervlaktes aan boekenkasten kunnen besteden en meer aan prettige, uitnodigende werkplekken. Andersom gaat het ook wel eens mis. Dan wordt er wel een technische infrastructuur opgezet. Maar men vergeet te bedenken hoe mensen die infrastructuur gaan gebruiken, en wat dat betekent voor de manier waarop ze met de ruimte omgaan. Bijvoorbeeld: een gemeente wil mee in de vaart der volkeren en besluit gratis wifi in de hele stad aan te bieden. Maar vaak blijft het dan bij een technologische voorziening, terwijl ook een ruimtelijke inbedding (bijvoorbeeld door een aantal ruimtes in openbare gelegenheden zo te ontwerpen dat ze ook als ‘campsite’ gebruikt kunnen worden) handig zou zijn.

Interactieve architectuur en Media-architectuur

In de voorbeelden hierboven gaat het steeds om aanpassingen in de gebouwde omgeving die beter aansluiten op nieuwe vormen van ruimtegebruik die zijn ontstaan door de opkomst van digitale media. Die aanpassingen zelf zijn grotendeels analoge, fysieke interventies. Het is uiteraard ook mogelijk om het ruimtelijk ontwerp zelf te verrijken met digitale media.  De meest voor de hand liggende toepassingen op dat gebied zijn ‘urban screens’ of ‘mediafacades’.[9] Schermen of lichtinstallaties maken dan deel uit van het gebouw of de omgeving. Deze medialagen liggen in het verlengde van een decennia – of zelf eeuwenoude trend – waarbij architectuur verrijkt wordt met inscripties, of dat nu de beelden op tempels, fresco’s en glas-in-lood in kathedralen zijn, of de knipperende lichtreclames van Tokyo’s Shibuya of New Yorks Time Square.

Sommigen van deze schermen of façades tonen bewegende beelden die weinig of niets met de omgeving zelf te maken hebben. Ze veranderen door hun aanwezigheid weliswaar de ervaring van een plek, maar gaan verder geen directe relatie aan met hun omgeving. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan schermen waarop reclamefilmpjes te zien zijn.

Andere installaties spelen juist wel in op de specifieke omgeving waarin ze worden getoond. De Nederlandse kunstenaar Simon Heijdens maakt zo installaties die reageren op de plaatselijke omstandigheden. Zijn Tree is een projectie van een boom op de façade van een gebouw. De projectie van de boom beweegt mee met de wind die op die plek daadwerkelijk waait. ’s Ochtends hangt de boom vol blaadjes, maar telkens als iemand voorbijloopt, dwarrelt er een blad van de boom af. Zo verbeeldt de projectie zowel de weersomstandigheden – het natuurlijke klimaat – als ook het ritme van de stad.[10]

Architectuur wordt zo, in de woorden van Kas Oosterhuis, een ‘time based discipline’, en de architect een ‘animator of constructed experiences’[11]. Een gebouw is niet meer een statisch gegeven, een vaste vorm in de stad, maar kan van vorm of in ieder geval van atmosfeer veranderen. De Allianz Arena – het voetbalstadion in München van Herzog en De Meuron – is hier een tekenend voorbeeld van. Het stadion zelf is uitgevoerd in onopvallende witte kleuren, maar de architecten hebben een uitgekiende lichtinstallatie in het gebouw verwerkt. Daardoor kan het al naar gelang de ploeg die het bespeelt – Bayern München (die in rode shirts speelt) of TSV München (blauwe clubkleuren) van kleur veranderen.

Oosterhuis was zelf een van de eerste architecten die dergelijke mogelijkheden van digitale media verkende, bijvoorbeeld  in zijn Zoutwater Paviljoen op Neeltje Jans in Zeeland. Oosterhuis heeft dit paviljoen zo ontwerpen dat bezoekers er een gevoel moeten krijgen van de omstandigheden buiten op zee. Dat gebeurt doordat een boei die ergens op zee drijft, radiosignalen doorstuurt aan de installatie in het paviljoen. Zowel het licht (de kleur en intensiteit) als het geluid dat in het paviljoen te horen is, worden vervolgens beïnvloed door de gegevens die de boei doorstuurt. ‘Being inside these architectural bodies feels like experiencing changes in the weather’, schrijft Oosterhuis. ‘It is all over you.’[12]

Gebouwen of installaties zijn daarbij niet alleen time-based structuren geworden, maar in sommige gevallen ook ‘mood-based’ – ze kunnen een bepaalde stemming weerspiegelen. De Nederlandse architect Lars Spuybroek heeft een aantal installaties gemaakt die uitgaan van dat gegeven. Een van de bekendste is de D-Tower in Doetinchem. Deze sculptuur weerspiegelt de stemming van de inwoners van de stad, zo is het idee. Een aantal inwoners is uitgenodigd om op internet een vragenlijst over hun gemoedstoestand in te vullen, en de uitkomst daarvan wordt weerspiegeld in het lichtprogramma van de D-Tower.

Interactieve architectuur

En zo zijn we op het gebied van de interactieve architectuur gekomen. Met interactieve architectuur wordt wel een architectuur bedoeld die direct reageert op haar omgeving. De opkomst van digitale media maakt het mogelijk om de fysieke omgeving uit te rusten met allerlei sensoren, en die via netwerken met elkaar te verbinden. Gebouwen kunnen vervolgens reageren op de input die de sensoren meten. Dat klinkt ingewikkelder en revolutionairder dan het is: denk aan de manier waarop een simpele thermostaat werkt. Grotere gebouwen hebben inmiddels zeer ingewikkelde klimaatsbeheersingsinstallaties die op soortgelijke principes werken. Inmiddels werkt een aantal bedrijven aan ‘smart homes’, waarbij technologie wordt ingezet om in te spelen op de activiteiten in een huis om het comfort te verhogen of het energieverbruik te verminderen.[13]

Nog een stap verder gaat Arch-OS[14], een operating system voor gebouwen. Dit systeem verzamelt allerlei informatie over een specifiek gebouw, variërend van de temperatuur en het aantal aanwezige mensen (bijvoorbeeld via camera-detectie) tot de hoeveelheid data die in het gebouw via het internet wordt gedownload. Die data kan verbonden worden met verschillende output-mechanismes. Een ontwerper die in Australië een installatie voor een unviersiteitscampus ontwierp, koppelde de data van Arch-Os aan een projectie van abstracte kleurenpatronen op het plafond van een universiteitsgebouw. Door de tijd heen zouden de gebruikers de patronen leren herkennen, en zo vertrouwd raken met het ritme van het gebouw.

In een ander experiment met Arch-OS werd het systeem gekoppeld aan een beweegbare muur die de grootte van de ruimte automatisch aanpaste aan de hoeveelheid gebruikers. Daarbij maakte de software ook voorspellingen: op basis van eerder gemeten data kon het systeem voorspellen dat het op een bepaald moment weer druk zou worden in de gemeenschappelijke ruimte en deze daar vast op aan passen.

Daarmee zijn we voor een deel weer terug bij de experimenten in de architectuur uit de jaren zestig. Ook daar was het idee ‘slimme’ systemen te ontwikkelen die in zouden kunnen spelen op de behoeftes van de gebruiker. Binnen deze benadering zijn twee verschillende scholen. De eerste probeert door middel van het verzamelen van allerlei gegevens het gedrag van gebruikers in kaart te brengen, te voorspellen en diensten te ontwikkelen die daar – al dan niet  automatisch – op in te spelen. Dit is de filosofie achter veel ontwikkelingen op het gebied van ‘smart’ technologies en ‘ubiqutious computing’.

De tweede school benadrukt de actieve rol van gebruikers. Zo geeft Usman Haque aan dat ontwerpers zich niet te veel moeten beschouwen als ‘probleemoplossers’ die door onderzoek (of data-analyse) een of ander probleem identificeren, en er vervolgens een kant en klare oplossing voor verzinnen. Die strategie ontneemt gebruikers de mogelijkheid om zelf oplossingen te verzinnen. Beter dan in kant –en-klare producten zouden ontwerpers na moeten denken over platfora die gebruikers ook zelf aan kunnen passen.[15]

Haque maakt zo onderscheid gemaakt tussen ‘responsieve’ systemen en ‘interactieve’ systemen. Responsief houdt in dat een installatie volgens een bepaald, vaststaand programma reageert op de omstandigheden. Interactief gaat een stap verder en maakt het voor gebruikers ook mogelijk om invloed uit te oefenen op de programma’s die bepalen hoe de data worden geïnterpreteerd, en aan welke vormen van output ze precies worden gekoppeld.[16]

Een interessant Nederlands experiment op dit gebied is het Urban Node-project van Vurb.[17] Urban Node is een installatie die ontwikkeld wordt in het Trouw Gebouw in Amsterdam. Met Urban Node kunnen bezoekers via hun smart phones toegang krijgen tot verschillende apparaten en installaties zoals de  verlichting op de dansvloer of de speakers. Tegelijkertijd ontwikkelt Vurb ook een toolkit waarmee de manier waarop de gebruikers invloed uit kunnen oefenen beïnvloed kan worden. Het interactiepatroon staat dus niet van te voren vast, maar kan door de tijd heen veranderen. Doel van het project daarbij is ook een onderzoek naar de sociale kanten van de manier waarop bezoekers zich gezamenlijk kunnen ontfermen over de aanwezige ‘resources’.

Het ontwerp van stedelijke ervaringen

En zo komen we langzamerhand op het derde domein van stedelijk ontwerp waarin digitale media een rol spelen. Nu gaat het niet langer om het ontwerpen van de fysieke omgeving als zodanig, maar om de (sociale) processen die zich er afspelen. Hier verlaten we voor een deel ook het terrein van de traditionele architecten – het gaat nu over ruimtegebruik, niet over ruimtelijke vormgeving – en betreden we dat van de software-ontwikkelaars, interface-ontwerpers. Zij ontwerpen toepassingen waardoor niet zo zeer de stedelijke omgeving zelf verandert als wel de manier waarop we die gebruiken.

Het duidelijkst is deze opmars van digitale technologiën zichtbaar in het verkeer. Van sensoren in het wegdek, die verbonden zijn met stoplichten kijken we al niet meer op. Camera’s die boven de snelweg hangen en aan de hand van verkeersanalys reisadvies geven via matrixborden boven de weg zijn ook al gewoon. Een stap verder gaan navigatiesystemen als de TomTom die niet alleen de weg wijzen, maar ook de positie en snelheid van automobilisten meten en doorgeven aan een centrale computer.[18] Bij elkaar opgeteld laten die gegevens zien waar het verkeer lekker doorrijdt en waar de files staan. Deze informatie kan weer gekoppeld worden aan een gepersonaliseerd reisadvies. Bedrijven als IBM en Cisco hebben zich inmiddels op deze ontwikkelingen gestort. Zij bieden ‘smart city’ toepassingen aan.[19] Met behulp van digitale technologieën kan het leven in de stad efficiënter of duurzamer worden gemaakt, beloven zij.

Maar ook op allerlei andere vlakken zien we ontwikkelingen op dit gebied. De smartphone-versie van Google Maps toont ons bijvoorbeeld dat er net om de hoek van waar wij zijn een broodjeszaak zit, en de mobiele app van Iens.nl geeft er de recensies bij. Met behulp van locatiediensten als Foursquare of Feest.je kunnen we onze vrienden laten zien dat we daar inderdaad een broodje gaan eten. Wie in de buurt is, kan langskomen. Nog een stap verder gaan diensten als CitySense[20]. CitySense is een app voor de mobiele telefoon die je bewegingen door de stad registreert en analyseert en aan de hand daarvan nieuwe plekken aan kan raden, op een manier die vergelijkbaar is met de manier waarop Amazon.com ons boeken aanraadt. Zo vinden we langzaam aan op een andere manier de weg door de stad.

Anderen zetten weer vraagtekens bij deze ontwikkelingen. Is het een goede ontwikkeling dat digitale media vooral worden ingezet om ons gebruik van de stad zoveel mogelijk te personaliseren, dat wil zeggen af te stemmen op onze persoonlijke voorkeuren? En efficiëntie in het verkeer is natuurlijk mooi, maar behelst het stedelijk leven niet meer dan enkel zo snel mogelijk van A naar B te komen? Ligt de aantrekkingskracht van het stedelijke leven er niet juist in dat we voortdurend worden verrast door dat wat we nog niet kenden? En moeten we juist niet ook diensten ontwikkelen die invulling geven aan die kant van het stedelijk leven?

Om deze vragen op te werpen ontwikkelde kunstenaar en architect Mark Shepard tijdens een residency bij V2_ in Rotterdam zo de GPS Serendipitor. Dat is een navigatieprogramma voor de iPhone die niet het doel heeft je zo efficiënt mogelijk van A naar B te leiden. In plaats daarvan verleidt het programma je om de route onderweg goed in je op te nemen. In plaats van ‘sla links af’ geeft deze navigatietool opdrachten als: ‘vraag een voorbijganger de weg naar de dichtsbijzijnde bloemenstal’, of ‘loop aan de zonkant van de straat. Als er geen zon is, denk die er dan zelf bij.’[21]

Alhoewel architecten zich tot nog toe mondjesmaat op dit terrein begeven, geeft het laatste voorbeeld wel aan dat hun expertise hier een rol zou kunnen spelen. Architecten koppelen van oudsher hun expertise op het gebied van ruimtelijke vormgeving aan kritische reflectie. Juist bij de ontwikkeling van diensten die ruimtegebruik mede beïnvloeden kan die combinatie van belang zijn.

Conclusie: naar een nieuwe manier van nadenken over stedelijk ontwerp

Nemen we bovenstaande voorbeelden bij elkaar, dan luidt de conclusie dat het stedelijk ontwerpproces een transitie doormaakt. De ruimtelijk ontwerpers die zich traditioneel met de vormgeving van onze steden bezig hielden – architecten en planners – hebben gezelschap gekregen van een hele reeks nieuwe disciplines: software-ontwikkelaars, interface ontwerpers, user experience experts, enzovoorts.

Digitale media beginnen daarbij op drie verschillende niveaus een rol te spelen in het stedelijk ontwerp: het ontwerpproces zelf, het vormgeven van fysieke ruimtes, en het vormgeven aan stedelijke ervaring. Die drie niveaus lopen ook in elkaar over en het valt dan ook te verwachten dat de verschillende partijen betrokken bij de verschillende aspecten van het stedelijk ontwerp steeds meer zullen gaan samenwerken in multi-disciplinaire teams.

Om een voorbeeld te geven: in de jaren zestig schreef Kevin Lynch in zijn beroemde boek The Image of the City over het belang van een aansprekend en iconisch stedelijk ontwerp.[22] Dat diende niet alleen om een plek een identiteit te verlenen waarmee mensen zich zouden kunnen identificeren, of om gemakkelijk de weg te kunnen vinden. Een ruimtelijk ontwerp moest ook uitnodigen tot verkenning van nieuwe plekken en maatschappelijke verbanden. Een sterk ‘visual framework’ zou dat bewerkstellingen. Ruimtelijk ontwerpers die dergelijke idealen onderschrijven, zouden nu niet alleen een sterk fysiek visueel ontwerp na moeten streven maar ook nadenken hoe ze digitale media in kunnen zetten om hun plek een identiteit te verlenen, of het publiek te verleiden hun ontwerp te bezoeken of op een bepaalde manier te ervaren. Dat betekent dat stedelijk ontwerp een complexe discipline aan het worden is. Of beter: een inter-discipline. De centrale vraag zal steeds zijn: hoe kunnen ruimtelijk ontwerp en media-ontwerp elkaar versterken?

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”.

What struck me most after a day’s worth of presentations of new media interventions – varying from a moodwall to complex multinlineair location based storytelling projects  - was that the talks articulated both a sense of optimism as well as a sense of doubt.

There was a lot of optimism that new media would make urban public spaces more interesting,  layering them with depth, connecting people, spark democratic debates, turn them into playgrounds and empower citizens.

Yet at the same time there were some doubts. Although the opportunities are there, many of the speakers were still not sure how exactly they are to be effectuated. How do we indeed engage people in public spaces with the help of these new technologies?

Optimism: enhancing public space with locative and wireless media

Let’s start with the optimist visions. During the day several visions of what public space is, which functions it fulfills, and what is problematic about it were  addressed.

1. Public Space as a place for deliberate democracy

This is of course a vision that builds upon theories by the likes of Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas, who have theorized public space as a meeting ground for citizens where they come together to discuss their common future.

At the conference Tobias Ebsen presented Climate on the Wall, an interactive mediafacade by the Digital Urban Living Lab (we have written about this project before) at Aarhus University. Climate on the Wall is based on the concept of ‘magnetic poetry’: text balloons with words are projected on a facade, and passers-by can drag the words in any order, forming poetic sentences, political statements or just nonsense.

The hope expressed in the project was that people would use the installation to make statements about the environment. However, that didnot always happen. People just started playing with it, or even using the installation in a subversive way. What the creators didnot forsee though is that debate did take place: not on the wall itself, but rather amongst the bystanders/ audience. The playful and sometimes subversive uses had turned their installation into a conversation piece.

2. Public Space as a theatre, as a stage for the representation of cultural identities and political movements

Various speakers at the conference alluded to the current events in Tunesia and Egypt, reflecting on the role of public space as a place for the representation of political movements. These physical and bodily mass events are now partially coordinated by the use of digital media in the form of social networks ans sms messages. Although in my opinion claims of a ‘Twitter revolution’, where the technology causes the revolts should be distrusted, there is no doubt an interesting dynamic going on between these media and the way collective political imaginations are shaped as well as the (organization of) physical movements through which these imaginations are articulated.

On a different but somewhat comparable plane, public space can also be understood as a site for cultural representation, where (sub)cultures proudly display themselves, (temporarily) claim a part of public space to assert their right to exist, or just to make it their own. At the conference the dance film Diamond Dancers bu Quirine Racke and Helena Muskens made me think of this particular approach of public space. The film is a flash mob performance of provincial line dancers who travel to amsterdam to stage a surprise performance on one of the main public squares.

3 Public space as a site for cultural experiences and exchanges

A number of speakers approached public space as a stage for cultural experiences. In these examples, wireless media are to enhance the experience of a particular place, for instance by showing historic layers, or connect places to personal stories, to make people aware of alternative points of view or just to tell an exciting story or engage people in a game.

Dick van Dijk of Waag Society showed their 7scenes platform – a tool for the annotation of maps and the authoring of location based stories and games. They are using this tool to develop an app for the Amsterdam museum – as part of an international trend sometimes called ‘museums without walls’. Earlier they also authored other locative experiences. For instance Madretsma.net is a route through Amsterdam commemorating the slavery trade. Here, the interface was much more low tech: at particular points in the city users could call a phone number and listen to a particular story connected to that place.

Michael Epstein of Untravel Media also showed a number of what he had called ‘terratives’ – narrative that are told on location. (see an earlier Mobile City report for a more in depth analysis of the genre).  For instance, in Boston they created a project named Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill. This project took the form of a walk along a number of locations in Boston, where scenes (movie clips) from a 19th century murder mystery were played out on a smart phone.

These are not just geo-annotated movie clips. To draw the user in, some dramaturgic elements were added. First there was a narrator, that invited participants to follow in her footsteps, also turning the player into a character. Second, actual physical props played an important role and third, players / viewers also had to interact with real people in the actual surroundings. For instance one of the scenes took place in the lobby of a luxurious hotel and some employees there were involved in the story.

Martin Rieser showed The third woman a project that was even more complex in its story telling. Where Walking Cinema was a more or less lineair narrative that played out on location, the Third Woman added interactive elements, where participants could influence the mood of particular filmclips they were shown.

4 Feeling at home in Public Space

A fourth approach of wireless media I encountered was not so much connected to a particular understanding of public space, but rather trying to deal with one of its inherent problems. If public space is a place where we encounter strangers, who might also be different from ourselves, than for many this can also lead to a somewhat uncanny feeling. Especially at certain locations that are not lively public spaces but somewhat neglected passage ways, people can easily feel unsafe.

Can designers intervene with digital or wireless media to make citizens feel more at home in public space? For instance by using visualizations of harvested mobile phone or social network data that show collective rhythms of citizens?

In this category, Matthijs ten Berge showed his Moodwall – a beautiful light installation in a dark tunnel in de Bijlmer area of Amsterdam. Its interactive light patterns are to make passers-by feel more at home in these surroundings.

The doubts

I was (although not necessarily unpleasantly) surprised by all these optimist visions , since often in the general debate about the affordances of digital media in relation to public space dystopian scenario’s are evoked. Digital and locative media are after all not only media of connection, providing added layers of experience. They also have the affordance to turn the city into a panopticon and allow their users to retract in their safe, personal communication bubbles – turning public spaces into private experiences. These more critical points of view were sometimes mentioned, but not really addressed during the conference.

That is not to say that there were no doubts expressed. On the contrary, although speakers were overall enthusiastic about the opportunities of digital media, they also found that the actual implementation, scalability and engagement of users is hard to accomplish.

The technology is here: we can now tweet, geotag, program urban screens or use the private screens of the mobile phone. Yet the question remains: how to actually engineer an interesting experience, how to seduce people to actually interact with the content? This question is all the more relevant, since one of the characteristics of wireless media is that they often are invisible. So it is not only a matter of engaging people but also make them aware of the added layers etc. All of the projects shown at the conference had somehow struggled with these issues, and it is fair to say that this will also remain one of the most important questions in wireless storytelling in the near future.

Lessons Learned

With regard to the design of locative experiences, I took two important lessons from these examples. The first is – as Michael Epstein put it strikingly – ‘Matter is a test for our curiosity’, meaning that material artefacts in real space can draw people into the story. The tension in locative storytelling projects comes from actually drawing in objects, locations and people, making it tactical and physical. Especially the use of people can really make the experience much more appealing. Although this is also very hard to arrange, but it is worth to try to draw in local shopkeepers, hotel lobby attendants or others into the scenario. In effect, as a narrative discipline locative storytelling is probably closest to theatre – you need a strong dramaturgy, script, actors and perhaps a gameplay. This also can make it hard to scale locative productions or reenact them at other locations. (see our earlier article Some notes on the design of pervasive games for more thoughts about this)

A second lesson, with regard to locative projects that try to engage people into discussions or exchange is to not overdetermine the design. Make it a playful design to draw people in, but also leave some room for people to appropriate it, to play with the rules of the game. Sometimes its more useful to design a conversation piece than wanting to direct the conversation itself.

It’s not a strange thought experiment. This, following Bolter and Grusin’s book Remediation, is roughly speaking what happens to any new medium when it enters society. Painting for example didn’t really start going all experimental on us until the photocamera was introduced, and it saw its use as a documentary indexical medium reduced. Photography, in turn, didn’t evolve it’s own expressive language until years later. The same with video, it took the likes of Vertov and other experimenters to turn a camera into an expressive device.

If we concider locative media a medium, then I have been waiting for a strong expressive culture to surface for over 10 years now.

Functionalism vs Expression

Obviously the first question would be “how would you delineate this medium?”. I concider its core to be about collections of spaces that are linked together in a meaningful, preferably narrative, way. A single expressive youtube video linked to a spot doesn’t cut it for me. I’m really looking for a hypernarrative storytelling medium where, like books or film, we can have plotstructures, exposition, twists and turns, a language through which the user is immersed and dragged along in an epic tale of love, anger, and everything in between.

There are some great examples in this search for immersion. The “locative literature” Landvermesser project comes to mind, in which bookwriters were asked to create narrratives in the city of Berlin. More recently Michael Epstein’s company Untravel Media has shown that with time and effort wonderful experiences can be created. But this type of usage hasn’t entered the larger public imagination, and is mostly the product of cultural institutions.

In the meantime there has been an explosion of startups that just aim to bring you Location Based Services. Google, Foursquare, Yelp, the list goes on and on, and they all want to give you useful information. Functionalism, in short, still very much trumps expression.

So what has caused this slant in the landscape?

An annoying thought is that locative media might never reach the level of immersion film can offer in the first place. With video we get ‘sucked in’, our bodies sitting in the chair like zombies while our minds are suspended in disbelief. This is difficult for locative media to do, as public space isn’t very zombie-friendly. There are things we might walk into while we sleepwalk through the digital dreamlayer placed on top of the city. In the messy ‘life out there’, many unexpected occurences could disrupt the suspension of disbelief. Sound, so far, has seemed most compatible with being in the city, and this has resulted in a lot of sound-based locative projects.

I suspect another reason for this slow development lies in the locatedness itself. In a world where the internet’s ability to offer content ‘anytime, anywhere’ has become synonymous with consumer freedom, locative media connection to ‘somewhere’ feels almost limiting. For example, if I create a locative thriller set in Amsterdam’s Red Light district, then it’s only really open to experience if you are there, in Amsterdam. Like a theater play, it would take non-trivial effort to ‘re-stage’ that same story in another city and thus open it up to a larger audience. This limits their easy reproducability, and thus potential profitability. Something unheard of for a digital medium.

Towards mainstream GeoMedia

But it shouldn’t matter. We also live in an age of mass-production of media, where amateur creations aren’t just possible, they’re popular. We could have wonderful stories in every city if we create accessible online tools, and, more importantly, get it into people’s heads that they could create ‘things’ in public space. Let the wisdom of the crowds have a crack at it.

I imagine a girl who, for their 2nd anniversary, creates a literal walk down memory lane for her boyfriend.

A Sherlock Holmes story along the london wharfs, where every turn you take literally takes the story in another direction.

A commemorative drive along the city’s ringroad that tells of Gary’s tragic life as a pan-european trucker.

I long for serious mainstream expressive tools around location-indexing technology. A photoshop for city streets. As the map below shows, I suspect it will be Silicon Valley that will get there first. Already tools like SCVNGR, The Hidden Park and Broadcastr are heading towards the expressive side of the scale, or at least allow space for it. I’m certain they’ll find a market there.

-- Map of geo-tools, click to enlarge --

But, beyond tools, what must be developed in the next 10 years is a shift in perception. Geo-media would allow an expressiveness that is local and authentic, but people have to know they have this option. In time, and with due marketing, they will. Because knowing in which nearby restaurant I should eat is only half of the story geo-media should tell.

I particularly liked the presentation of Dutch artist Sander Veenhof. Over the last few years Veenhof has grown into one of the more interesting practitioners that explore the possibilities of mobile media technologies from a fresh and sometimes somewhat estranging perspective.

Or as he describes his approach himself:

Exploring the ‘new’ in new media, in terms of new possibilities, practical advancements in dimension, scale, materialisation, hybridity and interactive opportunities. Bringing new concepts to the surface by means of carefully shaped apparent disbalances between minimalistic contra contemporary creations having nevertheless a maximum impact, at this point of time exactly.

In the past he has used Augmented Reality to stage a guerilla exhibition at the MOMA (as part of the Conflux Festival). He has also designed a dispensing unit (Mobile Thrill) to distribute mobile content (for instance at festivals). Rather than downloading a short clip, users had to entrust their mobile device to a vending machine and wait until the machine returned the unit, now with the clip loaded in its memory).

NBeep6

Yesterday he shared his experiences as an artist in residence in Cameroon. As a mobile media and AR-artist at first he found himself somewhat lost in a community where smart phones were close to non-existent and  internet connections unreliable at best.  But he did gain a fascination for the local communication culture of which the ‘beep‘ is a constitutive  element.

‘Beeping’ is a widely used practice in Africa (and elsewhere), that is based on people calling other people without making a connection. (For instance by disconnecting after letting the other phone ring only once). This way a very brief message is sent (‘call me’ or ‘thinking about you’ or ‘on my way’) without incurring any costs.

Beeping thus provides a free channel of communication. And when done from one mobile call box – the ubiquitous stands in Cameroon where people are renting out their mobile phones – to another  it can also be done anonymously. There is only one problem: for the receiver the content of the message is hard to decode.

To overcome that problem, Veenhof started to interpret a ‘beep’ as a ‘bit’ that can be send, it can be either on or off. Now, a communication channel that can only send one bit is of course very limited, it can only contain two messages. But what if it was possible to expand the bandwith? When several mobile phones are combined on each end of the communication channel, more complex messages can be send for free.

As an experiment, Veenhof set up a situation in which two groups of people, each with six phones would communicate with each other. In theory, this would thus enable them to send 128 (precoded) message to each other.

Veenhof also included a coding table so participants could translate their message into a sequence of beeps made with the help of the six telephones.

A test run (two groups of people with six mobile phones on two sides of the road)
did point out the difficulties of the system: it was time consuming to translate the messages into a sequence of beeps, especially if each letter of a message means calling up to six different phone numbers. Also, some bits got lost underway: one of the participants had lent his sim card to someone else, and also other everyday anomalies appeared.

It would however be thinkable to build an interface (for instance using an arduino) to take most of the effort out of the process.That way perhaps one could indeed set up a number of calling stations (perhaps reminiscent of  the Telegraph officies of yore) to provide anonymous communications. All one needs is a table, a few low end mobile phones and a parasol.

The overall point is perhaps not so much its direct practical implementation, but the creative way of thinking that has gone into it. It neatly illustrates that people often take up technology in completely different fashions than imagined by their creators to adopt them to their particular needs. Free and anonymous communication being two of them.

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)

During the 5^th and 14^th of November, the city of Istanbul became subject and object, host and platform to the fourth international Amber Art and Technology Festival. The festival explores and questions the impact of technologies on social, cultural, and political domains via artistic practices. This year’s theme was: DATACITY. The Mobile City’s guest blogger (and Amber conference-organizer) Zeynep Gündüz reports.

DATACITY conference

DATACITY takes the modern city as a data cluster as a departure point to examine novel experiences and perceptions of the city and its inhabitants. The artworks exhibited in the Amber’10 exhibition explore ‘ways of life’, production and consumption patterns, and politics of the DATACITY. The main exhibition displays art projects of Turkish and international artists; these projects aimed to revisit and rethink how technologies extend and/or modify the experience of the city. (An overview of participating artists and their work can be found here)

A prominent side-event was the Amber conference, which took place on the 6^th and 7^th of November in the cinema salon of the Istanbul Modern Art Museum. At the conference the meaning of DATACITY was explored from various perspectives.

Horst Hortner, one of the founders of Ars Electronica, for example, presented a new interactive interface –SimLinzMobile- that provides different interaction modalities to generate and visualize views of datasets on statistical and real-time information of a city. (more information on Ars Electronica can be found here)

Keynote speaker CJ Lim, on the other hand, presented the notion of “Smartcity” by which he addressed the issue of‘urban agriculture’ or how the production of food can affect the architecture of an urban city. (More information on the book Smart-cities and Eco-warriors can be found here)

Set-up for Rhythm of City

In contrast to most presentations in which the speakers start by introducing the content of the presentation, Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet Sola’s presentation started in silence. Instead of the speakers, a metronome was placed on the table. Gradually, the metronome started moving; however, it did not accompany a music instrument. Moreover, the metronome moved in various rhythms: at times it slowed down and at times it moved very fast. What made the metronome move? And what made it change its speed? At this moment, Guljajeva and Canet Sola explain that we have witnessed the art installation “The Rhythm of City”. This project can be described as a digital update of Bornstein and Bornstein’s (1976) study, which showed a positive correlation between the walking speed of pedestrians and the size of the city. In “The Rhythm of City”, Guljajeva and Canet Sola aim to capture the rhythm of a city by extracting geo-tagged social content and translating this data into the rhythm of a physical metronome in real-time. In other words, what made the metronome move and what made it change its speed was the data such as, SMS messages, videos of the inhabitants in certain locations in Istanbul. (A detailed explanation and demo video of this project can be found here)

The last panel of the second day, however, balanced ‘positive’ visions of DATACITY by critically questioning the rapid increase of technologies in everyday life, the difficulty of being anonymous and the impossibility to not be ‘seen’ in contemporary everyday life. Presenters, such as Georg Russeger and Ebru Yetiskin reminded us that data means translation and that translation inevitably leads to selection, exclusion, and loss.

Knowbotic Research in the MacGhillie suit

The presentation of Christian Huebler from Knowbotic Research addressed questions of public invisibility and camouflage within a world infiltrated by omnipresent technologies. Huebler made his point clear as he left the room dressed in a MacGhillie suit. As Huebler explains, the so-called MacGhillie suit was invented in the 19th century for hunting and was later also used during the First World War. The MacGhillie’s camouflage effect leads to the anonymisation and neutralisation of the person who wears it in public, and therefore, served the interest of Huebler’s objection to DATACITY. (An elaborate overview of Knowbotic Research can be found here)

More about the festival:

Beside its main exhibition, amber’10 was host to two other exhibitions. The Global Gateway Project, funded by Istanbul 2010 European Capital Of Culture – Civil Society Dialogue Grant Program, and Playful Interface Cultures Exhibition, which is created by the works of Interface Culture Graduate Program, Linz Art and Industrial Design University (more information on Playful Interfaces can be found here)

While the exhibitions allowed the public to visit the artworks, the side events offered a more-in depth engagement with the artists for the audience. The workshops, for example, allowed an intimate and interactive platform for the public to engage with the artists and learn more about the starting point for some of the projects and the features of the technologies used. The event “400 seconds” gave all artists 400 seconds to explain their art projects in front of the public. In this sense, 400 seconds can be framed as a kind of “speed dating” with the artists. Finally, the four performances in “Lunapark”, were the artistic outcome of a research on the impact of technologies on issues such as, personal traces, memory, and the fall and rise of traditions in the DATACITY. The performances were repeated several times per night and the repetitive character of Lunapark allowed the public to experience the performances more than once. (more information on the Lunapark project can be found here)

The Amber’10 Conference was accompanied by a film screening and two workshops: “Data Visualization and GIS for Urban Systems” by Selim Balcisoy and “Locative Contours, Residua and Documentary Inclinations” by Tina Bastajian ve Seda Manavoglu.

Amberfestival ‘10 will publish its catalogue next month. The catalogue will provide an elaborative overview of the main and side events that took place in and around DATACITY. The presentations on the DATACITY offered during the two-day conference will be published in the form of an e-book.

Between November 5-14th, the city of Istanbul hosted the fourth international

About Coffee Deposits:::Topologies of Chance

Coffee Deposits:::Topologies of Chance (aka Siting Maps in Cups) began as a speculative project that I presented at the Locative Media conference in Siegen, Germany in 2007.

For those not familiar with the Turkish (et al) coffee phenomena, it basically requires a blend of strong coffee that has been ground to a pulverized state, and is cooked over a stove until it boils several times, to be then served in small demitasse cups. After drinking, the cup should be turned upside down onto the saucer, and once dried, the settled coffee sediments form intricate patterns and shapes that can be interpreted. For me, the cup thus is an ‘interface’ or lingua franca that stimulates prophetic speculation through image translation via a versed reader, and often generates ludic scenarios and conversations, and even forms of testimony.

Our project’s initial intent was to build upon these cultural practices around the drinking of a cup of coffee. We wanted to explore the charting of layers, movement and dwelling in Istanbul through mobile and ad-hoc Turkish coffee encounters. We imagined that we would set up improvised mobile coffee stations with which to explore the city, arrange meetings and collect stories. We also would employ a combination of GPS traces and geocache tactics to document and augment the one-on-one encounters with artists, researchers and passersby. This documentation would then be contoured into an interactive environment (DVD-ROM) a hybrid between documentary and the ludic, whose interface would lead to an unfolding of counter-cartographies. Once in public space the project unraveled differently than the order outlined above, and took on other modulations, which are described throughout this text.

Our trajectory as autonomous mobile coffee makers hinted at the revisiting of a little known and short-lived practice before coffee houses had their firm place in the Ottoman Empire (circa 16^th century) and was part of coffee’s thorny migration beginning in Africa and proliferating to the Near/Middle East, Europe and beyond. Our street level coffee presence (also considering our own layers of alterity in Istanbul) was a stark paradox to the present day coffee establishments in Istanbul such as Starbucks and Gloria Jeans Café. Customers behind tinted windows and laptops peered in disdain (and some with delight) at our disorderly coffee construct from a safe distance.

We began on the streets and café’s in Kadıköy (located on Istanbul’s Asian side) to first explore the curious coffee-fortune trade, which operates under scrutiny from the municipality. That is to say, there is a soft law, which was re-activated approximately in 2003 to regulate the trade of reading fortunes for money in cafes even though it is advertised everywhere but instead the slogan furtively reads, “Coffee is on you, the reading is on us.” This is related to a law (article 677) that was instituted in 1925 (as part of Atatürk’s reforms) banning clairvoyants, fortune-tellers, dervish lodges and Sufi orders etc. This was the same law that forbade the wearing of clothes associated with these titles. The ambivalence of coffee reading in public space implicitly affected our own mobility, as we became suspect of posing as undercover agents by a network of fortune-tellers. At a crucial point, we indeed shifted our protocols and decided to forego coffee encounters as a locus, and as well to postpone the geocaching segments, yet still documenting our process via audio, video and GPS data.

Following a less result oriented trajectory and making space for the ‘courage for flux’ (in the spirit of Kierkegaard) was liberating in the sense that it allowed for unforeseen forms of exchange, and modes of agency such as in the way we conducted interviews, or how we made decisions to develop or follow disparate spatial and temporal narrative and documentary threads. Our adventitious detours led us to explore a multiplicity of converging, unpredictable and rapidly shifting urban patterns and diverse stories and accounts by those who inhabit, walk, dwell, witness, work and protest in the city. As film scholars Patricia Zimmerman and Dale Hudson have observed, “Locative media practices shift the terms of documentary media production. They move to interfaces, from refined arguments to contestations and speculations.” [1] In our case, the ambient mediums or phantom guides (coffee and GPS strategies) became a trope in which to negotiate, articulate and speculate multiple viewpoints and disorientations, sometimes ironically via diverging and non-linear traversals within screen and street interfaces.

The body of the work is structured in an interactive (DVD-ROM) that charts a constellation of relations. For the related concept of topologies we found inspiration in a text by Michel Serres:

If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities. If you sketch a circle in one area, you can mark out nearby points and measure far-off distances. Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant. This science of nearness and rifts is called topology… [2]

A sampling of in-situs include; street-level interviews with mobile junk recyclers who are seasonal migrant workers from Eastern Turkey, whose trade is encroaching upon obsolesce with pressure from the city and private waste companies. We traversed parts of Sulukule (Gypsy/Roma district) with artist and researcher Sevgi Ortaç who has done extensive research regarding the historic city walls and the problematic ‘urban transformation’ projects taking place in the area. Then to a more political walk taken with LGBTT activist and journalist Deniz Deniz who performed her daily walk through Istanbul’s Beyoğlu, district. She, amongst many others, was and still is a target for police harassment by issuing absurd and expensive traffic tickets during daylight hours, which attempt to keep transsexuals and transvestites from moving freely in the city. We navigated through a more palimpsestic lens with journalist ad historian Osman Köker where we revisit past Armenian presences (late Ottoman period), and into the present through several districts, often with the aid of historical postcards and in-transit interviews.

Amber conference workshop

During a presentation of our project at the workshop during the amber conference we navigated through some of the processes, contingencies and traversals described above. We then highlighted the work’s hyper-textual, interactive environment with varying interface, navigational and database narrative strategies by illustrating parts from each section on the DVD-ROM. And while GPS traces were originally to be used as tangential offshoots (narrative, illustrative, statistical) and as a documentation strategy in the final output, we also wanted to accentuate our own ambivalences with the technology. Our performative simulations through the work underscored what media theorist Lev Manovich outlined in his essay Database as Symbolic Form, as having two competing impulses, which “produce endless hybrids.”[3]

With our speculative presentation/workshop title we sought to triangulate location aware practices, source materials, data or rather residual, and hybrid forms of documentary. While we converged many themes throughout the introduction and presentation of the DVD-ROM we sought to focus on geocaching for the workshop portion. The geocache element interjects a slightly alternative notion of data that is less about statistics or that which is networked, algorithmically generated, or centered on clusters of data visualization. Rather we wanted to evoke a cinematic register, which we playfully coined as, D.iegetic A.ttributes T.o A.ssemble.  We illustrated how we are developing (spatial narrative) extensions to Topologies of Chance project with geocaching. Our deferred usage of geocaching strategies would now resurface as locational ‘postscripts’ (i.e. addendums or epilogues) by re/dis/locating fragments from our archive into urban space.

When first embarking on this project a few years ago, one of the initial motivations to employ geocaching tactics was for its networked community, and that it is practiced globally and is reasonably accessible. I personally was also interested in the détournement of the thorny phenomenon of modern day treasure hunting (archeological objects, gold, etc.), that has become part of the collective narrative and still very much alive in the eastern parts of Turkey (as well as in Istanbul). I have encountered this first hand by citizens who are keen on actively seeking out the gold and valuables hidden and buried by the Armenians who once inhabited the region. Such stories proliferate and are at once intriguing and disconcerting.

We first outlined some of the ways in which the Geocaching web database and network operates, such as how one first finds and/or places geocaches online; using coordinates, the use of tags, logs, categories, sub-categories, etc. The workshop participants would later develop their own geocache placements and scenarios on paper in small groups. In short, geocaching is a worldwide network and game-like sport that uses geo coordinates and a GPS device find to hidden ‘caches’ (weather proof boxes, micro containers the size of your ring finger, retrofitted pipes, etc.) a hybrid between a low and hi-tech treasure hunt in rural and urban space.           (See: www.Geocaching.com or www.Wayfaring.com).

While there are many types of geocaches, we focused on the basic cache, the multi-cache and virtual caches and illustrated a few examples of local caches listed online situated in Istanbul. Then correspondingly we described (sorry no hints until we hide the cache) a post-script scenario related to our project’s narrative in the form of a multi-cache that we would place in nearby Beyoğlu, what we call the Virtual 39^th Step.  First the geocacher would arrive to the site in question via coordinates, although geocaching with GPS coordinates only gets you approximately to the actual cache, then it’s up to you to navigate the 5-10 or so meters to the exact spot. From there, once you find the cache, inside it has instructions of a series of directions and visual clues to then find the 2^nd and 3^rd cache. Ultimately these would lead to the final cache location that is hidden in a small sealed container with log book, pencil, a picture, a riddle and token for exchange. The dramaturgy of our multi-cache in Istanbul relies heavily on clues, passwords, chance and local guidance through the interaction of shopkeepers and street vendors that simulate more ‘analog’ re-articulations of GPS devices, which renders their futility in certain situations.

Our participants consisted of local and international attendees, and included a class of architecture and design students who had just arrived from Northern Cyprus’ Dogu Akdeniz University (East Mediterranean University). Our first exercise was a preliminary warm-up to the geocaching segment by charting our individual routes to the Istanbul Modern. No matter how versed you are in navigating the cities various transportation arteries, all methods of movement require an acute sense of choreography, observation and space for happenstance. These maps could be drawn, spoken, performed or notated in any manner. This freeform mapping also collectively generated subjective ‘data’ for the second part of the exercise. It is interesting to note that many of the individual maps resembled filmic storyboards. These consisted of encounters that had triggered some sort of anxiety, confusion, curiosity, conversation or decision-making. Their subjective wayfaring detailed many observations on the way to Tophane, a collection of discrete parts from fleeting monuments or even nonu-ments, views from above, corners, teacups, mysterious structures, unused spaces, modes of transit, smells. One participant, traced more textually.

Cihangir à Tophane

Home à Istanbul Modern Museum

(mode) Walking: a down hill walk.

[…] going down the hill near the Cihangir Mosque, I looked at the sea and  saw a boat crossing the Bosphorus towards the other side of the city, the  so-called Anatolian side. It was likely a tugboat leaving a white trace in                                     the sea the way boats do […]

Meanwhile another person sketched a meticulous labyrinth of facades and scenarios in a relatively short amount of time. We were all drawn to a door he drew and described as always being open but with no one present no matter what time of day or night.

The groups converged throughout the grounds inside and outside of Istanbul Modern to discuss the 2^nd part of the exercise to come up with geocache scenarios. The groups had all ultimately chosen to use the multi-cache format, as it evokes game like strategies and extra sleuthing skills to lead the viewer to many locations. They had also constructed their caches to involve shopkeepers and vendors, as these local contacts are the way of the street and offer a way in which to interact in unforeseen ways. For example one group’s multi-cache brings you to Taksim Square. For this you would not need a GPS device, as it’s an obvious landmark. The directions are as follows: ask a nearby tea seller, from which there are many for a glass of free hot water to take away. The one vendor who gives you the glass (sorry no paper cups), then tells you that will need to exchange that water for a glass of rakı, (Turkish liqueur flavored with anise) from a patisserie located on Istiklal Caddessi. In turn after entering and asking the right patisserie, instead of receiving of a glass of rakı, you get a free cake and coffee.

Such simple task oriented objectives morph into a circuitous journey, and are likely to lead one to discover more than patisseries and rakı. Although not always evident in their scenarios why they decided to choose particular locations over others, but this perhaps reflects how one might easily get caught up in the game logic of how to get from cache to cache. This group also did not use the hiding of a physical cache or object in urban space, and what that would contain inside or might add to the game or locational elements. Likewise, by taking the workshop into the street would have stimulated and challenged the articulation of more complex strategies from the abstract to the tangible. Another group’s multi-cache (entitled the Worm Hole) did have a physical cache at the end, although you might have to get wet in order to find the container! Also to point out since many participants spoke Turkish, it was not clear how non-speakers would navigate the translations. And since it can be especially difficult to hide a cache in the city without someone seeing you, what is at stake is that they might possibly remove or destroy the cache. However these in the field glitches also nuance ways in which you hide, re-hide and find geo-caches.

Although the time flew bye, Seda and I hoped to stimulate some new thoughts connecting data, locational narratives and interaction with the city, her inhabitants, streets and hidden nooks and crannies. While chance and contingency are seemingly prominent factors in our projects themes, which migrated into the workshop, given more time we would have explored ways in which to create and re-imagine conditions for an unfolding of narrative in public space. How to incorporate the collision of real and virtual spaces in geocaching while also negotiating locational subjectivities? What sort of alliances and exchanges are made while placing or creating such multi-cache’s? So in that sense, chance also meets intention, follows intuition, encounters friction […]. We plan to come back to Istanbul in the near future with a surplus of GPS receivers, to go out on the streets and mark some coordinates, and hide some geocaches. To be continued…

About the Author:

Tina Bastajian is a Los Angeles born film/media artist, currently a PhD researcher based in Amsterdam. She has predominately made single channel works that are between experimental documentary and narrative forms that often triangulate themes of displacement, translation and memory.  In tandem, she is working in praxis and theory to chart and interrogate subjective mapping tendencies and archival proclivities in locative media practices that evoke and reconfigure themselves as potential geo-cinematic constellations.

Co-collaborator, Seda Manovoglu often works with photography and documentary subjects within installation spaces that use theatrical components, and has recently attended the Masters of Arts program at the Dutch Art Institute. As film/media artists both are drawn to ad-hoc and intimate situations that interlace documentary, experiments in narrativity, re-enactment, work processes: working in and between themes of gender, identity, migration, etc.

Works Cited:

1 Hudson, Dale and Patricia R. Zimmerman. “Taking Things Apart: Locative Media, Migratory Archives and Micropublics” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism Vol. 36, No. 5  (2009).

2 Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.

3 Serres, Michel. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: Univ of Michigan Press, 1995.

www.coffeedeposits.nl

www.coffee-deposits.blogspot.com

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

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

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

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

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

Scientific Research: A New Form of Demography?

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

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

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

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

Citizen Science

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

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

Personalized Locational Services

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

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

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

Who Is the Owner?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Desire to Share Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Privacy as Design Criterion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. www.cityware.org.uk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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