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.

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.

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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”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mimi Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Ken Anderson have an interesting chapter in the edited volume by Rich Ling & Scott Campbell (2009) “The reconstruction of space and time: mobile communication practices” which recently came out. The chapter is called “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places”. The authors explore how people use portable objects to ‘interface’ with urban space and locations. Up to now, the authors say, the dominant focus has been on conceptualizing the mobile phone as a personal communications technology. The emphasis in such studies has been on how interpersonal communication has been made possible “anytime, anyplace, anywhere”. To a much lesser extend the mobile phone has been conceptualized as a device that is tied to local situations. In this approach the mobile phone is seen as an interface to urban space. Mobile communication infrastructure intersects with the physical infrastructure of the city [1].

Ito et al do not look at the mobile phone on its own. Instead, they take the phone as but one of the portable objects that are ‘interfaces’ to the city. These include media players, books, keys, credit and transit cards, identity and member cards. Together these comprise “the information-based ‘mobile kits’ of contemporary urbanites” (p. 67). So the mobile phone, instead of being studied in isolation, is part of a larger assembly of objects that people use to navigate the city, as well as to sustain social relations with other people [2]. Next they discuss three kinds of urban interfacing, which they have labelled cocooning, camping, and footprinting. Cocooning is the practise of people shielding themselves off in public settings. For instance by using portable media players, books, doing stuff on their mobile phones, etc. They create an invisible bubble of mobile private space around them. Camping is the practise of finding a nice spot in town – often in coffeehouses – and doing information related work there with laptops, mobile phones, etc. This can be both for work and private affairs (and often intermingle). Camping can co-exist with cocooning when people shield themselves off from physical social interactions through portable media objects. Footprinting describes the various customer transaction and loyalty schemes through which people leave traces in a particular location. It is “the process of integrating an individual’s trajectory into the transactional history of a particular establishment, and customer cards are the mediating devices” (p. 79). The authors have done fieldwork research in three big cities: Tokyo, Los Angeles, and London. Interestingly, they conclude that behaviors vary only slightly between these cities.

I find this approach very interesting for a number of reasons. First, the conceptualization as ‘urban interfaces’ focusses on the locative qualities of mobile media. The paper gives a nice categorization of the various ways in which mobile media act as interfaces between ‘the digital’ and ‘the physical’. Second, the mobile phone is not studied in isolation but as part of a larger array of informational objects that people carry along with them to manage and deal with urban life. Consequently, the image of the mobile phone shifts from an intrusive addition to an imagined once upon a time of ‘real’ public space, face to face interactions, spontaneous encounters and serendipitous discovery, etc., to a more pragmatic view on the mobile as an everyday necessity of urbanites. Third, Ito et al connect changes in the urban experience to changes in displaying identity in public spaces. This point receives scant attention in the chapter but is very important indeed.

I also have some points of critique on this conceptualization and approach. First, Ito et al predominantly focus on the interaction of people with the physical localities and infrastructure of the city (p 71-72). They take infrastructure as a collection of ‘dead’ objects (roads, public transport entry ports, toll roads, etc.) making urban life possible. Location in their view refers solely to a point in Euclidian space, a coordinate on the map so to say. The authors leave out the human aspect of location and infrastructure. In their own words “it becomes even more crucial that mobile communications research look at these more infrastructural and impersonal forms of social and cultural practise” (p. 72 – my emphasis). Yet locations and infrastructures are only abstracted ‘ideal’ or ‘categorical’ concepts of their phenomenological equivalents in lived space. They are the abstract counterparts of places and routes (or trajectories). I would say we should look at the human side of infrastructures as crossroads of experiences, in the vein of what geographer Doreen Massey has called the “throwntogetherness” of place as an event [3]. Of course many locative media projects exactly tried to visualize this human aspect of infrastructures and locations (e.g. Christian Nold’s biomapping).

A second critique on this approach is that it considers only one side of the hybrid relation between physical space and digitally mediated space. This conceptual framework gives prevalence to physical space over digital space. The main focus is on how the digital ‘seeps’ into the physical and alters pre-existing situations there. But how does the physical seep into the digital realm? It is one-way, departing from the assumption of what Lev Manovich has called “augmented space” as an overlay of physical space [4]. This suggests that digital space is an extra layer to reality. As De Souza e Silva has argued, this idea of augmented space gives prevalence to behavior in the physical realm, rather than the interactions that take place in both types of spaces at the same time [5]. Instead, she argues, we must look at digitally mediated social behavior as taking place in ‘hybrid space’ [5].

Thirdly, important other location-based uses of portable information objects are being left out, such as navigation and wayfinding in (unknown) cities. The focus seems restricted to urban practises by people who actually inhabit or at least regularly frequent the city. In addition, footprinting is depicted as taking place solely in the commercial realm through customer loyalty cards. There is an abundance of locative media project that use geotagging as a way of leaving digital footprints or graffiti in the city (e.g. Dutch project Bliin). And the mobile device itself increasingly becomes the interface to footprinting. Many new high-end devices have automatic geotagging built in their photo camera, and come with various uploading services. Some devices already have NFC technology for micro-payments. It seems logical that more and more portable informational objects will converge into the mobile device. Will it ever come to the point that The Mobile City becomes “the city in our mobile”?

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[1] It should be noted that in most writings on ‘locative’ aspects of mobile media there is an almost exclusive focus on the city as the locus of action. This is understandable since in the city many of the networks that make up present-day ‘hybrid space’ are present in much greater density, and arguably with much greater consequences. In what ways rural space is changing under the influence of mobile media is understudied, I guess, and probably just as important. Especially if we consider that according to Claude Fisher (1992) who studied early fixed line telephony certainly in the beginning the telephone has been more important for rural living than for urban living.

[2] A similar point about the research bias towards studying single technologies is made by Julsrud & Bakke in chapter 7 of this same volume (p. 160).

[3] Massey, D. B. (2005). For space. London; Thousand Oaks: SAGE. p. 140.

[4] Manovich, L. (2005). The Poetics of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada. 1-15. Retrieved from http://www.manovich.net/TEXTS_07.HTM

[5] De Souza e Silva, A. (2006). From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces. Space and culture, 9(3), 261-278. Retrieved from http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/resolver/1840.2/80

In his recent book The Big Sort Bill Bishop writes that over the last decades American cities and towns have become segregated physcially. Republican neighborhoods have turned increasingly republican. That is: in many republican electoral precincts the margin with which the republican candidate beats his or her democratic opponent grows with each new election cycle. Meanwhile districts with a high percentage of second-hand bookshops, volvos and other insignia of democratic allegiance are attracting more and more democratic voting constitutents

This is, Bishop argues, not the result of gerrymandering, political conspiracy or even conscious political selection. Instead Bishop sees a handful of other factors. The first is simply affluence: if we can afford it, most of us prefer to live next door to people who are like us. The second is the growing importance of differential lifestyles and cultural values in all aspects of life. Churches might be one of the best examples of this shift. Forty or fifty years ago a church would be attracting people from all different politcal denominations, class or occupations. They formed a node in which different lifestyles met and interacted. Increasingly, churches market themselves to a particular lifestyle niche. Bishop: ‘There is no longer national ‘brand loyalty’ in regard to relgion. There are however local micro-brands. Ministers try to market their church to ind a niche, whether its being open to gays or lesbians or being strong as a pro-life church’. This focus on lifestyle is found in all aspects of life, and when people are looking for a place to live, they simply select an area that fits their cultural preferences: does it have the right kind of bookshops? The right kind of coffeeshops and restaurants? Etc

So is this sorting a bad thing? Yes, Bishop argues. To make this point, he lines up a defence of social psychologists. They state that people who only meet people from within their own community or peer group tend to become more extreme in their views. So not only are Republicans and Democrats retreating in their own circles, they are also growing less moderately in their opinions – and less willing to take the views from others in consideration – because of this. (Interesting, although I must say that I sometimes find his arguments somwhat confusing. On the one hand Bishop writes that culture is fragmenting in smaller and smaller niches, on the other there seems to be only two choices left: either you are republican, pro-life, against gun control, and pro hunting. Or you’re in the democratic pro-choice, ecological, big-government camp

If this all sounds familiar, it could be because a similar point was made about four decades ago by Richard Sennett in The Uses of Disorder, be it on psychoanalytic rather than poltical or social psychologic grounds.

Like Bishop, Sennett argued that modern cities had lost their nodes of ‘multiplicity contacts.’ Writing about cities in the first half of the 20th century:

‘each piece of the city mosaic had a distinct character, but the pieces were open and this was what made life urban. Individuals had the capacity and the need to penetrate a number of social regions in the course of daily activities even though the regions were not harmoniously organized and may even have been at warring ends. … It is this muliplicity of contact point that has died out in the city, in its stead social acitvities have come to be formed in a more coherent mold.

With his statistical evidence, Bishop’s books proves that Sennett wasn’t only right in his observations, but that the trend has become even more prevalent, even though Sennett himself had hoped that a new generation would eventually get bored by their homogeneous lifeworlds

I am not sure whether this trend is mainly a US one, or a world-wide one. And of course when talking about media practices, they will play out differently in different cultural contexts. I wondered though what the use of mobile and locative media could mean for this trend. To me it seems that they have the capacity to both stimulate as well as counter this trend, yet at this moment I would argue the former is more prevalent.

Sennett’s solution to the problem of geographical fragmentation was in line with the revolutionary character of the era in which the book was written: more anarchy. If there were less rules about zoning, behaviour and the like, people with different backgrounds would have to interact with each other to come up with solutions. This would force them to have them relate to each other directly and this will prove their stereotypical ideas about the other wrong. Conflict, he states, is a good thing, and not something that should be avoided. And so is disorder.

I think Sennet has a point there, although the idea to be forced into all these meetings, assemblies and informal get-togethers to work out all the little and big conflicts of everyday life doesn’t sound that appealing to me. But are there perhaps known good practices of how locative or mobile media might play a role here? Can these media bring different people together in what Sennett calls ‘Survival Communities’?

City planning, Sennett writes should not aim to make life in the city as efficient as possible, it should leave room for appropriation and especially disorder and confrontation. Should our mobile media interfaces do the same thing? Could the domains of locative gaming or digital situationism be meaningful in these ways?

Many commercial services are marketed in the exact opposite way: they are promoted as devices that make (working) life more efficient, that enable to personalize and filter your surroundings according to your own lifestyle. They do away with all the disorder around you – or least will class and clarify it for you. This, I would argue, does make life more pleasant. But will it in the long run indeed increase geographical apartheid, promote poltical extremism and erode solidarity?

The first is that McQuire sees media not as a means of representation, but rather as a technology that co-constitutes the experience of the city. In other words, what is interesting is not so much how a movie or tv show represents the city. What is interesting is how media can provide new frames for making sense of the city; how it provides new ways of experiencing the city.

Second, I liked his approach of technology: McQuire is interested in the way in which new technologies are incorporated into everyday life, how they are turned from ‘disembedding technologies’ into embedded media practices: when new technologies are introduced – be it the telegraph or the internet – they are usually seen as disruptive technologies that will ‘annihilate time and space’ and disembed existing social relations. However, usually after a certain period of time, some of these technologies have become so normal that we do not even notice them anymore. They are so embedded in our everyday practice that we simply can’t imagine what life would be without them.

It is the phase in between that is interesting. ‘What may in retrospect seem the logical pathway of future development is not yet inevitable; other possibilities remain open.’ Will these new technologies be applied in a reactionary or in revolutionary way?

When looking at locative media and the experience of the city, we might well be in the ‘in between phase’. There is still a lot of bewilderment and excitement about the technologies. Yet clear practices haven’t emerged, although McQuire is critical about the general direction of innovation. It’s mainly pushed by commercial providers aiming at instant gratification for their customer base. There is less attention for usages that might benefit a more public, collective culture.

Let’s have a more detailed look at what McQuire means when he says that

Rather than treating media as something separate from the city – the medium which ‘represents’ urban phenomena by turning it into an image – I argue that the spatial experience of modern social life emerges through a complex process of co-constitution between architectural structures and urban territories, social practices and media feedback.

McQuire gives several historic examples. For instance he looks at the serial photographs that Marville took in 19th Century Paris before and after Hausmann’s crew had swooshed through the neighborhood. These photos were not meant to be experienced as single objects of art, but rather as a series. ‘The most significant legacy of Marville’s work is the way it registers the transition from individual views to the cumulative knowledge established by the series or the set. … images coalesce into an information flow in which relations between images assume heightened importance.’ McQuire notes that around the same time picture postcards started to become a popular medium as well, and their serial logic could have had an interesting impact on the way we imagine the city:

‘[Postcards] enable the complex reality of the modern city to be reduced to a series of discrete visual units that can be easily manipulated and readily consumed. But even as they pander to a dream for panoptic mastery of the modern city, postcards sow the seeds of its confusion. When points of view multiply so excessively it becomes increasingly difficult to believe in the authority of a master shot or to limit oneself to the stability of a centered perspective. Postcards feed the modern understanding of the city as a fragmented discontinuous environment, essentially unrepresentable except as a series. It is this sense of the city unmoored and in perpetual transformation – which consciously or unconsciously informs metropolitan discourse in the 20th century.’

McQuire sees interesting links between this mental frame of understanding the city and developments in other areas. ‘The process [of Hausmanization] is mapped by the seriality of Marville’s images in which various sites become more or less interchangeable losing their unique identities in favour of the more abstract collective idenitity of the set’. At the same time house numbers started to appear, replacing the individual naming of houses that had been dominant until then with an abstract way of representing individual homes as part of a set. Is there a link with the rise of the mathematical discipline of statistics, with their dominant logic of the set rather than the individual? It started to appear as a way of getting a grasp of society and was adapted in the process of policy making by those in power around the same time. As life and society in general started to become more impersonal, subject to more abstract flows of goods, people, money, so did our experience of the city, and media such as photography played a role in providing frames to understand this new reality.

This made me wonder about the possible capacities of locative media. On the one hand, it uses an even more abstract way of representation of place: the grid of geometric coordinates provided by the gps signal. We find ourselves always at the center of this spatial universe, with the services we require mapped around us in concentric circles.

Through tracking software, statistics can be calculated in real time. They can be integrated in highly sophisticated and customisable data sets as those used in geodemographics. All our actions could easily be recorded, assembled in statistical sets, analyzed and fed back to us by means of lifestyle group labels such as ‘suburban optimists’, ‘aspiring hispanics’ or ‘hinterland families’. Will we identify with these new ways of ascribing identities, and thus expand the logic of the (data) set, yet in new ways?

Or, perhaps, will these capacities of new media technologies increasingly be used to sort the city for us? McQuire: ‘Public encounters with strangers are treated as increasingly problematic and control of the street has become part of a wider agenda to render urban space not only safe, but predictable.’

At the same time, it is possible to connect all these abstract coordinates with highly subjective interpretations and meanings. For instance through geoannoation software, or by connecting the objective reality of the grid with subjective experiences of a Flickr photostream. Through technological services, we can connect with absent friends and ‘broaden our horizon of social relations’ beyond those present nearby. McQuire calls this experience of place ‘relational space’. And ‘as urban structures cede priority to seemingly immaterial flows’, McQuire writes, ‘relational space has become the dominant experience of urban life.’

media no longer belong primarily to spatially bounded specialized sites such as the cinema, but are becmonig mobile and pervasive. Rather than a record of past events, digital media frequently provide instantaneous feedback in ‘real time’. Not only are social interactions routinely distributed across heterogeneous space-time frames, but mediation by complex technological systems has also become integral to social dynamics.

If postcards taught us to think of the city as a fragmented discontinuous environment without a master perspective, perhaps locative media can learn us to reconciliate the abstract world of globalization with more subjective experiences of place?

Yet, that is of course not an innocent matter of fact. If indeed the experience of the physical city cedes to our contact with absent others in relational space, what practices of inclusion and exclusion, of linkages and barriers will be involved in this process? Here McQuire warns us not to be too optimistic about current developments:

The problem is not simply the exposure of the previously private or the increased mediation of public space. Rather it is the all-too frequent reduction of the social uses of new media platforms to the possibilities dictated by commercial profit and loss. Failure to imagine new publics and new forms of privacy locks the relation between public and private into an unproductive structure of voyeurism and narcissism.