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…

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?

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”?

[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.