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

Check out the program here >>

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

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

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

Michiel de Lange

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rezone the game: playing for urban transformation

Introduction

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

About Rezone the Game

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

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

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

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

Initiators

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

Development of Rezone

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

Launch of prototype and future

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

Context: connecting to three trends

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

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

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

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

Games for social innovation

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

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

Concluding

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

At the same time we have witnessed a renewed interest in the public good or ‘res publica’. For instance in the recent debates about ‘ownership’ (about which we have written extensively before) and various examples of bottom-up city making, in which citizens have started to organize to address public affairs themselves.

The research program investigates three case studies in which the relation between public space and the public good takes on new forms. Dus Architects will be developping a housing cooperation for the 21st century, Trancity will investigate new ways to develop the (social) program of urban neighborhoods. The Mobile City will research the ways new media can create ‘urban publics’ in new ways. That is: how do new media enable citizens to organize themselves in ‘publics’ that can address the public good? As such the project builds upon the upcoming book The City as Interface by The Mobile City-co founder Martijn de Waal.

We look forward to sharing our thoughts on these issues with you here and elsewhere in the near future.

The first occasion to do so will be a conference (in Dutch) on bottom-up city making, on April 16th in Den Haag. See here for the full program.

Collegedag Publieke Ruimte Publieke Zaak Den Haag 16 April

Nu de verzorgingsstaat kantelt en de publieke sector legitimiteit verliest zoeken we naar nieuwe vormen van organisatie en toeeigening in het publiek domein.

Bottom-up, civic economy, coöperaties,nieuwe ontmoetings -plekken, zelfbeheer in de openbare ruimte zijn de nieuwe begrippen.Wat is daarbij de kracht van zelforganisatie en de rol van professionele organisaties? En hoe geven we daar ruimtelijk vorm aan?

Trancity organiseert een college-marathon over de vraag hoe we onze maatschappelijke ambities organiseren en hoe we die verankeren in de publieke ruimte? Een dag over publieke belangen, maatschappelijke organisaties en ruimtelijk ontwerp.

The Mobile City verzorgt een van de lezingen op deze dag.

Met lezingen van Simon Franke, Chris Sigaloff, Annemarie van Dalen, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Martijn de Waal, Joke van der Zwaard, Matthijs de Boer en Marc van Leent.

Zie hier voor het volledige programma van de collegedag Publiek Ruimte Publieke Zaak.

Inschrijven kan hier. (kosten: 195 euro, inclusief gratis boek van een van de sprekers.)

Eindhoven Hackable World City
by: Matthijs Bouw, Froukje van de Klundert, Michiel de Lange en Martijn de Waal, Amsterdam, 2013 (pdf 2.2 MB)

A while ago we were invited by Amsterdam based architecture and planning firm One Architecture to collaborate on a research project about the possible future of urban planning and policy in the Netherlands. The project was commissioned by Deltametropool Network for Metropolitan Development.

One of the outcomes of this collaboration is the publication ‘Eindhoven Hackable World City‘ (in Dutch, pdf 2.2 MB) in which we present our ideas about the future of the Eindhoven city region, and the role of technologies therein.

For the non-Dutch: Eindhoven is the fifth-largest city in the Netherlands. Together with a number of other municipalities, Eindhoven is part of Brabant Stad, a metropolitan area with more than 2 million inhabitants. In 2011 Eindhoven was named world’s most intelligent community by Intelligent Community Forum. (Wikipedia)

Below the executive summary of the publication (the publication itself is in Dutch only):

Executive summary ‘Eindhoven Hackable World City’
Traditional urban planning in the Netherlands with top down master plans and large scale area development is over. This is partly due to the financial crisis, demographic change, peak mobility, and the digitization of urban society. The challenge of large future  investment projects is to optimize and make better use of existing resources. Cities will have to adapt in flexible ways to changing circumstances. This implies an important conceptual shift in thinking about city making: it is less about individual possession and more about the question how multiple stakeholders can make use of the various resources that the city offers.

Digital media play an essential role in developing the instruments that allow a shift of gears to happen. The question is: how are we going to make use of these technologies? On the one hand local governments, technology companies en knowledge institutions are forming consortia to turn cities into ‘smart cities’ with the aid of informatics. Digital technologies are used to optimize urban processes and make them more efficient, like mobility and healthcare. On the other hand citizens and cultural organizations are increasingly often taking matters into their own hands. Tapping into the online culture and ethics of do-it-yourself (DIY), they take ownership over their city and undertake collective action: from collaboratively maintaining urban gardens to creating sensor networks to measure noise pollution or air quality.

We think these initiatives are too isolated to really offer a sustainable future perspective on urban transformation. The smart city departs too much from a utilitarian view of the good city but forgets the public domain and diversity of identities of urbanites. The bottom-up initiatives in the so-called ‘social city‘ on the other hand are often too fragmented. They are insufficiently connected to institutional stakeholders and lack impact and scalability. They also sometimes suffer from a ‘people-like-us’ mentality that seems to implicitly yearn for small-scale sociability rather than drawing on the potential of complex and heterogeneous city life.

These developments take place all over the world. In the Netherlands the city of Eindhoven is one of the most interesting places. In few other cities the divide is as big between high-tech business innovation occurring at the city periphery and inner city urban (sub)cultures. In this proposal we pose the question: how can we better connect ‘smart city’ and ‘social city’ in Eindhoven through research and design?  The challenge is not to fall in the same trap of attempting to construct yet another grand narrative for top-down urban planning. We are more interested in exploring and creating the conditions for urban ownership of citizens and organizations. Can we connect businesses, governments and the cultural and societal sectors to collaboratively make Eindhoven a truly smart hackable world city with the aid of digital media technologies?

* MediaCities, 3-5 May 2013, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York;
* New Media & Self-Organisation in Urban and Neighbourhood Governance Delft 16-17 May 2013
* HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions, 23-25 May 2013 Athens Greece
* Communication and the City: Voices, Spaces, Media Conference, 14-15 June 2013, Leeds University UK

In contemporary cities, the effects of advanced telecommunications and commodified media exist everywhere around us. In both eye-catching and oblique ways, mass and personalised media forms reshape our spatial practices and perceptions of specific milieus and the city as a whole.

We invite presentations that deal particularly with the following issues:

• the role of media and surveillance technologies in the spectacularisation of urban public spaces and events
• the ways in which media technologies and representations become part of the taken-for-granted perceptions and routinised practices and rhythms of urban life
• the actual and potential contributions of mass and personalised media forms to the contestation of economic, political and cultural hegemonies in cities

Throughout the interdisciplinary symposium, the spectacular, ordinary and contested aspects of the media city will be brainstormed through questions such as: What is the relationship of materiality of media and symbolic media representations in the construction of densely digitalised urban milieus? To what extent and how is media-saturation steering people’s urban activities towards automated and un-reflected modes? Or do the “urban media affordances” open room for creative place-making practices, new amalgamations of technology and corporeality, and even chances for decoding and political resistance? In which ways do different forms of art and popular culture (cinema, literature, theatre, digital games etc.) articulate and intervene in the media city? What ethical and political issues lurk behind the pecuniary motifs of the ongoing mediatisation of space?

Invited keynote speakers:

• Anne Cronin, Lancaster University, UK
• Stephen Graham, Newcastle University, UK
• Scott McQuire, Melbourne University, Australia
• Shannon Mattern, The New School, USA

If you would like to present a paper at the Spectacular/Ordinary/Contested Media Citysymposium, please send an abstract (max. 300 words) to mediacity-2013(AT)helsinki.fi by 14 January 2013. A narrative bio (max. 100 words) describing the author’s background and research interests should also accompany the proposal.

The organising committee

Jani Vuolteenaho & Outi Hakola, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

Seija Ridell & Sami Kolamo, University of Tampere.

Contacts / conference secretary:

Kirsi L. Reyes-Anastacio / Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Email: mediacity-2013(AT)helsinki.fi

More information >>

Photo: Masha Matijevic

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

Key points I took from the event

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

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

Morning Session: New Entrepreneurship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Session Open Stage

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

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

Afternoon Session: Temporariness as Permanent Chance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing talk: a silent revolution in urban design?

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

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

Conclusion: what about the smart city?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

notes

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

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

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

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

Barcelona / San Francisco , 19 November 2012: 

Today, twenty-one global cities and Citymart.com announce the LLGA|Cities Pilot the Future program to discover and implement the most promising solutions that meet pressing social and urban challenges. Over the coming 18 months, the initiative will evaluate around 1,000 submissions, and implement real-life pilots in all partner cities to improve the quality of life of their 121 million citizens.

The participating cities vary in population size from less than 100 thousand to 21 million. They are: Aalborg, Barcelona, Boston, Christchurch, Eindhoven, Fukuoka DC, L’Hospitalet, Lagos, Lavasa, London, Mexico, Oulu, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Rosario, San Francisco, Sant Cugat, Sheffield, Tacoma, Terrassa and York.

Challenges are presented by global cities – with the support of Oracle, the UN Global Compact Cities Programme and The Climate Group – in areas such as mobility, economic development, social inclusion, health & wellbeing, urban management, lighting, energy, culture, future government and sustainable lifestyles. In May 2013, key city leaders and 150 nominated solutions providers selected from over 4,500 candidates will come together in San Francisco to share challenges, opportunities and kick-start implementation during the 3-day LLGA Summit on Service Innovation in Cities.

 Xavier Trias, Mayor of Barcelona, says “LLGA|Cities Pilot the Future is a great opportunity to identify and share solutions to the global challenges that cities are facing. Every city is a world in itself, and we are living in an urban world, this is why it is so important to identify those common problems which require shared solutions. Barcelona has participated in all LLGA editions, and shares the vision of this transparent process with leading technology companies, social entrepeneurs, and international research centers. Furthermore, LLGA is a great opportunity for Catalan companies to join in and participate in this global proces”

San Francisco Mayor, Ed Lee,says “San Francisco is excited to be the first city in the United States to host the LLGA Summit on Service Innovation in Cities.  San Francisco, as the Innovation Capital of the World, will facilitate a vigorous exchange of ideas and help develop innovative solutions to common urban challenges including transportation, the environment and healthcare that will build a better world.”

Sascha Haselmayer, CEO of Citymart.com says  “LLGA|Cities Pilot the Future has transformed the way cities approach solving problems and improving lives. After a selection process involving more than 350 cities, we are proud to work on the challenges presented by our fully committed partner cities to make a difference already in the short term, creating new markets, getting improvements to citizens faster and making significant savings along the way”.

Juan Rada, Senior Vice President of Oracle, Public Sector, says “We are delighted to be working with Citymart.com and cities around the world to develop transformational solutions that address urban infrastructure, service, and operational challenges.  The future looks very bright for the development of innovative ideas. ”

 In the past three editions, LLGA has attracted 1,519 entries from 70 countries. By providing systematic market intelligence to decision-makers in cities, the program has proven to help cities discover innovative solutions that reach citizens 3 times faster with 80% lower spending.

Pilots and transformations to citizens’ experiences and opportunities can be seen in cities around the world:

• Citizens in Barcelona benefit from more fluid transport through real-time traffic monitoring;
• San Francisco’s citizens will enjoy more efficient and sustainable urban services thanks to the implementation of a citywide wireless communication network by Paradox Engineering.
• Thousands of citizens in Lagos, working in the world’s third largest movie cluster, will see their livelihoods transformed by eliminating endemic DVD piracy undermining the economy through the Nollywood Upgrade Project.

Entries to LLGA can be submitted free of charge until 31 January 2013. A shortlist of the 5 nominated solutions will be presented by each city in March 2013. The solutions selected to implement a pilot will be announced in a Summit in May 2013, hosted by the city of San Francisco.

Adebiyi Fatai Mabadeje, Chairman Lagos Innovation Advisory Council, Lagos State says ”We are once again participating in this program which seeks to promote innovation in service delivery by tapping into the more than 7 billion potential innovators worldwide and hope LLGA  will realize the solution that will best resolve our city’s challenge”

Paul James, Director of the UN Global Compact Cities Programme, says “For all of the information swirling around cities there are few clear platforms for communication that bring urban decision-makers and technology and process providers together. Good stories about good practices are not enough. We need lines of direct connection. The Cities Programme is excited to be a strong supporter of this project.”

About Citymart.com /LLGA/Cities Pilot the Future

Citymart.com is a global marketplace for cities based in Copenhagen (Denmark) and Barcelona (Spain), working with more than 80 cities and 1,000 companies and research centers in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Its mission is to open the market for service innovation in cities and overcome key technologcal, organizational  and trade barriers.

The organization, and its one-of a kind program LLGA| Cities Pilot the Future, has been recognized by leading global organizations such as the Clinton Global Initiative, the UN Global Compact Cities Programme and Ashoka Innovators for the Public for its transformative impact on improving decision-making, transparency and accountability in cities around the world.

Social media: twitter.com/LLGACities and facebook.com/citymartcom

For information about LLGA visit www.llga.org  and www.citymart.com 

http://www.otb.tudelft.nl/en/study/seminars-and-conferences/websites-internationale-congressen/international-conference-using-ict-social-media-and-mobile-technologies/

International Conference

An international conference organized by the Urban Communication Foundation and the Institute of Communications Studies in association with the ECREA Media and the City Temporary Working Group.

Where: Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds

When: June 14-15 2013

**Confirmed keynote speakers**

Professor Carole Blair (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Professor Cees Hamelink (University of Amsterdam)

Professor Alessandro Aurigi (Plymouth University)

Deadline for the submission of abstracts: November 30 2012.

The Communication and the City Conference hosted by the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds, is an international two-day event. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners from a variety of national contexts and institutional and professional fields, to discuss questions of urban communication across academic disciplines and professional fields.

Overview

By middle of this century 7 out of 10 people in the world will live in cities, and it is in cities that we find major centres of political, economic, creative and ideological power. For these reasons, in recent decades an increasing number of scholars have come to see cities as powerful texts and contexts for communication research. Drawing from across the humanities, the social sciences and the arts, urban communication has become established as an interdisciplinary field in its own right. Within communication studies, scholars have adopted a variety of approaches to the study of the urban environment. These include social interaction and organizational outlooks, rhetorical and discursive frameworks, and technology and media studies. While it remains vital to keep pursuing distinct lines of inquiry about the city within and beyond communication studies, we believe that it is also crucial to foster a sustained dialogue among the various perspectives that inform scholarly, practice-based, institutional, and professional endeavours in the field of urban communication.

Conference themes

We invite submissions that address one or any combination of these three broad questions:

1) What are the ‘voices’ that animate contemporary cities? How do different identities, groups, cultures, and constituencies interact, intersect and/or compete in mediated and non-mediated urban contexts?

2) What are the communicative dimensions of urban ‘spaces’ in their own right? How does space mediate specific ideologies and subjectivities, and how is urban space constructed and communicated as place?

3) What is the role of the ‘media’ in relation to both the symbolic and material existence of cities? How do both traditional and new media contribute to representing and experiencing, but also financing and structuring the urban environment?

We are interested in submissions that address these questions through various lenses, including technology, policy, aesthetics, and social/cultural/artistic/professional/political practices. In this regard, we welcome a range of theoretical, critical, empirical, and practice-based papers on any of the following topics:

• The communication of cultural and social differences in the city (e.g. gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, political and religious beliefs) along with the communication dynamics of related negotiations, divides and conflicts
• Identity politics, intersectionality, and intercultural communication in the city
• Political, countercultural, and social movements in the urban environment
• Power and urban space (e.g. urban regeneration, segregation, gentrification)
• Aesthetic, semiotic, rhetorical and discursive dimensions of urban spaces and places, including visual, material, aural, sensorial, and multimodal dimensions
• Urban space and the communication of memory, heritage, tradition
• Spaces of production, consumption and/or citizenship
• The relationship between urban, suburban, and rural spaces
• Representing and communicating the city (e.g. tourism and travel media, city and place branding, cinematic and televised urban spaces)
• Media and technology usage in cities and their role in the experience of urban space (e.g. geo-location, new public and private spaces, augmented reality)
• The presence and impact of media and communication technology in the urban environment (e.g. new forms of “media architecture”, security/surveillance technologies, urban screens)
• The relationship between cities and the media, cultural, and creative industries (e.g. strategies of attraction of media companies into cities, impacts on communities and urban landscapes, connectivity and infrastructure, the local/global nexus)

More information >>

The fourth MediaCity reflects on pluralities and globalities, on MediaCities everywhere.

What new lines of inquiry and emergent relations between urbanity and digital media are found in non-Western cities, in post-Capitalist cities, in cities hosting civic turbulence or crossing international boundaries? What urban-medial relations are taking shape differently in urban milieux that may have been heretofore overlooked? These cities are deserving of more attention than ever before, as sites of population growth, of new cultural and social formations, of new entanglements between urban life and contemporary media, communications and information technologies, and more. MediaCities promises to expand our understanding of both media and the city today, and to articulate new sites of practice and working methods for an expanding field.

This fourth MediaCity conference inaugurates its transition to a roving event taking place every two years in different cities around the world. Additional calls will follow for proposals to host the next event as well as for workshops and media art and architecture projects.

Areas of interest may fall broadly into several themes, with the assumption that others will appear in the process of proposals and discussion leading up to the event, always expanding our lexicon and mental maps of MediaCities globally. These themes are: Other Urbans, Uncommons, Zero Growth Cities, Media Geographies and Bordervilles.

Topics:

Other Urbans
MediaCities are typically associated with post-industrial societies, Western and Asian cultures, and urban centers whose economic bases are rooted in technology. But many nonwestern cities around the world are rapidly evolving under the aegis of ubiquitous computing, and urban living in these places appears differently as well. Now is the time to recognize and identify the new models, problems and lives of nonwestern and other MediaCities as relevant to all cities. Other Urbans concerns the non-Western MediaCity, but also the marginalized Western (Detroit, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Belfast, Leipzig) as well as the experimental (Songdo, Masdar).

Uncommons
What novel shifts are found now at the nexus of protest and public space in cities, and what roles are digital media playing? How are we to understand the enduring implications for events of 2010-2011 and after, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street to whatever unfolds up until the conference itself, as each suggest diverse mutations in urban, medial and participatory formations? Lately we are seeing new catalytic reactions between these three elements. While the cases are familiar (WikiLeaks, Tahrir Square’s life on Twitter, OWS’s “human microphones”), their potentials to intertwine matters of economic, cultural and other representation suggest the start of enduring changes to how public space and public discourse appear within and between global cities. Each holds potential to recognize and reform our thinking of public space and public discourse irrevocably as an “uncommons.” No longer modeled on a rural pasture and no longer only a problematic of shared resources and individual interests, uncommons describe novel formations located in contested shared urban events.

Zero Growth Cities
This theme regards relations between growth, economy and MediaCities in diverse cases where urban landscapes and populations once considered dead or dying are rejuvenating themselves: an urban afterlife of sorts, often with clever mixtures of new and old technologies. How are MediaCities being newly inhabited and opportunistically developed in response to market conditions, and what creative and theoretical responses can we make to these developments? And what of those cities experiencing no growth (or even shrinkage)? Do wireless networks perform similarly in these cities as elsewhere? How do sensate and sentient landscapes affect life in cities whose populations don’t otherwise change? What vibrant new urban events and situations are appearing in these sometimes overlooked places?

Media Geographies
Today we recognize terms like “landscape” and “urban” to be non-oppositional – instead, we embrace the view that environment, social relations and even human subjectivity must be seen as interrelated ecologies. What roles do digital media play in this shift, and what new practices under a rubric of “Media Geographies” can it all suggest? For example, how are we to operate across scales, as critics, scholars, artists, designers? From bodies to landscapes that are at once local and global in scale, media geographies ask how this trans-scalar subject constitutes a form of urbanism. This theme critically engages spatial, social, ecological and philosophical implications as it mines the media cities we know for urbanities that we have overlooked.

Bordervilles
How are urban conditions around national borders inflected by ubiquitous computing? What mediated forms of citizenship are emerging at these border zones, and how do they differ around the world? Bordervilles are often unofficially twinned cities that share common conditions (ecological, micro-economic, climatic) but not others (lingual, macro-economic), all of which can be affected by digital media that transcend physical boundaries and sometimes skirt national regulation. What new mediated bordervilles are to be seen, and what urban conditions do they propose? These MediaCities are diverse and ripe for study. Some include an expanded border region, (San Diego/Tijuana, Buffalo/Toronto) while others are cities divided across nations (Istanbul, Jerusalem, Shenhzhen / Hong Kong).

Host:
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

Disciplines:
Architecture, Art, Computer Science, Interaction Design, Geography, Media, Sociology, Urban Planning

Conference Chairs:
Jordan Geiger, Omar Khan, Mark Shepard

Submission Requirements:
Paper abstracts Due 12 November, 2012 by 11:59pm GMT, uploaded to the conference’s EasyChair website: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mc4
Abstracts should address global pluralities of MediaCities as the focus in this year’s conference, whether that corresponds to one of the sample topics described herein or one of your own interest. The proposed presentation may relate academic research, a creative project or other subject matter but should not exceed 500 words. Abstracts will be double blind peer-reviewed by representatives of a wide range of expertise in relations between media and urban issues today. Send questions to chairs [at] mediacities [dot] net

Important Dates:
October 8, 2012 – Call for Paper Abstracts
November 12, 2012 – Abstracts Due
Dec 31, 2012 – Acceptances Issued
March 1, 2013 – Final Papers Due
May 3-5 2013 – MediaCity 4: MediaCities

More information >>

The HYBRID CITY II: Subtle rEvolutions

Conference, workshops, exhibition and parallel events

23-25 May 2013

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

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

Hybrid City Conference 2013, in Athens, Greece, will consist of three days of paper presentations, discussions, workshops and satellite events, under the theme “Subtle rEvolutions”. The events will be hosted by the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and are in particular organized by the University Research Institute of Applied Communication (URIAC), in collaboration with the New Technologies Laboratory of the faculty. The main venue of the conference is the central, historic building of the University of Athens, while workshops, projects’ presentations and parallel events will take place in collaborating centers and institutions in the center of Athens.

Theme – Subtle rEvolutions

ICTs, whether mobile, wireless or embedded in persistent architectural forms, facilitate the collection and dissemination of data, infusing the physical expression of the city with digital layers of content, contributing thus to the emergence of new hybridized spatial logics and novel forms of social interaction. These systems and the hybrid spatial experience they afford, encourage encounters among users; both embodied and mediated, and influence community dynamics, giving rise to networks around common interests and collectives of affect. Sometimes, such groups, irrespective of how ephemeral, unstable and dispersed they may be, negotiate a new kind of engagement with the urban environment and civic life, suggesting thus an organizational paradigm that manages to surpass traditional vertical hierarchies of space and consequently of power and control. Such configurations among communities, locations, contexts and intentions were manifested intensely in the interlinking of protest events around the world since 2011, the Arab Spring uprisings, the Occupy movement and anti-austerity demonstrations in Southern Europe, but they also gradually permeate everyday life in the contemporary metropolis.

As sharing and collaborative tactics migrate from online culture to the urban realm and ICTs become increasingly open and personalized, rich opportunities for new forms of participation in civic life arise. Citizens may be enabled to access information about the city and also to become involved in the production, collection and distribution of data related to urban matters. The Hybrid City Conference considers a further investigation of such processes of crucial importance, so as to gain a deeper understanding of the effect they have on the urban experience and to explore their contribution in shaping the future cities. In this respect, Hybrid City cordially invites papers that present concepts, case studies, research projects, works of art and best practices and promote the discussion on the theme. at a theoretical or a more practical, applied level. Emphasizing the inherently interdisciplinary nature of technologically mediated urban activity, we welcome proposals which examine, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Open cities, open urban data.
• Environmental sensing and the Internet of things.
• Urban data visualization.
• Environmental perception, cognition, immersion and presence in the context of hybrid urban spaces.
• Citizen science and peer production of knowledge.
• Psychosocial perspectives into the impact of locative and pervasive media use.
• Placemaking, place attachment and place identity in the hybrid city.
• Cartography of hybrid spaces.
• Mobile commons and wireless practices.
• Public spaces and mediated presence.
• Gamifying the urban space: playful engagement and game-like citizenship.
• Hybrid spaces of conflict: forms of power and counterpower in the networked city.
• Tactical media practices in the urban context.
• From open data to data commons.
• Open source models of policy and governance.
• Emerging currencies and values.
• Issues of data ownership and copyrights in hybrid urban contexts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



(photo credits: Manuel Félix Cárdenas)

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

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

Full case descriptions:

Vacant buildings

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

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

Wastelands

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

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

Shrinking Cities

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

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

Sustainable Food and Energy Production

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

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

Mobility

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

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

New Business Models

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

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

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