International conference & workshop in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (14-17 February 2012)

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

This was the lead question for the international conference and workshop Social Cities of Tomorrow, organised by The Mobile City and Virtueel Platform with the support of ARCAM. The event took place in February 2012 at several locations in Amsterdam and brought together key thinkers and doers working in the fields of new media and urbanism.

See the background-section for our in-depth take on the theme of ‘social cities’. There you will also find our publication Ownership in the Hybrid City, in which we propose the design approach for urban media that has inspired us to organize this event.

Conference (17 February 2012)

The conference featured keynote speakers  Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko and Dan Hill who spoke for a sold-out house about the promises and challenges in the newly emerging and highly interdisciplinary field of new media and urban design. The keynotes were accompanied by presentations of ‘showcases‘ from various disciplines, such as architecture, art, design, and policy.

Workshop (14 − 16 February 2012)

A preconference workshop was held at ARCAM, Amsterdam for a select, interdisciplinary group of designers, programmers and digital creatives. The aim of this experimental workshop was to bring together local stakeholder organisations, and participants from various professional and national backgrounds to collaborate in real-world social design challenges.

As part of the workshop, Premsela organized a public discussion on the design of Trust.

The outcomes of the workshop were presented on an sold out event at  Mediamatic.  See theWorkshop Reports for an overview of the workshop and projects presented.

Video’s, Reports & Press Coverage

Video’s of the presentations will be made available soon. Read the reports of the workshop outcomes, and check out what the bloggers and press have made of our events.

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

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

You can download Ownership in the Hybrid City the report here. Een Nederlandse versie is hier beschikbaar

The workshop & conference Social Cities of Tomorrow that we organized together with Virtueel Platform and Arcam also addresses these issues. See the conference site for more information.

In the study we explore how digital media can strengthen ‘ownership’, that is, citizen engagement with collective urban issues and the capacity to act on them. The notion of ownership then is about inclusiveness, access and agency rather than exclusive proprietorship. Collective urban issues can have a global scope, like sustainability and social equity, or be locally specific, like shrinking cities and empty spaces. They are commons questions that involve multiple stakeholders, frequently with conflicting interests, and with divergent short and long term interests. The question therefore is: how can digital media be used to promote durable changes in citizen involvement, beyond being mere technological fixes?

The research started by compiling a longlist of cases. The list includes both international and Dutch examples. From the list several themes emerged. The themes share an underlying formative principle for stimulating or organizing ownership. In a series of two posts these are presented with examples. Note that many websites are in Dutch only.

4. Story-telling: a sense of place

Narratives are important mediators of personal and collective identities. People engage with their environment and with others when they recount and share stories and memories. With digital media normally hidden stories can be made public. The nature of storytelling itself changes too. Quite a lot of Netherlands examples exist.

Dutch examples

- Onder Anderen - http://www.onder-anderen.nl. ‘Among Others’ is a digital archive on an interactive map composed of the memories of people who lived in the Professorenbuurt, a neighborhood in Delft between 2007-2009.

- Geheugen van Oost – http://www.geheugenvanoost.nl. One of the first neighborhood website that allowed people to share stories and memories of living in Amsterdam-east. A project by Amsterdam Museum, Mediamatic and Dynamo, in collaboration with Buurtonline.

- Care-Taker – http://www.care-taker.nl. A history of the Amsterdam neighborhood Indische Buurt told by a Care-Taker who temporarily went to live in the neighborhood, helped people with small affairs, and reported about it on his weblog. By Dennis Kaspori and Jeanne van Heeswijk.

- Boven Tafel – http://boventafel.nl. ‘Above the table’ is an art walk based on the memories of inhabitants of Het Franse Gat, a neighborhood in Veenendaal.

- Laurenskerk, a monument full of stories – http://www.kossmanndejong.nl/projects/view/98. Multimedia project by Kossman.DeJong in the Laurens church in Rotterdam, to make stories visible in architectural space.

- Amsterdam Realtime – realtime.waag.org. A project by Esther Polak and Waag Society. Different Amsterdammers were equipped with a GPS device and mobile data connection, which sent location info to a central server in realtime. In the exposition space a map slowly emerged out of the physical movements of the participants. They in turn reflected on their own mobility patterns, thus narrating and sharing their personal experiences of city life.

5. Meeting in public space

Gatherings and interventions in the urban domain aim to tease out people onto the streets, connect to strangers and experience one’s environment anew. This may happen by using urban screens, media installations, urban play and games, flash-mobs organized with social media, or otherwise. Although some of these interventions center around specific issues they often are apparently pointless or seemingly silly in a Situationist tradition in order to open up room for spontaneity and avoid specifying in advance how people should behave and interact. In their yearly trendwatch our friends at The Pop-Up City note the rise of serendipity apps. Further, cities all over the world have seen so-called “pop-up” events (pop-up cafés, pop-up clubs, pop-up shops), often organized with a collaborative DIY attitude with the aid of social media. Their unexpected appearance and temporariness underline the transient nature of urban places. Yet the question is how durable these interventions remain after they disappear, and whether they aren’t catering to a disposable mentality towards novel urban services (‘swarm intelligence’ may easily become a locust plague when people rapidly graze a new resource to depletion and then turn to the next newest thing in town). Other projects aimed at meeting in public space are longer-lasting, for example neighborhood urban farming projects that use new media to organize and monitor affairs, and tap into the implicit knowledge of resident citizens.

International examples

- Flashmobs worldwide – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashmob.

- Fallen Fruit – http://www.fallenfruit.org. People map and share ripe overhanging fruit trees in LA neighborhoods (municipal law allows picking outside private fences). This can be a way to meet with residents.

- Foodprint Project – http://www.foodprintproject.com. A “collaborative exploration of food systems. Our goal is to bring together people with diverse backgrounds and expertise to start a conversation about using food as a design tool to make our cities more resilient, sustainable and healthy”.

- Subtlemob – http://productofcircumstance.com. Project by Duncan Speakman that lets people undergo a cinematographic experience on the streets through a soundtrack. See also the complete portfolio of his projects at http://productofcircumstance.com/portfolio/.

- Projects by urban design studio Civic Center – http://civiccenter.cc. Often low-tech and playful interventions that spur meetings.

- Tate Trumps mobile game – http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/information/tatetrumps.shtm.

- Pavement to Parks – http://sfpavementtoparks.sfplanning.org. San Francisco’s “Pavement to Parks” projects seek to temporarily reclaim unused swathes and quickly and inexpensively turn them into new public plazas and parks.

- TranquiliCity http://www.tranquilicityapp.com – One of the many serendipity apps.

Dutch examples

- WIMBY – http://www.wimby.nl. Welcome in my backyard is a project from 2007 by Crimson Architectural Historians and Felix Rottenberg in the Rotterdam neighborhood Hoogvliet. Aim was to elevate the large-scale restructuring of the neighborhood through various interventions together with inhabitants.

- Go for IT! – http://www.go-for-it-game.nl and http://go-for-it-rotterdam.nl/. This project by The Patching Zone is an urban game for and by inhabitants of Feijenoord, a neighborhood in Rotterdam. Pavement tiles were equipped with LEDs and sensors, which enabled playful interactions between people.

- Koppelkiek – http://whatsthehubbub.nl/projects/koppelkiek/. Social photo game developed by Kars Alfrink for the problem area Hoograven in the city of Utrecht. Designing simple social assignments made people come together in spontaneous ways.

-  .dotwalk – http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/dot-walk/. This psycho-geographic project by Wilfied Houjebek applies a very simple computer algorithm as a prescription for urban walks in an attempt to stimulate serendipity and encounter.

- Dropstuff – http://www.dropstuff.nl. Interactive art wall using a huge screen. It connects the digital world to urban public space, and allows people to control the screen through their mobile devices.

- Storylines – http://www.sndrv.nl/nff. “”Storylines” turns a citycentre into a 3D surround film-set of a ‘movie’ happening in augmented reality. Using the smartphone app “Layar” a world of scenes and storylines can be explored. Dialogues are still hanging in the air, as the geo-located textual remains of movie scenes which occured throughout the city.”

- Moodwall – http://www.illuminate.nl/outdoor-media/projects/16/moodwall-bijlmerdreef-amsterdam-zuidoost.asp. A 24 meter long media facade aims to improve people’s sense of security in a pedestrian tunnel in the south-east of Amsterdam, by displaying various interactive projections. Designed by Jasper Klinkhamer (Studio Klink) and Remco Wilcke (CUBE architects).

- Play Real – http://www.creatieve-innovatie.nl/page/1208/nl. PlayReal is an online/offline augmented reality game, that uses a global social network, coupled with real world assignments. PlayReal hands its players (10 – 16 year olds) tools and skills to engage in local problem solving of global environmental and societal issues. Initiative: Ahead of the Game: Claudia Rodiguez Ortiz, Alex de Jong and Minne Belger. Development partner: The Beach / Diana Krabbendam

- The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour – http://kkvb-cfwn.blogspot.com. A participatory project by the Slovene artist and architect Marjetica Potrč (b. 1953) and Wilde Westen, a group of young designers, architects and cultural producers, combines visual art and social architecture to redefine the village green. Community vegetable gardens become a tool by which the residents of Amsterdam Nieuw West reclaim ownership of their neighborhood at a time when demolition and redevelopment are causing many to feel uprooted.

- Nu Hier – www.nuhier.org. A project by Ester van de Wiel. “NU HIER is an initiative that links vacant sites with users from the neighbourhood, schools, clubs, corporations, and associations. Their cooperation and combined entrepreneurship is the engine behind what in this case is a project on the periphery of the centre of Rotterdam”. Using principles from e-culture, the project taps into local ‘Pro-Am’ knowledge http://nuhier.mmmmx.net/article/971/diy-do-it-yourself/.

6. Peer-to-peer economy: social currencies and collaborative consumption
A main concern in any attempt to ‘govern the commons’ is how people can be persuaded to prioritize long term collective benefits over short term individual profit. Reputation management is a social enforcement mechanism to counter the ‘free rider’ problem and strengthen trust. Social currencies can keep track of, and disclose individual contributions to the collective good. In the present so-called ‘economy of free’ this can be a way to monetize contributions. New currencies can stimulate stronger relationships between consumers and local entrepreneurs. While alternative currencies predate the widespread use of digital media, these media make keeping bookkeeping and trust management much easier. Bridging the gap between production and consumption, crowdfunding provides investors with a sense of ownership of the product they support and forges connections with other investors and a more direct relation with the producer. Not surprisingly, crowdfunding initiatives frequently display multi-tiered and publicly visible donations lists. Collaborative consumption attempts to move away from a strictly market view of social interactions as economic transactions. It is a hybrid model for consuming resources that reconciles private ownership with collective use by creating semi- common-pool resources (CPRs) out of privately owned property. In this peer-to-peer economy, digital media technologies enable the realtime sharing of scarce resources, whether parking spaces, cars, plots of land, tools and machinery, energy, food and meals, couches, and so on. These developments thus redefine ownership from possession to access, or from proprietorship to usage rights (much in the same way as the Turntoo concept developed by architect Thomas Rau aims to save scarce natural resources by promoting performance-based consumption instead of property-based consumption).

International examples:

- ParkatmyHouse – http://www.parkatmyhouse.com/uk/. ParkatmyHouse is the world’s largest online parking marketplace created to connect home and business owners who would like to earn money from renting their space with drivers in need of a convenient, safe and cost-effective place to park.

- Landshare – http://www.landshare.net. Landshare brings together people who have land to share with those who need land for cultivating food via the website and a location-based mobile app.

- Funding revolution – http://www.forumforthefuture.org/project/funding-revolution/overview. A guide to establishing and running revolving funds for community energy generation and renewal and carbon saving, based on a different ownership model.

- Hey, Neighbor! – http://heyneighbor.com. Share tools or help a hand in your neighborhood.

Dutch examples:

- Bijlmer Euro – http://www.bijlmereuro.net. Project by Christian Nold to develop a social currency that expresses and visualizes the relations between inhabitants and local businesses. Nold also helped develop the Lewes Pound and the Brixton Pound.

- I Make Rotterdam http://crowdfunding.imakerotterdam.nl. Crowdfunding intiative for a temporary pedestrian arial bridge at Hofplein in the centre of Rotterdam. An intiative of ZUS architects in collaboration with Hofbogen B.V., within the framework of the 5th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR). “Crowdfunding allows the bridge to be financed in an alternative way, namely directly by the public. This means that construction can start decades before it is planned.The necessary improvement in the quality of the area is therefore no longer fully dependent on policy plans and real estate developments”.

- WeGo – http://www.wego.nu/en/. A community car sharing platform.

Conclusion

Digital media are used to address a wide variety of collective issues at the city level. In part 1 we have seen that sensing data can be opened up as new resources. We have looked at new ways of organizing and managing collective action by making urban issues public through sensing and visualizations, and even more actively in DIY urbanism. In part 2 we have looked at ways of strengthening people’s sense of place through story-telling and how unexpected events, playful activities or appealing to their latent knowledge can be ways to get people together and meet. And we looked at new economic models that redefine ownership, and turn from a transactional view of social relations to a reciprocal view in which mutualism prevails.

Despite their differences, the above examples have one thing in common. They share a fundamentally relational view of city life, in which individual components – places, people, organisations, infrastructures, technologies; information and matter – are deeply intertwined. Simple ‘technological fixes’ will not do to help solve urban issues that are by nature complex. In most examples it is not the technology that is central but the collaborative spirit from e-culture that is ported to urban questions. That implies new roles for citizens. Citizenship becomes less about individual rights and obligations vis-a-vis state institutions, but more about generating awareness, trust and responsibility needed for collective governance. Only then can our cities truly become more social.

Spontaneous Interventions: design actions for the common good is the theme of the U.S. Pavilion at the 13^th International Venice Architecture Biennale (Fall 2012). In recent years, there has been a nascent movement of designers acting on their own initiative to solve problematic urban situations, creating new opportunities and amenities for the public. Provisional, improvisational, guerrilla, unsolicited, tactical, temporary, informal, DIY, unplanned, participatory, open-source—these are just a few of the words that have been used to describe this growing body of work.

Spontaneous Interventions will frame an archive of compelling, actionable strategies, ranging from urban farms to guerilla bike lanes, temporary architecture to poster campaigns, urban navigation apps to crowdsourced city planning. These efforts cut across boundaries, addressing architecture, landscape, infrastructure, and the digital universe, and run the gamut from symbolic to practical, physical to virtual, whimsical to serious. But they share an optimistic willingness to venture outside conventional practice and to deploy fresh tactics to make cities more sustainable, accessible, and inclusive.

Submission

In the open spirit of the theme, we are inviting protagonists to submit projects for consideration for inclusion in Spontaneous Interventions. Below is a set of criteria for the types of projects we are looking for.

1. project was initiated by the architect/artist/planner/landscape architect/hacker/activist/citizen (in other words, no one asked for it), OR was initiated by an alternative client, for example, a non-profit or a community group
2. project is publicly accessible and serves the common good
3. project improves a problematic condition (solves a problem by making a place more accessible, inclusive, sustainable, beautiful, etc.)
4. project is located in an urban context or tackles urban issues in the United States
5. project is participatory in nature, or open access, and serves an underserved or overlooked constituency
6. project is realized, deployed, in action or use (not theoretical)
7. project may be a physical intervention in an urban context, or an information, communication or digital project that improves people’s comprehension, navigation and access to a city.

We are looking for project that not only meet the above criteria, but also are distinguished by characteristics such as charm, wit, material invention, creative financing, community engagement, effectiveness, and beauty. If your project satisfies several or most of these criteria, please send a short (1 to 2 paragraph) description as well as a few images to clh@ifud.org or venice@ifud.org.

SUBMIT YOUR PROJECT BY FEBRUARY 6 IN ORDER TO BE REVIEWED IN OUR NEXT CURATORS’ MEETING.

The Venice Architecture Biennale  is the most prestigious architecture event in the world. Now in its 13th edition, the Venice Architecture Biennale was formally established in 1980 and is held every other year (alternating with the Venice Art Biennale, which was first held in 1895). For the 12^th edition, held in 2010, 53 countries participated in the Biennale, which was attended by 170,000 visitors.

The 13th edition will be held from August 29 to November 25, 2012 (press preview August 27–28). On December 27, 2011, British architect David Chipperfield was appointed the director of the Biennale, and he outlined the theme Common Ground at a meeting of commissioners held in Venice on January 17. Representatives from 41 countries attended the meeting.

More information >>

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

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

MAS Context, a quarterly journal created by MAS Studio, addresses issues that affect the urban context. Each issue delivers a comprehensive view of a single topic through the active participation of people from different fields and different perspectives who, together, instigate the debate.

Our next issue will focus on the topic of OWNERSHIP.

The concept of ownership — possessing the exclusive rights and control over a property of any kind — has existed for centuries and in all cultures. Whether by state, collective or personal, ownership is a determining factor not only in our built environment, but in the way we shape our society, too. Yet what happens to ownership when the behaviors and needs of our society shift? What do we need to own, if anything at all? In every change, the redefinition provides new opportunities for our built environment.

For this issue, we are soliciting submissions of unpublished critical articles, design projects or photographic series that examine the significance, opportunities and consequences of ownership in our built environment.

For information on the submission guidelines and other questions, please check this file.
Submissions are accepted until January 9, 2012 and may be sent to MAS Context: submission@mascontext.com

Is that really what we want the Internet of Things to become? According to the Internet of Things Council, we need to find out what could be the opposite of Panopticon. Therefore they have written out a writing contest:

What could be the metaphor of a free society where individuals are endowed with the capability to exploit their talents and realise their dreams, where social groups stand together, and where organisations adopt an ethical conduct? If we accept that Panopticon can be the metaphor for the surveillance society, the City of Control, the human enslaved by his objects, what could be the opposite concept for the freedom society, the City of Trust, the empowered individual?

If you share our analysis and the challenge that we’ve set for ourselves, please feel free to send your ideas to info at theinternetofthings.eu with ‘New Year Contest’ in the header.

Deadline January 31 2012

More information >>

In the study we explore how digital media can strengthen ‘ownership’, that is, citizen engagement with collective urban issues and the capacity to act on them. The notion of ownership then is about inclusiveness, access and agency rather than exclusive proprietorship. Collective urban issues can have a global scope, like sustainability and social equity, or be locally specific, like shrinking cities and empty spaces. They are commons questions that involve multiple stakeholders with sometimes conflicting interests. The question therefore is: how can digital media be used to promote durable changes in citizen involvement, beyond being mere technological fixes?

The research started by compiling a longlist of cases. The list includes both international and Dutch examples. From the list several themes emerged. The themes share an underlying formative principle for stimulating or organizing ownership. In a series of two posts these are presented with examples. Note that many websites are in Dutch only.

1. Data as a new resource: open data and open government

Governments and other institutions are opening up data they have collected and generated with the aim to stimulate creative reuse. Open data itself can be seen as a resource, a ‘data commons’. This entails a conceptual shift in the notion of ownership from possession to the right to act. In addition to a mentality change among organizatons, the challenge is how these data can be opened up to useful ends. The conceptual difference between data, information, and knowledge is important here. What data is potentially valuable information? How can that information lead to new knowledge and stimulate the capacity to act among urbanites? Countless open data platforms and projects exist. The Netherlands seems to lag compared to other countries, particularly the US and UK. Interestingly, cities are spearheading innovative approaches to open data efforts more than national governments.

International examples

- United States Government open data – data.gov. USA open gov data sets, aiming to create a more participatory democracy and empower people.

- UK government open data – data.gov.uk. UK’s open gov data sets.

- European public data – publicdata.eu. Especially from the UK. A project by the Open Knowledge Foundation http://okfn.org. A work in progress overview of open government data is maintained here: http://lod2.okfn.org/eu-data-catalogues/. This foundation is also involved in the List of European Open Data Catalogues http://lod2.eu.

- European Public Sector Information (PSI) Platform – epsiplatform.eu. European initiative to allow creative reuse of government data and to strengthen community, and stimulate action.

- France gov open data data.gouv.fr (in development).

- Paris open Data – http://opendata.paris.fr/opendata/jsp/site/Portal.jsp.

- New York City open data – http://www.nyc.gov/html/datamine/html/home/home.shtml.

- Datamarket.com – Data portal to visualize statistics of public and semi-public organizations, like the UN, World Bank, Eurostat, Gapminder.

Dutch examples

These are specifically Dutch examples to open up government data. Note how each project has a different focus.

- Open data portal Dutch national government – http://data.overheid.nl. Can also be found via http://nl.ckan.net. An initiative by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

- Rotterdam Open Data – http://www.rotterdamopendata.org. Rotterdam Open Data is a collaborative initiative of Hogeschool Rotterdam, Rotterdam business, and Rotterdam municipality to make information by, about and for the city of Rotterdam accessible and intelligible. “Because we believe that this contributes to the freedom of Rotterdam urbanites to get information and make choices, because it strengthens the connection Rotterdammers feel with the city and each other, and because it enables them to better help build the city in which we live.”

- Apps for Amsterdam – http://www.appsforamsterdam.nl. Apps for Amsterdam is an initiative to make as much data from the Amsterdam municipality accessible for everyone. We do this by calling upon developers and students to translate these statistic information or Open Data into successful applications for smartphones, web or Facebook. Apps for Amsterdam is a collaboration between Waag Society, Amsterdam municipality – economic affairs, and Hack the Overheid.

- Apps for Eindhoven – http://www.openeindhoven.nl. Open Data Eindhoven is a platform for data producers, data processors and data users. The contest Apps for Eindhoven connects to an international development of governments, programmers, designers, businesses and researchers who consider Open Data as an important impulse and fundamental factor in the quality of the information society. The development of Open Data in Eindhoven is supported by the platform Open Data Eindhoven, which exists of private persons (e.g. programmers, creatives), (representatives of) cultural and social organizations, companies, Eindhoven municipality, RHCE, Noord-Brabant province, TU/e, Fontys.

- Realtime air quality measurements by the Amsterdam GGD – http://www.luchtmetingen.amsterdam.nl.

2. Making urban issues public: sensing, data visualization, citizen science

Visualizing normally invisible urban processes can be a way to make complex urban life intelligible to people and create public issues and collectives. Projects about the urban living environment for instance use data visualizations to involve people and possibly even stimulate behavioral changes. Some ‘citizen science’ projects crowdsource the gathering of data to people themselves. In some cases the question is whether crowdsourcing is limited to a signalling role for citizens without allowing the agency to act on issues. Another question is where lies the boundary between engaging citizens and throwing institutional responsibilities over the wall?

International examples

- Trash|Track (MIT’s Senseable City Lab) – http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack. How can pervasive technologies expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability. Can these same pervasive technologies make 100% recycling a reality?

- The Daily Pothole – http://thedailypothole.tumblr.com. NYC government offers citizens the opportunity to signal potholes in the road and tell about it.

- Street Bump -http://www.newurbanmechanics.org/bump/. The same idea exists in Boston, now by using a smartphone to ‘see click fix’ potholes.

- Green Watch – http://www.lamontreverte.org/en/. Project by Daniel Kaplan, involving Parisians in environmental measurements and mapping.

- In the Air, Medalab Prado – http://www.intheair.es. This is a somewhat similar project to Green Watch, in which air quality is measured and visualized.

- Hollaback – http://www.ihollaback.org. Hollaback! is a movement dedicated to ending street harassment using mobile technology. The project tries to enhance urban livability.

- Ushahidi – http://www.ushahidi.com. A platform for collecting, visualizing, and interactive mapping of various data worldwide.

- FixMyStreet – http://www.fixmystreet.com. Small issues in one’s immediate environment can be reported to responsible institutions in the UK.

- Open Ideo – http://openideo.com. A crowdsource platform by design office Ideo with regular contetsts and prizes.

- Stimulus Projects Spot Check – http://projects.propublica.org/spotcheck. Project by journalists to monitor the status of US gov financed transport projects.

Dutch examples

In the Dutch context similar projects exist:

- Verbeterdebuurt – verbeterdebuurt.nl. The Dutch version of FixMyStreet, which also has an augmented reality app for the mobile phone.

- Geluidsnet – www.geluidsnet.nl. People living in the vicinity of Schiphol Amsterdam airport do their own noise measurements using cheap technologies as a way to counter official measurements that they do not trust.

- Waag Society SensorLab – http://creativelearninglab.org/nl/evenementen/sensorlab-op-picnic-young-2010. A workshop organized by Waag Society’s Creative Learning Lab and GLOBE Netherlands at PICNIC 2010 about the possibilities of sensor technologies in education.

- DEvLab – http://www.devlab.nl/?projecten. Research about wireless sensor networks and platforms (examples of projects: MyriaNed, Atalanta).

- Urbanode project – http://www.vurb.eu/2010/04/09/the-urbanode-project/. The mobile phone has become a remote control for the city. VURB and partners will enable a set of environmental services in the Trouw building to be ‘discoverable’ by mobile devices, and controlled by citizens/users through applications on their smartphones. One of the most interesting aspects to investigate about these types of contexts will be the social dynamics of resource sharing.

- Sense/Stage -  www.nescivi.nl and http://sensestage.hexagram.ca/workshop/. Marije Baalman is a Dutch artist and developer who works with interaction and sound, using code and electronics. She has been part of Sense/Stage research project with Chris Salter at Concordia and McGill University in Montréal from 2007-2010 and is currently developing a Sense/Stage sensor network kit for distribution.

- Transitiekaart – http://www.richardvijgen.nl/. This project visualizes spaces in the city that are in transition on a big interactive screen. The project aims to study the possibilities for temporary uses of spaces.

- Overlastdagboek.nl – http://www.meldwoonoverlast.nl/pages/overlastdagboek. People can report nuisances in their living environment.

3. DIY urbanism: knowledge sharing, e-participation, and co-creation

An increasing number of projects are founded on principles and modes of organization found in e-culture, like knowledge sharing, participation, co-creation, peer-to-peer networking. In such projects (part of) the actual design and the execution of a transformation lies with citizens themselves. This is a step further on the ladder of participation than crowdsourcing existing issues where people only have a signalling role and/or a role as generators of ideas but their right or capacity to act remains limited. What is a workable balance between a top-down and a bottom-up approach? Or is peer-to-peer organization a kind of third way? Further, who are reached by these projects? Are these the people who are already technologically savvy and know how to work with digital media technologies? Or are new publics reached too? NIMBY-ism is a concern as well. To what extent do these projects support or reinforce a “not in my backyard” attitude of a closed in-group of people? A substantial number of projects rely on game principles to persuade people to participate. Discussions about the ‘gamification’ of urban life then come into play as well.

International examples

- Natalie Jeremijenko’s environmental health clinic – http://www.environmentalhealthclinic.net. New Yorkers who have particular environmental health concerns can make an appointment and walk out with a prescription for actions, like local data collection and urban interventions directed at understanding and improving environmental health, plus referrals to specific art, design and participatory projects, local environmental organizations and local government or civil society groups.

- Betaville – http://bxmc.poly.edu/betaville. Betaville is an open-source multiplayer environment for real cities, in which ideas for new works of public art, architecture, urban design, and development can be shared, discussed, tweaked, and brought to maturity in context, and with the kind of broad participation people take for granted in open source software development. Pilots in lower Manhattan en downtown Brooklyn.

- IBM CityOne game – http://www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/innov8/cityone/. Like other tech companies – Cisco, Philips, Fraunhofer, HP – IBM focuses more and more on using technologies for the design of so-called ‘smart cities’. This is a serious game used for urban design.

- DIY City – http://diycity.org. DIY City is a website where people from all over the world think about, talk about, and ultimately build tools for making their cities work better with web technologies, a kind of ‘wiki-city’. Mostly US based.

- Commons The Game – http://www.commonsthegame.com. In Commons, compete to do good, while problems in your city get fixed. Report a problem or recommend an improvement in your neighborhood that you think deserves attention and resources. Vote on the best reports and improvements, and see what’s most popular in the hood. Go on short missions around town to earn bonus points, and unlock City awards to level up through the game. With Commons, share the things that you care most about fixing and improving in your neighborhood, and discover new ways to explore your city.

- Open Street Map – http://www.openstreetmap.org. Collaborative open source mapping project.

- Tools for actions – http://cca-actions.org. Exposition in the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal with 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world.

- Howtopedia – http://en.howtopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. A collaborative platform for practical knowledge and simple technologies that are easily explainable and usable by individuals or small communities for a sustainable and ecological future.

- Open Farm Tech – http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Main_Page. Wiki for sharing knowledge about  open source and low priced DIY farming technologies.

- Hub2 – http://nms.sagepub.com/content/13/1/75.abstract?rss=1. Academic article by Eric Gordon and Edith Manosevitch describing how they used a simulation environment – Second Life – in the design process of a public park in Boston. The application of participatory game principles for ‘real life’ social ends is called ‘augmented deliberation’.

Dutch examples

- Face Your World – http://www.faceyourworld.nl and http://classic.skor.nl/artefact-1114-en.html. A project by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk and architect Dennis Kaspori (2005) that took place in among others Amsterdam and Rotterdam. By participating in an artwork that combines urban development, computer technology and creative thinking, young people and neighborhood dwellers adopt the role of urban designers and make a plan for the new Staalmanpark in Amsterdam. The interactor, as the simulation software used is called, allows them to manipulate, recombine and reuse their environment in order to shape an innovative vision on their city. With this collaborative plan the Van Heeswijk and Kaspori managed to persuade the local government to abandon the initial plans for the park and execute the new one instead.

- Baas op Zuid – http://baasopzuid.nl. The online game ‘Boss on South’ allows inhabitants of old Rotterdam neighborhoods Pendrecht and Zuidwijk to take (virtual) policy decisions and help think about the regeneration of the area. A project by BBVH Architects.

- Wireless Leiden – http://www.wirelessleiden.nl. A good example of a bottom-up knowledge sharing project is Wireless Leiden, in which citizens of Leiden build and maintain a citizen wireless network, and offer a range of services to local parties and organizations.

- Scan je Buurt – http://www.bendeburgers.nl/?p=153. The project ‘Scan your neighborhood’ aims to let young people, policy makers, and politicians to create common policies by using an interactive map with geo-tagged multimedia from the neighborhood.

- De Amstel Verandert – http://www.deamstelverandert.nl. (‘The Amstel is changing’) How does the future look of the Amstel (the river Amsterdam was built next to)? As broad as possible a group of people from Amsterdam and surroundings share their ideas on a website and during four meetings.

- Stadsdialoog Delft – http://stadsdialoogdelft.nl/. In ‘City Dialogue Delft’ inhabitants of Delft informed and inspired urban planners in three conversations and via an online platform.

- Indemann – http://studio.driezesnul.nl/maurer/2009/07/maurer-united-builds-indemann/. Indemann is a watchtower in Germany, designed by Maurer Architecten United. It has a LED media facade where neighborhood inhabitants can upload their own content in order to co-design the building. Maurer Architects distinguish between “sculptural architecture, which is used as a reference point in the organisation and branding of a city, and social architecture, which challenges users to engage in social interaction”. See also http://studio.driezesnul.nl/maurer/2009/09/indemann-_pics/.

- Rotterdam Index – http://www.digitalepioniers.nl/projecten/Rotterdam-Index/93. Rotterdam Index (RIX) is an online neighborhood  game. The idea is that participants get a virtual monetary budget to invest in Rotterdam neighborhoods. By playing, i.e. trading in stocks of specific neighborhoods , players implicitly give their opinion about these neighborhoods. The game registers the sentiments in the city with the aim to increase involvement of inhabitants with their city and in turn involve local governments with citizens. A project by Jeanne van Heeswijk, Dennis Kaspori, and Joost van Eeden.

- Design for Emptiness – http://www.designforemptiness.nl. Many Dutch cities face the issue of empty shops and office buildings. In Heerlen this problem is even more urgent because of a shrinking population. Lively inner cities are vital as the entry card and visual identity of inhabitants. This project involved the challenge ‘Design for emptiness’, in which the winning idea received €10.000 to help realize it.

Social Cities: how to engage citizens with digital media

Michiel de Lange – The Mobile City

The increasing growth and complexity of cities raises the question how we can use digital media technologies and principles from online culture to design livable and lively cities. How can digital media aid citizens to engage with their environment, with fellow urbanites, and with issues at stake in their cities? Most mobile and location-based apps are about personalized consumption and sharing preferences with an in-group of like-minded people. Can we use digital technologies to help solve collective problems in the city too?

Some collective issues have a global span, like social equity, environmental sustainability, and water, food, and energy provisioning. Others, like shrinking cities, aging populations, or empty buildings, are locally specific. Many cities also face issues like the perceived loss of publicness, safety, social cohesion, and the gap between citizens and government. Typically, complex urban issues like these are not exclusively ‘owned’ by a single party. They are commons issues that involve multiple stakeholders who often have incompatible interests, and therefore they need collective forms of governance.

Cities collect huge amounts of data. Until recently these data often disappeared in the vaults of (public) institutions. These data could become new resources that provide valuable knowledge about urban processes and citizen behavior – a data-commons. In the Netherlands cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Eindhoven experiment with open data initiatives and collaborate with developers to see what interesting apps and services they can build.

Using municipal open data, the website Buurtvergelijker (‘neighborhood comparer’) allows people to compare statistical information from different neighborhoods.

In what is known as reality-mining these new resources provide insights in what is happening. Information can be used to provide people with consumer recommendations based on shared patterns (Citysense), but it can also inform design programs better tailored to citizen’s needs (Twitterhouse). In the data-commons scarcity takes on another meaning. The challenge is to design interventions where individual use does not deplete the commons but instead adds value to the whole. For example, the more people use location-based services like traffic reports, and feed information back into the system, the more accurate the service becomes.

For decades policy makers, institutions and architects have tried to persuade people to actively participate in shaping their cities. Often these remain top-down trajectories. The bottom-up extreme is a community model rooted in proximity, shared interests and similar lifestyles. Yet this denies the nature of cities as places of heterogeneity and the fact that many urbanites shiver at the thought of village-like parochialism. With digital media new networked publics can be activated, beyond top-down or bottom-up but peer-to-peer and distributed. An illustration is Verbeterdebuurt (the Dutch take on Fixmystreet). This is a mobile and web app that allows citizens to report problems in their neighborhood, but also to suggest improvements and vote on each other’s ideas, and therefore assemble others around collective issues.

In the small Dutch town of Hoorn, young people successfully used the platform Verbeterdebuurt.nl to get a skate ramp built in their neighborhood (photo: Stijn van Balen).

Digital media thus allow citizens to co-design their own environment. An interesting project in Amsterdam is Face Your World by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk and architect Dennis Kaspori. Young people and other people living in this neighborhood collaborated in designing a city park using a 3D simulation environment. With this crowdsourced plan they managed to persuade the local government to abandon the initial plans for the park and execute theirs instead.

In Face Your World people co-created a neighborhood park by using a digital environment in which they could upload their own images and ideas to debate amongst each other (photo: Dennis Kaspori).

Cities worldwide (like Amsterdam) are embracing smart city policies in close collaboration with tech companies and academia to optimize urban processes. These policies are technologically driven and despite claims to the contrary tend to ignore an active role of citizens. If we truly want engaging cities, it is urgent we start exploring how we can make our cities more social rather than more high-tech.

—

From February 14 − 17 2012 the international conference and workshop Social Cities of Tomorrow takes place in Amsterdam, NL, organized by The Mobile City, Virtueel Platform and ARCAM.

HOME SENSE or ‘Dwelling and the Internet of Things’

http://www.v2.nl/events/one-day-conference-the-internet-of-things

The Ideas and Ideals in Urban Media Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

U-City

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

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

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

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

Urban Flaneurs and Situationists

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

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

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

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

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

The City as an Operating System

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

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

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

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

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

The City as a Commons

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

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

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

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

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

The City as a Community of Strangers

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

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

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

The City as a Public Sphere

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bianchini, ed., Urban Mindscapes of Europe. New York:Editions Rodopi.

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Charitos, Dimitris, Olga Paraskevopoulou, and Charalampos Rizopoulos. 2008. Location-specificart practices that challenge the traditional conception of mapping. Artnodes 8.

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E. B. Parker, eds., Handbook of Communication. Chicago: Rand McNally.

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Hardin, Garrett. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162 (3859):1243–1248.

Hutchby, Ian. 2001. Technologies, texts and affordances. Sociology 35 (2): 441–456.

Hwang, Jong–Sung. 2009. U-city: The next paradigm of urban development. In M. Foth, ed.,Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City. Hershey,PA: IGI Global.

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More about the Book:

From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen

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

Order the book: Amazon

Marcus Foth, Laura Forlano, Christine Satchell and Martin Gibbs

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

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

About the Authors

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

Laura Forlano is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University.

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

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

Where’s the data? Technology has progressed to the point that we as citizens with concerns or interests can leverage open source hardware and software together with cloud platforms like Pachube to quickly and cheaply build the systems we need to get the data we want. It’s time we put theory into practice and come together as a community to produce a project which illustrates the possibilities available to us.

This workshop, focused on air quality data, will bring together a group of people with different skillsets — some technical, some creative, some with domain expertise — who will move from concept to working plan by the end of the session. We will answer questions like: Why is air quality data important? How will we gather it? Who will build what and how? What will we do with it? How will we fund this? The goal will be to have a persistently available, open air quality sensor network for use permanently and by anyone within 90 days.

This workshop will be followed by a working session/hackathon in December during which the hardware, web services, and deployment will be tackled.

Pachube will be contributing 50 Nanodes as a base for the hardware development.

Coffee, lunch, and a reception will be provided.

Hosted by Casper Koomen (Pachube Amsterdam community mgr)  and Sara Córdoba Rubino of Booreiland.

Casper is a user experience and concept developer. In his company Combustic, he develops new product and business concepts for a wide range of clients (SME, multinational, government) in many domains (mobile, media, web). He loves to connect people, ideas, business oportunities and technology.

Sara graduated as an industrial designer in 2004 and finished a master program on Strategic Product Design in 2008. She began designing interactive exhibitions for children, then shifted to the world of services and packaging. Currently Sara works at Booreiland as project manager and researcher on Meta Products.

Friday, November 18, 2011, 10:00 AM

More information & registration >>

Program Your City: Legal and Governance Issues of an Urban Integrated Open Data API
Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology

Tuesday, November 15, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person via the form below
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

The physical city is covered with an increasing number of layers of digital information. At the same time, there is a significant trend towards incorporating location data into web and mobile applications: The urbanisation of the internet, and the digitisation of the city.

Recent ‘Government 2.0’ initiatives have led to the creation of public data catalogues such as data.gov.au (U.S.), data.gov.uk (U.K.), data.gov.au (Australia) on federal government levels, and datasf.org (San Francisco) and data.london.gov.uk (London) on municipal levels. In most cases, these initiatives produce mere collections of data repositories. However, proprietary database formats and the lack of an open application programming interface (API) often limit the full potential that could be achieved by allowing these data sets to be cross-queried.

This talk presents the proposal for an information substrate with an integrated open data API – in a way, an operating system for cities that integrates three types of data sources:

• Public government data (traffic, public transport, health, population, etc.)
• Social media data (eg., Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.)
• Sensor network data (domestic energy monitoring, river gauges, weather, etc.)

The primary goal is to put intuitively accessible real-time data into the hands of citizens and residents and unleash the creative capacity of programmers and end-users who will be able to create, share (or sell) their own custom-made web and mobile based decision-support tools and applications that take advantage of data mash-ups comprising all three types of data sources and tailored to specific needs. The talk will present a number of potential demonstrator applications that illustrate the capabilities of the proposed infrastructure with a view to specifically discuss the legal, policy, copyright and goverance issues and implications that may arise.

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

Professor Foth’s research explores human-computer interaction design and development at the intersection of people, place and technology with a focus on urban informatics, social media, ubiquitous computing and mobile applications. More…

Links

• Urban Informatics
• CC and Government

More information & registration >>

(via @yuleheibel)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 http://stroom.nl/activiteiten/lezing_symposium.php?l_id=2472204

Donderdag 27 oktober 2011, 20 uur
Locatie: Hogewal 1-9, Den Haag
Voertaal: Engels
Entreeprijs: € 5,- (overmaken op ING-rekening 605409 van Stroom Den Haag onder vermelding van de naam van de lezing)
Reserveren verplicht: zie formulier onderaan deze pagina

De Amerikaan Mark Shepard is kunstenaar, architect en onderzoeker die in de praktijk voorbij gaat aan disciplinaire scheidslijnen. Hij is met name geïnteresseerd in nieuwe sociale ruimtes en de betekenisstructuren van hedendaagse netwerkculturen. Zijn meest recente onderzoek richt zich op de implicaties voor architectuur en stedelijkheid van mobiele media, communicatie- en informatietechnologieën. Zijn werk is internationaal tentoongesteld in musea, galeries en op festivals. Hij stelde dit jaar het boek ‘Sentient City: ubiquitous computing, architecture and the future of urban space’ samen.

The Knight’s Move
Stroom Den Haag organiseert jaarlijks een aantal toonaangevende lezingen onder de noemer ‘The Knight’s Move’ met internationale sprekers die zich onderscheiden door ongebruikelijke, verhelderende en inspirerende visies op de stad, stedelijkheid en het publieke domein. Zoals het paard – the knight – zich grillig over het schaakbord beweegt, over lopers, koningen en torens heen springend, zo wil Stroom het gesprek over de stad vanuit onverwachte posities nieuwe impulsen geven.

Mediapartner van deze lezingenserie is: De Groene Amsterdammer

The Knight’s Move wordt mogelijk gemaakt door het Stimuleringsfonds voor Architectuur.