The Mobile City

Job opening Utrecht University Assistant Professor in New Media & Digital Culture / Urban New Media DEADLINE 29 April 2022

Michiel de Lange — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 07:55:29 +0000

Become my colleague at Utrecht University!

Job opening “Assistant Professor in New Media & Digital Culture: (1.0 FTE), specializing in #urbanmedia #urbaninterfaces #smartcities #urbanfutures #greenmedia @UniUtrecht @UniUtrecht @UUMediaCulture https://www.uu.nl/organisatie/werken-bij-de-universiteit-utrecht/vacatures/assistant-professor-in-new-media-digital-culture-10-fte

DEADLINE 29 April 2022 #academicjobs

Link to job >>

The Mobile City partner Media Architecture Biennale 2020 “Futures Implied”

Michiel de Lange — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 12:19:44 +0000

The Mobile City is a partner in the Media Architecture Biennale 2020, which will take place in Amsterdam and Utrecht between 23 – 27 November 2020.

Stay tuned for more updates in Fall 2019 on our own website, and via mab20.org >>

Final presentations MA students New Media & Digital Culture project “Cirque du Data”, 31 Oct 2019

Michiel de Lange — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 12:11:25 +0000

How to involve citizens in discussion around the datafication of their city? That’s the main question of the cultural project Cirque du Data, initiated by Utrecht-based data design office CLEVER°FRANKE and city lab RAUM.

As part of the methodology course Research Lab 1 that I’m teaching at Utrecht University, we are partaking in the project. On Thursday 31 October 2019 14:30 – 17:00 we will have the final presentations by our students. Venue: Pathe Leidsche Rijn / Cinemec, Berlijnplein 100, 3541 CM Utrecht.

http://themobilecity.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Cirque-du-Data-—-De-grote-datashow-5.mp4

Keynote Michiel de Lange “Beyond Smart Cities Today”, 19 Sept. 2019

Michiel de Lange — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 11:18:39 +0000

On 19 Sept. 2019, I was invited to talk about our research project “Designing for Controversies in Responsible Smart Cities“, at the event Beyond Smart Cities Today, organized by Centre for BOLD Cities. Very well organized and great lineup with – among others – the following speakers:

Rob Kitchin (Maynooth University)
Ayona Datta (University College London)
Alberto Vanolo (University of Turin)
Maria Kaika (University of Amsterdam)
Willem Schinkel (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Bianca Wylie (Tech Reset Canada & #BlockSidewalk)
Michiel de Lange (Utrecht University)
Carina Listerborn (University of Malmö)
Linda Kool (Rathenau Institute)
Liesbet van Zoonen (Erasmus University, LDE Centre for BOLD Cities)

I presented the outlines of the project so far, based on work done by team members Julieta Matos Castaño (postdoc UTwente), Anouk Geenen (PhD UTwente), and Corelia Baibarac-Duignan (postdoc UU).

See slides below (or download pdf, 4 MB)

image credit: Centre for BOLD Cities

Launch Special Issue Leonardo Electronic Almanac on “Urban Interfaces” 30 Oct 2019

Michiel de Lange — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 11:10:34 +0000

The [urban interfaces] research group, composed of Nanna Verhoeff, Sigrid Merx and Michiel de Lange, have co-edited a special issue in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, titled “Urban Interfaces: Media, Art and Performance in Public Spaces”. We are currently wrapping up the last tidbits. See the special issue on the LEA website >>.

In this collection of essays, we advance the notion of urban interfaces to explore how situated media, art, and performances (co-)constitute and (co-)construct the public spaces of our mediatized cities. Central is the question how urban interfaces may act as privileged sites to negotiate contemporary frictions in and about these spaces – frictions around such issues as digitization and datafication, privatization and commercialization, individualization, and immigration. This issue investigates how these negotiations take shape and contribute to understandings of the role of art and technology in public space.

Among the contributions is our own introduction to the issue, called “Urban Interfaces: Between Object, Concept, and Cultural Practice.”

On Oct. 30 2019, we’re launching the special issue as a pre-event at the IMPAKT Festival in Utrecht. You are welcome to attend.

Date: 30 October 2019

Time: 17:00 – 18:30

Location: Studio 3, Het Huis, Boorstraat 107

Url: https://www.facebook.com/events/1316719185162391/

Mini-Symposium Urban Interfaces

This mini-symposium on Urban Interfaces is to celebrate the launch of the online Urban Interfaces Special Issue on Leonardo Electronic Almanac! You are all warmly invited!

The issue approaches interfaces in a contemporary urban context, and explores the different ways in which situated media, art, and performances create, intervene in, and transform urban spaces. The contributions in this issue are aimed at investigating what interfaces, ranging from window facades in city streets to creative mobile apps, do; as well as how contemporary technological frictions, like digitization and commercialization, are negotiated in mediatized public spaces.

During this mini-symposium evening contributing authors Dr. Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink, dr. Eef Masson, and dr. Karin van Es will speak about their essays, artist Richard Vijgen will present his artistic practice and scholar in art, design and architecture dr. Katherine Willis will respond to the issue as a whole.

Entrance is free.
Afterwards there will be free drinks, after which the official opening of Impakt festival will start in the same building.

More info here >>

New book chapter “The Right to the Datafied City: Interfacing the Urban Data Commons”

Michiel de Lange — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 10:19:48 +0000

Just out, a new chapter in this great looking edited volume:

de Lange, Michiel. 2019. "The right to the datafied city: Interfacing the urban data commons." In The Right to the Smart City, edited by Paolo Cardullo, Cesare Di Feliciantonio and Rob Kitchin, 71-83. Bingley: Emerald.

Publication day for ‘The Right to the Smart City’ book edited by @kiddingthecity, Cesare Di Feliciantonio & @RobKitchin published by Emerald. Focuses on smart cities, rights, citizenship, social justice, commons, civic tech, participation, ethics https://t.co/I8VCEx2pyc pic.twitter.com/YkOyEq9NkO

— Rob Kitchin (@RobKitchin) June 7, 2019

Includes chapters by @trolleytweet, Jiska Engelbert, Alberto Vanolo, @mdelange, @kanarinka, @ericbot, Elizabeth Christoforetti, @aschrock, @syperng, @GabrieleSchliwa, @NancyO_UCT, Ramon Ribera-Fumaz, @kiddingthecity, @RobKitchin, Cesare Di Feliciantonio pic.twitter.com/j60ABPdzWY

— Rob Kitchin (@RobKitchin) June 7, 2019

As it’s not Open Access, e-mail me for a copy.

Call for Conference Contributions “Beyond Smart Cities Today”

Michiel de Lange — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 10:17:52 +0000

Jiska Engelbert at Erasmus University Rotterdam is organizing a very interesting event (18 and 19 September, 2019) at which I will be speaking. See call here: https://www.centre-for-bold-cities.nl/beyond-smart-cities-today.

Beyond Smart Cities Today

Call for Conference Contributions

Conference title          Beyond smart cities today
When?              18 and 19 September, 2019
Where?                   Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Hosts Centre for BOLD Cities, Erasmus Institute for Public Knowledge, Knowledge Lab Urban Big Data, Erasmus Initiative Vital Cities and Citizens.

Queries and abstracts to Jiska Engelbert, engelbert@eshcc.eur.nl
Deadline abstracts 20 June 2019

Confirmed keynotes

Rob Kitchin (Maynooth University)
Ayona Datta (King’s College)
Alberto Vanolo (University of Turin)
Maria Kaika (University of Amsterdam)
Willem Schinkel (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Bianca Wylie (Tech Reset Canada & #BlockSidewalk)
Michiel de Lange (Utrecht University)
Carina Listerborn (University of Malmö)
Dorien Zandbergen (University of Amsterdam & GR1P Foundation)
Linda Kool (Rathenau Institute)
Liesbet van Zoonen (Erasmus University, LDE Centre for BOLD Cities)

About Beyond Smart Cities Today

The last decade has seen crucial critical sociologies, geographies, histories and ethnographies of “the actually existing smart city” and so-called paradigmatic smart cities (Shelton, Zook & Wiig, 2015). As a consequence of these efforts, critical urban scholars across the social sciences and humanities can now apply established theoretical notions and normative concepts in unearthing the neoliberal premises and implications of smart cities.

However, are these crucial scholarly exposés and (re-)politicizations of current smart city practices “enough” to imagine and enact radically different smart cities? What have these analyses enabled, where do they fall short, who do they exclude, and is it not time to move beyond them? Moreover, how do smart city critiques and activist scholars relate to civil society campaigns and political movements that claim the right to the (future) smart city? What are the affordances and constraints of academic analyses? Is it at all possible to radically re-imagine future smart cities within the current (post-) political economies of smart city thinking and academia today?

This two-day expert symposium aims to provide the time and space to reflect and act upon these kinds of questions.

We welcome work and ideas from all disciplines that are concerned with the academic and/or political dimensions of deeming possible and enabling better smart cities. However, we especially encourage you to consider if and how their work can seek dialogue any of the following three lines of enquiry, which are central to the contributions of the confirmed keynote speakers:

What are the implications of smart cities as object of inquiry of so many critical branches of academic scholarship, from social geography and anthropology, to philosophy, public administration and media & communication studies? Which common politics, ethics and normative ideas about citizenship and social justice (should) underscore this scholarship?
What has critical smart scholarship not exposed enough, who has it left excluded, and what is under-theorised? Which/whose (academic) politics and economies account for these exclusions, and how can they be overcome?
How can critical smart city scholarship effectively intervene in present smart city practices, but also, how could it fuel claiming the right to the future smart city? How can arts, culture or other media and technologies feature in making or remaking radically different smart cities?

How can you join?

Short abstracts (around 200 words) that detail your proposed topic for a panel presentation or other kind of contribution should be e-mailed to Jiska Engelbert (engelbert@eshcc.eur.nl) by 20 June 2019. Please clearly state your institutional affiliation. Alternatively, you may also want to attend (and not present at) the symposium. In that case, please explain why attending the event is important for your work.

Attending the conference (including lunch and snacks, but excluding travel to/accommodation in Rotterdam) is free of charge for those who have either their abstract or presence approved by the conference organisers.

We are looking forward to welcoming you in Rotterdam!

2-Year fulltime postdoc vacancy NWO project “Designing for Controversies in Responsible Smart Cities”

Michiel de Lange — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 11:36:24 +0000

Work with me as a postdoc at Utrecht University in this project:

Direct link to job description >>

Postdoc position in project “Designing for Controversies in Responsible Smart Cities” (1.0 FTE)

Description:

We are looking for a Postdoc researcher (2 years, fulltime) who has experience and/or affinity with smart cities, datafication, public values, and design. You will be working at Utrecht University under the supervision of Dr. Michiel de Lange in the collaborative project “Designing for Controversies in Responsible Smart Cities”. The project is funded by NWO as part of the Smart Culture – Creative Cities call. The overall Project Leader is Prof. Mascha van der Voort at the University of Twente (UTwente); co-leads are Prof. Peter-Paul Verbeek (UTwente) and Dr. Michiel de Lange (dep. Media and Culture Studies, Universiteit Utrecht). Non-academic project consortium partners include The Municipality of Amersfoort, Marxman Advocaten, Aerovision, Kennislab voor Urbanisme, and the Design Innovation Group.

The project aims to investigate how controversies around the smart city can be made visible and debatable in order to garner broader civic engagement and agency. One of these controversies concerns the role of datafication in shaping today’s cities and urban culture in general, and public values in particular. What controversies arise from the datafication of urban life (e.g. ontological, epistemological, socio-political)? How can data aid in strengthening civic participation and public values in the smart city? What legal and privacy controversies arise through datafication? How can design interventions help to tease out these and other controversies, as well as the potential affordances of civic data?As part of the project you will be working closely together with, and complementing a PhD researcher (UTwente, started Oct. 2018) and a Postdoc (UTwente, started Nov. 2018). Their focus is on the role of design and ethics in making controversies around the smart city visible and debatable.

Tasks for the Postdoc candidate will include:

mapping controversies around datafication in the smart city, with a focus on Amersfoort;
translating these to a research-by-design approach together with consortium partners;
exploring legal and privacy related controversies as part of the smart city;
complementing collaborative work on setting up and evaluating design interventions;
regular briefing of the project team on progress and findings;
reaching out and collaborating with the non-academic consortium partners, e.g. Marxman Advocaten about privacy and legal issues.
assisting in educational tasks (max. 20%).

Requirements:

A completed PhD dissertation in a relevant field such as Media Studies, Social Science, Philosophy of Technology, Human Geography, Urban Design or any field related to the project topic.
Knowledge about processes of technological mediation in general, and datafication of the city in particular.
Experience in research on (smart) cities and urban culture.
Knowledge of theories about civic participation and empowerment, and public values.
A vision on and/or expertise in working on a specific controversy or friction.
Affinity/experience with research by design.

Additional strengths:

affinity with legal and ethical matters;
affinity with (formulating) policy;
ability to understand Dutch because of the situated local context.

Salary Benefits:

The Postdoc position will be for a two-year period, full time. The postdoc is expected to start on 1 June 2019 or not long after (Sept 1 2019 at the latest). Initially, there is a one-year contract. After a positive evaluation this contract can be extended for another year (2 years in total).

The salary scale will be 10/11, the gross salary will be between €3,389 and €3,637 per month on a full-time basis depending on experience and qualifications. Utrecht University offers a pension scheme, a holiday allowance of 8% per year, an end-of-year bonus of 8.3% and flexible employment conditions. Conditions are based on the Collective Employment Agreement of the Dutch Universities. More information: terms of employment.

Work Hours:

38 – 40 hours per week

deadline: 12 April 2019

New publication: “CyberParks – The Interface Between People, Places and Technology”

Michiel de Lange — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 09:26:15 +0000

Another new co-edited volume out this year. Available Open Access.

Costa, Carlos Smaniotto, Ina Šuklje Erjavec, Therese Kenna, Michiel de Lange, Konstantinos Ioannidis, Gabriela Maksymiuk, and Martijn de Waal, eds. 2019. CyberParks – The Interface Between People, Places and Technology: New Approaches and Perspectives, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. [Available Open Access]

This edited volume is one of the outcomes of the EU COST funded research and network collaboration COST TU1306 Cyberparks, which has been running from 2014-2018. See the Cyberparks website here >>

The Mobile City co-edited this book, and authored the introduction to part 3

de Lange, Michiel, and Martijn de Waal. 2019. “Programming and Activating Cyberparks: An Introduction and Overview.” In CyberParks – The Interface Between People, Places and Technology: New Approaches and Perspectives, edited by Carlos Smaniotto Costa, Ina Šuklje Erjavec, Therese Kenna, Michiel de Lange, Konstantinos Ioannidis, Gabriela Maksymiuk and Martijn de Waal, 153-156. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. [Available Open Access]

Michiel de Lange also co-authored one chapter:

de Lange, Michiel, Kåre Synnes, and Gerald Leindecker. 2019. “Smart Citizens in the Hackable City: On the Datafication, Playfulness, and Making of Urban Public Spaces Through Digital Art.” In CyberParks – The Interface Between People, Places and Technology: New Approaches and Perspectives, edited by Carlos Smaniotto Costa, Ina Šuklje Erjavec, Therese Kenna, Michiel de Lange, Konstantinos Ioannidis, Gabriela Maksymiuk and Martijn de Waal, 157-166. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. [Available Open Access]

Out now: Open Access edited volume “The Playful Citizen”

Michiel de Lange — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 15:52:17 +0000

Long time in the making but finally available as an Open Access Publication:

The Playful Citizen: Civic Engagement in a Mediatized Culture, edited by René Glas, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Joost Raessens, and Imar de Vries (Amsterdam University Press)

In addition to being one of the editors, the collection consists of a chapter by me called “The playful city: Citizens making the smart city” (Ch.18).

Free pdf download available here >>

With contributions by:

Contents

1. The playful citizen: An introduction René Glas, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Joost Raessens, and Imar de Vries

Part I Ludo-literacies

Introduction to Part I René Glas, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Joost Raessens, and Imar de Vries

2. Engagement in play, engagement in politics: Playing political video games Joyce Neys and Jeroen Jansz

3. Analytical game design: Game-making as a cultural technique in a gamified society Stefan Werning

4. Re-thinking the social documentary William Uricchio

5. Collapsus, or how to make players become ecological citizens Joost Raessens

6. The broken toy tactic: Clockwork worlds and activist games Anne-Marie Schleiner

7. Video games and the engaged citizen: On the ambiguity of digital play Ingrid Hoofd

Part II Ludo-epistemologies

Introduction to Part II René Glas, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Joost Raessens, and Imar de Vries

8. Public laboratory: Play and civic engagement Jessica Breen, Shannon Dosemagen, Don Blair, and Liz Barry

9. Sensing the air and experimenting with environmental citizenship Jennifer Gabrys

10. Biohacking: Playing with technology Stephanie de Smale

11. Ludo-epistemology: Playing with the rules in citizen science games René Glas and Sybille Lammes

12. The playful scientist: Stimulating playful communities for science practice Ben Schouten, Erik van der Spek, Daniël Harmsen, and Ellis Bartholomeus

13. Laborious playgrounds: Citizen science games as new modes of work/play in the digital age Sonia Fizek and Anne Dippel

Part III Ludo-politics

Introduction to Part III René Glas, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Joost Raessens, and Imar de Vries

14. On participatory politics as a game changer and the politics of participation Mercedes Bunz

15. Playing with politics: Memory, orientation, and tactility Sam Hind

16. Meaningful inefficiencies: Resisting the logic of technological efficiency in the design of civic systems Eric Gordon and Stephen Walter

17. Permanent revolution: Occupying democracy Douglas Rushkoff

18. The playful city: Citizens making the smart city Michiel de Lange

19. Dissent at a distance The Janissary Collective (Mark Deuze and Lindsay Ems)

20. Playing with power: Casual politicking as a new frame for political analysis Alex Gekker

New journal article “Playful civic skills: A transdisciplinary approach to analyse participatory civic games”

Michiel de Lange — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 10:23:45 +0000

Visiting PhD scholar Delaram Ashtari and I wrote a paper “Playful civic skills: A transdisciplinary approach to analyse participatory civic games”, about a playtest session we organized in Utrecht on Nov 20 2017, with the help of Tessa Peters & Rolf van Boxmeer who created the urban planning game Redesire.

Abstract

Although civic participation is an inseparable part of contemporary urban planning, the civic skills needed for meaningful engagement in the planning process and the way citizens learn them are still controversial issues. Digital transformations establish thematic connections between hitherto separated disciplines like media and communication studies and urban planning around citizen participation. Using playful digital media as parti- cipatory tools is a recent development. The learning and engagement affordances of games suggest there is potential to enhance civic skills and build a deeper form of civic engagement. Building on theories of urban planning, media and communication studies, and game design, this study proposes an analytical framework for investigating game affordances to enhance and expand civic skills. The model enables us to recognise how different aspects of a game -mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics- can increase civic knowledge, expand ex- pression and communication skills, establish new ways to join publics, and provide new spaces for taking civic action. This study analyses the case of a civic game, developed as a participatory urban planning tool in the Dutch context, and proposes the notion of ‘playful citizenship’ as a new civic engagement style in urban planning.

Read the paper here: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1YSL5y5jOZCcN.

The Hackable City – Open Access edited volume out now!

Michiel de Lange — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 11:24:53 +0000

Just out, and available as Open Acces:

The Hackable City: Digital Media and Collaborative City Making in the Network Society, edited by Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal (Springer)

The book is the result of our long-running NWO-funded project The Hackable City.

The [urban interfaces] graduate seminar 2018-2019 “The Right to the City & Urban Commons”

Michiel de Lange — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 11:20:29 +0000

2019 [urban interfaces] graduate seminar series at Utrecht University

Dates: 12 & 26 February 2019, 12 March (seminars); 19-20 March 2019 (workshop)
Location: MCW Lab, Kromme Nieuwegracht 20, Utrecht
Organized by: Nanna Verhoeff, Michiel de Lange, Sigrid Merx, and Lotte van der Molen from the [urban interfaces] research group at Utrecht University.
ECTS: 4 EC
More information: See http://urbaninterfaces.sites.uu.nl/
Fee: € 10,00 (partly covering coffee/lunch during workshop), please bring exact change on the first day of the workshop (March 19)
Registration via: RMeS-fgw@uva.nl
Please be sure to specify your master programme, national research school and university

New technologies and datafication in so-called smart cities affect how we interface with the city. Social, economic and technological changes also lead to new urban frictions, and increasingly put strain on collectively shared urban commons and the right to the city. This shifting landscape of urban politics and power dynamics and the role of media, arts, and performance, provides the framework for this seminar series.

In the graduate seminar series The Right to the City & Urban Commons , students participate in three seminar sessions and a 2-day ‘pressure cooker’ workshop. The first seminar will focus on conceptualizing the notions of ‘the right to the city’ and the ‘urban commons’. What are today’s urban commons and how can people claim their right to the city in contemporary shifting urban conditions? The second session is dedicated to current urban common practices, and the imagining of new ones, from the perspective of media, art and performance projects. Several case studies will be discussed and analyzed. The third seminar prepares participants for the two-day pressure cooker workshop, where students will learn how to put their theoretical knowledge into practice through the use of a ‘critical making’ approach.

Students prepare readings for every seminar and write short blog posts to be put on the website of [urban interfaces]. The pressure cooker workshop – organized in collaboration with partners HKU and Creative Coding Utrecht – consists of two days in which hands-on making is combined with in-depth theoretical analyses and inspirational keynote speakers. During these two days, students work in small groups on the design of urban public interventions that depart from Elinor Ostrom’s commons design principles. This critical making workshop trains students to put their theoretical knowledge into practice and to position themselves within the current debates on urban commons and the right to the city.

New chapter “From real-time city to asynchronicity: exploring the real-time smart city dashboard”

Michiel de Lange — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 10:57:27 +0000

Fresh from the press, this interesting edited volume by colleagues Sybille Lammes, Chris Perkins, Alex Gekker, Sam Hind, Clancy Wilmott and Daniel Evans, called “Time for mapping: Cartographic temporalities”. I have a chapter in the book called “From real-time city to asynchronicity: exploring the real-time smart city dashboard”. In this essay, I pursue the idea of an ‘asynchronous smart city’ (as originally suggested by design researchers Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova), using the temporal framework of sociologist Barbara Adam. At stake, I argue, is to unbox what is presented as real-time mapping beyond the merely discursive level, and to develop ‘asynchronicity’ as an alternative heuristics to scrutinize the role of urban dashboards in governing today’s (smart) cities.

The book is freely available as an Open Access pdf publication through OAPEN here >>

Interview Medialab Katowice about municipal data and public values

Michiel de Lange — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 10:55:26 +0000

Medialab Katowice published an e-mail interview with me, as part of the Data (for) Culture conference in Katowice at which I spoke in December 2017.

Here is the link to the interview on the Medialab Katowice website >>

Below the original correspondence (unedited version of the interview):

Łukasz Mirocha (LM): Generally speaking, what is the role of data in the city of 2018? What value has it for different actors: municipalities, citizens, local and non-local businesses?

Michiel de Lange (Michiel de Lange): The role of data in today’s cities is already pretty huge and will only become more important. Data are being used extensively by many cities throughout the world for a variety of purposes, like monitoring infrastructures and services, crime fighting, managing traffic, pedestrian flows, social media monitoring, risk analysis, and much much more. Now, issues that concern me are among others that, first, this deployment of data tends to be primarily about management and control, and second, this tends to obscure from sight and scrutiny the myriad of implications for public urban life. As for the first, my colleague Karin van Es already pointed out in the interview you did with her (https://blog.medialabkatowice.eu/en/karin-van-es-data-driven-approaches-are-often-particularly-good-at-raising-new-questions-which-may-need-to-be-answered-with-different-methods/) that data never speak for themselves. As we know, data are not given but taken. This process of taking data, and constructing a certain image of reality through data, I find very intriguing on an epistemological level. What kinds of knowledge does this foster, what cannot be know, what remains hidden from sight? Recently, I have explored this theme in a ‘Critical Making’ workshop about urban data (https://co.laborations.nl/2018/03/21/report-workshop-critical-making-of-frictional-urban-interfaces/), which involved interdisciplinary teams of Humanities and Arts students and creative coders working together on imagining the possible narratives behind data creation, by following an approach called ‘data dramatization’ (as proposed by Memo Akten here: https://medium.com/@memoakten/data-dramatization-fe04a57530e4). As for the second issue of urban publicness, a yet untapped potential seems the uses of data for engaging citizens with their environment, and allowing them to have a say in the future of their cities. That is a longer-running programmatic theme I am interested in.

LM What was left from the Smart City idea from the early 2000s? Has the corporate vision of smart city that is based on closed, proprietary data management services and solutions prevailed or there is still hope for the participatory, open-data smart city? How does it look like in the Netherlands and at the EU level?

MdL Businesses seem to move away from the initial overblown promises of the smart city as technology-driven urban management, and instead appear to turn to practical applications built on the Internet of Things. However, I believe that civic discourses around the smart city have gained a solid foothold. This people-centric perspective is supported both in and outside of academia, by funding schemes, programs, organizations, researchers, artists, designers. For example, I am part of a recently awarded Creative Industries project called “Designing for controversies in responsible smart cities” (https://www.nwo.nl/en/news-and-events/news/2018/01/four-new-research-projects-into-transformations-of-cities-and-urbanity-in-relation-to-the-creative-industry.html), which is a collaboration between two Dutch universities, the municipality of Amersfoort (a mid-sized centrally located city in the Netherlands), and various private partners. In the next few years we’ll investigate ways of engaging people with smart technologies by focussing on the frictions they engender. By involving a Law Office as a partner, legal questions about data ownership and proprietary vs. open data shall be addressed as part of our project. These are controversial issues, that have not yet been adequately publicly discussed. It is my hope that by focussing on such controversial issues, we shall be able to tell better stories about the civic datafied smart city. These stories will be very different from the frictionless, sanitized and boring technology-driven smart city visions. Precisely because they highlight frictions and struggles, they will actually be more believable and relatable.

LM What is at stake here, are there any alternatives to data commons / data sharing? What would be the consequences of outsourcing city-related data management services to actors using proprietary standards and services?

MdL In the Netherlands and in the EU there is a strong push for safety, as we see in efforts to expand the rights of government intelligence to collect and store data. Together with proprietary commercial interests in data, I think this is often at odds with the demand for more openness and the public potentials of data. We need to seriously consider whether key public services can be outsourced to commercial parties. This is a political question of how to best organize and safeguard public services. Bottom line questions at stake in any municipal data project are: who actually benefits, how can the project best help to strengthen public values?

LM What are the ways and strategies to enrich citizens’ life in the city through applying open data and urban data commons strategies?

MdL Data can help foster a civic commons in multiple ways. For example, data can help to create new publics around shared issues of concern, to visualize and hence make actionable otherwise abstract problems like air pollution, to create strong narratives about public concerns and ideals (what kind of city do we want?), and to pool resources to sustain collective efforts and contribute to the commons. I have written about this a draft paper (http://www.bijt.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2006/01/Michiel_de_Lange-Datafying-the-commons-of-data-and-smart-citizenship_draft-v01.pdf), which is to become a chapter.

LM What municipalities can do to encourage citizens to take part in the participatory model of the smart city, to basically co-create the smart city in cooperation with municipalities and other actors?

MdL When we focus on the data part of participatory smart cities, in my view cities have to work hard on creating accessible, meaningful and empowering data interfaces. I am not a policy expert but I do have some rudimentary suggestions. On the procedural level of policy, this means involving a variety of groups and people, making sure their voices are heard and actually taken into account, allowing data platforms to be writable (citizens can contribute data themselves), and experimenting with productive formats for data-driven dialogues that are situated in meaningful places and events, rather than online only. On the conditional level of policy, it means safeguarding the public nature of participatory smart cities. That is more challenging I guess, but we can think for instance about commons-based licensing systems (e.g. Creative Commons), determining clear indicators to assess public benefits of data, policy measures that stimulate sharing of data, the formation of self-organized civic institutions and the inclusion of broad segments of society, and measures that protect public data resources from misuse and freeriders.

LM To what extent city-scale data commons solutions can be useful in implementing grass root / citizen-initiated services and projects that are based i.a. on sharing economy or participatory budget? I am interested in the role of sharing economy in a wider ecology of pro-citizen strategies and policies.

MdL In my view, such solutions can only be useful when they do not merely support experiment but also prescribe or codify what happens with the results, and who benefits, and makes sur that this passes the keystone of the public interest. Hence, in order to strengthen the public qualities of civic initiatives, the conditional, institutional level of (data) policies are just as important as the ‘urban labs’, the experiments, the prototypes, if not more in the long run. Otherwise, sharing economy is just another word for neoliberal lassez-faire capitalism in which the social domain too becomes monetized. Moreover, not all citizen-led action is inherently good or desirable, so there needs to be a way to debate and negotiate desirability.

1 PhD + 1 postdoc position new NWO project ”Designing for Controversies in Responsible Smart Cities” deadline 20 April ’18

Michiel de Lange — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 08:08:02 +0000

Recently, the research project ”Designing for Controversies in Responsible Smart Cities” in which I am co-applicant received a NWO grant, as part of the program Smart Culture – Creative Cities.

This new project further strengthens the research profile of The Mobile City platform, which since 2007 has actively shaped a research and design agenda around digital media and urban culture.

Project lead: Mascha van der Voort. Co-leads: Peter-Paul Verbeek & Michiel de Lange.

The mid-sized and centrally located municipality of Amersfoort is building a new Internet of Things infrastructure. A consortium of public and private partners will develop a government+citizen+academic+industry collaboration (a so-called ’quadruple helix’) that allows a wide range of stakeholders to become involved in shaping their urban future. In a series of co-design sessions a number of ethical, juridical, and social controversies are made visible and debatable, as a way to garner broader engagement, agency and support.

Consortium partners include The Municipality of Amersfoort, Marxman Advocaten, Aerovision, Kennislab voor Urbanisme, and the Design Innovation Groep.

Currently, the project has 2 job opportunities:

1. PhD (4-years, 1.0 fte, starting May/June 2018) – https://www.academictransfer.com/employer/UT/vacancy/46202/lang/en/.

2. Postdoc (3-years, 0.5-1.0 fte, starting November/December 2018) – https://www.academictransfer.com/employer/UT/vacancy/46203/lang/en/.

Deadline: April 20 2018.

Next year, we’ll be employing another postdoc at Utrecht University as part of the project. More info in due time.

Short info about the project: https://www.nwo.nl/en/news-and-events/news/2018/01/four-new-research-projects-into-transformations-of-cities-and-urbanity-in-relation-to-the-creative-industry.html

More info in Dutch: https://www.uu.nl/nieuws/nwo-beurs-voor-onderzoek-naar-de-slimme-stad

The Hackable City Cahiers

admin — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 03:09:42 +0000

The Hackable City is a research project that explores the potential for new modes of collaborative citymaking in a network society. The area of Buiksloterham in Amsterdam is our primary case study. In these three cahiers, we present our main findings.

Cahier #1 introduces our Hackable City-model and explains how it can be used to explore collaborative processes of citymaking in democratic societies. What new roles have emerged for citizens, (design) professionals and institutions, and how can collectives of citizens organized issues of communal concern interact with traditional institutions? Download here >>

Cahier #2 describes a series of design probes that explored cooperative area development in the Amsterdam brownfield redevelopment site of Buiksloterham. These probes were tailored to investigate specific aspects of ‘hackable citymaking’: collaborative practices between different stakeholders, where new media technologies are employed to open up urban institutions and infrastructures to systemic change, in the public interest. Download here >>

Cahier #3 explores a series of concrete hackable citymaking practices in Athens, São Paulo and Shenzhen. Despite being situated on different continents and having distinct traditions and political systems, we found a number of dynamics around civic initiatives in these cities that further informed our Hackable city model. Download here >>

More about The Hackable City

The goal of this research project is to explore the opportunities as well as challenges of the rise of new media technologies for an open, democratic process of collaborative citymaking. How can citizens, design professionals, local government institutions and others employ digital media platforms in collaborative processes of urban planning, management and social organization, to contribute to a liveable and resilient city, with a strong social fabric?

Hackable citymaking revolves around the organization of individuals into collectives or publics, often through or with the aid of a digital media platform. Individuals contribute resources, such as knowledge, time, information or money, and at the same time reap some form of a benefit, be it social, economic or political, on an individual or communal level.

These collective projects are often (though not always) initiated and managed by professionals who have started to broaden their workfields. They are no longer ‘just’ designers, but have taken up the role of community organizers, fundraisers, storytellers, project developers, etc.

The collectives act within legal and democratic frameworks, often making use of resources or infrastructure provided by the city at large. Hackable Citymaking makes this relationship between collectives and institutions interactive. How can the governing and administrative institutions of the city learn from the initiatives taken by these collectives, and adjust their frameworks accordingly?

Organization

The first contours for this project were laid out by One Architecture and The Mobile City during the Metropool NL workshop organized by the Deltametropool Society in 2012, resulting in the publication Eindhoven, Hackable World City.

This was followed by an ‘embedded researcher’ project executed by Cristina Ampatzidou, hosted at the University of Amsterdam and One Architecture and funded by the Creative Industries Research Centre Amsterdam, with contributions from Utrecht University.

In 2013 funding was received from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for a KIEM-exploration (lead by Michiel de Lange at Utrecht University). And in 2014 NWO funded this as a Creative Industries research project hosted at the University of Amsterdam, The Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS), and One Architecture. For the latter, new partners joined the research coalition: The Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, Pakhuis de Zwijger, and Stadslab Buiksloterham.

Towards a Citizen’s centered IoT. Panel report at Thingscon 2017.

Martijn de Waal — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 10:26:10 +0000

How can we develop an IoT from a citizen’s perspective? What kind of projects have empowered citizens and what does it take to get these kind of projects of the ground? Those were the central questions we addressed at our panel at Thingscon 2017 that I had co-organized with Iskander Smit. Point of departure was to look at the design and implementation of IoT not from a technological but rather from an organizational and societal perspective.

Meta-level: citizen empowerment in frames for policy and funding schemes

First up was Jiska Engelbert from the Centre for Bold Cities, who approached the theme from the level of the frames and visions on smart cities and citizens. These frames are important as they are do not just appear as words on paper or in powerpoints at numerous smart city exhibitions staged across the world. These frames inform policy, research and funding opportunities and thus set the stage for the actual development of IoT and smart city technologies.

At these conferences, Engelbert, noted, the ‘citizen perspective’ has increasingly gained popularity. But what exactly is meant with it? Mostly, she concluded it is addressed from an economic, creative city perspective. Cities are framed as sites of opportunity, where citizens in start-ups, living labs and light-house projects contribute to finding solutions for particular problems and built business models around these. In turn, this is framed as an opportunity to make cities more competitive and attractive as sites for large tech companies. This frame often arrives at the expense of addressing social problems in cities, such as unemployment, social exclusion, debts, loneliness, etc.

Currently, finding opportunities to address these issues in research and development projects for IoT is very hard, Engelbert concludes. Most grants and policy frameworks see the city as an object that we can improve upon with technology, rather than as a social system. They also require co-investment from companies and/or results that are up-scaleable rather than address situated social problems.

So in her view, in order to come to a truly citizen centerd smart city and IoT research and development agenda, these frameworks need re-adjustment from smart to shared: Sustainable, Harmonious, Affective, Relevant, Empowering and Diverse.

[As a side-note: if you are interested in the framing of citizens in smart city discourses, you might be interested in an article I recently wrote about this topic, together with Marloes Dignum: The citizen in the smart city. How the smart city could transform citizenship]

Level of city infrastructure

In the next two talks we zoomed in to the level of the supporting infrastructures that cities would need to support a citizen centered IoT. Hanna Niemi-Hugaerts, the IoT Program Director at the Forum Virium Helsinki gave an overview of the projects they had undertaken. They have been active at a number of levels.

Inclusivity Forum Virium has organized numerous workshops in which citizens were invited to discuss possible futures for their city. These workshops were accessible for people without any knowledge about the technologies itself. The goal was to get the input of a broad group of citizens in the drafting up of an agenda and vision on the role of technologies in urban life.
Capacity building Next, for those who were interested in becoming more active in the actual development, Forum Virium organized workshops in which they could develop skills such as data gathering through crowdsourcing; There are many neighborhood groups that are interested in measuring air quality or traffic in their surroundings, but don’t have the actual skills yet.
Data infrafstructure In order to further open up the development process, Forum Virium has been active in developing an open source data platform that combines various data sources from numerous sources in the city
Data consent management system Finally, in order for citizens to trust IoT services and give them agency over their relation with IoT services, Forum Virium has been contributing to the development of the My data ‘consent management system’. This is an easy to understand/use application that citizens could use to interface with various IoT and Smart City Services in the city. The main principle is that citizens should always have control over their data. At the same time, this platform enables interoperability of various data between platforms.

Next-up was Peter van Waart, researcher at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences and part of the Participatory Citymaking research-through-design project. This project addresses citymaking from an urban transition perspective.

In this vision, cities are mostly run through a ‘patchwork of regimes’. These are institutions like local governments, housing associations and the like that have established sets of rules and ways of doing and organizing.

At the same time, at the level of the everyday lifeworld of citizens, there are numerous ‘niches of novelty’. Groups of citizens or collectives who have organized themselves around particular issues like energy transition. They often have found new and innovative ways to address urban issues. However, often their ways of doing and seeing the world does not match with the ways of working of the existing patchwork of regimes.

In order to make the leap from these niches of novelty of the patchwork of regimes, new modes of organizing and new roles for professionals are needed. On the one hand, design thinking (e.g. through prototyping) could play a role at the level of bottom-up initiatives in order to start discussions around issues that are of importance to citizens.

On the other, new ways have to be found to ‘institutionalize’ the innovative approaches of these initiatives if indeed they contribute to public value creation. The Participatory Research-project has drafted a model to get a grasp of these new relations.

[side-note: we have been reflecting as well on these issues, specifically on models and roles in processes of collaborative citymaking in our own research project The Hackable City]

Level of individual projects

Last speaker in our panel was Mara Balestrini, the CEO of Ideas for Change, and an HCI-researcher that has been involved in many projects that have aimed to empower citizens, such as Making Sense and Salus.

Balestrini sees herself as a ‘community orchestrator’, possibly one of the new roles mentioned by Van Waart that have arisen in the process of collaborative citymaking. Community Orchestrator’s help local communities to identify an issue, frame it in a particular way so it resonates with potential community members as well as with policy makers and other institutional parties and helps in the design of tools and processes that can activate a community around the issue.

She calls this the Bristol Approach, after the city where she deployed it in a project on participatory city sensing. There, through a number of workshops, interviews and analysis of data, it was found that damp housing was considered a problem by a number of citizens.

This issue was further developed in a number of framing workshops, in which participants starting to address themselves as the ‘dampbusters’, a term that provided them with a sense of common identity and purpose.

To gather data about the issue, in a series of workshops a specific sensing tool was fabricated. It consisted of a technical sensor, but also of a model of cute looking frog that could be easily fabricated through 3d printing technologies, and that could house the sensor. Balestrini stressed that this ‘affective’ approach was important, as it helped people to relate more intimately with the technology and adapt it in their everyday lives. The photogenic image of the frog-sensor also was helpful in gabbing attention from mainstream media attention for the issue of damp housing.

In the Making Sense project Balestrini and her co-researchers followed a similar approach at the Placa del Sol in Barcelona. Here noise was considered a huge problem by the residents around the square, as crowds of people hang out at the square at night, drinking and having a good time. Again, here residents were involved through a number of workshops to discuss the issue and develop collaborative sensing technologies to measure the levels of noise that kept them awake late at night.

Here, the issue was reframed as a health issue, rather than just one of discomfort. Scientific research has shown that exposure to high levels of noise can lead to various health problems. It was this particular framing that made it easier to get access to policy makers and engage in discussions about the issue. In the end, thanks to this project, measures were taken to make the square less attractive to drinking crowds.

What the examples Balestrini brought in show is that IoT technologies can play a role in the empowerment of citizens around particular issues. In these examples this worked out well thanks to the role of community orchestrator. This role consists of organizing the community to identify relevant issues, frame it in ways to make sense to the community itself as well as institutions that need to be engaged to solve the problem, and help designing affective and engaging technologies and processes of sharing and communicating in which the community can be activated.

In that way the community-orchestrator could take up some of the roles that Van Waart en Niemi-Hugaerts discussed. It is likely that this could only get of the ground in a semi-institutionalized way of working, where organizations like Forum Virium, applied research groups at Universities or independent ‘urban curators’ like Balestrini can find the means to set up the city-level frameworks as well as play a role in orchestrating the individual projects. In turn, to get this of the ground, as Engelbert argued, institutional metaframeworks for Iot and Smart Cities are needed that recognize the need to address social issues through collaborative and participatory projects that are not about developing business models and scalability, but about the creation of public values.

The Hackable City: Citymaking in a Platform Society

Michiel de Lange — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 11:03:38 +0000

For the journal Architectural Design, we wrote a contribution for the Special Issue: 4D Hyperlocal: A Cultural Toolkit for the Open-Source City.

Abstract

Can computer hacking have positive parallels in the shaping of the built environment? The Hackable City research project was set up with this question in mind, to investigate the potential of digital platforms to open up the citymaking process. Its cofounders Martijn de Waal, Michiel de Lange and Matthijs Bouw here outline the tendencies that their studies of collaborative urban development initiatives around the world have revealed, and ask whether knowledge sharing and incremental change might be a better way forward than top-down masterplans.

Download the publication:

de Waal, M., de Lange, M. and Bouw, M. (2017), The Hackable City: Citymaking in a Platform Society. Archit. Design, 87: 50–57. doi:10.1002/ad.2131.

Talk at Data (For) Culture conference in Katowice, 2 Dec. 2017

Michiel de Lange — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 10:50:04 +0000

On December 2 2017 I will give a talk at the Data (For) Culture conference in Katowice. The event is organized by Medialab Katowice. About the event:

During the conference, experts from Poland and abroad will discuss a number of topics, including: (a) how to combine traditional methods of cultural research with the analysis of large data sets from the web, primarily from social media; (b) how cultural events (official and grassroots) impact on the city’s development; (c) how social media form a networked public sphere, influencing urban culture through various forms of involvement and participation, (d) how to work with data in an interdisciplinary team while retaining openness and using rapid prototyping tools, (e) how and what tools to use for data analysis and visualisation in order to study and present complex areas such as the cultural life of the city.

About Medialab Katowice:

Medialab Katowice is an experimental project combining creative, research and education activities. Participants of interdisciplinary projects placing themselves at the intersection of art, design and technology use digital media to research the city and create new narratives for Katowice. Medialab is a forum for the exchange of ideas and knowledge, meeting inspiring artists and designers, as well as a collaboration platform for artists and institutions from different countries: universities, NGOs and creative-sector companies. The project involves workshops, interventions in public space, exhibitions, lectures and discussions. There are also several workgroups focused on areas of city data visualisation, spatial analysis (MapLab), open data and the Arduino platform.

The program looks very interesting, and I look forward to the event.