New The Mobile City event: Social Cities of Tomorrow, 14 − 17 February 2012, Amsterdam

November 19th, 2011

We are happy to announce a new event: Social Cities of Tomorrow. Social Cities of Tomorrow is an international conference that takes place on 17 February 2012, plus an intensive three-day pre-conference workshop on 14 − 16 February, in Amsterdam Netherlands. Social Cities of Tomorrow is organised by The Mobile City, Virtueel Platform and ARCAM.

Using digital media technologies for collective urban issues
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 international conference brings together key thinkers and doers working in the fields of new media and urbanism. Keynote speakers such as Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko will speak about the promises and challenges in this newly emerging and highly interdisciplinary field of urban design. The keynotes will be accompanied by presentations of ‘best practices’ from various disciplines, such as architecture, art, design, and policy.

Join us in February 2012 at Amsterdam’s Westergasfabriek to explore how urban designers, interface developers, app builders, policy makers, housing coorations, artists, scientists and others can use digital technologies to organise citizen engagement, and to contribute to our social cities of tomorrow.

Visit the event website here: www.socialcitiesoftomorrow.nl

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Some upcoming events I’m participating in

November 17th, 2011

I’ll be giving two lunch talks in the next few weeks, the first is public, the second isn’t:

November 22 2011 Broodje Kennis at Spui 25 (University of Amsterdam)

More information >>


December 8 2011 Place-Mat talk at Ymere housing corporation for Placemakers.

The announcement should be published soon on the Placemakers website >>

In addition, November 23 2011 I’m participating in an e-tourism strategy day organized by LAgroup and Waag Society in Pakhuis De Zwijger.

More information >>

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Academic course: “The Media City”

October 10th, 2011

As I wrote in an earlier post, I have been developing a new course at Utrecht University, called “The Media City”. It is a course for bachelor 2 students and pre-masters. The program has been set up around a number of guest lecturers, who talk about several ‘media city’ topics from their own expertise. Below some more information about the course (guest speakers + literature list). The course is in Dutch, but all of the literature is in English.


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Download introductory presentation (PDF, 2.3 MB in Dutch)

Download full course instructions (PDF, 220 KB in Dutch)

 

Course schedule:

week1, Sept 22 – Introduction (Michiel de Lange)

week2, Sept 29 – ‘Hybrid space’: the relation between digital and physical space (Eric Kluitenberg)

week3, Oct 6 – New media and urban publicness (Martijn de Waal)

week4, Oct 13 – Privacy & surveillance in the media city (Sander Flight)

week5, Oct 20 – Media art and the urban experience (Annet Dekker)

week6, Oct 27 – Urban play & gamification (Kars Alfrink)

week7, Nov 3 – eParticipation and co-design: designing cities with new media (Carl Lens)


Course literature:

week1 – Introductie De Mediastad

Read the rest of this entry »

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Out now: study “Ownership in the Hybrid City” (in Dutch)

September 29th, 2011

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Virtueel Platform commissioned Martijn de Waal and me (The Mobile City) to do a study about the ways media technologies and e-culture can help to design livable and lively cities.

In this study we present “ownership” as an alternative design approach. In today’s cities, our everyday lives are increasingly shaped by digital media technologies. How can we engage these technologies to design for cities where citizens feel they belong, where they feel the city belongs to them as well, ands 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?

With ownership we mean the extent to which urbanites share a sense of belonging and responsibility for their urban environment, and engage in collective issues. Typically, complex urban issues are not ‘owned’ by a single party but commons questions that involve multiple stakeholders and require collective forms of governance.

In the study we propose to address complex urban issues through the lens of ‘ownership’. We signal three interrelated promising developments: the creative (re)use of digital data as a new resource (data-commons), do-it-yourself urban design based on collaborative principles of online culture, and reaching and activating new networked publics through digital media. Three actual cases from the Netherlands are described, followed by a series of reflections and recommendations.

At the moment the report is still in Dutch only.

More information & free download of the report >>

In February 2012 The Mobile City in collaboration with Virtueel Platform and other partner organization will organize an international event around this theme. We have already posted a call for an internship position to collaborate in this event. Stay tuned!

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Some upcoming events & activities I am working on

September 1st, 2011

The beginning of this academic year will be quite busy:

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Sept 14 2011 Amsterdam.
 Session during PICNIC 2011 “Future Cities: Designing for Ownership”

First, at PICNIC this year I’ll present a fresh new study about ‘Ownership in the Hybrid City’ that I’ve done together with Martijn de Waal. The study was commissioned by Virtueel Platform. More about this study (and the international event we are planning in its wake) soon at The Mobile City website.

More information >>

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Sept 20 2011 Istanbul
Session during ISEA 2011 “Beyond Locative: Media Arts after the Spatial Turn”

After PICNIC I rapidly move on to Istanbul for the ISEA 2011 symposium, where I’ll be in a session together with Marc Tuters, Tristan Thielmann, and Mark Shepard, to talk about the future of locative media.

More information >>

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Sept 22 – Nov 3 2011 Utrecht
Lecturing course “The Media City”, Utrecht University

Just back from ISEA, I will start teaching a course that I have been developing as part time lecturer New Media Studies, Utrecht University. It is a totally new program for an existing bachelor II course, called “new media in the current debate” (the course is in Dutch). I have chosen to take ‘the media city’ as an umbrella theme. A fine group of guest lecturers will be giving talks. This is how the course looks in a nutshell:

week1, Sept 22 – Introduction (Michiel de Lange)

week2, Sept 29 – ‘Hybrid space’: the relation between digital and physical space (Eric Kluitenberg)

week3, Oct 6 – New media and urban publicness (Martijn de Waal)

week4, Oct 13 – Privacy & surveillance in the media city (Sander Flight)

week5, Oct 20 – Media art and the urban experience (Annet Dekker)

week6, Oct 27 – Urban play & gamification (Kars Alfrink)

week7, Nov 3 – eParticipation and co-design: designing cities with new media (Carl Lens)

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Sep 1 2011 ->
Research project “Mobile Learning”

This academic year I will also devote one day per week to the research project in progress about “Mobile Learning”, joining several of my colleagues at the Center for the Study of Digital Games and Play, at Utrecht University, and mobile story-telling platform 7scenes.

More information >>

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Book review on The Mobile City blog: Paul Dourish & Genevieve Bell – Divining a digital future (2011)

July 27th, 2011

I wrote a review of this recent book on The Mobile City website:

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In Divining a Digital Future (2011), computer scientist Paul Dourish (Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine) and cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell (Intel Interaction and Experience Research Lab) again team up in an attempt to marry ethnography with ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) research. The book heavily builds on some of their previous collaborative work. Dourish & Bell propose to develop “a ‘ubiquitous computing of the present’ that takes the messiness of everyday life as a central theme” (4). Their scope embraces the far ends of mythology, the cultural ideal-narratives that shape ubicomp’s research agenda, and messiness, the complex and contested realities of how people actually use and interpret everyday technologies.

Continue reading >>

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The Mobile City website redesign + new direction

April 27th, 2011

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Martijn and I have been working on a major redesign of The Mobile City website. Not only does this bring a much tighter interface, it also involves a reorientation of what we want to do with The Mobile City in the future.

On the About us page, we more clearly position ourselves as an organization that continues to actively participate in the debates about the new urban condition, and define in what ways we can contribute through our non-profit activities. In addition, we are now more actively bringing our expertise to the market. We added a page called Our services, where we explain how we might be of assistance to your organization.

Go check it out here >>

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Presentation: Mobile media & (serious) games

March 21st, 2011

This is the presentation I gave a few weeks back at the second ‘Serious Games’ expert meeting, organized by the Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends (STT) for their Future study Serious Games. The afternoon session took place at Hyves headquarters. You can view back some reports and videos from previous sessions here.

Presentation by Michiel de Lange for STT about Mobile media & (serious) games

Download the presentation >> (PDF 1.4 MB)

 

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Indonesia’s craze for mobile social networking visualized

March 8th, 2011

This comes as no surprise to me. I’ve been describing this love of high-tech and all things ‘modern’ among Jakartans in my dissertation.

Chris McDowall on the “Seeing Data” section of SciBlogs reports: Mapping a Day in the Life of Twitter. He notes that Jakarta glows brightly 24 hours, day and night…

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(see full animation at SciBlogs)

Mark Graham on Floating Sheep notes:

As Chris points out, we can see Indonesia (particularly Java) producing an unexpected amount of content. Well, at least unexpected until we realise that Twitter is enormously popular in Indonesia. The country apparently has world’s highest proportion of internet-users on Twitter.

From the CNN article linked to:

Indonesia is the world’s fourth largest user of Facebook and has been dubbed the most Twitter-addicted nation on the planet by online research firm comScore. The country beat every other nation in the percentage of online Twitter users. […] Most people use their mobile phones to access the web.

(via Floating Sheep)

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Review @themobilecity: Aurigi & De Cindio (2008) – Augmented urban spaces

March 2nd, 2011

I posted this review on The Mobile City blog yesterday:

Aurigi, A., & De Cindio, F. (2008). Augmented urban spaces: articulating the physical and electronic city. Aldershot: Ashgate.
(The introduction is a free read from the website).

This book from 2008 had been on my desk for quite some time but finally I got around to do a review. It is listed in a recent overview of a decade of writing about digital cities. Three years earlier, one of the editors Alessandro Aurigi wrote the monograph “Making the Digital City: The Early Shaping of Urban Internet Space”.

The main question of this edited book is how enriched media environments, ubiquitous computing, mobile and wireless communication technologies, and the internet are modifying city living and the fruition of urban spaces. A familiar stance by now, the editors argue against a clear boundary between the digital and the physical:

“in the augmented city, ‘virtual’ and ‘physical’ spaces are no longer two separate dimensions, but just parts of a continuum, of a whole. The physical and the digital environment have come to define each other and concepts such as public space and “third place”, identity and knowledge, citizenship and public participation are all inevitably affected by the shaping of the reconfigured, augmented urban space” (p. 1).

The stated aim to strive for an interdisciplinary “contamination of perspectives” is attested to by the fact that Aurigi is an architect/urban planner and De Cindio a computer scientist. The contributing authors are a mixed bunch in both disciplinary and cultural background, although most have an academic affiliation. Architects, urbanists and geographers go side by side with new media and information- and communication researchers. Contributors hail from (or work in) Italy, USA, Canada, Brazil, Australia, South Korea, UK, and South Africa.

The book is structured in three main sections: Augmented Spaces, Augmenting Communities, and Planning Challenges in the Augmented City. I will not discuss all contributions but pick out those that I found most interesting.

Continue reading on The Mobile City blog >>

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