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 >>

Seumas Miller – Australian National University – Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics; privacy issues
Cathy Flick – Charles Sturt University – ICT industry, codes of ethics, policies, trust, privacy
Jeroen van den Hoven – TU Delft; prof. Ethics of Technology; privacy issues, moral identity
Alper Cugun – MSc student TU Delft; social issues, online communities
Noëmi Manders – PhD researcher TU Delft; ethical aspects of identity management
Bibi van den Berg – PhD EUR; ambient intelligence
Jeroen Timmermans – PhD EUR; playful identities
Michiel de Lange – PhD EUR; playful identities

There were some interesting topics discussed. Read the full notes on the meeting below:

// Jeroen vd Hoven:
Privacy issues & moral identity: the right to write your own biography (Isaya Berlin).
With more and more data, identities are being constructed about people on the basis of database- information.

Popper: 3 worlds
objections:
1. someone interrupting and interfering in your autonomous thoughts
2. increasing your self-awareness by ‘looking at you’ – new perspective
3. information gets stored into databases > who will see it? quasi-independent information objects leading life of their own.

Institutions can constrain information (physical, deontic, epistemic) – moral justification:
- preventing harm (cf. Nazis in NL with lists of jews)
- transparancy – personal data has become commodified and is being sold
- information must remain in its original context; it can be used in discriminatory ways if it leakes into other domains.
- One can only write his own moral biography. Other institutions/person shouldn’t have acces to information that could picture your Self. [one cannot know what it is like to be you; persons change and develop their personalities]. Privileged acces only for subject.
We expect modesty in others in judging us and saying “I know you”.
——–
Q: is breach of privacy justified when you suspect someone is doing something evil when your aiming for the truth, but it’s difficult to get at?
Q: What lattitude should people have to keep aspects of their life private?
> people need a ‘time-out’ from morality to experiment with it and develop their owm moral identity.
[individualist perception of identity; atomistic vs. collective image]
> We reveal more of ourselves to invite others to assist us in identity creation.
[presupposing an autonomous kernel that knows itself].
[the individual that constructs itself can do so in language that is not at all useful for other to comprehend - Wittgenstein]
Q: how can you describe the boundaries of what others may know things about you (just like ‘social space’. A: one can descern information as being ‘sensitive’ when it can be used to describe your moral identity; Q: but what is ‘sensitive information’? differs from person to person. Stereotypes can quickly emerge.

// Bibi
ambient intelligence: personalised space.
Q: to what extent can you expect a technology to ‘know you’ and adapt to your personality? Is the Self becoming a set of preferences?
concept of ‘strangeness’ of places: in a globalised world there are a lot of places that are familiar: the same everywhere. No room anymore for the ‘ongemak’ and the unexpected, unmediated experience. Sometimes persons are formed by uncontrollable events.
Q: what if there are many different people with all their own preferences present in one place?
Q: what does collective experience mean when all places are personalised?
Q: when does it turn off? how does it respond to your changing preferences?
Q: Responsability for experiences are being handed over to technologies. Who is responsable for the quality of these experiences?

// Cathy
Trusted computing: chip on motherboard, booting in ‘trusted mode’. Trusted modes are becoming ubiquitous: everyone needs to have a ‘trusted computer’. Large corporations are developing this. Possible problems:
- TC could be used to enforce DRM
- Technical specs change often
- open standards group TCG originally set up has been left by MS
- it can be used also for ‘trusted communication’ between terrorists, MS has not fully incorporated it in Vista.

// Seamus Miller
Collective actions.
individual action – collective action (behaviour/congnitive). How can this be morally significant?
- assertions you don’t have the right to have
joint procedural mechanism: not one person, not collective, but through adding/combining different databases to create profiles > who is responsable?
Q: make distinction between responsability – accountability?