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

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!

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 >>

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 >>

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)

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

How can architects relate to digital media?

The Mobile City keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’: outcomes and further thoughts

written by Michiel de Lange & Martijn de Waal

Introducing the main questions

What do developments in digital media have to do with architecture? And how should architects and urbanists relate to developments in new media? The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) and Royal Institute of Dutch Architects (BNA) invited The Mobile City to address that question for the yearly ‘Day of the Young Architect’, on November 7th 2009 in the NAi in Rotterdam. This day was themed ‘the virtual’, and was organized as part of the overarching ‘connectivity’ cluster during the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR).

We gladly accepted this challenge, since this very issue was one of the main reasons we founded The Mobile City two years ago. After all, as the boundaries between physical and digital spaces blur, this should have profound consequences not only for new media developers but also for those professionals who traditionally deal with physical spaces. We surely did not expect this to be already obvious for most architects. But the fact that only half of the audience raised their hands when asked by moderator JaapJan Berg whether architects should deal with digital media in their profession showed there is still some way to go.

This report contains the main argument of our talk. But it also presents some additional reflections, and is an attempt to take our argument further than we did at the NAi/BNA day. We address the following questions: what position can architects, planners and urbanists take in their design profession vis-a-vis new media? Why should they bother with new media in the first place? What are the challenges they face? And what are future directions and chances for these professions?

In answering these questions, we make a strong plea for an attitude of ‘critical engagement’. This posits architects should neither ignore nor completely embrace digital media. Rather we would urge them to think of themselves as designers who primarily shape social processes, and only second as designers who shape spatial forms. Which social processes underly new commissions? What kind of activities, social interactions or exclusions should a new project encourage or discourage? How can these be shaped through spatial forms? And what roles do digital media play in this? We think architects shouldn’t just build an urban screen just because you can, or the Kunsthaus in Graz has one too. Rather they should start by asking: what kind of social processes do we want to provoke or hope to avoid? Can an urban screen indeed contribute to these processes or will it disturb them? What other disciplines do we need to invite to the table to meaningfully program an urban screen so that it goes beyond mere window dressing and indeed enhances the project?

Read more at The Mobile City weblog >>

On December 14th 2009 De Balie – an Amsterdam-based center for culture and politics – organized an evening about old and new cartographies. Participants were Ferjan Ormeling (Emeritus Professor Cartography, Faculty of Geographical Sciences, Utrecht University), Henk van Houtum (Associate Professor of Geopolitics and Political Geography, Head of the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research), Maarten Keulemans (science journalist), Jelle Reumer (director Natural Museum Rotterdam, Special Professor at Utrecht University), Lucas Keijning (NEMO science center), and me. The evening was lead by Volkskrant journalist Martijn van Calmthout. The evening was set up as a prelude to the presentation of a new world map the day after in The Hague. From the announcement:

We have been making maps for centuries, to establish territorial borders or mark safe routes. A map is a model of reality, and the terrain of a fascinating branch of science: cartography. Maps represent social and political choices, which start forming their own truths. For example the Persian Gulf is not the Persian Gulf everywhere, the world on its head or with China in the middle all of a sudden looks very different, and maps today seem less complete because of an increasing number of ‘white spots’…

Some of the issues addressed this evening concerned the relation between model and reality, the consequences of new map-making media technologies for society and politics, and – unavoidably it seems in such popularizing science discussions – the question whether new developments are good or bad? I was invited to talk about the influence of mobile and locative media and cartographic representations.

Cartographer Ferjan Ormeling started the evening with an overview of cartography as a professional scientific discipline. He defined cartography as “the transmission of spatial information for decision-making”. In a few slides he walked through cartographic history, mainly from a western perspective as the attempt to explore and chart unknown territories, with ensuing overseas trade and later colonization in its wake. Some of the interesting topics he touched upon included the fact that cartography is always subjective and culturally determined. Dutch maps for instance often leave out ditches because they are everywhere, whereas in Belgium they are included on maps. The world maps we know today are clearly Euro-centric, placing other territories in the periphery of Europe. Maps were hugely important for an upcoming sense of nationalism (a point made by Benedict Anderson in his well-known work “Imagined Communities” 1991). Nation-states were now drawn in monochrome colors, clearly separating them from their neighbors. Further, names on maps are often surrounded by controversy. For example in the 1970s attempts were made to modernize the spelling of Dutch town and city names. This met with fierce opposition from local government, because this meant some places would lose their name-based exclusivity (Veghel sounds more chic than Veggel, ditto for Wijchen – Wijgen). Map-making therefore always involves selection, manipulation, and generalization. What is displayed? What is left out? Where are borders drawn? What is on the map and what lies outside of the map? Ormeling closed his talk by assessing the relevance of new technologies like Google Maps. Here it became interesting, since Ormeling tenaciously clung to the idea of the unique professional expertise of cartographers. While digital technologies certainly are useful, Ormeling argued, the role of cartographers remains important because they are the ones who “fill in” these satellite images, and “give meaning” to those satellite views. Sure, there are interesting attempts by amateurs to engage map-making (such as Openstreetmap). But there are lots of things professionals can and amateurs can’t do, like accurately mapping a rugged coastline.

Then Henk van Houtum and I joined the discussion. Van Houtum argued new geographic technologies like TomTom and Google Maps turn all of us into geographers. But very uncritical geographers. We unwittingly feed all kinds of information to search engines. Van Houtum worries about the loss of personal autonomy as we are surrender ourselves to various digital search and control systems. But on the more positive side, new technologies enable far more people to engage in place-making and representing spatial knowledge. The old monopoly of mapmaking by geographers under the auspice of the nation-state is crumbling, and that is a good thing.

I argued that under the influence of mobile and locative media, cartography has changed from being a predominantly geographical medium in which the representation of space and place is central, to a social medium in which online social networking acquires a cartographic element. Our mediated social relations are now being ‘rooted’ in physical places. A good example of such a locative social network is Bliin, a project by Selene Kolman, who was in the audience, and Stef Kolman.

This has in part been a response to our perception of the internet as placeless, and broader social and spatial shifts often grouped under the name ‘globalization’. Further, New technologies offer people the opportunity to write space and place with their own experiences (e.g. by ‘geotagging’ places), rather than just reading the maps made by others (see e.g. Greenfield & Shepard about “read/write urbanism” p. 12-13). This means cartography is no longer the prerogative of professionals but indeed, as Henk van Houtum said, we have all become geographers. Already in 1946 geographer J.K. Wright proposed in front of the Association of American Geographers that the earth had been largely mapped by conventional geographical method. The time had come to map our earth all over again. Wright called upon geographers to map folk knowledge of places, and more aesthetic experiences of our environments. This would vastly expand the terrain of classic geography to include what Wright called ‘geosophical’ knowledge. Wright would probably have been thrilled to see how his plea is being realized today… A third change is that maps now consist not only of mostly spatial information but also temporal information. The historicity of place as a process is made visible by the range of micro-narratives that are attached to places through locative media. Maps become far more dynamic representations of spatial and temporal knowledge. A nice example is the project Droombeek, by Edward Mac Gillavry, who was also present this evening, and Peter Dubois.

In this project inhabitants of Roombeek, an area of the city Enschede which was destroyed in 2000 by a huge fireworks disaster, recount their memories and stories of their neighborhood. These stories are made available to others by taking a GPS-walk. A fourth change is the database structure of geographical knowledge captured in maps. We can now query items through maps. Most of these searches are about simple properties like categories of places and proximity, such as finding restaurants nearby. However while we still can’t search for sadness in New York (PDF 2,4 MB; Russell – Headmap Manifesto – p. 31), we are already awfully close.. Fifth, new cartographies alter our subjective experiences of space and place. For instance, locative media can inform a more aesthetic experience of space and mobility. Someone who is working on GPS-based cartography as a new form of landscape painting is Esther Polak, who also joined this evening – just back from a trip to Nigeria. And what about the fact that in many locative media views the ego is the center of the map? You no longer have to first find your position on the map. Rather, the environment revolves around you. Does this literally lead to a more ‘ego-centric’ worldview? Finally, maps are increasingly often used as a way to visualize and transfer increasingly complex datasets. Maps are becoming metaphors to represent information, and for thinking. An organization that has been doing this for while is Informationlab by ‘information architect’ Auke Touwslager, who also attended the evening (yes, good crowd present..). To summarize, under the influence of locative media mapping tends to shift from mostly objectifying representations to highly subjective, from general to thematic representations, and from visualizing topological rather than topographical information. I wanted to raise some more ‘political’ issues of these developments but – alas – time was running short… (I couldn’t even bring in half of the above).

It was interesting to see how the audience, and ‘old school geographer’ Ormeling, reacted to this new media story. Ormeling himself did not feel these developments had much to do with his profession as a cartographer, apart from being handy new instruments. This strikingly parallels the dominant reaction of another professional audience: architects and planners. New media technologies as instruments yes, but investigating the consequences of these technologies for the professional practice itself… no. In the audience, meanwhile, someone wondered in exasperation “this is al very nice but who actually wants to know all the time where their friends are?”. Indeed only one or two people raised their hands. Although the predominantly white middle-aged male audience perhaps might not exactly be representative of very active mobile media users, this question of course is a legitimate one. All talks about new representations of knowledge and new ‘participant audiences’ or ‘networked publics’ in spite, who are “we” (we – the people more or less professionally dealing with geo-locative media) actually representing in our talks and thoughts? The majority of people, at least during this evening, seem very skeptical about these developments. The discussion immediately turned to the pervasive influence of mobile media themselves in everyday life and all sorts of ethical discussions, rather than pausing for a moment to look at media developments and their influence on cartography. Too bad this somewhat fell of radar at the end of the evening. Luckily, columnist Jelle Reumer restored this by evoking the poetics of maps. Looking at maps above all brings up half-forgotten memories of the places one once was and where beautiful or sad things happened. Maps also stir the imagination about places one would perhaps never go. I thought Reumer’s short talk was a nice closure of the evening, which put matters in a broader perspective. Aside from their obvious differences (differences that do matter, as I’ve tried to show here), to what extend does it matter whether such imaginations occur by holding a map made of paper or by looking at a handheld screen?

In this article I discern five possible ‘levels’ to understand urban games: (1) the city is often used as a model to construct an architecture of computer and video games; (2) the city itself has historically been understood in multiple ways as a game or playground; (3) pervasive games take digital games out to the streets and bridge the digital-physical distinction; (4) (serious) games are used in the process of (re)building actual cities; (5) urban games are a metaphorical lens through which to look at utopian and dystopian futures of cities. For each of these ‘levels’ I raise some relevant questions.

You can read the article here >> or download a PDF of the article (1,6 MB).

There are a number of other interesting contributions. See the journal’s table of contents.

This is what we’re doing:

• November 5th 20:00-22:00 Keynote with Mark Shepard
  
  location: NAi Auditorium Rotterdam
• November 6th 12:00-17:00 Sentient Rotterdam Workshop with Mark Shepard & The Mobile City. Participation is restricted to registered participants. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to register.
  location: IABR Forum, NAi Rotterdam
• November 6th 17:00-19:00 Opening of the Exhibition The Sentient City Survival Kit. The opening events includes a public presentation of the workshop results.
  
  location: IABR Open Podium, NAi Rotterdam. The Exhibition will last until November 12th. This event is followed by a Pecha Kucha Program at 20:20.
• November 7th 10:00-20:00 Day of the Young Architect with keynote lecture by The Mobile City. Accessible to members of the Bond Nederlandse Architecten (Royal Institute of Dutch Architects).
  location: NAi Auditorium Rotterdam
  

For more information, see The Mobile City website >>.

I’ve written a review of Stephen Graham’s “The Cybercities Reader” (2004) at The Mobile City. Go there >>

As MoMo is a kind of trend-watching event, the main emphasis of this MoMo#11 was on the emerging field of augmented reality. Of course this vision has been around for a long time. Yet prototypes have mostly been very clunky head-mounted displays, or relied on some flat surface to project things on. As our mobile devices have by now arguably become the most ubiquitous technology humans ever carried with them (becoming a third skin, like our clothes are a second skin), they appear the ideal platform for all kinds of new forms of augmented reality in new and unexpected ways. This arguments of course echoes the argument made by Bell and Dourish (“Yesterday’s tomorrows”, PDF) that the vision of ubicomp has in actual practise taken shape in a different way on the mobile phone. Below some of my notes and impressions of MoMo#11.

Continue reading at The Mobile City weblog >>

Read review at www.themobilecity.nl >>

Just a few more or less recent items that I find interesting (cutting it up in multiple posts):

Wired reports that hackers have attacked an online forum for epilepsy patients. They placed fast-moving images on the forum, which resulted in a number of epilepsy patient getting a seizure.

Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

What triggered me:

The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs. [my emphasis]

A cruel yet fascinating example of the blurring between online space and the physical, and how the ‘virtual’ is creeping (or in this case seizing) into the world we formerly knew as ‘real world’. Of course, examples abound of people carrying their online avatars with them outside the (MMORPG) game, or people making hard cash out of virtual real estate, etc. Yet what makes this case special I think is the intention of the attackers to target this specific group in this way, in order to inflict bodily harm on actual persons through digitally mediated ways. No doubt they must have imagined epileptic patients getting fits and seizures behind their computers when crafting their attack. It’ precisely this intentional aspect of breaking out of screen space, stepping outside of the bounded online world with its own rules that thrives on willingly forgetting that there are actual people in flesh and blood sitting behind their screen (in their underwear picking their nose), that makes this a special case.

It is just a matter of time before hackers launch similar attacks on the digital infrastructures of the city, be it the RFID transport system, CCTV surveillance, the various wireless data networks, or any combination. The first attempts are already there. The physical seizure this may cause to the city is hard to imagine now.

The BBC reports that Cubans get access to mobile phones, as Raul Castro lifts the ban on possessing them:

Cubans are to be allowed unrestricted access to mobile phones for the first time, in the latest reform announced under new President Raul Castro.

…

Some Cubans already own mobile phones, but they have had to acquire them via a third party, often foreigners.

Cuba’s rate of cell phone usage remains among the lowest in Latin America.

Now Cubans will be able to subscribe to pre-paid mobile services under their own names, instead of going through foreigners or in some cases their work places.

However, the new service must be paid for in foreign currency, which will restrict access to wealthier Cubans.

What strikes me is not only that one of the countries with the most restrictive political regimes and lowest mobile phone penetration percentages is lifting the ban. More interesting even is the way this is presented in various media as almost inevitably leading to huge social change. This news item is phrased in terms like reform (BBC), technological catch-up (Engadget), the new Cuba; Raul Castro is revolutionizing his brother’s island; change (Wired) [my emphasis]. Perhaps the strongest phrase I found on MobileCrunch: “The communist dominos are falling as the dictatorship of the proletariat realizes it can’t stand up against the relentless momentum of the mobile phone.” Here, the mobile phone is imagined almost as a natural force, logically leading to political reform, freedom and democracy.

This reminds me of Tim Cresswell’s keynote speech in which he showed how the term ‘mobility’ is always infused with meanings and values. In this case it seems the mobile phone becomes a symbol for reform, social change, modernity, political opening and transparency. I really feel his point about the value-laden aspects of ‘mobility’ (and consequently also ‘mobile technologies’) is extremely important for all working in the field of mobile technologies. The apprehension Tim voiced in workshop 2 towards the term “mobility paradigm” perhaps also stems from the realization that a paradigm – with enough people ‘in’ it – inevitably means basic concepts (like ‘mobile’) are accepted as validation and legitimization in themselves for working on them. And yes, we too realize that “The Mobile City” has exactly this rhetorical power: a whole new view on, and approach to the city, paradoxically both inevitable as a future image and simply here & now as an empirical fact.

Dutch tech/nerd blog tweakers.net report that Hyves, Holland’s most popular social network, has struck a deal with operator KPN (the biggest telcom in NL) to add locational information to text messages Hyves users send to each other. According to KPN, questions such as “where are you?” and “what are you doing?” are often asked by mobile phone users.

KPN customers can switch the service on by first registering for this service on Hyves. Whenever they send a text message containing information about what they are currently doing to a specific number, they will be positioned on a Google Maps application within Hyves, which may be seen by other Hyves users.

This is just another step in the field of LBS (location based services) that telcoms are seemingly desperately trying to develop. LBS had been a buzzword for some time now, but the real “killer-app” hasn’t come up yet. I’m curious to see how this will develop, since these are very strong partners indeed.

Just a thought, I think questions as quoted above like “where are you?” and “what are you doing?” shouldn’t be taken too literary. We don’t really need or even want to know this information all the time. They are often just a sign of reciprocal involvement with the life of the other person, a type of mobile gift exchanges.

Moreover, part of the fun in talking through the mobile phone is also the joy of imagining what someone else is doing at the moment, and trying to picture where he or she is. It is part of the process of creating “imagined proximity” or “co-presence”. I wonder what kind of new imaginings will arise when this kind of background information is already given through location based services? If we know all this kind of stuff in advance, is there even sense in still making the actual phone call? Perhaps in an unexpected way, LBS as the chicken with the golden eggs may turn out to be a bullet in the telcoms own foot.

Read more about it, watch photos, and see some video registrations at the conference website’s coverage area.

[update: website structure changed: all content of The Mobile City '08 now here]