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Posts in category cities

Digital Birmingham

Aug13
2008 3 Comments Written by egordon

The City of Birmingham, UK is working on a significant transformation in image. As it is described on the Digital Birmingham site, the city seeks to transform its industrial past into a digital future. The initiative seeks to tie together all the digital efforts in the city into one portal. Wi-fi initiatives, coupled with resources on online safety, digital film exhibitions, and conferences, are all aggregated through Digital Birmingham. While much of this effort is directed toward PR and tourism, there are other pieces that are legitimately pushing the envelope of participation and transparency in city government. Even those pieces, ironically, that are directed towards PR and tourism.

The Virtual Birmingham initiative is a good example of this. Spearheaded by the company Daden Limited, this initiative is “leading discussions with partners on how Birmingham can be represented and promoted in a 3D virtual environment such as Second Life that would address specific needs from the visitor economy, attracting inward investment and putting Birmingham ‘on the map’.” The results, thus far, are some incredibly interesting designs in Second Life that integrate Google Maps with the virtual environment. The goal here is to make the map immersive – clicking on places and then walking your avatar through them. Currently, in what’s called a “briefing center,” avatars can walk on the map, bring up wikipedia, BBC or CNN newsfeeds, represented by familiar Google placemarkers. When I spoke with David Daden about the project, he expressed interest in turning it into a planning tool – fleshing out the entire map with virtual models to reflect the city’s various uses.

The possibilities here are quite exciting, although I don’t know in what direction the city intends to take this. One could imagine that the Second Life map could function as a portal into a deep urban database, that includes civic information as well as social information. Using the map as the anchor for virtual designs is exactly the right way to go. However, it will take a lot of convincing to get cities to invest in the virtual technologies for the enhancement of their own citizens, as on the surface it appears that the primary use is as spectacle or immersive representation.

That said, my hat’s off to Birmingham, a city that is taking more of a chance than any other I can think of. Certainly, Boston has a ways to go before it adopts virtual (let alone digital) technologies with such enthusiasm.

Posted in city, citygovernment, mediated urbanism, placeofmedia, SecondLife

Located Publicity

Jul25
2008 Leave a Comment Written by egordon

It has been some time since I posted to my blog. This is primarily because I found myself quite busy working on my new book, whose title has changed to “Location Matters,” with some snappy subtitle to bring it all home. What follows is a section from chapter two that describes the concept of located publicity, which is a reversal and adaptation of Raymond Williams well known designation of “mobile privatization.”

Commonly, location aware technologies are associated with mobility or mobile computing. While this association makes good sense, there remains an important distinction. Location aware technologies enable people to be mobile, but mobility, in this sense, is a byproduct of locatedness. Mobility refers to the practice of “computing on the go,” of accessing one’s information regardless of where one is. But this practice is obviously contingent on the ability of a device to be located and connected to a network. Device location is a prerequisite for device mobility; both of which inform the cultural expectation of locatedness. I can only be located if I can locate my data from wherever I am. This may seem like a subtle distinction, but it is actually quite important. Thinking of contemporary digital culture as mobile culture takes away from the more significant effects of location culture. “Computing on the go” is really “computing on the map.” As Ezra Goldman points out, “people are likely as mobile today as they ever were. What’s different is that we’re more accessible and connected when we do move around” (2007, 13). By studying practices of college students and young professionals, Goldman concluded that people do most of their work in one place – whether home or office, and cafés and parks in some rare circumstances. So while “mobile computing” has not yet resulted in mobile work places, it has resulted in a freedom to choose where one will find a connection. The feeling of being connected, more so than the feeling of being mobile, provides the necessary context from which to be productive, both in terms of work and social life.

But in some respects, connectivity works against the freedom implied by mobility. Connection tethers us to information, tangles us in a web, whereas mobility frees us from stagnation, liberates us from social norms. This is precisely why mobility is the industry’s moniker of choice for describing these trends. Indeed, the promise of mobile computing is social freedom, even though in practical terms it ties us to work, family and social life in inconceivable ways (2007, 69). As Paul Saffo, the director for the Institute of the Future observed in 1993, “Heaven is the anytime office. Hell is the everywhere, everytime office” (qtd. in Goldman 2007, 14). So in Summer 2008, when Apple announced an update to its .mac functionality it is no surprise they chose the name MobileMe. Apple has appropriated the appeal of mobility to describe its back-up and synchronization services. “Your Desktop Anywhere” is the slogan. (Notice they do not say “Your Desktop Everywhere.”) MobileMe pushes everything up to a web cloud to enable the rapid synchronization of all Apple devices, promising absolute seamlessness between computer contexts – or, in marketing terms, absolute mobility.
The cultural power of mobility that we see exercised in Apple’s new product is not isolated to handheld devices or cloud computing. Raymond Williams, writing about television in the 1970s coined the term “mobile privatization” to talk about the troubling aspects of mobility. “At most active social levels,” Williams claimed, “people are increasingly living as private small-family units, or, disrupting even that, as private and deliberately self-enclosed individuals, while at the same time there is a quite unprecedented mobility of such restricted privacies” (1983, 187-189). Williams was responding to what he understood as a new context brought about by media ubiquity. The living room, the automobile, even the street, became privatized bubbles of media engagement. Our constant access to broadcast media enabled and encouraged the sense that we were mobile – physically, psychologically, socially and economically. Of course, as broadcast media has given way to networked media, Williams’ lament has been quite useful in understanding the new context of perpetual connection. But it can also be argued that domesticity and individuality are in fact growing more distant from traditionally held understandings of privacy. Private details must be made public for networks to be robust. So it is no longer the case that we are dealing solely with mobile privatization, but instead, we might describe socialization within digital networks as located publicity. We personally locate data, and are personally located by data, and we make and have made the fruits of that labor public to increase the functionality of the network. Privacy is no longer a matter of filtering what sees in, but filtering what peers out.

Posted in citygovernment, civic_engagement, mediated urbanism, mobility, net-locality, placeofmedia

Where is the Where?

May15
2008 Leave a Comment Written by egordon

I just got back from the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame, CA this morning. As someone who attends mostly academic conferences, it was both refreshing and disturbing to spend two days with this group. Refreshing because the group was composed mostly of developers, interested in figuring out how to transform the emerging possibility of location aware into a profitable business (and in some cases, productive social activism). This translated into fast-paced presentations and a perhaps constructed sense of commonality in the group – speakers marched on stage, presented their product and marched off. I took vigorous notes (see my del.icio.us links to the right). But with all that incoming information, I have to say that I was slightly disappointed in the lack of dialogue that took place. There was little effort put into backchannels – short of a meebo chatroom that was hardly used – and there was no time devoted to question and answer. The first few talks on the first day had a few questions from the audience, and there were even microphones positioned in the audience, but by the middle of the first day, that pretense had all but dissolved. So, why at a conference devoted to location-based social networking, was the place largely devoid of digitally enabled social networking? It would have been nice for O’Reilly to practice what it was preaching. Sure, we had a robust wi-fi connection throughout the event. But come on, let us talk to one another, the people in the same space, as easily as we can talk to people in the wide open Internet!

While I learned a lot about what some companies are doing in the “location space,” I didn’t hear a lot about why. I didn’t hear a lot about why location-aware computing is necessary, positive, or tranformative. I heard a lot of, “this is uncharted territory,” but not a lot of, “this is important because…” Let’s face it, I don’t need to have a network of computers aware of my location – but as a result of that awareness it just might transform my awareness of x,y and z. Sure, I have some opinions about this subject, but I want to see the developer community engaging with these questions. Software is not just a product, it’s a tool. Constructed needs will decompose eventually unless they are answering something a bit more fundamental. Location aware technology is transforming what we already do – location and place are already important to our personal and political identities. Developers need to act in response to social practices as opposed to acting by constructing social practices to fit a market niche. Ultimately, the market will be more receptive to the former anyway.

Posted in geography, mediated urbanism, mobility, net-locality, placeofmedia, web 2.0

Urban Spectator

Apr28
2008 2 Comments Written by egordon

For the last several months, I’ve primarily been working on revising my book manuscript. And I finally feel as though the introduction is reflective of the text. I’m posting the first few pages here to solicit thoughts or commentary.

On the corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, there are dozens of people looking at little screens, typing on little keyboards, with plugs extending from their ears. Each of these people is having a different experience, customized through their personal media. The college student with his iPod selects his music to correspond with the weather and time of day; the businessman types an address into his GPS-enabled phone to find his next meeting; and the tourist stares through her mobile phone camera to capture the Empire State Building in the distance. Mediated by little devices, these people are shaping their experiences of the city. Nicholas Negroponte (1995) famously noted that the world of atoms (our bodies) would no longer need to correspond to the world of bits (data) – that physical proximity would cease to be necessary for public life. But as we can see on that street corner, the world of atoms and the world of bits come together in the city. There is little distinction between the practices of everyday life, and the technologies that enable those practices. The soundtrack, the map, the photograph: these artifacts of the everyday, are constructive of environments. The practices one adopts to navigate and comprehend any space can never be seen as separate from that space.
New communication technologies complicate accepted notions of urban life, including the nature and scope of public interactions and the corresponding design of the built environment. Can one truly be engaged in public space if they are looking through a viewfinder or tapping sweet nothings with their thumbs on tiny keyboards? Can the city, as an entity, continue to matter when digital networks enable public gathering without requiring the public to gather in physical space? The answer to all of these questions is a resounding “yes.” The modern American city has never been bereft of these complications – from the hand held camera at the end of the nineteenth century to the mobile phone at the end of the twentieth, the city has always been a mediated construct. The city enters into the cultural imaginary as a hodgepodge of disconnected signifiers, often organized by the technologies that produce them. When Kodak introduced its hand camera in 1888, it provided a tool for people to record and retain experiences through visual reproduction. Photographers produced images and, even more importantly, possessed them and organized them to manage their memories. Likewise, when Google introduced its mapping software in 2004, it enabled people to record and retain experiences by marking places on a map, keeping notes and connecting images. Google Maps has been implemented as both a wayfinding tool and a personal organizing tool; through its simple interface, it serves to manage an individual’s understanding of space. Communication technologies certainly produce new information about the world; but they also have the facility to organize that information through the literal or metaphorical storage capacity of photo albums or archives. They provide the spectator the unique opportunity to at once experience space and possess its traces.

These traces, and their inherent possibilities, have substantially altered the nature of media and urban practices in the twentieth century. I call the spectatorship structured around the desire for possessing these traces, possessive spectatorship – a way of looking that incorporates immediate experience with the desire for subsequent possession. And while this phenomenon has had implications for the modern city in general, in this book I describe how it has been uniquely important for the American city. What’s distinctive about the American context is the timing in which the city becomes central to the cultural imaginary. The American city grew up in parallel to the technologies that enabled its possession. Not until the late nineteenth century, corresponding to the introduction of the handheld camera and the cinematograph, did the American city take on a meaning outside of mere urban concentration. Prior to that time, while cities were of course present in America, they did not present themselves as unique constructs. I argue that emerging media practices transformed urban practices by naturalizing the notion that individual spectators could not only see the city, but also possess it. And most importantly, I argue that this spectatorship altered the material shape of the city as urban plans were drafted to meet the expectations of a spectator eager to take control of the city’s assembly.

Posted in geography, mediated urbanism, placeofmedia

Hub2 on Smart City

Apr05
2008 Leave a Comment Written by egordon

This week, I was interviewed by Carol Colletta of Smart City Radio to discuss Hub2.  You can listen to the radio program here.

Posted in boston, citygovernment, civic_engagement, Community_Informatics, hub2

Urban Communication Meeting

Mar29
2008 Leave a Comment Written by egordon

UCF Logo

So I’m down in DC this weekend, not for the cherry blossom festival (although the cherry blossoms are quite nice), but for a board meeting of the Urban Communications Foundation (UCF). We’re meeting today primarily to discuss the nature of the “communicative city.” The question is: what does it mean for a city to excel at communication? Digital infrastructure? Innovative use of public spaces? Safety? Neighborhood cohesiveness, perhaps? The question is important because the foundation is keen on creating another framework by which to judge urban health and prosperity, beyond the typical economic factors. Upon first blush, the concept is nebulous. But with further contemplation, it is seems perfectly logical to insert communication in amongst issues of design, flows, and markets. Of course, communication is implicit to those issues, but by making it explicit, it potentially foregrounds the humanness of each. Designs, flows and markets, while operating within their own internal logics, have an external logic of communication. There is a grammar and syntax to each.

So, what does this all mean? What can an organization with a little bit of money do to alter the course of urbanism? It can lobby local or federal governments to promote healthy communication in cities; it can fund innovative, interdisciplinary research, that can translate to policy white papers; it can promote a certain brand of scholarship through establishing a journal or web presence. It’s an interesting dilemma, really. There is lots of great work being done on issues of urban communication, urban semiotics, etc., but there is a great need for an umbrella organization to mobilize that intellectual work towards real changes in political or cultural priorities. There are some great organizations that currently exist: most notable is the Project for Public Places. They promote place-based growth in cities. Their Great Cities initiative is making great strides to work with actual communities in promoting a certain philosophy of development. The UCF is working towards similar ends; it’s really a matter of how it can compliment work already being done.

Posted in citygovernment, civic_engagement, Community_Informatics, place, placeofmedia

Industrialization of Information

Mar06
2008 Leave a Comment Written by egordon

This recent article in Wired lays out the fascinating phenomenon of the information industry. It describes the massive new server farms cropping up in Oregon to house the petabytes of information for Google (and others) to keep up with the task of copying the rapidly expanding Internet. The article points out that the main problem facing companies like Google that depend on their ability to centralize the Network is not computing speeds or storage, but rather energy consumption. These server farms require so much energy to run that they are likely first to run out of electricity than storage space.

The simple problem of energy consumption leads to a fascinating repetition of industrial growth patterns. Big industry is going to seek out growth areas that supply cheap and easy access to energy. Just as industrial waterfronts are giving way to luxury condominiums, they might soon revert back to industrial warehouses filled with thousands of interlinked CPUs. Perhaps we can expect a new industrial revolution in the near future, with an equally powerful potential to spew noxious fumes and deplete natural resources.

Posted in geography, network, placeofmedia

Mobile Places

Jan08
2008 1 Comment Written by egordon

I’ve had this question running through my head for some time now: what’s the connection between mobile computing (i.e. cell phones, PDAs, GPS, etc.) and local computing (neighborhood networking, digital civic forums, etc.)? On first blush, these are entirely separate phenomena. But, the more I consider it, the more I see them as parallel. What is truly significant about mobile computing is, in fact, not computing. What is peculiar about mobile computing, is that the computational device is far less important than what the device enables. The device enables people to move without having to carry along their data. As more and more of our data is stored on placeless networks (from Google to Facebook to Flickr), individuals are more free to move from place to place, with the capability of accessing their data wherever they happen to be. But how does that alter the concept of neighborhood networking? Well, if people no longer need to be tied to their data, we might be able to say the same about places. Places are becoming less dependent on spaces. Data about a place, the stuff that enables a meaningful engagement with space, is also stored in a placeless network and accessible from anywhere. This is not to suggest that space no longer matters; only that space is annotated by mobility. The discussions that take place in online forums, the commentary left by bloggers, the reviews of a local restaurant – all of this data, accessible to the individual from multiple locations, thickens engagement with place.

So I’m trying to say something like this: mobility, a cultural phenomenon enabled by new technologies, is transforming how we think about our cities and local places. While it is by no means pervasive, it suggests a promising model for local and community politics.

Posted in city, citygovernment, Community_Informatics, mediated urbanism, mobility, net-locality, place, placeofmedia

Urban Informatics

Jan04
2008 Leave a Comment Written by egordon

Journal coverA special issue of Information, Communication and Society just hit the stands and it’s worth a mention here. Yeah, yeah, I have an article in it, but more importantly, it’s a fantastic collection of work on the topic of “Urban Informatics: Software, Cities, and the New Cartographies of Knowing Capitalism.” Here’s the table of contents:

  • Mike Crang & Stephen Graham, “Sentient Cities: ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space”
  • Rowland Atkinson & Paul Willis, “Charting the ludochrome: the mediation of urban and simulated space and the rise of the flaneur electronique”
  • David Beer, “Tune out: music, soundscapes and the urban mise-en-scene”
  • Michael Hardey, “The city in the age of Web 2.0: a new synergistic relationship between place and people”
  • Eric Gordon, “Mapping digital networks: from cyberspace to Google”
  • Simon Parker, Emma Uprchard & Roger Burrows, “Class places and place classes: geodemographics and the spatialization of class”
  • Andy C. Pratt, Rosalind Gill & Volker Spelthann, “Work and the city in the e-society: a critical investigation of the sociospatially situated character of economic production in the digital content industries in the UK”
  • Nicholas Pleace, “Workless people and the surveillant mashups: social policy and data sharing in the UK”

Unfortunately, IC&S is not available online, so these articles might remain obscure to those without access to a research library. Seems a shame, especially considering the theme of the issue. We might be closer than ever to urban data, but academic knowledge remains quite distant.

That aside, it’s a privilege to have my work included in this excellent volume. And as I read through the journal and familiarize myself with the various projects, I hope that the issue sparks a greater debate about the politics of urban informatics – its potential benefits to democratic engagement and its potential risks to personal privacy and freedoms.

Posted in maps, Media Theory, mediated urbanism, mobility, placeofmedia, surveillance, ubiquitous computing, web 2.0

Situated Technologies

Dec10
2007 Leave a Comment Written by egordon

Situated TechnolgiesThe reception for the new Situated Technologies pamphlet series is taking place this Friday at the Urban Center in New York City. I really wish I could be there, but with the end of the semester fast approaching, I won’t be able to get away. This looks to be an amazing pamphlet series that will surely spark some necessary connections between urbanists, architects, technologists and media producers/critics.

BTW, the first release by Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard, entitled Urban Computing and Its Discontents is available here as a free download.

Posted in augmented_place, iDC, mediated urbanism, mixed_reality, mobility, placeofmedia, ubiquitous computing
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