receiver magazine      #21 | Space is the place!

Martijn de Waal is a writer, curator, consultant and researcher based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Together with Michiel de Lange, he co-founded and organised “The Mobile City”, a conference on locative and mobile media and how they relate to urban culture and questions of identity. The conference took place in spring 2008, in collaboration with the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. De Waal is currently working on a dissertation on new media and urban culture in the department of philosophy at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His receiver contribution introduces you to “MySpace urbanism” – the condition of cities saturated with media networks, where physical space is intersected with layers of personalised, spatial orientation.

Website: http://www.martijndewaal.nl

Website: http://www.themobilecity.nl

Illustration by Dennis Schuster ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

“Great cities are not like towns, only larger”, urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs observed almost half a century ago. But what then is it that makes a city into a city? Now that telecom operators, handset builders, and media companies are churning out new media technologies that promise to drastically alter our sense of place, this question has once again become very urgent. Whether we call them locative media, contextual media, or placed-based media, these technologies promise to change the way we interact with our surroundings. Let me call this new way of experiencing the city “MySpace urbanism”.

If you ask urbanists, city planners, architects, economists, sociologists or urban anthropologists about the essence of a city, you will probably get as many different answers as there are disciplines concerned with the study of the urban fabric; each answer somewhat cloaked in its own jargon. Yet, if you closely observe what scientists in all these different domains have written about the city, two common themes usually float to the surface: heterogeneity and density. The city is a place that brings together people with a broad variety of different backgrounds, in a heavily built up area. People with different ethnicities, lifestyles, professions, economic status, outlook, religion etc, all find themselves cramped together in a few square kilometres.

It is exactly this diversity that leads to what has often been called “urban culture”. Even in the 1920s a scholar of the famous Chicago School of Sociology observed that “it is characteristic of city life that all sorts of people meet and mingle together who never fully comprehend one another. The anarchist and the club man, the priest and the Levite, the actor and the missionary who touch elbows on the street still live in totally different worlds.” Yet, ideally, the city is not a mere collection of “urban villages”; isolated enclaves of the like-minded. What makes a city a city is that these people with different backgrounds and identities observe each other, interact and confront one another. This process leads to a cross-fertilization of ideas and makes the city a stronghold of innovation, economists might point out. This is what leads to the creation of new lifestyles and identities, anthropologists would say. And sociologists would argue that this very eclectic mix of lifestyles downplays the effect of social control that has characterised traditional societies.

At the same time, some philosophers claim, the city also provides a spatial composition that enables all these different lifestyles to live together in spite of all their differences. The city, in their view, is a stage on which people display their identity, often unconsciously, just by acting out their everyday life. Everyone is a performer and an observer at the same time, constantly making comparisons; are those people behaving in such and such a way like us? Or do they belong to other social groups? “We identify ourselves socially by continuously comparing ‘us’ with ‘them’”, writes Dutch sociologist Talja Blokland. This process has different consequences: it helps us to define who we are ourselves, mixing and matching, rejecting and dismissing elements of lifestyles that we see around us. At the same time, this process could also produce a certain form of trust between citizens, even if they do not belong to the exact same lifestyle group. Some theorists have called this “public familiarity”: we’ve become familiar with unknown others in public places. “The trust of a city street”, wrote Jane Jacobs, “is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts”. Finally, this process could also produce a political community: we all share the same city space, so whether we like it or not, we just have to deal with each other.

Many of these accounts describe idealised (some would say nostalgic) versions of the city, and often refer to cities of a bygone era. It is the boulevards lined with cafés and pedestrian passageways of Walter Benjamin’s Paris that is often evoked in these theories. Therefore, we could label these ideas “BLVD-urbanism” – referring to the broad boulevards that formed the heart of public life in late nineteenth century Paris.

Over the last few decades, quite a few critics have pointed out that many of our cities have stopped to function as such, due to several different causes. Suburbanization and gentrification have isolated different lifestyles in their own enclaves, limiting the nodal contact points between different groups. The rhythms of our daily lives run less synchronously as well, so that haphazard meetings between different people become less likely. We drive around in automobiles to commercialised “non-places” such as shopping centres rather than strolling around public piazzas. Yet, in many accounts the ideal remains: the city as a site of physical exchange and interaction between citizens, that fosters different communities, enriches the life of the individual, leads to innovation and creates what Dutch philosopher René Boomkens has called, a “community of strangers”.



The city of the digital natives

Most of these theories see the city as a purely physical space. So, how do these theories hold up in the era in which the city is saturated with media networks such as, to name just a few, GPS, WIFI, UMTS, HSDPA, GSM? Now that mobile and locative media change our interaction with our environment, no longer do we just experience the physical city itself: we SMS and chat with distant friends who in our minds are near at hand. We can inquire about our location, or leave virtual graffiti for those who’ll pass by after us. We can withdraw our attention from our actual surroundings, and into the mediated spaces of these networks. Or we can actively engage with our surroundings through the screens of our mobile phones.

Recently, a range of discussions have arisen around these themes. Let’s have a look at some of the points that were brought up. One of the central tropes of BLVD-urbanism is the idea of the city as a stage for comparison, interaction, confrontation and innovation. As Mark Shepard (http://www.lulu.com/content/1554599), Danah Boyd (http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/18-socializing-digitally) and others have pointed out (in, amongst other places, this journal), at least for the generation of “digital natives”, the urban stage has now broadened extensively with the rise of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Livejournal, Cyworld or QQ. There, identities are displayed through profiles, pictures and widgets, in two different ways. On the one hand, these webpages are performance-sites in the literal sense: constructing a profile is akin to putting up a carefully directed stage act, or dressing up for a night on the town. Which picture, which catchy status-update, which profile description matches best the image that the user wants to portray to the outside world?

On the other hand, new iterations of these sites can also display the unconscious rhythms of everyday (urban) life. It is easy now to add widgets to your profile that automatically show the last song that you listened to on your iPod, the last article you read, the last bookmark you made on Del.icio.us, and even your exact whereabouts in the real city. Sites such as Plazes or Bliin let users update each other about their physical location in the city. The places that one visits – tracked and broadcasted by mobile phones with GPS receivers – become automatically a part of one’s performed identity, both in the actual city as well as on-line.

On a personal level, these developments mean that we can continuously receive “status updates” from our friends. Adam Greenfield uses the term “the big now” to describe this experience (http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/the-long-here-and-the-big-now/). Through services like Twitter or Facebook on our mobile phones, we are in continuous touch with those we feel close to, even if they are on the other side of the planet. “For me, at least”, Greenfield writes, “it’s been difficult to see my New York through quite the same eyes, when every time I get my phone out I feel the entire planet’s deeper rhythms working themselves out.”

On a higher level, something interesting is going on as well: all these tracks and traces that we are leaving behind can be aggregated. These aggregates can be visualised and projected on to maps and portray a collective culture of what is happening where in the city. MIT’s Senseable City Lab ( http://senseable.mit.edu/ ) and Citysense ( http://www.citysense.com/home.php ) are early experiments with these new cultural forms that show us the city and its collective rhythms in new and possibly interesting ways.

“Today’s intelligent maps don’t just represent spatial relationships”, Kazys Varnelis has written ( http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/thinktank/tt_varnelis.html ).

“They reveal conditions in the city that were previously hidden in spreadsheets and databases.” They are not just maps in the old sense. They show us real time representations of events in the city, ranging from a traffic jam, to a gathering of our friends in a neighbourhood bar. We can even adjust our own behaviour in the city on these maps.

We could also use these maps to collaborate on assembling information about the city. During a lecture at a conference we organised in Rotterdam, artist Christian Nold showed the audience a collective map of nearby gardens in Los Angeles that featured trees with low-hanging, ripe fruit, there for the taker (http://www.softhook.com/). Other wiki-style maps are currently emerging that can be updated right from a mobile device, varying from restaurant reviews and personal memories, to local news. This means that geographic visualisations – not necessarily the Cartesian grids that are the basis of most of our current on-line maps – are becoming an important interface through which we experience the city.

The utopian promises of these technologies go one step further. When social networks, and the traces we leave in the city are combined, mobile media might start to work as an enhanced “city guide”. Just like Amazon might recommend to you a book based on aggregated purchase patterns, mobile media might start recommending new places to visit and people to meet. The media will “filter” the city for its users and guide them to the places they would like to go. They could even help us to engage in new communities, or forge “smart mobs” – spontaneous get-togethers in real space with unknown others to achieve a common goal.

Adam Greenfield has called this a shift from “browsing”, where we just wander around in the city, to “searching”, where we are more actively looking for a particular area, function or person in the city. The buzzword language of the dotcom-industry takes the metaphor even one step further. We are not just searching for what we already know, industry pundits argue. These services will help us to “discover” places and experiences that we didn’t even know we were looking for.



The city: OurSpace

Of course it’s easy to be critical about these utopian visions, often put forward by marketing departments of commercial companies that want to sell these services, and certainly not all of these features will become popular. Yet the general direction of these developments is taking shape right now, and could be labelled MySpace urbanism.

First, this term refers to the role of social networks, on-line profiles and tracking sites, as spaces where we project our identities, through which we connect and which could lead to interaction in the real city. Secondly, the term “myspace” also implies that these media can help us to personalise the city: to focus only on the bits and connections that are of specific interest to us personally, to remake the city in our own image.

In this way, locative and mobile media promise to make the experience of the city more pleasant, more efficient, more exciting and more manageable. Yet there are also critics who point out that these exact developments endanger one of the central concepts in BLVD-urbanism: serendipity. Serendipity means that it is never completely predictable what or who you may encounter in the city, nor are these unexpected encounters avoidable. It is exactly these inevitable confrontations with unknown others, this experience of “social seams”, that are important: through these confrontations trust is built up, a community is forged, and (cultural) innovation is achieved. But when you start “searching” the city, rather than “browsing” around, this quality might get lost. Do these critics have a point? They might. In the most extreme negative scenario, public space might evaporate. People will use locative media to filter out serendipitous encounters as much as possible. This is a very defensive interpretation of MySpace urbanism, where people use technology to demarcate their space and refuse to let anyone else in – “this is my space, now get out!”.

But there is also another way in which MySpace urbanism can be interpreted. A space becomes “yours” when you engage with it. Not to claim it as solely yours, but to actively take some responsibility for that space; when you are actively (and collectively) taking part in its shaping. The collective maps mentioned above can be used as platforms for exchange and confrontation. They could even help to make visible collective rhythms that until now have gone unnoticed.

In reality, we will probably see a combination of both scenarios. People who use mobile media often find themselves shifting between different modes of being in the city. Sometimes they use their technology to withdraw from their actual surroundings, to form a private bubble, to demarcate TheirSpace: at other times, they will use the same devices for more public acts. They will engage in the space around them, and participate in OurSpace.

This article was written for receiver

Contact: Martijn De Waal