As a follow up on Blum’s article on how digital media might enhance our urban experience, adding social layers to it, I found the Museum of the phantom city  project by Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder as they offer people to walk in the city adding layers  to it -not functional ones, but imaginary ones:

“iPhones and mobile devices are undoubtedly transforming the way we navigate the city. Apps like Google Maps and Urbanspoon put an unprecedented amount of information about the city at one’s fingertips. Most of these programs, however, are purely functional in purpose: they seek to clarify the city, to demystify and make it more legible. In contrast, we are interested in how mobile media can deepen and intensify urban experience, perhaps even introducing new pleasures and mysteries of the metropolitan condition. We are inspired by the work of artists and urbanists like Janet Cardiff and the Situationists, who strived to make ordinary landscapes appear unfamiliar and strange again. How might mobile media be used to reveal dimensions of the city veiled from everyday experience – to manufacture an augmented reality? ”

Playing with the affordances of the mobile media: using our Iphone to navigate the city, but not only a tool for “simplifying”, making the city manageable, but also for complexifying, adding imaginary layers and opening up questions for us.

I also like the idea of using this application as a “probe” for users and for architects and planners to reflect on the city.

I’m currently not in NY but I’ll try when I’m back. If you’re in NY, I’ll be curious to know about your experience.

I arrived nearly 2 weeks in London and was planning to get a phone fast but realized one needed a bank account to have one, and this takes some time.

I could have taken a pay-on-the-go phone, but thought, “better just to wait, I can survive a few days without a cell phone”. I can, this is confirmed but along the way I also realized how my perception of the city changed. When I go and meet people, I always have this worry that I might be late, or they might and they won’t be able to call me. I could go to a public phone but it is as if the phone booths don’t seem efficient anymore.

I went to this meeting in Hampstead and I got lost and was late. There were no public phones around. I had a few seconds of frustration and then I thought, “I’ll get there when I get there”… I was 20 minutes late and apologized. It was OK but I don’t think the person I was meeting could really picture someone without a cell phone.

What does all this tell us? How connected, technology dependent we are. I guess so. It also shows the materiality of these connections - cell phone, public phones, etc. More deeply I realized that I had this mix feeling of being alone, not being able to talk or text anyone, and a sense of freedom. Text messages are often these tags we send to each other, sharing our perceptions, waving at the other. They create a second layer of space. Yet, once this habit is put on hold, there’s a sense of freedom, even maybe adventure to walk in the city “on your own”. From being “disconnected” I became “unconnected”.

al

My friend Nicole was in Paris for the first time and sent me this clip (mostly audio though) that she recorded in a taxi.

She wrote “It was on a late Monday night and the streets of Paris were very quiet.” and she tried to capture “the sounds from that night in the cab, including the taxi headlights blinking, an ambulance, 2 really great French songs which I heard for the first time” and a conversation between the taxi driver and her friend.

I thought it was interesting how her perception of the city was linked to her experience of the taxi, her emotions while listening this song… It was even more meaningful to me as the first song, “Ma ligne de chance” is a song I love in one of my favorite movies - Pierrot Le Fou from Godard. It was interesting that she sent me the link which is recording of her “perceptions” to which she added a comment to give us some content and describe the emotions associated with the perceptions (in fact perceptions are in some ways never neutral, aren’t they?) and to me it became an evocative object because I knew the song, the sound of the Paris ambulances (so different than the NY or London ones). I’m just wondering how she would have shared it with us if she had had only words — It’s also interesting that she “needed” the title “Sounds of the city” and the commentary to make this clip meaningful… to me, maybe to her.

Here is an interesting essay by one of our blog members, Laura Forlano (published on Urban Omnibus) and how work and work practices have evolved and its implications for space, and for the design of cities.

http://urbanomnibus.net/2009/06/work-and-the-open-source-city/

Two points that I’d like to highlight in Laura’s article:

1.Laura highlights the tension between “the ways in which these emergent forms of organizing are deeply embedded in physical places and, at the same time, enabled by new technologies such as laptops and wireless networks.” This leads me to the more general discussion that is taking place in organizational studies on the role of materiality (boundary objects, space, etc.). It also highlights the point discussed at length on this blog on the merging, intertwining between physical and virtual space. Last, it is important to note that these new forms of organizing, sometimes described as virtual forms of organizing are not immaterial - just think of the laptops and the wireless networks!

2.  I found the anecdote on Laura’s experience in Japan really interesting. First of all, it reminded me of some of Pico Iyer’s descriptions of his life in Japan. Second, and more importantly, it leads to the question of the “nature” of technology. Even if we agree on the socially constructed nature of technology, we often still assume its cultural neutrality. Here as my work on videoconference also led me to discover (but unfortunately not investigage further) technology can be seen as a cultural lens - as it has been shown to be a social lens. This of course raises issues for researchers… all this work on informal interactions and innovation and creativity, and the role of space, does it make sense in all societies? in all cultures? what does it mean for global organizations?

thanks Laura for this great essay which raises so many important questions,

al

Hi,

just read an interesting article, My Living Room, in the Urban Omnibus by James Reeves, writer and designer.

James Reeves describes his perception of New York as he has just moved to Helsinski and that leads him to reflect of what makes him feel comfortable in New York and what is different in Helsinki. He highlights how cities, places in general (and our perceptions of it) emerge from structures, material dimensions (size of the blocks, street labels, stoops vs. court yards, etc.) but also social affordances - which includes mores and practices: cheap food, stores open all night long, etc. in NY which allows a certain life style and a certain type of interactions, and defines your personal space in a different way - your apartment is not the walls of the space you rent, but it extends out in the street. It reminded me my friend John Klima who always told me that “the city was his kitchen”.

Reeves notes:

“There are probably just as many people who prefer a city like Helsinki over New York, so perhaps it’s easier to tackle the question from another direction: is a personal connection to one’s environment simply a function of time and familiarity, or is it possible to arrive in a new city and, after taking a look at its buildings and establishments, immediately have a gut feeling that says, “Yes, this feels good. I could get comfortable here”? ”

I guess this article also touches me as I’m moving soon from NY after 3 1/2 years and my walks through Brooklyn and Manhattan take another dimension. I could empathize with his feelings as he’s reflecting on the places he knows, his routines as I feel the same when I go down Smith Street in the morning, stop by at Victory to get my coffee, or bike up to Prospect Park. Like Reeves I feel like I might not have taken enough photos and I do take some. My next stop is not Helsinski, but London - more exciting than Helsinksi many might say. I’ll tell you more in a couple of months.

I guess these issues can also be linked to the different ways people experience online spaces. We had lunch with two friends yesterday and we were discussing social networking platforms and other online tools. Two of us did not feel comfortable with facebooks and the type of interactions it supported but we loved skype which we perceived as a one-on-one communication tool which allowed us both fast (”peripheral” in some ways in the sense of “peripheral vision”)  and long (in-depth) interactions with people we know and like… More to be discussed here.

al

Austin just sent me a very nice story about robots, people and space in New York city. Kacie wrote:”In New York, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.”Read the rest of the story and/ or watch video to know what happened to the Tweenbots. I think it raises interesting issues about space and interactions…http://www.tweenbots.com/

Thanks to one of my students,  I read this recent NY Time article reviewing a book by Andrew Lih, The Wikipedian Revolution and compares Wikepedia to a city (referring also to the History in the City by Lewis Mumford):

“[…] Like a city, Wikipedia is greater than the sum of its parts; for example, the random encounters there are often more compelling than the articles themselves. The search for information resembles a walk through an overbuilt quarter of an ancient capital. You circle around topics on a path that appears to be shifting. Ultimately the journey ends and you are not sure how you got there.Wikipedia articles can send you down unlikely alleyways in two ways. First, there are links that direct you to the same article in another language, a trippy experience that sheds light on a culture. Spend time in German Wikipedia, and you find jazz musicians likeThelonious Monk with articles far longer than those written in their own language; you may also come upon odd areas of deep interest, like “pecherei,” the extraction of resin from trees — no English equivalent provided — and 15 different tools needed for the job.Second, at the bottom of most articles, there are the categories — impromptu neighborhoods, or perhaps civic organizations, that bind together the virtual encyclopedia. […] 

Mumford elaborates: “Even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this ability to attract nonresidents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its essential dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider.”The marvel of Wikipedia — and cities — is that all the intercourse and spiritual stimulus don’t make living there impossible. Rather, they are exactly what makes living there possible.  […]”

Of course I found the comparison between the virtual space of Wikipedia and the physical space of a city a compelling comparison. I also found interesting the comments on the role of social practices (trust, behavior, etc.) which once again highlights the discussion we had about the intertwining between social and physical spaces. Last, I could not be insensitive to the description of the journey through Wikipedia similar to a journey through a maze!

al

Cassim  Shepard wrote about maps on the Urban Omnibus yesterday: 

” The map provides one of the principal governing metaphors for how we organize and navigate information. According to New York Times technology reporter John Markoff,

With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map… As this metaphor takes over, it will change the way we behave, the way we think and the way we find our way around new neighborhoods.

Understanding where we are in the world usually involves a singular conception of location. Phrases like “from point A to point B” reflect the common view: you are either here or there. And if you are in between, you are at a single point in between. Mapping fields of action is far more complex – activity is zonal, concentrations are unequal – and the two together often lead to muddy and busy if not downright confusing results. “

I could not help thinking of the discussions on this blog and how one might be involved in several conversations online (through email, chat, facebook, posting on a blog etc.) and thus involved in many different “spaces” while sitting at “point A” - whether it’s your home, a coffee shop, your office or an airport. This notion of space and geography is indeed challenged by the current development of the technology…

As noted by Cassim “One of the many gaps in the existing literature that STEW-MAP seeks to redress is that notion that no two bodies occupy the same space. Common sense tells us otherwise, yet the most popular and accessible forms of geographic information (note the google map on your right) still make it easier to drop a pin than to draw a polygon. ”

Questions discussed with Yasmine Abbas   on physical, digital and mental mobility: e.g. one can be physically in a place but longing for another place, or Turkle’s work on people who feel that they are more present to the MUDs they are involved in than to the physical space in which they sit while playing, are relevant to these issues.

There is also a second of issues highlighted by Cassim linked to our definition of the geography of the city (cf. Latour’s book on Paris Invisible): there is the level of the streets but there are many other layers, spatial but also of practices involved in the making of the city that we are often not aware of.

In the spirit of Paris Invisible (see February 6), here is another attempt to provide a “thick description” of interactions in public spaces.

A while ago, Yasmine posted about an interesting project “Touching the city”  by her friend Alexandra Ginsberg is showing her work done in collaboration with Oliver Froome-Lewis (see June 19, 2007):

Touching the City is a design research unit that explores the ways in which we interact with the city. Observing the private life of small public spaces, we consider and exchange views on their potential and make proposals for their transformation.

While reading Yasmine’s post on the situationists and the “psychogeographical” maps (February 2nd), it reminded me of a book by Latour, Paris, Invisible City.

In this book which mixes photos and texts, Latour takes on a journey beyond “Paris, the City of Light”, reminding us how beneath the surface, there are always much more going on and highlighting the complex networks of people, artifacts and socio-material practices that “make” a city. This is a great exercise of “thick description” (Geertz, 1973).  It reminds me also of Becker’s description of art worlds (1982): Artistic work, like all human activities, depends on the joint activity of a number of people. Producing an artwork requires more than just an artist; it requires an idea, a manufacturing/distributing network, time, money, “support” apparatus, an audience, critics, training, and civil order (Becker, 1982).

In some ways, Aileen and I are also aiming to develop a “thick description”, a good understanding of  the relationships between physical spaces, virtual spaces and interactions. (more…)