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

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

to follow up on Yasmine’s post about distributed spaces (April 5th) and her idea of “simultaneous happenings in various locations”

and just a cool project aiming to create a sense of place through sound

I do think that the somewhat relaxed sense that developed in me in the exhibit seemed related to a sense of being in a community as well as a space. People at the show could post to the blog, the words moving through the visual area in a rhythmic fashion, the sound of voices in the background. It was like being able to work or just be, with a sense of people around you whom you could consult when you wanted to, but whose voices and words were accessible and connecting. Also the way the blog is written is welcoming.
Lynne Henderson

Je m’appelle Kelechi et j’habite a Nouveau York

Aha m bu Kelechi. E bi’m na New York

My name is Kelechi and I live in New York

oluwa ti se te ni, e je kia gbadun dada

Kelechi and Tosin

How to conserve cultural identity through the recording of disappearing languages?

Language is a crucial symbol of cultural identity as well as one of its crucial elements. Yet, there are hundreds of languages which are disappearing as young people leave their villages.

“Of the world’s 7,000 languages, 40 percent are on their way to extinction, with the last fluent speaker of a language dying once every two weeks.”

Two linguists, K. David Harrison and Greg Anderson,aim to stop this disappearition by documenting all these endangered languages. Their project is the topic of a documentary, The Linguists, which is discussed in a Seed’s article.Not only do they travel around the world recording languages in remote areas but they also provide communities with tools to keep trace of their language. Technology becomes a tool to preserve identity and a sense of community. Indeed, it’s not only about recording - keeping a trace - but it’s also about sharing and building relationship:

” The tech tools of recent decades — like text messaging, web pages, chat rooms, and YouTube — are finding use among speakers of indigenous languages, says Anderson. Margaret Noori, a colleague of Anderson’s and a professor of literature and linguistics at the University of Michigan, is part of a network of Native American Ojibwe speakers who have Facebook networks, a website (Ojibwe.net) with easy-to-download language lessons, and who share Ojibwe words with each other using the Zephyr application for iPhone.”

Harrison and Anderson’s project  reminded me of  an article I read a few months ago in the New York Times on an academy in Western India, where students in their early 20’s are documenting oral languages which are disappearing (in that case by writing them down, making dictionaries of languages which have never been traced before).

“If a community has a strong sense of identity and a sense of pride in that identity, it wants to survive and thrive,” Mr. Devy (the founder of this project) said. “The new economy is important. The old culture is equally important.”

It made me think of Bernadette, the refugee from Rwanda living in Denmark that Yasmine met. She was afraid of loosing her language, and her identity. This reminds us of how language shapes our identity, our sense of home and to a certain extent our personal geography.

al

Post-it notes for neighbors: post-it notes to share knowledge and build a sense of community

I’ve just read about an interesting project Post-it-notes-for-neighbors by Cathy Chang, an artist, designer and urban planner on the Urban Omnibus.

Cathy Chang noticed that people use public spaces to post information to share with others. She also noticed that people don’t know each other (in the line of the Bowling alone argument of Putnam).

Starting from the statement:

“Residents are brimming with local knowledge, from the trivial to the empowering: the best slice of pizza, the nearest place to donate clothes, the latest news on the power outage, the lowdown on yesterday’s community board meeting. All of these fragments of local information are dispersed amongst a population within a defined area, and lots of people would benefit from the knowledge and resources of others“, Cathy Chang asks:

“For one, how can our public spaces be better places for sharing information? How can we harness the collective knowledge of a neighborhood?”

To explore this question, she created a project “I lived” where post-it notes to fill in where posted on different windows of stores in Carroll Garden and Cobble Hill where people tell about how long they’ve been living in a neighborhood and how much they pay for their place.

I like this project which again is an attempt to “make things visible” - information about people’s private lives. More generally, it’s about information sharing and building a sense of community in a physical space - a neighborhood. Reading about it I could not help thinking of my study of public online forums on knowledge management…

Last, it’s about creating this sense of community through messages, post-it notes, stuck on public spaces.

al

Hi,

for those of you in New York, two of our contributors, Bruno Latour and Natalie Jereminjenko are giving talks this week and next week in New York.

- Bruno Latour gives a talk “Globalization: Which Globe? Which Politics?”Thursday, February 5, 2009. Rennert Hall, the Kraft Center, 6:15pmFind out more about the event online here:http://www.heymancenter.org/events.php?id=117

- Tuesday, February 10, 2009, 6:30 – 8:30pm, Natalie Jereminjenko will moderate a discussion on Light Patterns: A Forum on the Design Challenges of Urban Ecology and Biodiversity at Van Alen Institute. More at http://www.vanalen.org/html/02_021009_FlightPatterns.php

If you have any events to share with us - in New York, but not only in New York, please do so.Also if you go to these events, please share your thoughts with us.al

Marc Hansen suggested me to look up Sprawling places by David Kolb.

There is a book and a website: http://www.dkolb.org/sprawlingplaces/index.html. I’ve started exploring the online version of the book and there are many interesting ideas, photos and narratives.

The main questions addressed in the book are: “Are contemporary places as bad as some critics claim? Are we building “non-places”? Are we imprisoned in a universal Disneyland?”

Kolb argues against some of the current criticisms which describe “contemporary places as inauthentic or unreal or totally commodified”. He argues that instead of just criticizing current places, one should try to understand the process and looking for new possibilities (e.g.  Do our new kinds of places make room for new kinds of community?).

I’ll post more tomorrow on the specific issues of virtual space and what Kolb calls “social grammars”.

Thanks Mark for a very interesting reference. If you have time to share more thoughts with us on Kolb’s work, or more references, please do so.
al

Here is an exhibition (Fondation Cartier, Paris, http://fondation.cartier.com/index.php?lang=en&p=2&c=15&linkid=15) I read about a month ago or so. It came back to my mind while reading Yasmine’s quote. Two of our blog’s contributors, Marc Hansen and Ben Rubin have contributed to it.

Native LandStop EjectNov. 21, 2008 > March 15, 2009

Raymond Depardon and I both came around to this same question: what is left of this world, of our native land, of the history of what so far is the only habitable planet?” Paul VirilioWhile the world has reached a critical moment in its history, where the environment conditions what humans do and what they will become, the exhibition Native Land, Stop Eject proposes a reflection on the notions of being rooted and uprooted, as well as related questions of identity. Whereas Raymond Depardon gives a voice to those who wish to live on their land but are threatened with exile, Paul Virilio examines and challenges the very idea of sedentariness in the face of the unprecedented migrations taking place in the contemporary world. Paul Virilio´s concepts are given form in a design by the artists and architeDiller Scofidio + Renfro, as well as Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan, and Ben Rubin. The exhibition is, therefore, a confrontation. It is at once a contradictory and complementary dialogue between filmmaker and photographer, Raymond Depardon, and urbanist and philosopher, Paul Virilio. Depardon´s work has often explored native lands, and, particularly, the world of farmers, giving value to speaking and listening. His capacity to combine both the political and the poetic is clear to anyone familiar with his work. Through his writing, Paul Virilio has spent much of his time working on notions of speed, exodus, the disappearance of geographic space, and the pollution of distances.

Two quotes that illustrate the dialogue:

“Let us listen to these people, be they Chipaya, Yanomami, or Afar. Let us listen to these people and give them a chance to speak, so we can hear them express themselves in their language, with their own way of speaking, their own facial expressions.”Raymond Depardon 

“The nature of being sedentary and nomadic has changed. […] Sedentary people are at home wherever they go. With their cell phones or laptops, [they are] as comfortable in an elevator or on a plane as in a high-speed train. This is the sedentary person. The nomad, on the other hand, is someone who is never at home, anywhere. ”Paul Virilio