Geomedia

Networked Cities and the Future of Public Space

Scott McQuire

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745660769, 9780745660752
• eBook ISBN: 9781509510658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Geomedia offers critical analysis of the new possibilities and power relations emerging in the public space of contemporary cities. As ubiquitous digital networks enable embedded and mobile devices to integrate place-specific data with real-time feedback circuits, everyday experience of public space has become subject to new demands. Looking beyond debates framed by the dominance of surveillance and spectacle, McQuire asks: how might the kind of collaborative practices that have flourished in art and online cultures be translated into urban space?

In the urban crisis of the 1960s, Henri Lefebvre argued that the capacity for a city's inhabitants to actively appropriate the time and space of their surroundings was a critical dimension of modern democracy. What does it mean to speak of 'the right to the city' in the context of the networked city? Addressing this question through a series of case studies, this cutting-edge text highlights the tensions between citizen and consumer, communication and surveillance, participation and control, which define contemporary struggles over public space.

1
Transforming Media and Public Space

The right to the networked city

In 1968, Henri Lefebvre posed the question of urban space in terms of ‘the right to the city’. Contrary to the top-down ethos that dominated modern urban planning, Lefebvre argued that the capacity for a city’s inhabitants to actively appropriate the time and space of their surroundings was a critical dimension to any modern conception of democracy. Lefebvre’s right to the city is not a formal rights agenda, but relates to the capacity of city dwellers to live as inhabitants rather than to merely occupy the city as habitat. ‘Appropriation’ stands as a general term for various forms of citizen-led action that would enable the reinvention of the politics of everyday life that Lefebvre did so much to put on the urban agenda.

In ‘the right to the city’, Lefebvre announces what was already becoming a familiar theme in the 1960s – the death of the city. However, this was not merely a lament. Rather, he is concerned with the impact of industrialization on the form of the city, and the consequent need for the reinvention of the urban – something which he distinguishes from the city. Lefebvre argues that industrialization had created a double dynamic of implosion-explosion, in which the evisceration of the city centre proceeds in tandem with the extrusion of urban boundaries. ‘From this situation is born a critical contradiction: a tendency towards the destruction of the city, as well as a tendency towards the intensification of the urban and the urban problematic’ (Lefebvre 1996: 129). If the city takes different historical forms, the urban is something that he defines in a manner akin to an older generation of urban sociologists – such as Georg Simmel and Louis Wirth – as a ‘way of life’. The urban is primarily a condition of social complexity and encounter with difference that fosters a new dynamism of social life: ‘As a place of encounters, focus on communication and information, the urban becomes what it always was: permanent desire, disequilibrium, seat of the dissolution of normalities and constraints, the moment of play and of the unpredictable’ (Lefebvre 1996: 129).

Lefebvre’s writings influenced a generation of urban researchers in France and elsewhere and also achieved some traction in urban policy, particularly in Europe. More recently, the theme of the ‘right to the city’ has been revisited and taken up anew by writers including Don Mitchell (2003) and David Harvey (2008, 2012), who argues that ‘the right to the city’ is ‘one of our most precious and yet most neglected rights’ (2008: 23). I want to use Lefebvre’s concept as a provocation for thinking about the right to the city in the context of pervasive digital networks. If the right to the city is fundamentally concerned with social encounter, communication and practices of appropriation, how should we think the right to the networked city?

What I want to establish across the different parts of this chapter are key trajectories in the transformation of both media and public space that have combined to produce the current conjuncture. If I initially sketch these as somewhat separate, in order to elaborate the emergence of distinct histories and bodies of thought, this is not to ignore the fact that the present is defined by their increasing intersection. It is worth recalling at the outset that concern over the role and future of public space in the industrial capitalist city has been coextensive with its emergence. This became particularly acute in the late twentieth century, as the demise of many older industrial urban spaces led to explicit strategies for urban ‘regeneration’. Renewed concern with, and desire to reinvent, the urban over the last two decades has coincided with the profound transformation of media technologies associated with computerization and digital convergence. Media, which was once associated primarily with the demise of public space and the commercialization of the public sphere (a logic grasped by Habermas (1989) as ‘refeudalization’), is today one of the keys to the city’s possible reinvention. Geomedia, which I characterized above in terms of the convergence of media sectors, the ubiquity of digital devices and platforms, the everyday use of place-specific data and location-aware services, and the routinization of distributed, real-time feedback, has become a major force shaping the contours of public space. By altering the rhythms and spatiality of social encounters, geomedia has become critical to the politics of contemporary public space.

How should we understand this politics? Nearly a century ago, Robert Park memorably characterized city-making as ‘man’s most consistent, and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire’ (1967: 3). But the search for a constructed utopia was not a one-way street: in remaking the city as lifeworld, Park added, ‘man’ finds that he ‘has remade himself’. David Harvey strips this sentiment of its gender bias, while sharpening its political implications, arguing that ‘what kind of a city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be’ (2012: 1). My broad argument in this book is that, in the twenty-first century, how we imagine and implement the digitization of the city and the networking of public space will prove pivotal to what kind of future city we inhabit. In many respects, how we deal with this threshold will offer a template for what ‘kind of people’ we will become. This is not to assert that there will be a single outcome across different cities and societies, but rather that the threshold of digitization manifests a tipping point. It poses a set of questions with deep implications for the future of urban inhabitation.

As cities become increasingly media-dense spaces, the older modes of boundary-formation that previously defined the geometries and rhythms shaping everyday life have become subject to significant reworking. The function of urban public space as the locus for distinctive practices of social encounter and communication is being extensively recalibrated by new logics. Contrary to many pronouncements, ‘place’ has not disappeared, but particular sites and practices are now routinely ‘opened out’ spatially and temporally, reframed by new potentials for recording, archiving, analysing and retrieving various streams of information. Enhanced capacity to ‘connect’ to others supports a new prominence of transversal and transnational exchanges in social life, but also generates anxieties arising from the incursion of Others into previously circumscribed places and local practices. Geomedia is one name for the condition in which these new scales and speeds are inserted into the weft and warp of everyday life.

Will geomedia be used to submit social life to increasingly intense processes of scrutiny and micro-evaluation, aiding and abetting the commodification of the common, the intimate and the personal which have become the most valuable forms of marketing knowledge? Or will the nexus between geomedia and public space become a critical forum for the incubation and elaboration of social practices that might enable a reinvention of the urban? Posing the issue as a choice between two apparently separate and easily separable trajectories is misleading. As I argued above, the ambivalence of the current digital conjuncture is marked by the high degree of entanglement of contradictory trajectories. This has confused some of the terms belonging to an older language of political critique.

When Lefebvre extolled the urban in terms of encounter with difference, spontaneity and play, he was appealing to an idea of the urban everyday as a reserve or reservoir of resistance to ‘authority’:

this urban life tends to turn against themselves the messages, orders and constraints coming from above. It attempts to appropriate time and space by foiling dominations, by diverting them from their goal. It also intervenes more or less at the level of the city and the way of inhabiting. In this way the urban is more or less the oeuvre of its citizens instead of imposing itself upon them as a system, as an already closed book. (1996: 117)

Today the urban everyday is precisely the terrain that many applications of geomedia progressively target. In the 1960s, Lefebvre could claim that: ‘The use (use value) of places, monuments, differences, escape the demands of exchange, of exchange value’ (1996: 129). The prospects for such ‘escape’ seem far more complex in the present. As Jonathan Crary argues, the contemporary ‘everyday’ is an increasingly uncertain ground for the elaboration of counter-practices:

Even though, at various points in history, the everyday has been the terrain from which forms of opposition and resistance may have come, it is also in the nature of the everyday to adapt and reshape itself, often submissively, in response to what erupts or intrudes in it. [. . .] [N]ow there are numerous pressures for individuals to reimagine and refigure themselves as being of the same consistency and values as the dematerialized commodities and social connections in which they are immersed so extensively. Reification has proceeded to the point where the individual has to invent a self-understanding that optimizes or facilitates their participation in digital milieus or speeds. (2013: 69–70, 99–100)

From this point of view, one can immediately note the growing ambivalence surrounding Lefebvre’s appeal to ‘play’, in a context in which modes of play are now directly implicated in generating economic value.¹ This is not to dismiss the potential for playful engagement to support the invention of new social relations, but to note that concepts such as play, appropriation and participation demand critical scrutiny and careful deployment in the present.

The key driver of this new degree of colonization of ‘lifeworld’ by ‘system’ is the tightening circuit fostered by the extension of digital technologies that has enabled the integration of previously separated systems and sectors. Bernard Stiegler describes this as a logic of hyper-industrialization:

With the advent of very advanced control technologies emerging from digitalization, and converging in a computational system of globally integrated production and consumption, new cultural, editing and programming industries then appeared. What is new is that they are technologically linked by universal digital equivalence (the binary system) to telecommunications systems and to computers, and, through this, directly articulated with logistical and production systems (barcodes and credit cards enabling the tracing of products and consumers), all of which constitutes the hyper-industrial epoch strictly speaking, dominated by the categorization of hyper-segmented ‘targets’ (‘surgically’ precise marketing organizing consumption) and by functioning in real time (production), through lean production [flux tendus] and just in time (logistics). (2011: 5)

Hyper-industrialization is characterized by the growing integration of production, consumption, finance, logistics and marketing. This convergent logic finds its peak expression in contemporary digital ‘platforms’ – such as Apple’s iTunes, Amazon and various offerings by Alibaba, where software enabling ‘one-touch’ purchasing is linked to both credit facilities and logistics systems (warehousing, distribution) – but also to cultural practices and social relations. User-created content such as product reviews, comments and ratings systems function to lubricate processes of exchange under the rubric of ‘sharing’, joining social practices and market logics in a tight loop – this is what your ‘friends’ did/liked/read/listened to/ watched/bought today. Seen in this light, the dominant forms of digital culture are less the carrier of new freedoms – whether conceived in terms of the consumer utopia of Anderson’s (2006) ‘long tail’ or in terms of the new possibilities for ‘participation’ enabled by convergent media platforms identified by Jenkins (2006) – than a powerful and historically unprecedented force of synchronization.

For Stiegler, the driver of this synchronizing force is the historical failure of contemporary capitalism to generate the conditions for its own replacement, despite the massive growth in its productive capacity. In fact, this political failure is closely connected to the chronic instability engendered by increasingly rapid technical development, manifest in the explicit shift to accelerated production cycles based on ‘permanent innovation’ – and its corollary, perpetual obsolescence. Stiegler argues that ‘hyper-industrial’ capitalism has initiated a decomposition of capitalism’s older political-symbolic terrain, which was dominated by the nation-state and the myth of a unified national culture. However, the failure to develop other values and beliefs that might replace national governance and the homogeneous culture in which the national imaginary was long grounded has led to the wholesale submission of social life to the logic of consumption. Stiegler argues that instead of rethinking the limits of national belonging and addressing the inequalities of the global system of production, we have entered a period of ‘decadence’, in which belief in a viable future is blocked. Awareness of the need for systemic change in the face of global challenges such as resource inequality and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Transforming Media and Public Space
• 2 Googling the City
• 3 Participatory Public Space
• 4 Urban Screens and Urban Media Events
• 5 Recomposing Public Space
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement