Code and the City

Rob Kitchin, Sung-Yueh Perng

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138922105
• eBook ISBN: 9781317413806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Software has become essential to the functioning of cities. It is deeply embedded into the systems and infrastructure of the built environment and is entrenched in the management and governance of urban societies. Software-enabled technologies and services enhance the ways in which we understand and plan cities. It even has an effect on how we manage urban services and utilities.

Code and the City explores the extent and depth of the ways in which software mediates how people work, consume, communication, travel and play. The reach of these systems is set to become even more pervasive through efforts to create smart cities: cities that employ ICTs to underpin and drive their economy and governance. Yet, despite the roll-out of software-enabled systems across all aspects of city life, the relationship between code and the city has barely been explored from a critical social science perspective. This collection of essays seeks to fill that gap, and offers an interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between software and contemporary urbanism.

This book will be of interest to those researching or studying smart cities and urban infrastructure.

1
Code and the city

Introduction

Rob Kitchin and Sung-Yueh Perng

The modern city exists as a haze of software instructions. Nearly every urban practice is becoming mediated by code.

(Amin and Thrift 2002: 125)

Over the past few decades, software has become essential to the functioning of cities. Urban systems and the physical and social infrastructure of the city are increasingly composed of and mediated by software-enabled technologies, and the management and governance of society framed by and undertaken through interconnecting socio-technical systems. A diverse range of public and private organisations now deploy digital technologies to monitor, regulate and control their infrastructure and the delivery of services using coded assemblages of hardware (such as chips, boards, sensors, actuators, transponders, meters, wires, batteries, screens, etc., combined into digital devices), software (e.g., firmware, middleware, operating systems, programs, apps), flows of data and interfaces, which are networked together (via various forms of Internet connections: e.g., wired, wireless, radio, satellite) (Kitchin and Dodge 2011).

Such coded assemblages now exist with respect to urban government (e.g., city services, public administration), utilities (e.g., energy, water, lighting), transportation (both car-based and public transit), public and private surveil-lance and security, emergency response, communications (e.g., mobile phone networks, the Internet), financial institutions and retail chains, environmental monitoring (of pollution, environmental risk, weather), and other services. All kinds of websites and apps exist – including information and data portals, crowdsourced maps and encyclopaedias, and reviews of shops, accommodation, etc. – that provide insights about urban environments, resources, services and pressing issues, as well as providing a means to source further data. A large percentage of people now traverse their cities carrying a relatively powerful computer in the form of a smartphone that hosts locative social media platforms, such as Twitter, Foursquare and Tinder, enabling and facilitating new forms of social interaction and socio-spatial behaviour, and location-based services providing spatially contextual information and recommendations.

Indeed, interacting with software has become an everyday occurrence for people, to the extent that it is mostly treated as routine and habit, operating as a ‘technological unconscious’ that is only noticed when it performs incorrectly or fails (Thrift 2004; Kitchin and Dodge 2011). Moreover, such is the pervasiveness of digital technologies and networks, it is impossible now to live outside their orbit, even if one possesses no digital devices and resides within an analogue home, as all key infrastructures are coded and national governments deploy digital systems in managing their affairs. Whether one is relaxing at home, travelling across a city, engaging in work, undertaking consumption, or communicating with friends and family, these are now activities that are mediated by code.

Digital technologies and services, then, are increasingly important to how we understand and plan cities, how we manage urban services and utilities, and how we live urban lives, helping to produce what have been termed ‘smart cities’: densely instrumented urban systems that can be monitored, managed and regulated in real time (see Townsend 2013; Kitchin 2014), whose data can be used to better depict, model and predict urban processes and simulate future urban development (Batty et al., 2012), and whose deployment facilitates new forms of digital subjectivity, citizenship, participation and political action (Isin and Ruppert 2015).

And yet, despite the rapid development and deployment of digital technologies for augmenting and facilitating city management and urban life, and the creation and roll-out of new forms of networked urbanism, it is fair to say that, in contrast with the thousands of academic studies and the experimentation of companies seeking to develop, test and implement new technological products, critical analyses of the relationship between code and cities are small in number, underdeveloped conceptually and lacking detailed empirical case materials. The speed of technological innovation and material deployment, and the power of the discursive regimes driving their adoption, is outpacing and outflanking critical reflection and intervention. Moreover, critical social scientists and humanities scholars are still struggling to get to grips conceptually with a series of interrelated phenomena – code, ubiquitous computing, big data, locative social media, mobile computing, networked urbanism and smart cities – at the same time as trying to map out and dissect their consequences and implications.

The book

Code and the City is designed to add to and extend the theoretical and empirical work conducted to date, providing both new conceptual thinking and illustrative examples of the relationship between software and the urban. It is not focused specifically on the notion and creation of smart cities, but rather on the technologies, networks and relationships that enable their production. As such, the book is interested in charting and understanding the recursive relationship between code and the city: how the city is translated into code, and how code reshapes the city. To do this, the book brings together an interdisciplinary group of authors (from geography, sociology, media studies, cultural studies, communications, informatics and computer science), as critically examining this recursive relationship requires a variety of expertise and knowledge and for these to be brought into dialogue. As well as a range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, to illustrate the diversity of different coded assemblages and the coded production of space, the chapters also detail a number of empirical examples, including the Internet of Things, community wireless, locative social media and other apps, urban art installations, code libraries, search engines, geodemographics, city interfaces, hackathons and crowdsourced emergency response.

The chapters were initially prepared for a workshop at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, in September 2014, which was funded by the European Research Council through an Advanced Investigator Award to Rob Kitchin for The Programmable City (project ERC-2012-AdG-323636-SOFTCITY). The workshop met the travel costs of a carefully selected group of researchers, enabling them to attend. Each paper was drafted and submitted in advance of the meeting, extensively discussed at the workshop and subsequently revised for publication in this volume. A second volume based on a similar workshop held in September 2015, Data and the City, will hopefully form a companion book. To provide a structure, we have divided the book into three sections, each with five papers.

Code, coding, infrastructure and cities

The first section considers the relationship between code and the city in a broad sense, focusing on code, its production, and how it is being embedded into cities and used to reshape city life.

In Chapter 2, Rob Kitchin argues that, to date, the literature focusing on the relationship between code and the city has a number of shortcomings. He posits that studies that concentrate on code are often narrow in remit, fading out the city, and tend to fetishise and potentially decontextualise code at the expense of the wider socio-technical assemblage within which it is embedded. Studies that focus on the city tend to examine the effects of code, but rarely unpack the constitution and mechanics of the code producing those effects. To try and provide a more holistic account of the relationship between code and the city, he forwards two interlinked conceptual frameworks. The first places code within a wider socio-technical assemblage. The second conceives the city as being composed of millions of such assemblages. The latter, Kitchin contends, aims to provide a means of productively building a conceptual and empirical understanding of code and the city that scales from individual lines of code to the complexity of an entire urban system.

Much of the rhetoric and creation of smart city technologies revolves around the production of an Internet of Urban Things and urban computing – networked devices, sensors and actuators embedded into the fabric of buildings and the infrastructure of cities. Paul Dourish critically examines, as two parallel discourses, the Internet of Things and smart cities, in order to identify points of connection and to read the pragmatics and politics of deployment of each through the other. In the first part of his essay, Dourish traces the development of the Internet of Things and provides a set of observations concerning its networked nature, its temporality, its scaling, its operation and relations to people. In the second part, he turns his attention to smart cities, applying the same framework of observation. Dourish notes that both the Internet of Things and smart cities are plagued by tensions between holistic design and piecemeal accumulation, temporalities of development, and disparities in control and management. The consequence he contends is that, in contrast to the marketing hype, smart cities evolve in a piecemeal, gradual, disparate manner, under the control of different groups, shaped by politics, and consists of a hodge-podge of technologies using varying standards and protocols, and builds on an array of existing technology and infrastructure. There is no master plan, but rather lots of patching, hacking, jury-rigging and settling. In so much as smart cities exist, they are ‘accidental smart cities’. Dourish argues that an understanding of the Internet of Urban Things necessitates examining their socio-technical assemblage, with serious attention paid to the ‘technical stack’, their temporalities, their politics and the participation they engender.

Much information about cities is presently accessed through screen interfaces, which present particular urban visions. Shannon Mattern critiques the ‘widgetisation’ of urban resources through such coded media and provides a rubric for thinking about the kinds and sources of data that underpin these systems, the design and implementation of such systems, and the people for whom such systems are created and deployed. How these coded urban dashboard and city operating systems are being deployed to produce smart cities, Mattern argues, reflects a certain kind of instrumental rationality that serves particular corporate and government interests and shifts urban vision and interaction from collective endeavour to personal consumption and convenience: translating urban sociality and spatiality ‘from our messy city into my efficient city’. Mattern contends that much more consideration needs to be paid, on the one hand, to unpacking how urban interfaces are framed, designed and work, and, on the other, on how to design interfaces for urban citizens that are open, transparent, creative and imaginative and open up possibilities rather than limiting conduct and facilitating command and control. Such an approach would facilitate thinking about the relationship between technology, people and cities; what kind of cities we want and what kind of citizens we want to be in the era of smart cities.

For Matthew Fuller and Graham Harwood, the increasing use of computation to manage and control cities necessitates the production of a certain kind of abstract urbanism. Abstract in the sense that the logics of computation are underpinned by processes of abstraction, reduction and empiricism that inherently frame social and spatial processes with respect to defined rule sets. They trace the rationale and logic of computational models of urban processes, especially simulations, back to game theory, developed in the 1940s and racial segregation modelling, from the 1960s, through to agent-based models designed to simulate how individuals of differing characteristics behave in the city under different conditions. For Fuller and Harwood, computers are abstract machines that may make claims to objectivity but are in fact thoroughly political through the choices made with regards to mathematical structures underpinning the models and encoded in software. As such, while social simulations express forms of emergence, they do so within a field of defined constraints. And yet, despite their limitations, models and modelisations are being ever-more integrated into the design and operation of city spaces and services, and urban issues are becoming computational problems. Fuller and Harwood thus argue that, as computation is increasingly embedded into urban life, and software becomes a city-making force, it is crucial that its processes of abstraction and reduction, and the consequences thereof, are exposed and examined.

In Chapter 6, Adrian Mackenzie asks and answers two key questions. In what frame and at what levels of abstraction does the density and plurality of code in the city become legible or even enumerable? What has happened to the cycling through and rewriting of code over the last 15 years? Drawing on Thrift and French (2002), he discusses three geographies of trafficking code through cities: a geography of writing code (where code writing takes place), a geography of power and control (how code defines and enacts rule of urban conduct and interlinks systems) and a geography of indeterminancy (how code produces emergent spaces). Mackenzie argues that, over the past 15 years, a reordering of code traffic has occurred, with the clustered production of code being decentred through a much more networked flow of code. He illustrates his argument through an examination of GitHub, an enormous code repository initially centred in San Francisco, but now with branches and users distributed globally. Code, he details, travels between different bits of software and GitHub acts as both a platform for social coding and a terminus for code traffic that rechannels and reshapes the code that passes through it. Mackenzie concludes that the production of code is less like a machine, a system or an assemblage but more like a crowd, and that, given the mergers, coalescences, branching and replication of bodies of code within code repositories, there is no single operational level at which code governs cities. As such, code needs to be viewed as a mixing process that reconfigures the infrastructure, logistics and circulation of individuals in cities; to make sense of such code means examining the traffic in code – how it moves and takes shape – rather than isolated pieces of software, systems or applications.

Locative social media and mobile computing

The second section considers the relationship between code, locative social media and mobile computing, focusing on how smartphones in particular and the locative social media apps they enable are mediating how people interact with the city and each other, and how the large quantities of data generated from such apps can be used to explore and analyse these relationships.

With the rise of smartphones, location-based social media has become an increasingly popular means of documenting and mediating interactions with city spaces and places. Drawing on initial studies of Foursquare – an app that links and shares location, activity, tips and photos – and their own research of Foursquare use in Limerick, Ireland, and Sheffield, UK, Luigina Ciolfi and Gabriela Avram examine the technological support of human activities and the relationship between code, digital agency and the physical world. In particular, they explore: how location-based social networks (LBSNs) are used by individuals, and how they influence socio-spatial behaviour and frame place perception, as well as being used strategically with respect to self-presentation; and how LBSN interactions are rematerialised in the physical world and also feed back into how the software works. Their findings highlight how digital social interactions are increasingly interwoven with urban spaces and places, producing new kinds of code-mediated socio-spatial behaviours and practices.

Similarly, Leighton Evans, also focusing his analysis on Foursquare, argues that the use of location-based social media can result in deep and novel understandings of locations. He contends that the crowdsourced contributions of other users and the information pushed by the app help individuals to rapidly attune themselves to places. Drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenology and Sloterdijk’s theory of spheres, he explores how the moment that place is appreciated as place (that is, as a meaningful existential locale) can be reconciled with the delegation of the epistemologies of placehood to a computational device and location-based social media application. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of Foursquare users, code and computational devices are contextualised as a constant foregrounding presence in the city. The engagement of the user, device, code and data in understanding place is a moment of phenomenological revelation that is co-constituent of all these elements, wherein code is the membrane that allows information to flow and influence, and yet is withdrawn and opaque to users. As such, the computationally mediated spatial behaviours of LBSNs, and thus the relationship between code and the city, operates largely beyond the circumspection of their users. Consequently, Evans argues, it is important to theorise and empirically examine the phenomenological unfolding of urban computational praxes in order to appreciate their diverse affects and effects.

Screen interfaces to interactively access, explore and engage with information are becoming an increasingly common feature of many urban spaces. In some cases, these screen interfaces are art works that layer together spaces, software...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Code and the city: introduction
• PART I Code, coding, infrastructure and cities
• PART II Locative social media and mobile computing
• PART III Governance, politics and knowledge
• Index