Augmented Urban Spaces

Articulating the Physical and Electronic City

Fiorella De Cindio, Alessandro Aurigi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754671497
• eBook ISBN: 9781317177364
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Local & Regional Planning Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

There have been numerous possible scenarios depicted on the impact of the internet on urban spaces. Considering ubiquitous/pervasive computing, mobile, wireless connectivity and the acceptance of the Internet as a non-extraordinary part of our everyday lives mean that physical urban space is augmented, and digital in itself. This poses new problems as well as opportunities to those who have to deal with it. This book explores the intersection and articulation of physical and digital environments and the ways they can extend and reshape a spirit of place. It considers this from three main perspectives: the implications for the public sphere and urban public or semi-public spaces; the implications for community regeneration and empowerment; and the dilemmas and challenges which the augmentation of space implies for urbanists. Grounded with international real -life case studies, this is an up-to-date, interdisciplinary and holistic overview of the relationships between cities, communities and high technologies.

PART 1
Augmented Spaces

Alessandro Aurigi

The section that opens the book is – not by chance – very diverse in its contents, examined technologies and raised issues. This reflects the complexity of the topic and the range of different ways in which contemporary cities get “augmented” by ICT. It is a natural consequence of the fact that we are not talking about some precisely defined “product” or “solution”, such as the so-called virtual or digital cities conceived in the 1990s and consisting of more or less sophisticated and interactive internet sites. Augmentation is a much more capillary and complex phenomenon, embracing the city as a whole and its components: spaces – at different scales – people, businesses and so on. It is something that goes well beyond the remit of the single initiative, actor, and concept, though of course specific case studies can still be examined, and specific actions envisaged.

Ubiquitous computing and mobile technologies are blurring the distinction between physical space and digital media, with the latter also combining in complex ways, sometimes resulting in very physical, public and visible setups, whilst other times being hardly visible and strictly personal. Urban ICT can therefore materialise into the very conspicuous presence of big screens in prime civic locations, remain partially hidden in the mobile phones within people’s pockets or simply exist as a non-physical, but highly local and potentially very meaningful, geo-referenced database of spatial tags.

In this section Allen claims that ‘the majority of city centres in the UK now fall into the category of augmented urban spaces rather than this being confined to major international and global cities’. The capillarity and “everyday” character of the intersection of physical and digital makes the debate shift further – or maybe creates room for complementary reflections – from the simple consideration of high technologies as one of the supporting factors for the affirmation of global, mega-cities and financial hubs, or from the efficiency-inspired vision of e-government innovation, to the very local, small scale of ordinary urban space, in ordinary towns, enhanced by very “ordinary” telecommunications networks.

And it is not just the distinction between the different urban scales interested by the information revolution which is put into question. Looking at the deployment of large displays in public spaces, Allen argues that ‘both the building upon which an urban screen is placed, and the space in which the building is located can be considered as a form of multimodal text’. This leads to considering how only a blurred distinction seems to exist between space and information, as elements of space increasingly are powerful conveyors of information, whilst information – materialising into them – becomes more and more spatially-related. This is in a way not a new phenomenon. McCullough for instance takes readers on a journey that starts from ancient inscriptions and their epigraphy, and brings us to thinking how urban “markup”, the ability to “layer” the city with digital inscription, tagging places and buildings in a participatory, interactive way can be a way to support new cultural productions which exist within ‘a new domain [which] emerges between the authority of broadcast and the defiance of graffiti’.

Relationships are extended and multiplied, and urban space gets literally “augmented” by this, as more becomes possible. This extension of relationships and presence is not just quantitatively characterised by “more” possibilities. It can also have an important qualitative side. Heesang Lee’s study on the spatiality of the mobile phone in Korea notes that existing in a public or private space can also depend on being connected to it through a switched-on phone, rather than being physically present. Connection and disconnection – and desire to be connected or disconnected – become important aspects of our ability to inhabit spaces, and of the quality of this condition. Augmented space, Heesang Lee argues, is not just ‘intelligent’ and ‘efficient’ but ‘emotional’ too, and this introduces a qualitative, very personal variable in this relationship between us and digitally-enhanced space, which can make connection assume the positive connotation of belonging to a place and to a network associated to it, or the negative one of being controlled and subdued to the network itself, seen in its wide sense of digital infrastructure as well as that of the people who share a connection.

However, as a consequence of these extensions of relationships, it is inevitable to consider that the re-definition of urban space and the extended range of possibilities that ICT may introduce, may also carry an increased risk of uncertainty and disorientation. Some of the authors highlight the tension between place and non-place as an important issue here. Mediated space can often be compared to globally-characterised non-places like airports and shopping malls. The tension could also suggest a “displacement” effect of digital technologies, taking their user “somewhere else”, which is indeed a non-place denying or competing with the actual physical place they are at. Urban ICT, seen by many as a force of displacement and global – spatially indifferent – access, needs to get itself grounded again, in situations where space does matter.

This attention for ways of “framing” the augmented spatial experience and making it meaningful is – in different ways and at different scales – expressed by several of the contributors to this section.

Allen sees the body – present and involved in the augmented situation – as what can frame or re-frame this experience. But he also argues about the power of local context and culture, when this becomes one of the guiding constraints to the design and deployment of digital and media-rich urban initiatives. As it will also be highlighted in the other sections of the book – from different viewpoints – the efforts in “grounding” projects as well as making them “owned” and truly participated seem to be the other crucial factor for “framing” augmented space and allowing it to avoid the “non-place” trap.

This is also confirmed by Willis’s observations on a Wi-Fi endowed café in London, and on the fact that rather than it becoming a non-place for anonymous, casual and entirely nomadic patrons, a mere physical platform to shelter “surfers”, it would be appropriated by regular customers looking exactly for the augmented “bonus” of the place itself, providing a social physical environment with a digital edge. McCullough also notes how libraries – a physical space often seen as under threat from the ability to consult electronic information in a de-spatialised way – have become places of open digital access, providing a sense-rich spatial context for these activities, and support for social networking. As mentioned earlier, even mobile phones, one of the emblems of individualistic, displaced existence and virtually sustained relationships, end up being much more bound to local places and communities than expected, Heesang Lee notes.

But making all of this work positively for our cities requires a degree of proactiveness in shaping and designing grounded, meaningful intersections of space and ICT. Doing this implies questioning and refreshing our theoretical as well as practical approaches to space, as the simple juxtaposition of physical and digital – or the retro-fitting of physical space with digital facilities – is not a guarantee for the obtainment of properly, and usefully, augmented spaces. Willis argues that ‘The two domains are operating on different structures, layered one on top of another but in many instances not working as a unified domain. In order to resolve these disparities it will be necessary to rethink some of the ways we act, occupy and also construct our physical world’, calling therefore for the need of some “augmented” knowledge.

This prompts us to review a series of basic concepts and frameworks through which we read and interpret urban space. Willis again addresses how concepts of separation, bounded-ness, bodily presence, linkage and temporality are impacted upon by the presence and use of ICT. She also draws people – and people’s changing habits – into the picture and argues that ‘spatializing these communication technologies and reconnecting them to spatial settings requires new views on the inter-connectedness of location and behaviour’.

Such issues are also central to Foth and Sanders’s research work on the augmentation of residential buildings and complexes, and the intersection of physical settings and digitally-enhanced community. They remark the importance of considering ‘opportunities to inform residential architecture through advanced understandings of social networks and communicative ecologies will be essential in order to create public space that accommodates the needs of urban residents and their new social formations’. Their chapter ideally links this first book section on space with the following one on community augmentation, and shows how – despite the rather artificial distinction forced by the book’s economy – these are really the two inseparable sides of an “augmented place-making” coin and will have to be dealt with in jointly.

But there is a third – obvious maybe, but sometimes overlooked by those who deal with the built environment – factor in the equation. Back in 1999, and addressing an architectural evergreen issue such as the relationships between form and function, Mitchell noted how ‘in the design of smart things and places, form may still follow function – but only up to a point. For the rest, function follows code’1. David Murakami Wood focuses on this by highlighting the software dimension of augmented space and looking at the emergence of “spatial protocols” as ‘highly restrictive and controlling rules embedded within the materiality of urban space, which produce all kinds of new liberatory and repressive possibilities’. Murakami Wood points at the fact that the software providing the “intelligence” in spatial augmentation is certainly not neutral. It cannot just be seen as a platform which can be used in virtually infinite ways to extend relationships, but as something that embeds rules, behaviours and the ability – or lack of – of establishing relations in certain ways. The relative invisibility of the “soft” elements of augmentation, coupled with a degree of lack of transparency on how “code” is written, should prompt designers and shapers of augmented space – especially when this is public – to consider open source philosophies and approaches to ‘create spatial protocols that actually open up better forms of civility and interaction and new domains of possibility for a wider range of citizens’.

All in all, this opening section provides a complex picture and a series of questions which are somehow left open – not a surprising thing for an emerging topic – though the different chapters suggest – if not precise solutions – at least lines of enquiry and issues for practice. On the one hand augmented space is seen as something potentially re-defining behaviours in ways we do not fully know, whilst on the other hand ways of re-framing and making sense – and positive usage – of this new range of possibilities are suggested. Grounding the experience spatially as well as culturally and socially seems a common thread – or set of themes – to focus on. Making it as much as possible open, transparent and participated is another one.

Do we need new rules and theories to tackle this? Maybe we need to re-frame our existing spatial concepts to accommodate this increased range of possibilities. Augmentation might end up “remediating” – as Bolter and Grusing would have argued about cyberspace2 – our established spatial practices. Research and reflection is already under way, as some of the contents in this section – amongst certainly a much wider and richer global production – prove.

Finally, practice, experiments and designs – with all their potential limits – are essential to understanding more. Learning by doing is essential to explore new territories. Foth and Sanders quote in their chapter Hornecker et al. who examine opportunity spaces where ‘there is no urgent problem to be solved, but much potential to augment and enhance practice in new ways’3 and highlight why this is a worthy topic for urban designers as well activists in social informatics. It is not about reacting to problems to solve – hence having to wait for a major change to happen or materialise – but proactively putting forward new ideas for improving the spaces we live in.

1 Mitchell, W.J. (1999) E-topia : urban life, Jim – but not as we know it, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

2 Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

3 Hornecker, E., Halloran, J., Fitzpatrick, G., Weal, M., Millard, D., Michaelides, D., et al. (2006) ‘UbiComp in Opportunity Spaces: Challenges for Participatory Design’, paper presented at the Participatory Design Conference (PDC), Trento, Italy.

Chapter 1

Places, Situations and Connections

Katharine S. Willis

Introduction

I then shouted into M (the mouthpiece) the following sentence:

‘Mr. Watson--come here--I want to see you.’

To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said.’.1

In Graham Bell’s first experimental call enabling communication between two people in separate locations (Bell 1876, 40-41) his opening instruction was to ask the person at the other end of the line to come to where he was. This underlines how the way of understanding the world so very often requires visual presence to authenticate social experience. In so many aspects of our everyday life we tend to “believe it when we see it”. Our visual experience of the physical environment we inhabit therefore guides a great deal of how we perceive, remember and act in the world. Our spatial perception is also to a great extent influenced by the visual features and characteristics of physical space. In the 1960’s the urban planner Kevin Lynch underlined the extent to which we essentially visually perceive and categorise the world in his seminal work, The Image of the City (Lynch 1960). In this study he established that individuals construct mental imagery about the space in which they move, which he proposed was broken down into a series of five key elements; landmarks, edges, districts, paths and nodes. He introduced the term “image-ability” to describe the qualities of a city which make it understandable to any citizen, again underlining the effect of the visual form of the city on perception and memory of physical space.

As far back as the introduction of the telephone, evidence can be found of how communications technology has had a significant impact on the structure and social use of the city. According to the work of de Sola Pool and his co-authors in The Social Impact of the Telephone (de Sola Pool 1977), the telephone contributed considerably to urban decentralisation and mass migration to suburbia, and also helped to create the specific architectural forms of the skyscraper and skyline (Gottmann, in de Sola Pool 1977, 310). But the telephone was and still is a fixed wire technology; it has to start somewhere and end somewhere with wires in-between. As we move into the twenty-first century we are experiencing a growth in a whole range of new communication technologies which enable not just wireless but also mobile communication. Mobile phones, wireless internet, Bluetooth, GPS and all their associated applications enable the oft repeated ideal of communication “any time, any place”. We no longer need to be sat at a computer in an office building to send an email, or hold a wired receiver to make a phone call. Consequently a number of authors have highlighted how the predominant visuo-spatial way of understanding the city is being fundamentally affected by such technologies which have very little visual presence. Graham (Graham et al. 1986, 50) highlighted the fact that: ‘Given this visual pre-occupation, it is easy to diagnose the virtual invisibility of telecommunication in cities as a key reason for the curious neglect of telecommunications issues in cities’. Batty (1990, 128) further noted that ‘cities are becoming invisible to us in certain important ways’, and in another paper set out a research agenda which would look...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction Augmented Urban Spaces
• Part 1 Augmented Spaces
• Part 2 Augmenting Communities
• Part 3 Planning Challenges in the Augmented City
• Index