In a talk at the Responsive City meeting, Manuel Castells discussed the practices of urban management and design in this current historic moment when 50% of the planet population now lives in cities (South America reaching 80%!). Unlike what futoroligsts predicted communication networks did not kill distances the cities have not disappeared. It lead to new form of urbanism - some call it megacities (Casstells has another word about that) or what Peter Hall and Kathryn Pain refer as Polycentric Metropolis, a cluster of cities and towns, physically separate but intensively networked in a complex spatial division of labor. These new places are represented by networks (like new england, southern california) and they do not have official names. In fact the name are defined by the news and media. For instance local news refer to the “Bay Area” in San Francisco (a region where San Jose is even bigger) and “South Land” in Los Angeles. In these cases, the television market (and how it attracts advertisement) actually defined the place.

Globalization is made of these networks. Each network has a different geographies (movie industry, knowledge production, finance). In some metropolitian areas these networks overlay (e.g. London) and synergies happen at the nodes where theses different networks connect. They form “micro-milieux” where decision making takes place. For instance, the city of Saragossa is currently being integrated to Madrid and Barceona in the same time. As Barcelona made less efforts in interconnecting, apparently Saragossa is becoming absorbed as a spatial node of Madrid.

There is not political authority over these new places (megacities). The expression of people on their major metropolitan areas (see Un point de vue unique sur la ville) reveals that they feel betrayed by their local governments because they favor the management of the flows over the management of the place. It means that the strategy to first get rich by privileging connections to the outside world (investiement in airport, optic networks, convention centers) and then we redistribute the wealth is not well perceived. Saragossa is an excellet example of these tensions between existing in the world and providing basic or good services to citizens.

Castells gives some key pointers that now must be considered in urban planning:

• connectivity is critical (multi-modal, local and global connectivity)
• speed and scale create huge environment problems. Technologies make cities grow and do not make them disappear (as also stated by Richard Florida, “the World is Spiky“. On some city maps the freeways are now drawn in green. Therefore, environmental planning should the at the foundation of planning.
• crisis of political legitimacy. citizen are more distrustful from local governament than the central authorities.
• the public physical space is really hard to maintain. Some of them, like La Rambla became a theme park where locals are not present anymore (even the mimes and entertainers are foreigners).

and a few implications in the management of these spaces:

• strengthen of the public space in each of the nucleus
• aim at congregating people with no specific purposes (serendipty) shopping centers are not public spaces. merchants streets are public spaces
• metropolitan cities are about building “stations”. For instance, the most innovative places are close to railway stations. We have to think that we must build cities around these nucleuses.
• density of population creates possibility for stores, business and life emerges (following here the Barcelona Ecologia’s concept of compact mediteranean city)
• maintain a vibrant immigrant life (letting them to be open the whole night). Like stores owned by Chinese immigrants in Spain.
• nurture the notion of distributed monumentality. Build spatial signs of recognition, otherwise people don’t know where they are. It can take the form of monumental architecture (whit the same usual suspects designing the monuments (Nouvel, Gehry, Foster, …- cities are divided by serveral architectural agencies). These monuments become signs of indifications are more important than their actual settings.

Relation to my thesis: Even though I do not focus on macro/global issues of the development of networks, I was curious to hear how a leading urban sociologist describes the hybridization of the physical and digital in the city and the type of signals he analysis and how they are transformed in implications for planning and management. From Castells’ talk, it seems that the interface with technologies and networks is still not taught in land use planning and urban design. It once again comforts my feeling that urban space will need researchers with mixed competences in engineering, HCI (call it user experience or interaction design) and urban planning, validating this year’s move to the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

In relation to the notion of “distributed monumentality” and their necessity as spatial signs of recognition, I believe that the analysis of pervasive user-generated content could reveal the monuments of the city that people use to anchor their data in the space.

“Who’s Your City?,” the world is spiky

In the processing of building a coherent story around my research endeavors and considering potential outcome, I have returned to exploring how agent-based modeling techniques can help grapple with the validation and significance of user-genereated content in the realm of urban/mobility/tourist research. Current tourism simulation and modeling (see for instance TourSim) works mainly rely on specific surveys to build and evaluation the simulation. In addition, the data collected describe tourist behaviour such as spending habits, and psychological motivations for tourism. These sparse information make it hard to reflect the complexities of tourist behavior and build effective and efficient decision support tools to assess planning decisions. What is required for recreation planning, is verification of how tourists act spatially at recreation sites. However key variables such as the speed of tourist travel, wayfinding decisions, crowd avoidance, and other spatial behaviour, are not yet well understood to model the tourist visiting a city. One of my hypothesis is that digital footprints such as user-generated content can help develop agent-based models and simulations of tourist flows and movements (in that case through photography).

Similar to transport research, some tourist research collect quantitative data of tourist activity such walking and photography. In Building better agents: Geo-temporal tracking and analysis of tourist behavior the authors use quantitative data captured by sensors to build agent-based models of tourist behaviors. Their simulation provide one way for managers to accurately predict future impacts, and their spatial patterns of the develop of certain tourist areas. They analyze:

• detailed visitor counts
• average trip durations
• tourist behavior
• spatial patterns of movement

in order to reveal some group and individual behaviors:
Crowding: Determing through correlation whether people were spending less time, for example, on the viewing platform, during more crowded times of the day.
Graphing: Provide detailed information about times and sequences of travel for individuals and groups
Travel time: Time frequency distribution to be analyzed. Correlation between time spent in various area of the study site
Travel sequence: Tourist behavior can be devided into distinguishable groups based on movement sequences

However, the overall validity of the simulations remains uncertain without detailed calibration data. As described in Understanding of tourist dynamics from explicitly disclosed location information, the flickr dataset can provide more coarse grained quantitative observations of similar phenomenon. However, user-generated data can surpass the scalability and time constraints of surveys and sensor-based approaches. My current believe is that the availability of data over the world’s most photographed cities can allow me to validate tourist models build from user-generated content. Building such a model and validate it with simulation over several cities might be one nice outcome.

Next steps in that direction, Michael Batty wrote a book on Cities and Complexity: Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models, and Fractals. Repast Simphony 1.0 has recently been released which includes a point and click interface for model development and full GIS support.

The objective to metamorphose the LIFT conference from its grassroot and “groups of friends” origins to become a perfectly ran organizations has been widely achieved. While building a professional profit-generating event, the organizers did not forget about the keys to their previous success: openness (no VIP treatments, nor reserved areas), rely on the community (I only heard positive feedbacks from the workshops and the open stages delivered their pleasant surprises), commercial free, and magic formula of mixing the right amount of entrepreneurs, researchers, designers, artists, journalists and activists.

I attended the conference digitally naked with a pen and pieces of papers as instruments to record notes and thoughts and the archived videos to support my memory:

Bruce Sterling launched the conference in the role of a near-future futurist. Predicting the future is about moral boosting. The main reason people prosper is because they are willing to get out of the bed. Showing up is 90% of the job.

His talk focused on how we can deal (i.e. analyze the driving forces and get on with our own life) with a phenomenon we are certain to be confronted in 2008. He exemplified a foresight method (”you cannot predict the future but you can describe it“) with a recent black swan, the wedding of model Carla Bruni with french president Nicolas Sarkozy . An event that defines the character of our time (especially in Europe). An event that, if we do not have the proper analytical tools, we will be overwhelmed, confused and sicken by it. However, If you we understand the driving forces that guide what is going on we will be able to anticipate the developments. “Like an american who learns the rules of soccer, you probably still won’t like it very much, but you will understand why it matters to people, you’ll be able to put into a useful perceptive and get on with you own life.“
Paul Dourish (video) how we can understand what ethnography can teach us (talk in the following up of his implication for design paper). We miss disciplinary power relationships: ethnographers might regularly be asked what implication for design are, whereas it is not possible to ask a computer scientist the impact of his/her work to social theories. The relevance of classical ethnography in the context of mobility, presence and absence. Symbolism of to define mobility different from the technological perspective (location, coordinates) and the ethnographic perspective (dispora, nomad, asylum). There are different ways to represent space that is not about the cartographic representation (aboriginal vs western, history of the place, identify, different account of space). Particularly relevant to my current project with the senseable city lab (reveal the digital traces) and my taxi driver study (the impact of satnav system on mobility and practices)

Genevieve Bell talked about the armed race of digital deception (quoting James Katz), for every device that aims to tell the truth such as GPS there is a service available to deceive (e.g. alabi service). Technology changes faster than people do (culture, practice). How do we act in social practice with the act of lying or withholding information, the notion of white lies and good lies. Lie is about negating the real, but not about negating the truth (Peter Stiegnitz). Playful act through the rules of the world (how we choose to present ourselves, depending on the knowledge of the lookers). With secrets, we keep safe from what we choose to withhold. With lies, we shape our own realities .”Twitter is making an art out of the form of confabulation“. Particularly relevant to my work on people’s disclosure of location information in Flickr and the granularity they use (attaching a coarse-grained location information can be considered as a good lie). It also touches my taxi driver study as Genevieve points out in the very end of the talk: what do we do if technologies also start to lie such as satnav systems giving a bad direction?

Tom Taylor (video) how to use social network to inflect behaviors in the context of sustainable development. He advocated for the use of positive peer/social pressure. The positive approach goes through the engagement of individuals in groups via social softwares and let people expose their behaviors. In the future we will be able to capturing data from different sources (such as Nike+) and expose them where you do not expect it (Measure, visualize and expose in a social graph). As using a Wattson to monitor the electricity consumption in a house. Tom stated that exposing actions can have a massive effect on the way people behave. In the light of the recent works on persuasive computing, this still needs to be proven (specifically how to make that happen). This work reflects well the intention of WikiCity, its feedback loop, and the use of digital traces for social navigation. An aspect to study would be analyse the spiral of: influencing behaviors that influence the data that influence behaviors the influence the data…
I had a pleasant discussion with Rafi Haladjian on creating innovation and services from the technological constraints. In his career he created success from constraints in the network administration for the Minitel (the importance was not about creating a density of traffic, but by spreading of the day so that line would always be used), the Internet (bet on the physicality of server hosting, the unique link that is not virtual and therefore fragile) and the internet of things (play and take advantage of the positive aspect of immature technologies).

Still to come… the foresight session with Scott Smith, Bill Cockayne and Francesco Cara.

We collected very valuable content from picking up the brains of the 70+ participants of our workshop Ubiquitous computing: visions, failures and new interaction rituals. The feedbacks were rather positive: Mark Meagher, Hannes Gassert, Michele Perras, Vincenzo Pallotta, and Tom Hume.

Group activity at the workshop

Martin Dodge has put together a rough and ready web page to summarise research on code/space he conducts in collaboration with Rob Kitchin.

Code/Space research is examining the new spatialities and new modes of (spatial) governance and empowerment enabled by the development and adoption of software through an exploration of the dyadic relationship between software and space; how the production of space is increasingly reliant on code, and code is written to produce space. In so doing, we are developing a set of conceptual tools for identifying and understanding these relationships, illustrating our arguments through rich, contemporary empirical material relating to different spatial spheres and everyday activities (travel, home, work, consumption). The principal concepts we detail are transduction and automated management. Through the concept of transduction we theorise space and spatialities as ontogenetic in nature, as constantly in a state of becoming. Software, through its technicity – its ability to do work in the world - transduces space; enables space to unfold in multifarious ways. We formulate the concept of automated management to think through the various ways that new software systems survey, capture and process information about people and things in automatic ways and make judgements algorithmically without human scrutiny.

Relation to my thesis: The emergence of new forms to experience space through technologies have sparked research in a number of different disciplines, including sociology, computer science, interaction design, urban planning, and in the case of Code/Space, geography. The concept of automated management seem closely related to the WikiCity’s real time control systems.

In the context of my BCN taxi driver study, I have been reading some of the word done by Silvia Elaluf-Calderwood on the organizational ability of London Black Cabs with mobile and wireless technologies. The study was conducted as part of the research network for Mobile Interaction & Pervasive Social Devices that support research on socially situated technologies, the socio-technical aspects of mobile working and on the mutual adaptation of work practices and mobile and wireless technologies.

Silvia performed a longitudinal ethnographic study with empirical data provided by qualitative interviews with 35 Black Cab drivers and 14 hours of videotaped observation of driver behavior to highlight some issues of the relationships between the drivers practices and the supporting mobile technology. She focused on the observations of the different socio-technical arrangements the taxi drivers work with:

• Traditional: The Knowledge + mobile phone to keep in touch with family and friends
• Dispatched Radio Taxi: radio call system + electronic booking system + mobile phone
• Automatic Customer-Driver Connection: Real-time GPS location system + satnav + mobile phone

From the interviews she was able to define the main factors that influence to encounter work: physical location, awareness, time, strategic planning, situational acts, planned acts, human factors, role of the technology, emerging practices and chance to succeed. Then she compared each arrangement in the light of these factors. In concordance with my study, she points out that the most interesting technological opportunities may be thwarted by practical barriers such as problems with support of individual taxi work (not coordination) through GPS systems when these assume the driver relinquish control entirely and simply follow directions when these are far from perfect or:

With Arrangement C, in which the driver relies on his mobile phone to obtain work – besides street hails – the ubiquity is wider. Drivers get accustomed to longer runs on specific routes to maximize the number of passengers transported. However passengers sometimes take the first cab that is closer to them and the driver loses his ride. During the interviews drivers in Arrangement B were reported to say that this uncertainty is the main reason they felt discouraged from trying Arrangement C.

Related to my analysis, she also mentions the feeling of relaxation that the technology brings (when the destination is known and pressure of constatly searching for new passengers is reduced by greater trust place in the computer system) but also the distraction it brings to their driving (multiple-tasking, they liked the fact that the system turns off to black screen after two minutes idle) and the accuracy of the GPS system used (billing and payment, outages, when it needs repair it means unplanned time of the road).

In my study, I first analyze under socio-technical lenses how everyday cab driver adapt their working practices depending upon the integration of location-aware technology (co-evolution). However unlike Silivia’s work that focuses on the organization to capture customers, I reveal the implication of acquiring at satnav system on the wayfinding strategies and knowledge acquisition. At a second step, I study the role of context in influence the access of location information (granularity). In that part of the work, I can inspire form Silvia’s list of factors that influence the cab drivers work. Moreover, I should explore the impact of the relation with Suchman’s situated action theory (locations and opportunity determine the action): “Idiosyncrasy, improvisation and knowledge are all useful tools when choices between planned and situation acts are complex” (Suchman, 1987)” and maybe establish a link with the accuracy/uncertainty/granularity of the location information.

Finally, Silvia makes reference to the conflict between using location-aware technology and gaining skills and knowledge of the environment:

Drivers express the introduction of GPS systems as a way of making their “skilled” job an unskilled one; anyone with a GPS could do their job
[…]
The more the driver relies on the system to locate jobs, the less he or she relies on their in-depth knowledge of where they need to position themselves to maximise income.

In fact, my contextual inquiries somehow revealed quite the opposite. First, a navigation system was a mean to gain knowledge on the city (novice drivers have the tendency to leave it on passive mode to learn the street names). As a proof, after installation, the system tends to be used less and less by cab drivers. Second, the few mistakes a satnav system can make challenges the trust novice cab drivers put in the location technology. In fact, they have a tendency to use the street directory and paper maps for the dense urban area (or areas where they have points of reference). Experience drivers mention their feelings that now even freshly arrived cheap labor could do their job (as mentioned by Silvia). The reality proved to be more complicated than that. A satnav system does only do a part of the taxi driver’s job.

Sources:
Elaluf-Calderwoodand, S. and Sørensen, C. (2006). Organizational Agility with Mobile ICT? The Case of London Black Cab Work. Butterworth-Heinemann.

Elaluf-Calderwood, S. and Sørensen, C. (2008). 420 Years of Mobility: ICT Enabled Mobile Interdependencies in London Hackney Cab Work, Mobile Work/Technology.

Thinking about how innovation and urban infrastructure affects people mobility, the Daily Mail’s How children lost the right to roam in four generations provides an example of the declining mobility of children in cities and suburbs. It Includes is a map of the wondering space of children over three generations. Its gone down from about 6 miles in the early 1900s to about 300 meters today.

Courtey of the Daily Mail.
via the Future of Cities

Relation to my thesis: Example of the innovation impacting mobility and the perception of space. Connectivity (quality, opt-in/out) have lead to similar changes (see Rethinking the Role of Space in a Networked World), location-based services might also affect our relation with space.