Yesterday, I delivered my last formal talk of the year at the Lift @ home session on “Urban informatics / Les nouveaux paysages numériques“, organized by Nicolas Nova in the Lift Conference premises in Geneva. This event was part of the urban informatics workshop series Nicolas and have been running. I played the role of the utilitarian to engage the audience on the potentials benefits of exploiting the logs of digital activities in our contemporary cities. My established spiel was enhanced with some insights from a recent study of crowd dynamics at the Puerta del Angel/Rambla area in Barcelona. As usual, the slides of “L’analyse urbaine à partir des activités numériques” are online for your downloading pleasure.

It was a pleasure to finally tag team with Boris Beaude from EPFL who brought his geographer’s reading of the notion of digital spaces and the maps they entail (read “Internet, un lieu du Monde” in the book L’invention du Monde, and see his courses at SciencePo Enjeux politiques de la géographie and Théorie de l’espace at EPFL). His insights help raise the kind of reflexive awareness need to reduce the effect of map designers’ personality/background on what is finally produced (see his recent paper Crime Mapping, ou le réductionnisme bien intentionné). He delivered a compelling argument on the reductionism of crime maps visualizations, highlighting the classic misleading error of calculating the density of a phenomena from the density of residents. Furthermore, these representation rely on citizen’s declarations, while it is well known that the most dangerous areas of a city are where there is a fear to report crimes. Among other issues, this calls the attention on the lack of critical thinking on “what does this information informs us on?” and who is responsible for the mishandling and misrepresentation of the data?

Boris Beaude at the improvised cabaret in the Lift Conference premises

The third speaker, Pascal Wattiaux discussed the role of technologies in the production of the olympic games. Each of the project run for at least 10 years, with each candidacy strongly embedded into the city planning, compressing 30 of development into roughly 7 years with no escape and a constant acceleration and organizational ramp-up (growing from 350 to 150.000 people in a few years). The games experience goes from the preparation of the games, through the production of the games, and the legacy of the games. It must be in sync with the expectation of the various stakeholders (public, athletes, workforce, sponsors, municipal, regional and state governments, etc).

In that unique context, technologies constantly offer opportunities in both revenue opportunities and cost savings. However, with the constant evolutions of technologies, it is hard to build “best practices”, therefore organizers report on “best experiences”.

Nowadays there are opportunities in the analysis of the spatial dynamics of the organization, could improve the spectators management (the stadium need to be full, it is a question of image), reduce the staff of volunteers, or organize the emergency operations with specific language competences.

So yes, cities are all about difficulty. Most of the urban systems designs and scenarios out there are about to reduce their complexity adding layers of technologies and information (see The “Quants”, their Normalizations and their Abstractions). But we will never design complication out of the world, and certainly not with all the kind of instruments, practices and objects we develop. It tried to make that case in Embracing the Real World’s Messiness and in Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities. In their recent Situated Technology pamphlet, Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova argue on this quite nicely:

The idea of a ubiquitously computing urban setting where everything functions perfectly won’t work. We don’t even have to give the technical reasons why, we can rely on the history of failures as one often does, the things that are too often forgotten about but provide the richest set of materials for design and, despite this, are almost never considered.

At best the difficulties will shift. So is the design of urban systems about reducing complexity or make cities less intimidating? In an inspiring “melt up”, Adam Greenfield went off script and argued for the latter. Urban system are about giving more visibility to engage, to have citizens a little bit more prepared to understand the complexity and at best participate to the conversation that is the city. The design goals are both very humble and yet extremely challenging to reach. It will request us to disable the way we do design. That is, user-centered design is not enough and we have to go out and get dirty (e.g. practicing urban scouting, confronting practices or as Adam would say “Go beyond the safety nets of the practices we use”).

But even with perfect designs, the city has no guarantee of perfect outcome, citizens do appropriate the resources in an equal manner, some take advantage of the systems and have the ability to break the rules. So, as asked by an attendee to Adam’s talk, “Can we avoid a digital dump in our backseat?“. I have no real answer to that (great!) question, but it seriously questions the way that we contextualize, design and plan the integration of urban systems into contemporary urban environments. In the series of workshops on urban informatics Lift lab leads we often ask participants to “criticize” their scenarios/interventions with considerations on the (basic) implications on the different stakeholders (”win” and who “loses”?). One outcome of our resent workshop in Cornellà proved that it takes a long effort to go beyond the pretty and inclusive designs of urban system or the scenarios that discard the nasty elements that are integral part of urban life. It was not until the real end of the workshop that conflicting debates emerged.

Why do I blog this: near-future networked and digital cities are also about: Brussels’ digital garbage collectors going on strike, an alarming rate of digital syllogomania among the registered citizens of Sao Paolo, Google fined by the EU for their open data spillage of Amsterdam and Tokyo’s mayor who has to resign for sensor data smuggling. The contemporary Paris Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meeting Reality is yet only a weak signal.

Even with a perfect design, the city offers not guarantee of perfect outcomes

In the latest Situated Technologies pamphlet “A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing“, Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova discuss the notion of “real-time cities” shifting discussion away from the hygienist model of efficiency towards unscripting the unexpected and cultivating the unusual. In a world of “open data initiatives” and “smart cities”, I have a lot of sympathy for their discourse that consider computing in an urban setting not be about data and algorithms, but people and their activities. They critique the hold of quants on the representation of the city arguing that “our relationship to the spatial environment should only be based on statistical analysis or mediated by computations”:

One characteristic of these sorts of mass city visualizations is that they operate at an abstract level and normalize the individual, averaging out all the atomic units—the people—of contemporary cities. Another dimension that is lost is the history and culture, which are not part of these representations.

Of course, the “quant” failure in the financial markets makes this idea of our reliance on spreadsheets, quantification and computation even more poignant.

And these numbers guys on Wall Street—the “quants”—were going berserk with their numbers. They were creating such byzantine computational number-crunching algorithms that no one knew how it all worked. The quants, with their theoretical mathematics PhDs, had so divorced themselves with their abstracting tier of calculation that it all was destined to collapse.

In my thesis, I intended to downplay the role of data and the unique reliance on data scientists, arguing for mixed quantitative and qualitative approaches to capture urban dynamics and support the design of urban services (see The Other Point of View). It also implies integrating other practices to question the hold of engineers, accounts and architects on the design of our cities. Julian and Nicolas use the following terms:

I suppose this is where designers could participate if they sat at the same table as the engineers and accountants and brought additional sensibilities that can vector interpretations and semantics differently, away from the up-and-to-the right graphs of instrumental progression to bigger, faster and cheaper.

Last week I was at Donosti-San Sebastian, to give a short presentation of my research at the The First International Conference on the Measurement and Economic Analysis of Regional Tourism. In the session, “New Instruments for Measuring and Modelling Tourism Flows”, I delivered my classic spiel “Analysis of Visitors from their Digital Activities” that covered:

1. the ability to reveal aspects of visitors experience of a city/region from their digital activities
2. the opportunities to evaluate urban strategies

I have added some notes and references to augment my slides.

Prior to my talk, Carlos Arce provided a complete scan on the new instruments and techniques to measure travel behaviors, mentioning the battles in persuading people and organizations to participate to survey and the necessity to “sell better” the value of these kind of analysis (impact, opportunity and efficiency; for special need population or special areas (eco-tourism)).

Following the other presentations, it seems there are not many innovations that can surpass the power of paper+pencil to measure travel behaviors. Back in the Simpliquity days, we inspired from this traditional technique to develop a very simple technological solution for Detecting air travel to survey passengers on a worldwide scale. This approach contrasted with the quest for perfect data some statisticians seem to lose themselves in, some requesting a mandatory Galileo reporting system for each vehicle in function in the EU. I mean, Europe can be more creative than that! Fortunately, some statisticians do not seem well-armed with a consistent argumentation to get what they do not have, considering the barrier they already face (privacy, propriety, silos, data quality, evaluation of their models). I particularly expected to experience more discussions on the transformation of measures and analysis into politics and strategies (and their evaluations).

Last week, Nicolas was also invited in a keynote address to discuss the near future of tourism services based on digital traces.

Señor!

Thanks to CICtourGUNE and particularly to Ibon for the invitation!

It seems our work has inspired others very recently: Explorando otras fuentes de datos: Flickr y el turismo and Redes sociales y turismo: flickr + Canarias.

Last saturday at Citilab in Cornellà, in the outskirts of Barcelona, Nicolas and myself organized a “lift @ home” event during the Urban Labs days.

This one-day long workshop called “Hands on Barcelona’s Informational Membrane helped launch the Ciudad Percibida initiative and is part of a series of seminar about the new practices as well as the visions and issues around the hybridization of the digital and the physical in cities (upcoming November 9 in Geneva: Urban informatics / Les nouveaux paysages numériques). In this event, we focused on the informational membrane hovering over Barcelona and try to sketch near-future scenarios with datasets and infrastructures existing in city. The goal was to understand a contemporary urban software infrastructures and explore the implications (trade-offs, opportunities and concerns) in the data they generate. The effort was put on Barcelona’s specific issues (e.g. mobility, infrastructure, tourism, gentrification, ecology …) and their related datasets.

We had a group of 30 participants coming from very diverse backgrounds: designers, engineers, people from the city of Barcelona, ethnographers, architects, etc. both from the area and abroad. We started from a presentation&discussion about the general problems of Barcelona and the available data. Then small groups have been formed to work on how to use the existing infrastructures and data to create potential solutions in terms of services. The assignments led people to go beyond traditional techno-determinism to envision social and organizational framing.

We’re working on a short write-up document for this workshop. Something that would summarize the findings and pave the way for upcoming seminars.

On Saturday October 24, Lift lab will run the workshop “Hands on Barcelona’s Informational Membrane” at Citilab in Cornellà (Barcelona) in the last day of Urban Labs. Our first workshops that aimed at discussing the new practices (see Round table on Real-Time Cities at MIT) and the visions and issues (see The Design of the Hybrid City of the Near Future at Lift09) behind the concept of hybrid cities. This time, we will try to go beyond abstract discussions and far-fetched visions. The 25 participants will focus on the informational membrane hovering over Barcelona and try to sketch near-future scenarios with datasets and infrastructures existing in city. The goals will be to understand a contemporary urban software infrastructures and explore the implications (trade-offs, opportunities and concerns) in the data they generate. With Nicolas Nova, we will use these upcoming days to finalize the format of the workshop, but we will make an extra effort to ground it on Barcelona’s specific issues (e.g. mobility, infrastructure, tourism, gentrification, ecology …) and their related datasets.

Once again, we are particularly proud with the mix of talents and pioneers that will join us.

Prior to the workshop, Adam Greenfield will present his takes on networked cities and hopefully also provoke us on the data networked object generate (see Toward urban systems design). Following-up on the same theme, Ben Cerveny will most certainly take some altitude to discuss design research on urban computational systems (see VURB). We could not think a better pair of inspiring speakers to provoke the rest of the participants who for the main part, are pioneers practically involved with the concepts of digital/hybrid/data/networked/sentient cities:

Mario Ballesteros, independent editor, researcher who I met in his role of curator for the Design Hub in Barcelona, is a regular collaborator at Actar Publishers and writes in his own personal research blog, Mañanarama, on the subject of modern architecture in Mexico as a product of failed development.

Joan Batlle, the Head of Innovation and eGovernment International Cooperation Department of the Barcelona City Council, has been leading many projects applying innovative Technology in government processes, including the Intelligent Cities of the Next Generation project.

Anjalika Bose, working currently in Philips Design Probes, as an Ambient Experience Designer, pushing projects in the realm of architectural spaces (see Design Probes).

Cariou Christophe, an independant researcher and founder of Everydatalab who I met at the World Information City conference where he presented an innovative process of mixing quantitative data (anonymous logs of calls, handovers and sms) with user-generated content to map the Fête de la Musique night in Paris.

Jose Luis De Vicente, a cultural researcher and curator. He directs the Visualizar program at Medialab Prado, Madrid.

Domenico Di Siena, architect and researcher, has been reporting his exploration of the relationship between public space and new technologies on Ecosistema urbano and urbanhumano. He is also actively involved in the development of the Meipi collaborative platform.

Juan Freire, PhD in Biology and Professor at the University of Corunna (UDC) where he acted as Dean of the School of Sciences. Now, he is CEO of Fismare, an environmental consulting firm, and fellow of e-Cultura, a firm devoted to cultural management, territorial development and creative processes. I particularly discovered the uniqueness of Juan at Visualizar when he wore his marin biologist hat and drew comparisons between the ocean and urban environment.

Paco González, architect, works and researches at radarq.net, an open study which works and researches on architecture, city and network (see their projects).

Irene Hwang, an architect and editor, co-founder of Constructing Communication. I met Irene in her role of curator for the Design Hub in Barcelona.

Daniel Kaplan, founder and CEO of the Next-Generation Internet Foundation (Fing), a collective and open Research and Development project that focuses on digital innovation and on the interaction between technological progress, business innovation and societal change

Giles Lane, an artist, researcher and teacher, founder and co-director of Proboscis that has widely been inspiring research in locative media and ubiquitous computing since 1994 (mine included), particularly for their capacity to act on the field with citizens and institutions as well as their creative practice that mix fields as diverse as medical research, music, community development, housing and urban regeneration, pervasive computing, mapping and sensor technologies.

Joachim Neumann, researcher at Telefonica Research who has been developing some unique analysis of the Bicing bike-sharing system in Barcelona (see Sensing and Predicting the Pulse of the City through Shared Bicycling)

Thierry Marcou, director of the Villes 2.0 program (e.g. workshops with citizens and local institutions) that led to the development of the Green Watch / Citypulse platform that encourage people’s implication in measuring environmental indices.

Andrés Ortiz, co-founder of Bestiario dedicated to data dynamic representation and to the creation of digital spaces for the collective creation of knowledge. A pioneer in making the complex comprehensible.

José Luis Pajares, designer and research at Univ. Carlos III de Madrid. He has been working on web interfaces web for location and context-aware mobile devices.”Gelo” also organized of the My Map is not your Map workshop.

Yuji Yoshimura, who I am at Barcelona Ecologia, is now an expert in urban mobility and environmental analysis at Center for Innovation in Transport in Barcelona.

Fortunately, we will benefit from the critical thinking of a couple of participants less involved in practical work on informational membranes:

Nurri Kim, artist and archeologist of the moment, who has recently opened Feeder in Helsinki. This exhibition presents a project dedicated to photographing people that I’ve made custom lunches for (including depictions of the meal that I cooked for them and what they would usually have for their lunch) from 2006 to the present.

Rosa Pera, director of Bòlit, Centre d’Art Contemporani. Girona and director of the master degree “Directing and Designing Exhibition Projects” at Elisava School of Design in Barcelona.

Last but not least, I look forward to meet for the first time Albert Cañigueral, Mathieu Favez, Chris Pinchen, and Lillian Shieh!

Why do I blog this: We hope that this workshop offers an alternative venue to the now omnipresent corporate discourses on self-proclaimed “Smart Cities” and government initiatives on “Open Cities“. With its practical approach, anchored on a specific urban context (i.e. Barcelona), this workshop aims at exploring the implications behind these kinds of initiative, understanding what resources are available and their potentials to improve/prejudice near-future cities. Other similar approaches include Dan Hill’s Urban Sensing course and the upcoming Sentient Rotterdam workshop.

Idealista has been developing its business in offering the classic online real estate ads platform. The massive amount of information they have been accumulating over the years is transforming them into an urban actor, offering their analysis of the evolution of the real estate market back to the public as well as trends almost in real-time (e.g. el precio de la vivienda usada en españa ya está en niveles de 2005); the kind of report that would take longer to produce through traditional processes. Not only do the analyze the market from the offers (online ads) but they could also evaluate the demand in certain areas of a city from logs on their web server. All this accessible back to the public through their open API.

Now, Idealista offers a call-free number for housing seekers to report any “for rent” or “on sale” sign on the street. If the real estate object is in their database, they will provide all the descriptions and possibly offer the kind of comparative service (i.e. comparing the price with the market) they offer online.

Why do I blog this: Some food for thought for our upcoming workshop ‘Hands on Barcelona’s Informational Membrane‘: An online service, accumulating data on a city transforming into an urban actor, now using crowdsourcing techniques to expend is coverage. Curious to see how this evolves.

This blog is now a 6.5 years ‘note to self‘, and will continue so. It contributed to help me frame and polish my thoughts on my research, and will continue so.

Now, A PhD behind me, and Lift lab in front of me, I have paved my next steps, communicating the results of my research and forging new non-academic alliances, to the detriment of contributing blog. Now that my “voice” related to the contributions of my thesis needs a renewal, I am back to a Making/Creating/Building phase (see The Kind of Research I am). I am spending a good share of my time, slightly away from this blog, developing processes and tools to qualify, measure, find utility and extract value from captured urban dynamics. It means moving beyond the fascination around basic capacities to sense or visualize a city in real-time. It means, being humble, working on the ground, understanding clients and partners, their practices and how new tools and techniques can integrate their traditional processes. It means confronting and plotting with bounded disciplines or as Julian Bleecker would say:

“Let things get rather undisciplined and a bit unruly. Disciplines are self-satisfied, with is akin to apathy, which never solved any problems.”

Back to the Making/Creating/Building Phase, contributing on two levels: 1) software/process modeling (making/creating/building); 2) talk planning (polishing a discourse)

As part of a conference-debate on “La Terre Vue du Web” organized by Joaquín Keller and Christel Sorin, I gave a talk entitled “Pratiques des nouveaux espaces numériques” (slides in French) to present and debate on the emerging presence of geoinformation, often issued from the Web (expended definition of the Web that includes web protocols and Web of Things) and their implications on contemporary practices in the city. Based on a previous talk, I highlighted the ability to perform a new type of urbanism, based on evidences, merging traditional survey techniques that observes and counts the visible with now developed web analytics tools that measure activities online. This “evidence-based urbanism” provides new means to evaluate and improve strategies, exemplified by our analysis of the digital activity at the New York City waterfront as indicator of urban attractiveness (see study of the New York City Waterfalls).

New practices: merging techniques and tools to observe and measure the urban and the web, the visible and the invisible.

On the other hand, the digital representation of the physical is imperfect and potentially misleading. For instance, satnav system augment our wayfinding capacities with instantaneous contextual and planning information. Taxi drivers must assess and learn their fluctuating quality that must be assessed, leading to an evolution of their practice, sometimes amputating the capacity to learn directly from customers advices.

Evolving practices: assessing the quality of the geoinformation

The debate covered several aspects around the capacity to manipulate previously inaccessible datasets (see From Shoeboxes to Digital Footprints and Digital Shadows, Citizens to Improve Bicing, …), their ability to represent/disform the truth, the use of “sexy” visualizations as part of a research process (see Below the Tip of the Urban Data Iceberg), and their integration into current practices (see Why Real-Time Data Are Not Used to Improve Urban Systems?)

Thanks to Joaquín Keller and Christel Sorin for the invitation!

This week, I head to Paris for a gig at La Cantine on the theme “La Terre vue du Web“. I will team-up with Denise Pumain to discuss the ways information, communication and location-aware technologies change our relation with the space. This event is part of a conference series on interdisciplinary approaches to the Web.

Later this month, Lift lab will run a workshop in Barcelona “Hands on Barcelona’s Informational Membrane” that aims at exploring the implications and opportunities of the presence of the informational membrane hovering over Barcelona. The list of participants is already utterly promising.

Finally, I will mingle with tourism professionals and experts at the First International Conference on the Measurement and Economic Analysis of Regional Tourism in San Sebastian, presenting new instruments for measuring and modelling tourism flows and other types of innovation in the tourism enterprise. After the 9th International Forum on Tourism Statistics at OECD, I am thrilled to once again participate to a conference sponsored by the UNWTO with practitioners and people who perform studies on the field.

Back on the road again

Why do I blog this: Thriving from the rich diversity of contiguous domains, languages and perspectives.