Towards a City of Events: Digital Media and Urbanity

Some notes and thought from Antoine Picon‘s informal talk at this morning Ambient Informatics course. Picon is Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at Harvard. His background make him a perfect observer of what is happening today and skeptical of the benefits of technologies. His conversation started by agreeing that digital media is changing the city as we experience it. However, the nature and the scope of this change remain unclear. For instance, unlike William Mitchell evocation in City of Bits of the dematerialization, we now know that it is far from being the case, physical circulation has increased in direct proportion to the rise of the electronic exchanges. Similarly, there has been the assumption that electronics link to the dispersion of cities (e.g. sprawl) such as in the Silicon Valley. In fact, this perspective is in contrast with the reality of the importance of centers and concentrated urban senses (see Manuel Castells or Saskia Sassen‘s works). Finally, we can assume that new means of communication will affect primarily urban life and urban experience rather than the urban layout and fabric. This contradicts the current developments of social softwares such as facebook that builds communities based on who you know physically. In fact, as suggested by Steve Woolgar virtual interactions are all more vivid when they are based on a material reality of some kind.

So should we consider that the digital media city is just the city we know with hypertrophied characteristics, more circulation, a more complex sequence of centers and peripheries, more networks? Or as suggested by Marc Augé‘s discourse we might very well live in a state of supermodernity and in supermodern cities rather than being on the verge of a different mode of existence.

Urban mapping is a mean to lead us to explore further what is happening today in the urban realm. Picon presented the evolution of the map representation of the city. In the Renaissance, many maps were about presenting the portrait of the city, its physiognomy, like a person, and its main monuments. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, maps were more and more often about urban geometry. In the nineteenth century, maps conveyed notions about new dimensions of the city like its networks (e.g. sewer maps, what happens in the network. such as surveillance, state of traffic). Nowadays, with the complexity of cities, Even their centers are hard to understand using the traditional means of cartography. Contemporary maps might come with two scales. First, mapping globably what is happening (i.e. global perception). These maps present us the city from a control room perspective. As highlighted by Bruno Latour, these maps only represent selected point of view of the city. Second, mapping what is happening to the individual (i.e. particular and local aspects, such as the use of satnav systems). These maps show us the city as we experience it, with the nearby possibilities offered to us. Beyond being produced using digital technologies, these two scales share another property: they how occurrences, events, situations, scenarios rather than objects, arrangements and organizations. The first type functions at the scale of the city, the second at the scale of the individual. Since the 50s and 60s, the city is more and more defined as a program of events. Archigram‘s work reflects very well this evolution. Similarly, the Paris evoked in the Debord’s psychogeographic maps was a matrix of events and situations. Nowadays, it is those events, festivals, celebrations of all kinds that define cities as surely as monuments. In fact even pieces of architecture become events (e.g. the Guggenheim in Bilbao)

In fact, very often nothing happens in the city, but the city is the event (e.g. being in Eurodisney is part of the event) with all its “hyper-local” micro-events. The weather or traffic conditions have been transformed into an everyday event. We have now the capacity to reveal them in real-time. However, it is not yet entirely clear what should one do with this real time possibilities.

Then Picon went to on talking about the suspention of the cricis of historicity. That is that we currently live in the circle and to get out of it we must think about apocalyptic changes. Digital media is making promises, but in practice it shows nothing on how it changes the world or the city. It does not aim at a radically different future. Digital technology is proliferating without promises. Therefore we live in a suspended present. Real-time maps developed at the SENSEable City Lab shows life how it is and no how it could be. In fact, in the media map how it could get worse, and digital media participates to that. As a provocation, Picon mention the purpose now is not to open doors as the MIT Media Lab has been doing. This kind of ideology of figuring out the “how” is over. The real-time maps are a mean to engage the discussion but of course do do not solve the problem. Therefore we should focus on the “why” and what is really problematic today and engage in the construction of a possible future. For instance, digital media could help introducing sustainability more sexy way (such as what Tim Taylor presented at Lift08). I liked the comment that our current approach is very similar to biological science: we try to understand a living system through observations, and then think on how this knowledge can solve problems, develop medicaments and cure diceases. In summary, we have an agenda, but we are not really clear about it. What do we do with all these real-time data?

Junno wrote some follow-up thoughts.

Relation to my thesis: Antoin Picon historical description of the city from its physiognomy, then infrastructures and finally global and individual events is very relevant to sketch a future instantiation of WikiCity that will feature how to connect these maps of events to people.