Sentient Cities Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space

Via Anne Galloway.

Crang, M. and Graham, S. (2007). SEntient cities ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space. Information, Communication & Society, 10(6):789–817.

Mike Crang and Stephen Graham deliver a “British cultural geography” approach (see also Dodge and Kitchin’s Code/Space) to urban ubiquitous computing far from the contemporary techno-determinism and well attuned to socio-cultural nuances and the variety and complexity of everyday lived experience (see Concepts That Go Against the Technological Tide in Social, Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing). In this article, they explore domains within which the reconfiguration of cities and their politics are being actively imagined and enacted through the imagination and deployment of ubiquitous computing. Through a wide-ranging survey they emphasize that there is a great deal of work going on developing and exploring urban pervasive in three main domains: “commercial fantasies of ‘friction-free’ urban consumption; military and security industry attempts to mobilize ubiquitous computing for the ‘war on terror’; and attempts by artists to interrupt fantasies of perfect urban control through artistic use of new ubicomp technologies to try and re-enchant urban space and urban life.” Strangely enough, I do not really understand why research endeavors to explore urban informatics are not discussed (such as investigating the significance of digital traces, use of urban probes, study of the co-evolution

They categorize the latter domain (digital art and locative media) into three main types of initiatives:

• The first take the data coding of the environment and seek to make it transparent and/or aesthetically problematic.
• The second are those that seek to re-enchant the environment through multi-authored overcodings. That is they take augmented space but seek to pluralize the authorship.
• The third are those that seek to foster new engagements with the environment by promoting new practices of direct contact and association

The critique of a possible future of the perfect, uniform informational landscape and the fantasies of ‘friction free’ urban consumption matches very well with the message of Sliding Friction. They refere to Michel de Certeau:

His nightmare city was one of perfect knowledge and transparency where terror is no longer about the shadows but ‘an implacable light that produces this urban text without obscurities, which is created by a technocratic power everywhere and which puts the city-dweller under control.
[...]
Far from the pure vision of what de Certeau calls the ‘concept city’, we may find the production of myriads of little stories – a messy infinity of ‘Little Brothers’ rather than one omniscient ‘Big’ Brother

and Malcoml McCullough’s Digital Ground

In practice, we may find that temporary and ‘good-enough’ approaches to urban ubicomp may lead to ‘local aggregations of self-connecting systems [that] can become islands of coherence in the chaos raised by pervasive computing’.

It matches also quiet well with what I attended to communicate at Lift07 in Embracing the Real World’s Messiness.

But they are only mythologies of a perfect, uniform informational landscape. In reality, the seamless and ubiquitous process of pure urban transparency that many accounts suggest will always be little but a fantasy. In practice, the linking of many layers of computerized technology is generally a ‘kludge’, as software designers call it. That is, a bricolage of component middleware, none of which is really designed for the task to which it is put, nor perfectly configured to work with the other middleware or devices it encounters. Computerized systems thus run ‘sub-optimally’ but normally function adequately nonetheless.
[...]
There is a real issue about proliferating knowledges circulating routinely and more or less autonomously of people. But it would seem to us that the political options are not those of rejection or romanticizing notions of disconnection. Rather, it is to work through the inevitable granularity and gaps within these systems, to find the new shadows and opacities that they produce.

And finally I share the same discourse whenever I have to answer the “Big Brother” question for Tracing the Visitor’s Eye:

As such, there may well be an issue where rendering our tacit sociospatial practices visible is an uncomfortably close echo of commodified and surveillant systems. But these artistic endeavours in turn offer a second politics of visibility, that is these technologies themselves need to be made visible.