The Visible City

Last week at Picnic took place a session on the The Visible City that featured projects that map cellphone network activity mobility as proxy of different urban dynamics in a city. Euro Beinat Director Sensible Future Foundation revealed the Current City initiative was with an artistic animation of SMS activity in Amsterdam by designed by Aaron Koblin with the support of urban data mining star Andrea Vaccari. In addition colleague Assaf Bidermann presented the senseable city lab‘s classics (see the a recent program on Discovery Channel for a description of the motivations behind these projects).

InternetActu has a concise report on these 2 presentations (Regarde la ville vivre) that apparently briefly discussed the use of cellphone data to reveal touristic areas (a theme I touch in a paper in the upcoming issue of IEEE Pervasive Magazine). With a less subdued tone, Michiel de Lange (who organized the Mobile City conference this year) provides a very refreshing angle on the session. He argues that quantitative data reduce mobility to mere movements without meaning that does not allow to to get a sense of the city as a lived space and how it is experienced. I find a lot of sympathy in this claim that touches the limitations of hard urban data (they might reveal the “how” but barely assess the motivations of the people who produce the data) and the necessity of the qualitative angle to describe the “why”.

A new urban hiker in Manhattan (the day Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection). Quantitative data won’t capture his divergent experience of the city that day.

Relation to my thesis: Discussing the visualization of urban digital footprints seems to be the trend this year (see also José Luis de Vicente’s interview “Visualiser pour discuter et agir” and the upcoming VISUALIZAR’08: Database City workshop he organizes). In 1 years will we actually discuss the analysis of these data and the methods to assess them? My journey as a PhD candidate will be over by then.

Apparently my work on Flickr in Barcelona has been mentioned at Picnic. Photo courtesy of cc. Kandinski