At Forum Chronos on "Maps. Territories to Invent"

While in Paris, I was kindly invited by Bruno Marzloff of Groupe Chronos to participate to their forum on “La carte. Des territoires à inventer“. My contribution entitled Intégration des technologies et de l’intelligence ambiante dans les environnements urbains compressed in 15′ a few thoughts and studies extracted from my research on the integration of ubiquitous technologies in urban environments. A broad topic that I already intended to cover in an interview to Groupe Chronos “Réduire l’incertain, Révéler le réel-réel“. I discussed the emergence of new urban actors and the massive amount of digital footprints we produce in their implicit and explicit contact. Besides the obvious concerns on privacy, these new dynamic urban data provides opportunities to improve the management in real-time (remote control urbanism, feedback loop), the planning (evidence-based urbanism) and design (post-occupency evaluation) of cities of the near-future. After a couple of example of the applications of new potential types of urban analysis, I fed the debate on questioning some of the techno-determinism and utilitarian rhetoric and wondering that by trying to solve problems we actual contribute to the good of society. I argued with a practical example from my study of taxi drivers in Barcelona and the co-evolution with their satellite navigation system (different appropriation and evolution in the use depending on their experience of the city).

The 1-hour discussion (summarized here) that follow the interventions of the speakers revealed how much maps are no more the speciality of cartographers, geographers and urban planners. As they become manageable and “habitable“, they are now part of the thoughts and practice of engineers, architects, social scientists, artists and philosophers. The obvious first challenge to avoid confusions have this kind of heteroclite crowd to speak a common language and share common references. We are still far from that state, and that’s probably what made this forum fascinating to attend.

In relation to my work, the obvious subjects discussed were about the ownership of the generated digital footprints (the user who produces the, the service providers who deploys the infrastructure, the analysis provider who adds value? the local authority that manages the space?) and who is allowed to access them. A classic example is the tension between JC Decaux and the city of Paris on the ownership of the usage data of the city’s bike sharing system. One sure thing, is that not many institutions claim that their job is to analyze and add value to these data. Even Orange France sells considers their business as provide of brute data instead of provider of urban information. For instance they sell their cellular network traffic data to provide real-time road and highway traffic information.

Beyond the acknowledgment of the power of new digital maps to draw attention (e.g. chronotope of visitors data in France’s reveals the heartbeat of the country) it becomes necessary to think about their real use and misuse. For instance who will be the hackers of these new territories? who will play the role of digital garbage data collection? who will manipulate them for their own interest? All this considering that we, in general, show poor skills in actually reading maps and we interpret them in a very individual way based on our experience with the physical space.

Thanks to Bruno Marzloff, Léa Marzloff and Julie Rieg for the invitation! It was a great pleasure to meet for the first time Loic Hay, Frank Thomas, Bruno Caillet and Hugues Aubin.