Curry Chandler

Curry Chandler is a writer, researcher, and independent scholar working in the field of communication and media studies. His writing on media theory and policy has been published in the popular press as well as academic journals. Curry approaches the study of communication from a distinctly critical perspective, and with a commitment to addressing inequality in power relations. The scope of his research activity includes media ecology, political economy, and the critique of ideology.

Curry is a graduate student in the Communication Department at the University of Pittsburgh, having previously earned degrees from Pepperdine University and the University of Central Florida.

Filtering by Tag: space

Niantic responds to Pokemon Go players, acquires scanning company

In an earlier post I wrote about how Pokemon GO developer Niantic was rolling back some gameplay changes implemented during the pandemic, and how many players were pushing back against the reversion to the pre-pandemic status quo. Last week Niantic posted a response to the Pokemon GO community:

“We have heard your feedback about one change in particular - that of the PokéStop and Gym interaction distance. We reverted the interaction distance from 80 meters back to the original 40 meters starting in the U.S. and New Zealand because we want people to connect to real places in the real world, and to visit places that are worth exploring.”

Several threads on Pokemon GO-related subreddits featured reactions to Niantic’s statement. Some users dismissed the developer’s message as diversionary corporatespeak and crisis PR. This was echoed in several of the top comments in an r/Games thread:

“tl;dr We heard you. Now shut up and leave us alone. Quit telling us how you should be enjoying our game. But just to make you be quiet, we promise to make an investigative task force who will look into the risks and benefits of increasing the distance and get back to you at a later date.”

“Ah the classic "we need an internal team to decide the best course of action" when the solution is already right there and had been implemented for months. They're not changing anything, they're attempting damage control and hoping it all blows over.”

Over on r/PokemonGo, several users found Niantic’s stated rationale of “encouraging exploration” as dubious:

“This game is like 2% exploration and 98% visiting the same neighborhood pokestops and gyms over and over again, and Niantic knows this.”

“You want to give us exploring? Give us biomes, give us rare Pokemon in hiking areas, give us better pokemon in eggs so we see the benefit of walking. Why the hell would I want to walk any extra to get the same dumb pokemon that is in the wild? Do I really need to "explore" a QFC parking lot? Lies. Exploring has nothing to do with it.”

Many of the comments in the above thread posited that Niantic was appealing to virtues of “exploration” and “exercise” in order to mask their purely financial interest in prompting players to move to Poke stops. Niantic is clearly invested in maintaining their edge in geolocation and augmented reality technology: last week the company acquired a 3D scanning company called Scanverse. As Greg Kumparak wrote for TechCrunch:

“As I first wrote about years ago, one of Niantic’s goals is to build a detailed and endlessly-evolving 3D map of the world — a step they see as fundamental to enabling true, rich augmented reality experiences if/when the world ever embraces something like AR glasses. It’s a rather massive (and never-ending) task, but one made a bit more feasible by way of its ever-roaming player base across games like Pokémon GO, Harry Potter Wizards Unite and Ingress.”

Meanwhile, debates over the gameplay changes have now spawned divisive conversations over Covid and vaccines on the Pokemon Go subreddit. One user asked why Niantic was reversing the pandemic gameplay decisions when the virus is still with us, and the board moderators have affirmed a zero tolerance policy toward Covid denial or anti-vaccine posts.

Paris, Texas: Cinematic Space, Emotional Landscapes, and American Environments

Paris, Texas is a film about space. Space that you move through and space that you move beyond. The spaces between people, both inner and outer. It is a film utterly fixated upon landscapes: geographical landscapes, symbolic landscapes, and emotional landscapes. It offers one of the most evocative depictions of American environments in narrative cinema. It is a film about how the emplacement of memory provides a foundation for our identity and self-understanding, and how our imaginations of the places we want to end up provide conceptual and affective orientation for our forward movement into the future. It’s about the power of naming places and the power of a nameless place.

The film evokes dichotomy and duality at multiple levels beginning with the title itself. In addition to its dichotomous construction as two words separated with a comma, the title conjures contrasting spatial imaginaries. The disparate associations elicited by “Paris” and “Texas” respectively stage a conceptual distinction between elegant urbanity and rugged frontier. This polarity is reflected throughout the film in the juxtaposition between geographic landscapes and built environments, and in the way the cinematography frequently captures natural light and artificial illumination within a single frame. It is also reflected in the depiction of the two brothers, Travis and Walt. One brother wanders out of the desert and silently conceals his mysterious past, embodying a sort of wild unknowability. The other brother is immersed in civilization and domestic life, rooted in commerce and materiality by virtue of his trade. They are like a postmodern Cain and Abel, with one tending the flock and the other tilling the ground.

The film’s all-encompassing thematic and visual spatial concerns are established in the opening shot: an aerial view of a vast desert topography composed of rugged mesas, sloping escarpments, spindly buttes and jutting shafts of stone beneath broad blue sky. The airborne camera sweeps across this arid landscape until it finds a lone figure traversing the tableau. We cut to a closer view for our first look at Travis. Dressed in a dust-covered navy pinstripe suit, gold necktie, and red baseball cap, he casts an incongruous visage as a solitary testament to contemporary civilization amidst the timeless natural backdrop.

Travis soon wanders into a human settlement. He staggers into an apparent cantina housed in a small standalone building and collapses.

“The DUST has come to stay. You may stay or pass on through or whatever.” - Sign in Terlingua cantina

Glimpses of identificatory signage in the area establish the location as Terlingua, an actual town in Texas. Some historical context from Legends of America:

The name “Terlingua” actually applies to a mining district, and there were three different settlements located here in southwestern Brewster County. The name derives from two Spanish words, tres, and lenguas, meaning “three tongues,” called such for one of two reasons. Still debated today, some say “three tongues” refer to the three languages spoken in the area long ago – English, Spanish, and Native American. The second reason refers to the three forks of Terlingua Creek.

The notion of “three tongues” evokes the production of the film itself: a German and French co-production shot in the United States. The narrative also features many multilingual and international elements: there is a Spanish thread woven throughout the film, with Travis’ recollection of his mother’s Spanish lineage, his use of Spanish language and pronunciation as subtle indicators of his time in Mexico, and in the brief bilingual sequence with Carmelita; Walt’s wife Anne is from France and teaches French words to Hunter; and the Terlingua doctor who tends to Travis, Doctor Ulmer, speaks with an evident German accent. When Ulmer’s diagnostic inquiries are wordlessly rebuffed by Travis’ persistent silence, his response offers another lingual allusion:

Doctor Ulmer: Guess something must have cut your tongue off.

The lighting in Doctor Ulmer’s office presents the first example of the distinctly green fluorescent light that will be a persistent visual element in the film. Having received no information from his patient Doctor Ulmer dials a telephone number that he discovered in Travis’ pockets, a number that is revealed as belonging to Travis’ brother Walt.

Our first glimpse of Travis depicted him as a miniscule figure dwarfed amongst the vast desert landscape surrounding him. The first time we see Walt he is framed in medium close-up against the backdrop of a slate-black high-rise office building. While we can discern a field of blue sky in the distant background along the left and right edges of the frame, Walt’s figure is entirely encompassed within the borders of the tower, its monolithic surface defined only by orderly rows of opaque windows.

The scene cuts to a wide shot to reveal that Walt is not standing in front of the building after all but rather an oversized photograph of a building propped up against a wall behind him. He appears to be in a sort of industrial workshop and we see other massive images scattered around the area. This is our first introduction to Walt’s business of creating billboard advertisements. The initial image of Walt juxtaposed against the modernist office building visually establishes the character’s association with urban environments, and the subsequent depiction of his workspace strewn with oversized images further concretizes his connection to artificial landscapes. Walt populates the physical environment with images, and the interconnections between images in space and images of space will be a recurring theme throughout the film.

Walt flies to Texas to find Travis. A short scene of Walt sitting in an airplane with blue sky visible through the porthole window behind him dissolves to a shot of him at a gas station. It is a stunning shot and one of the greatest examples of how the film’s photography evocatively captures the contrast between natural and artificial light within a single frame. Walt is positioned in the mid-foreground standing beside and behind his parked car. He stands beneath the gas station overhang and everything in Walt’s immediate environment is awash in the green-blue pallor cast by the station’s fluorescent lights. In the background, electrically-illuminated signs and street lights trail off along a silhouetted landscape to the horizon line where the last remnants of twilight glow orange against the darkening dusk sky. 

Walt studies a road map that lies open on the roof of the car. He reads out highway numbers and place names as he plots his route to Terlingua:

“10 to Van Horn, 90. To Alpine, 118 South.”

As Walt verbalizes these numeric route designations he is visually embedded within a tangle of arithmetic iconography: a “99¢” sign on the ice machine behind him, the fuel prices listed on the gas station marquee, and the highway road signs visible in the background.

Walt arrives in Terlingua only to be told by Doctor Ulmer that Travis disappeared that morning. He sets out in his car to continue the search. Soon enough he comes across Travis, who is not walking along a road but rather only occasionally bisecting the paved paths as he cuts through open fields. Travis marches resolutely through grazing livestock and across glistening blacktop as if tracing out some invisible line guided by an unseen lodestar. He strides right past Walt’s stopped car without seeming to notice the vehicle at all.

“You look like 40 miles of rough road.” - Walt to Travis upon their reunion

Walt takes Travis to a motel. When Walt goes into town to buy his brother some new clothes Travis marches out of the motel room. He heads down a gravel road past a billboard advertising the “Marathon Motel and Trailer Park,” and sign poles bearing notices for “TV” and “vacancy” and embellished with the stars and stripes.

Walt once again gives chase and this time he finds Travis walking along railroad tracks. After looking down the stretch of tracks and telling his brother that “there’s nothing out there,” Walt coaxes Travis into the car.

The scene cuts to a POV shot looking out through the car windshield, past the sweeping wiper blades. The car travels across a rain-slicked road toward the fading embers of sunset beneath a canopy of dark cloud. The shot holds as the vehicle moves toward another neon-lit oasis of roadside rest stops and restaurants, illuminated marquees for establishments with names like “El Rancho Motel” and “Silver Saddle Lodge.” It is another of the film’s stunning landscape shots: the horizon line that constitutes the meeting point between the vast stretch of highway and the endless sky is rendered in the liminal luminosity between the setting sun and the neon nightscape.

In their motel room Travis sits on the bed and gazes at his reflection in the mirror, presaging the film’s climactic confrontation and emotional apex.

The next morning Walt stops at a gas station down the street from the motel before getting on the highway. While they sit parked at the gas station Travis speaks for the first time in the film: the word “Paris” spoken three times in succession. When Travis asks if they can go to Paris Walt assumes he is referring to the French capital, but the camera cuts to reveal that Travis is studying a map of Paris, Texas. The homonymous confusion remains unresolved for the time being.

When the brothers arrive at the airport Travis seems skeptical about the change in their mode of transportation:

Travis: Where are we going?

Walt: We’re gonna fly to L.A. You’re not afraid of flying, are you?

Travis: We’re leaving the ground?

Walt: Yeah.

Travis: Why?

Travis does not seem persuaded by Walt’s assertion that flying is “faster” and “easier.” Indeed, the plane stops in the midst of taxiing on the runway so the brothers can disembark, evidently at Travis’ insistence. After apologizing to the flight attendant for delaying the departure Walt admonishes his brother’s erratic behavior, explaining that he’s “not in the wilderness anymore” and can’t behave in such a way in civilized society.

When they go to rent a car to continue the journey to L.A. Travis insists on having the same vehicle that Walt initially had. After some discussion Walt eventually convinces the rental service representative to provide him with the license plate number of his original vehicle so they can search the lot and find the car.

Travis: How are we gonna go in another car?

Once returned to their rental car Walt drives while Travis sits in the backseat regarding something in his hand. Walt asks what his brother is holding and Travis responds that it is: “A picture of Paris. A picture of a piece of Paris.” The photograph shows a plot of land, mostly bare dirt, with a small “For Sale” sign embedded in the earth. Travis explains that he bought the lot of land “a long time ago.” Walt looks at the picture of the vacant lot again and says “there’s nothing on it.” Travis laughs and says: “Empty.”

Further along in their journey Travis tells Walt that he remembers why he purchased the plot of land. Based on something his mother once told him, he believes that he may have been conceived in Paris, Texas.

Travis: So, I figured that that’s where I began. I mean me: Travis Clay Henderson. They named me that. I started out there.

As Travis and Walt continue this conversation in the car their exchange is presented in a sequence of intercutting shots. Rather than filming the characters together in a two shot from the front of the car, the scene cuts between individual shots of Walt driving and Travis in the passenger seat. The shots are angled in such a way so that each man is positioned in a lower corner of the frame, while the opposite-upper portion of the frame shows the surrounding highway traffic and the roadside sprawl stretching beyond. The resultant effect is a multi-level depth of image where our characters in the car are in the foreground, the passing traffic of other vehicles on the highway occupies the middle ground, and the background is a swiftly-moving landscape of billboards, light poles, and McDonald’s arches. It is a visually dynamic way to shoot a car conversation, and an evocative depiction of highway travel through the material landscape of the American built environment.

As the brothers enter greater Los Angeles Walt explains that he lives in the suburbs but has his business “in town.” Travis asks what his business is and Walt explains: “I make billboard signs for advertising.”

Here again one of the key thematic distinctions between the brothers is emphasized. Through his business of outdoor advertising Walt is centrally implicated with the construction of the built environment, with the creation of material and symbolic landscapes. He installs signs and images in space. By contrast, Travis carries an image of space. His photograph of the plot of land in Paris, Texas represents a complementary inversion of Walt’s relationship to space. Travis’ clarification that his photograph shows only “a piece of Paris” indicates an awareness of the image as a fragment, rather than a totalizing abstraction of a place. (It is worth noting, however, that Travis’ photograph also contains an example of signage in space by virtue of the “for sale” sign; this detail reveals the overlap between the brothers’ spatial associations, and also demonstrates an additional dimension of how space is fragmented and parceled out.)

The brothers arrive at Walt’s home which sits on a hill overlooking the L.A. urban sprawl and the constant air traffic of the Burbank Airport. The first morning after their arrival Walt’s wife Anne finds that Travis has collected all the shoes from the house during the night. She finds the footwear laid out neatly along a low brick wall in the backyard where Travis sits with a pair of binoculars watching the planes taking off and landing at the airport. As he observes a plane’s departure a POV shot reveals that Travis is tracking not the aircraft itself but rather the shadow cast by the plane; he is following the part of the plane that does not “leave the ground” during its flight.

In addition to reuniting with his sister-in-law Anne, Travis also reconnects with his 7 year old son Hunter, whom he has not seen for the past 4 years. On this first morning as Anne is getting in the car with Hunter to take him to school Travis offers to walk Hunter home that afternoon. Anne seems enthusiastic about the idea but Hunter balks at the suggestion, telling Anne: “Nobody walks, everybody drives.” Evidently the son shares his father’s particularity about modes of transportation.

When Hunter sees Travis waiting across the street after school that day he ignores his estranged father and asks his friend if he can ride home with him instead. Later that evening Travis, Anne, and Walt sit around the kitchen table worrying about Hunter’s whereabouts. Walt soon finds Hunter hiding out in the garage, sitting in the driver’s seat of a parked car with his hands gripping the steering wheel. He explains that he is “just driving,” and avoids Walt’s questions about Travis by asking: “When are they going to make spaceships like they make cars?”

This scene is followed by the splendid “home movies” sequence, a superb centerpiece moment in the film. With the acoustic accompaniment of Ry Cooder’s slide guitar, the characters wordlessly watch silent Super 8 footage of a family vacation from years earlier when Hunter was only 3 years old. Well, almost wordlessly: the scene features a solitary exchange of dialogue between Hunter and Travis after the Super 8 footage shows Travis driving an RV while toddler Hunter sits in his lap pulling on the steering wheel:

Hunter: That’s me driving.

Travis: I know. You’re gonna be good.

Cars and driving provide an obvious throughline in Paris, Texas, not only as part of the overall travelogue themes and “road movie” motifs, but through salient dialogue and persistent character associations. Travis and Hunter’s shared preoccupation with cars and driving suggest something about motor vehicle operation as a rite of passage. There is also a semblance of automobility as autonomy, a tangible realization of control and self-direction.

The “home movies” sequence marks a turning point in the film. It stages a development in the relationship between Hunter and Travis, who demonstrate closer affinity following the scene. It is also the audience’s first glimpse of Jane.

In a subsequent scene the Henderson’s housekeeper Carmelita observes Travis rapidly flipping through the pages of a magazine. He explains that he is looking for an image of “the father,” and she discerns that he is searching for a visual archetype of fatherhood that he can emulate. She helps him try on outfits from Walt’s closet, and asks whether he wants to appear as a rich father or poor father. After Carmelita asserts that there is no in-between, only a binary distinction between “rich father” and “poor father,” Travis opts for “rich.”

Carmelita: OK, one thing you must remember: to be a rich father, Señor Travis, you must look to the sky and never at the ground, eh?

Newly adorned in his “rich father” garb Travis is waiting across the street when Hunter leaves school that afternoon. Father and son walk along together on opposite sides of the street, until finally coming together in the middle of the street at the top of the hill. It’s a charming sequence with Harry Dean Stanton channeling silent film-era physical comedy and pratfalls, and a wonderful piece of visual storytelling.

Back at home Travis and Hunter look through a family photo album, and we learn that Travis and Walt’s father was killed in a car accident. The revelation evokes not only the recurring references to automobiles, but also Doctor Ulmer’s questioning Walt back in Terlingua whether Travis had ever been in a car accident.

Some time later Anne reveals to Travis that Jane has been depositing money into an account for Hunter. Using the bank account information, Anne had the wire traced to a bank in Houston. With the knowledge that Jane makes a deposit on the 5th of every month, Travis determines to travel to Houston in search of Jane.

This is followed by an interlude sequence: a lateral tracking shot following Travis as he walks along the sidewalk at dusk. The camera keeps pace as Travis passes in front of a car wash where latin music can be heard playing from a radio, then across a freeway overpass. As he crosses the span a voice is heard shouting from off camera, growing louder as Travis draws nearer. The voice bellows an apocalyptic jeremiad over the din of the rushing traffic below:

Screaming Man: They will invade you in your beds! They will snap you from your hot tubs! They will pluck you right out of your fancy sports cars! There is nowhere, absolutely nowhere, in this godforsaken valley -- I’m talking about, from the range of my voice, right here, clear out to the Mojave Desert, and beyond that! Clear out past the Barstows, and everywhere else in the valley all the way to Arizona! None of that area will be called the safety zone! There will be no safety zone! I can guarantee you the safety zone will be eliminated! Eradicated! You will all be extradited to the land of no return! It’s a navigation to nowhere!

When Travis reaches where the Screaming Man is standing near the center of the overpass he pauses momentarily to regard the man, then steps off the sidewalk to walk around him. As Travis passes he reaches out one hand to lightly brush the man’s back and shoulder in an ostensible gesture of sympathy and perhaps understanding.

Travis tells his brother about his intentions to leave in search of Jane as they are standing atop a billboard while Walt’s latest advertisement is installed. In spite of his earlier aversion to leaving the ground, Travis expresses appreciation for the change in perspective afforded by the higher elevation:

Travis: Too bad things don’t look the same on the ground. 

Walt: What do you mean?

Travis: Well, things are clearer up here. Might clear things up.

Travis informs Hunter of his upcoming quest as they are sitting in the bed of his newly acquired pickup truck. They eat lunch parked along the side of a freeway beneath the sweeping spans and towering concrete columns of highway interchanges. Hunter tells Travis that he wants to come along to Houston, and so the two head out together.

Once they are out on the open road Hunter regales Travis with a brief history of the universe:

Hunter: This whole galaxy, this whole universe, used to be compressed into a tiny spot this big. And you know what happened?

Travis: What?

Hunter: It went *pchoo* and blew up! All the spark, everything went flying all over the place and formed space. It was just gas, it was floating around.

Travis: The earth was?

Hunter: Yeah, the earth was really gas. And the sun formed, and it was so hot that the earth just formed into one hard big ball of oceans; nothing but ocean. So there were sea animals, and under the water a volcano went *pchoo* and the hot lava hit the water and formed rock to make land.

This vignette expands the film’s spatial concerns from local landscapes to the cosmos itself; from the daily spaces of quotidian life to galactic timescales of evolutionary development. It provides further evidence of Hunter’s fascination with outer space: he wears a silver bomber jacket emblazoned with NASA patches and the space shuttle emblem; he sleeps in Star Wars sheets; he asks Walt when space ships will be as available as cars; he recognizes Houston as the location of the Space Center. It also offers another link between spatial concerns and questions of origin, reflecting Travis’ preoccupation with Paris, Texas as the site of his conception, the place “where he started.”

The duo stop at the Cabazon Dinosaurs tourist spot in Riverside County, just west of Palm Springs. Hunter calls home to let Walt and Anne know what he is on the road with Travis. The sequence provides another striking example of the film’s evocative photography of neon lights and illuminated road signs reflecting off the glass of a phone booth, another instance where the fluorescent lights emit a particularly green hue.

Further along on their journey Hunter rides in the truck bed and uses their newly purchased walkie talkies to explain special relativity and time dilation to Travis.

Once they’re in Houston Travis and Hunter track Jane to a peep-show club where customers can observe sex workers through a one-way mirror and communicate via telephone intercom. The peep-show setting continues the film’s occupation with gaze, image, and spectularity. I’ve already commented on how Walt and Travis are engaged with images in and of space. But Jane’s presence in the film is also always rendered through a mode of observation and imageability. She is first glimpsed in the silent Super 8 footage of the “home movies” sequence. Afterward Hunter tells Anne “that’s not really her, that’s just her in a movie.” Later in the film Travis gives Hunter a strip of photobooth pictures of Jane so that he can recall his mother’s face. When Travis finally sees Jane again for the first time in four years it is through the window of the one-way mirror; she is framed for observation and he remains unseen to her.

Yet the peep-show booths also reflect the film’s abiding interest in space, and in particular the kinds of spaces the characters have been moving through. Each viewing cubicle is themed around a particular generic location and outfitted like a stage set. The first booth Travis enters is designated “Poolside” and features set design and props intended to evoke an indoor natatorium. When Travis finally sees Jane she is in a “Hotel” themed booth decorated with the accoutrement of a scaled-down simulacrum: a mini-sized bed; a lamp and red telephone resting on a small dresser; a faux window partially obscured by drapes; the ubiquitous television set propped in a corner. When Travis sees Jane for the second time it is in a “Coffee Shop” themed booth.

These viewing booths are themed after spaces that we’ve seen throughout the film: hotel rooms, coffee shops, roadside diners. Liminal “non-places,” virtual spaces of transit, the generic spaces of transition between places of meaning and dwelling.

Paris, Texas is a film about space. Of course, it is about a lot of other things, too. The dramatic core centers around relationships that have become strained by emotional and geographic distance. The character arcs are about hurt and loss, about coming to terms with a traumatic past or narrativizing one’s personal history to make meaning out of chaos. The story slowly reveals underlying elements of abuse and addiction and rage. When Travis finally narrates the events that led to his solitary sojourn through the desolate desert the story is almost unbearably sad and evokes haunted histories and legacies of inhumanity.

So the film is about more than mere space and should not be reduced or essentialized to its surface elements of picturesque landscape photography or evocative imagery of urban sprawl. Yet even the film’s most personal articulations of the deepest human experiences find their expression through spatial language and imaginaries.

Travis: And for the first time he wished he were far away, lost in a deep vast country where nobody knew him. Somewhere without language or streets. And he dreamed about this place without knowing its name.

Travis conveys his desperate flight away from the calamitous despair that had overtaken his life. This flight led him into the desert, away from the maddening markers of civilization that reminded him of his own inhumanity. It is as if he intuitively sought solace or salvation in a primal existence apart from the intrinsically corrupting forces of society.

Travis: For five days he ran like this, until every sign of man had disappeared.

Travis tells Jane that Hunter is waiting for her at a hotel called The Meridian. The film once again asserts the geographic imagination through the name of the hotel. A meridian is a cartographic feature and suggests boundary, dividing lines, a point of passage or transition. The name is appropriate because Travis is providing Jane with coordinates: a hotel name and a room number that will lead her to her son.

The concluding scenes feature a recurrence of my favorite visual motif in the film: Travis stands beneath the greenish glow of a light post on the roof level of a parking garage, gazing out at a twilight sky cast in transitional bands of color from the fading orange of the setting sun up through hues of deepening blues. From this vantage point Travis observes Jane and Hunter’s reunion through the hotel room window. As with every encounter between Travis and Jane in the film he is observing her through glass, gazing from a removed and distant position. In the final shot of the film Travis’ truck drives away from the downtown Houston skyline, just another anonymous vehicle caught in the flow of freeway traffic underneath a darkening sky.

I had heard acclaim for Paris, Texas for a long time, usually framed as a signal example of Wim Wenders’ masterful directing and a rare leading role in Harry Dean Stanton’s capacious filmography. For whatever reason I had never encountered the film in the wild nor been drawn to seek it out. My exposure to Wenders’ work overall has been limited. I’d seen Buena Vista Social Club, which is a fine documentary. Wings of Desire provoked a mixed reaction: I loved the “city symphony” aspects and existential evocations of everyday Berliner’s internal monologues in the first part of the film, but the latter shift into romantic melodrama left me feeling disconnected.

Then a couple of weeks ago Turner Classic Movies aired a block of Harry Dean Stanton films. I tuned in to catch the end of Wise Blood, then kept the TV on in the background while I worked, with the volume turned down low. Paris, Texas was the next film in the night’s programming. Every now and then I would glance over at the TV and be captivated by the images. It was immediately evident that this was a major work. After some time I increased the volume to hear the dialogue. I was getting drawn in to the narrative, but it was late and I couldn’t stay up to finish the film. I went to bed thinking about the images I had seen and the associations they evoked. When I woke up I was still thinking about them. That morning I turned off all the lights in my windowless home office and watched Paris, Texas in its entirety.

I cannot imagine what this film would’ve meant to me if I had watched it earlier in my life. My experience of it now is inextricably bound up with having spent the last several years thinking about visual communication, representations of place, and spatial imaginaries more broadly. But it is also colored by the personal tragedies of my life experience. Paris, Texas doesn’t just capture a sense of moving through physical environments, it conveys the subjective resonance of these environments with the inner sojourns of one’s life. It speaks to those moments when a bleak personal journey calls out for an accompanying barren landscape. When space defines the horizon of possibility for escape, and solitude offers the only semblance of refuge. It evokes the melancholy recognition of the inexorable incarceration of incarnation. Of the desperation to discard your old maps and seek a new territory. Of being lost in every way that a person can be lost.

The Fair City part 5: Urban Aesthetics & Spatial Justice

Richard Sennett’s perspective on the role of “disorder” in urban life was further developed in his book The Conscience of the Eye. In this work, Sennett strengthens the relationship between urban diversity and broad political perspectives, and argues for a connection between a concern for urban spaces and concerns with social justice. Building from the Greek concept of sophrosyne or “poise,” Sennett argues that a “city ought to be a school for learning how to lead a centered life” (loc 108).

To care about what one sees in the world leads to mobilizing one’s creative powers. In the modern city, these creative powers ought to take on a particular and humane form, turning people outward. Our culture is in need of an art of exposure; this art will not make us one another’s victims, rather more balanced adults, capable of coping with and learning from complexity. (loc 117)

In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry argues that the “willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education” (loc 79). If this is the case, this notion of the educative impulse seems complementary to Sennett’s notion of the city as a school. Does not the flaneur’s traversal of Paris suggest a “willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty”? Many poets and urbanists have written about their psychogeographic explorations of the urban streetscape as affective passages through constantly shifting scenes of aesthetic beauty and urban sublimity. Many of these same writers have evinced an empathic awareness of disparity and inequality among urban denizens. Consider Baudelaire’s poem “The Eyes of the Poor,” in which a young man dines with his fiancé in a Parisian cafe. An impoverished family lingers on the street out front; they stare through the cafe’s windows, their eyes wide so as to take in the gleaming opulence inside. The woman asks the cafe attendant to send the family away, as their destitute appearance is interfering with her ability to enjoy the ambiance. Seeing her lack of empathy, the man realizes that his love for her has turned to hatred. In these examples we can see how the urban experience can cultivate a concern for both aesthetic forms and just relationships.

The examples presented in this essay also support this connection between a concern with the built environment of the city and a concern for equality and social justice. Early academic discourses of the 20th century metropolis emphasized the “artless” and chaotic of these sites, partly as a reaction to the sensory overload produced by the urban experience, but also the condition of heterogenous populations of varying ethnicities and backgrounds living in close proximity. Pathological discourses of urban populations relied on aesthetic evaluations to justify policing practices in urban communities. Often these policies adversely affected already vulnerable populations, exacerbating conditions of urban inequality. The issue of gentrification is currently a key concern facing U.S. cities. The advent of gentrification has accompanied a general “reclamation” of urban cores by affluent agencies and individuals, who are eager to revitalize blighted and disinvested neighborhoods into more aesthetically pleasing forms. These aesthetic evaluations have become increasingly significant for the governance and maintenance of urban spaces and bodies. As David Harvey states in Rebel Cities, “signature architecture and the cultivation of distinctive aesthetic judgments have become powerful constitutive elements in the politics of urban entrepreneurialism in many places” (p. 106). The pertinent question facing urban citizens, as posed by Harvey, is “whose aesthetics really count?”

References

Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New York: Verso, 2012.

Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye : the Design and Social Life of Cities. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1990.

The Fair City part 1: Aesthetics of Urban Order and Justice

In his book The Uses of Disorder, Richard Sennett valorizes the uncontrolled events and heterogeneous populations of cities as creating environmental conditions necessary for healthy personal development and the maturation of open and engaged worldviews. Published in 1970, the then 25-year-old Sennett was writing in the immediate wake of urban riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In the book, Sennett is primarily concerned with the negative effects of white flight from urban cores, and the proliferation of comparatively homogenous suburban developments and “gate communities”. For Sennett, encounters with the difference and “disorder” found in a thriving urban center are essential for personal development, helping citizens learn to live a balanced life and develop nuanced political views. The notion of disorder that Sennett emphasizes is directly drawn from the social pathology literature of the time. Rather than pathologizing these elements of urban life, Sennett conceptualizes diversity and difference as vital components of the urban experience. Disorder, Sennett argues, is an essential and productive element of city life.

Discourses based on a dichotomy of order and disorder have long been applied to urban spaces. Cities and citizens have been “ordered” not only through planning schemes and infrastructure, but also through public policies and discourses. Through employing the language of disorder, these discourses have functioned pathologically to conceptualize certain citizens, spaces, and practices as either harmful or beneficial. At times it is urban residents themselves that are considered “disorderly,” based on predominating perspectives of the “good city” and the “good citizen”. In other cases it is the urban environment itself that is deemed “disorderly”. Visible litter, graffiti, and buildings in disrepair are common examples of physical disorder in city spaces. Sometimes, it is the present of certain people that makes the environment disorderly, as has recently been the attitude taken toward the visibly homeless in U.S. cities.

Many notable urban theorists have expressed the importance of social justice in urban life. Authors such as Sennett, David Harvey, and Susan Fainstein have written about justice in the city as well as the search for “the just city.” In his classic book Social Justice and the City, David Harvey writes “the shaping of space which goes on in architecture and, therefore, in the city is symbolic of our aspirations, our needs, and our fears” (p. 31). This notion serves as the foundation for Harvey’s investigation into the relationship between urban development and social justice. For Harvey and related scholars, the city has served as a useful unit of analysis for both the examination of and the intervention into visible disparities and social injustice.

These two perspectives on cities, of cities as disorderly spaces and of cities as representative of social justice, are linked through their attention to aesthetic concerns. In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry considers the etymological link between beauty and justice: fairness:

A single word, “fairness,” is used both in referring to loveliness of countenance and in referring to the ethical requirement for “being fair,” “playing fair,” and “fair distribution.” One might suppose that “fairness as an ethical principle had come not from the adjective for comely beauty but instead from the wholly distinct noun for the yearly agricultural fair, the “periodical gathering of buyers and sellers.” (loc 827)

A key constituent of both notions of fairness, Scarry notes, is symmetry. She cites John Rawls’ definition of fairness as “symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other” to further emphasize this connection. Balance and symmetrical distribution is an ideal for both aesthetic beauty and social justice. Cities have often served as sites where social inequality is made visible, as unequal development and distribution of resources is set in stone. This essay argues that this link between aesthetic awareness and social justice is an important aspect of the urban experience, and that cities are particularly adept environments for cultivating both values.

The first section of this essay focuses on scholarly discourses of the city and how they influenced regimes of urban planning and governance. Particular attention is paid to the social scientific approaches developed in the early 20th century that developed into the “social pathology” perspective of U.S. sociology and political administration. The second section presents a case study of the “broken windows perspective” in urban studies and governance. This case demonstrates how aesthetic evaluations have served to promote regimes of urban policing and criminal justice. The third section considers the current trend in U.S. cities of gentrification and displacement as it relates to these concerns with urban aesthetics and social justice.

References

Fainstein, Susan S. The Just City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.

Harvey, David. Social Justice and the City. REV - Revised. Vol. 1. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.

Sennett, Richard. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life. [1st ed.]. New York: Knopf, 1970.

Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Watch_Dogs: Legion, part 1: Open Worlds

I love the Watch_Dogs franchise. Or rather, I want to love it. I certainly love the overall concept. The distinguishing features of the series incorporate some of my favorite elements from video games in general, as well as more particular niche interests. For one thing, the games  are set in contemporary urban open worlds that can be experienced in “sandbox” style, which is one of my personal favorite video game genres. The game worlds are also based on real world cities, which is another plus for me that I will talk more about later. The second defining feature of the  Watch_Dogs franchise for me is the thematic focus. The game's primary thematic concern, as indicated by the franchise name, is technologically-enabled surveillance in modern society. The narrative and gameplay address obvious concerns surrounding intrusive technology in terms of the erosion of privacy. A related major component, particularly in the first game, involves urban infrastructure, as well as how the implementation of emerging technology for city management produces augmented spatialities and governmentality. Now, as I said earlier I definitely love the concept, but how the games execute these concepts can be more difficult to ascertain. I have looked forward to the latest entry in the series, Watch_Dogs: Legion, for the past couple of years and have enjoyed playing it over the past month or so. Now that I've had some time to think about the game, I wanted to offer some thoughts before my scant video game time becomes occupied with Cyberpunk 2077 next week. I am going to organize my thoughts and comments around the two themes I have already identified that appeal to me most about these games: the urban open-world play environments, and the thematic engagement with the issues of surveillance capitalism and imaginaries of resistance.

Open Worlds: Exploring Virtual Spaces

My love of open world games, and in particular urban sandbox style games, began with Grand Theft Auto 3. Driving around the three islands of Liberty City sowing discord while listening to Chatterbox FM was unlike any video game I had ever experienced.  Nearly 20 years later, open world exploration remains my favorite video game pastime. Self-directed exploration of a virtual environment provides me with a surefire circuit for relaxation, recreation, and escapism. I have thus far been focusing on the particular sub-genre of urban open world games, although I certainly have great appreciation for other varieties as well. For example, my experiences exploring the worlds of Oblivion and Skyrim remain pinnacles of fantasy role-playing. 

Now, even when limiting our purview to the subgenre of modern city environments, we can distinguish urban open worlds in video games between those that are based on actually existing cities, and those that are wholly fictional or imagined. I enjoy both types for their unique qualities and appreciate them in different ways. For instance, an entirely fictional virtual city offers the potential to explore an environment that is totally unknown and surprising, largely free from the baggage of preconception and expectation. Furthermore, a virtual city created from scratch is not necessarily bound by the constraints of real world geography and can therefore endeavor to prioritize a game space optimized for play and creative mobility. An example of this category might be the city of Steelport from the Saints Row series, although clearly even this fictional city bears evidence of association and allusion to real-world urban centers. Another example that comes to mind is the setting of the Crackdown games. In this case it is an extremely generic near-future urban environment; I don't even recall the name of the fictional city from the first two games... Port Town? Star Union? Megalopolis? However, the game world is designed to accommodate what for me is the key feature of the Crackdown series: bounding from rooftop to rooftop collecting power orbs, increasing agility stats so that you may reach increasingly higher peaks. Indeed, I was always somewhat taken aback to be walking or driving along a street in Crackdown-town and notice all of this superfluous level of street level detail that the designers had included, such as signage for shops and other businesses with punny names as if this was a Rockstar game. 

Speaking of Rockstar, the Grand Theft Auto series provides a perfect point of interconnection between the categories of fictional virtual cities and those based on real world locations. The aforementioned Liberty City from Grand Theft Auto 3, for example, is a fictional city: the name suggests a link to New York by evoking one of that city's greatest landmarks, yet the design of the game world itself does not incorporate much in the way of specific iconography or virtual re-creations of specific places. Vice City, the subsequent game in the series, declares a setting in Miami of the 1980s beginning with its titular allusion, yet that is only the beginning. This game furthers the funhouse-mirror-view-of-America-as-seen-by-Brits-through-the-lens-of-American-popular-culture that began in Grand Theft Auto 3. Yet in addition to drawing from gangster films and other pop culture of that era the game also incorporates limited recreations of iconic Miami locations. San Andreas represented an even further evolution, not only further in time to the 1990s where the game draws heavily from pop culture and media depictions of Los Angeles from that era, but also to the scale of the environment and the degree of verisimilitude attempted in its recreation of real world cities. Grand Theft Auto V extends this trajectory to an exceedingly ambitious simulacrum of Southern California that is simultaneously a parody of contemporary America, a condensed impressionistic depiction of Greater Los Angeles, as well as strikingly accurate recreations of actually existing locations. Of course, the metropolis of GTA V is Los Santos rather than Los Angeles, because while the game dips its toes in nearly simulation level depictions of LA, it's other foot remains firmly planted in the satirical and cartoonish Grand Theft Auto alternate universe. 

Further along the spectrum of realistic video game depictions of actual cities we find more grounded portrayal of real world sites. Some of the best examples come from the Assassin's Creed series, where some of the great cities of the world are recreated based on previous historical eras. Now, one of the reasons that I love accurate representations of real world cities is that they provide a novel way of interfacing, in a mediated and imaginative way, with an existing location. This offers rich benefits whether you have personal experience of the place, or if you have never actually visited. When you are familiar with the place depicted you can test the designed world of the video game against your personal knowledge and memory. You can, for instance, go seeking for a particular location or landmark to see if it has been included in the game world, and if it has been included you can compare the accuracy with your own experience or recollection. However, a detailed re-creation of a real city can be a wonderful means of learning more about that place. This is why one of my all-time favorite video game cities is the re-creation of Manhattan in True Crime New York City. The play space of True Crime NYC is a GPS-accurate block-by-block re-creation of the Manhattan grid. Because the game was released in 2002 it obviously does not offer the level of detail or graphical fidelity that we are spoiled by in more recent video games. However, True Crime New York City does offer the distinct pleasure of being able to race along every Avenue on the island of Manhattan while crossing every real-world street and encountering none of the real-world traffic. One of my favorite things to do in True Crime NYC was to think of a prominent building or other landmark, look up the cross streets on a map, then go to that intersection in the game to see if the landmark was included. Most of the time I found that it was. I remember playing the game after returning from a brief visit to Manhattan where I had stayed in Midtown for an academic conference. In the game I was able to re-create the route of my daily walk from the hotel to the conference venue, finding satisfying details such as the inclusion of a church right on the street corner where it had been during my stay. I also discovered landmarks that had been previously unknown to me, and learned things about New York City history from playing the game. For instance, one time while racing down 3rd Avenue I was stopped in my tracks by the appearance of a massive building with an attached tower. I brought my virtual car to a screeching halt in the intersection to face this distinct structure. The building stood in such contrast to the more generic streetscapes that fill in the spaces between more customized locations in True Crime NYC that I felt compelled to look up the cross streets online to discover whether this was indeed a re-creation of a landmark that I was not familiar with. It turned out that this structure was the mosque and minaret of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. Yet another time I was speeding along through lower Manhattan. As you are driving in True Crime NYC, the names of streets that you are crossing are displayed at the top of the HUD. I saw in quick succession the street names “Duane” and “Reade” flash by at the top of my screen. I went back to confirm what I had seen, and upon further investigation learned that the Duane Reade convenience stores which are so ubiquitous in Manhattan are indeed named for the location of the company's original warehouse which was situated on Broadway between the streets of Duane and Reade. Moments like these are a large part of why I continue to feel such fondness for the New York City presented in the True Crime series even after so many subsequent games have presented more dynamic representations of the Big Apple. 

Watch_Dogs’ London: Virtual Horizons of Urban Life

The London of Watch_Dogs: Legion straddles the boundary line between realistic representation and fanciful imagination by virtue of its near-future setting. The city is unmistakable, rendered with a plethora of recognizable landmarks and significant amount of granular detail. However, the London-as-we-know-it is also augmented by certain science fiction trappings: landmarks such as Big Ben and Tower Bridge are emblazoned with massive holographic projections indicating a general threat level for terroristic activity along with the logo of the private military company overseeing local security. The other major deviation concerns traffic through the city, both at street level and in the skies above. The road traffic consists of an assortment of cars, trucks, and motorcycles, along with iconic London vehicles like black cabs and double-decker busses. These more familiar conveyances are joined also by fleets of autonomous taxis or self-driving ride-share vehicles (the in-game lore establishes that all personal vehicles are legally mandated to have autonomous driving capability). One gameplay change that this introduces is the ability to commandeer vehicles on the move without “stealing” the car and inconveniencing a driver. The autonomous taxi vehicles in fact have no separate driver compartment or steering wheel, and are instead designed like a commuter train passenger carriage with two benches of seats facing each other (they are incredibly similar to the autonomous taxis featured in the execrable third season of Westworld).

Self-driving cars represent one element of the near-future technological projections featured in the game. One of the other major additions (and more significant in terms of gameplay impact) is the ubiquitous drone presence in the city. Above the ground traffic buzzes a constant stream of autonomous drone vehicles, flying quadro-copters that largely follow the terrestrial street routes. Drone devices are mostly confined to a number of vehicle categories: delivery drone quad-copters ferrying packages; slow-moving cargo drones hauling crates and construction materials; CToS surveillance drones hovering around to monitor goings-ons in the city; news drones filming footage for GBB reportage (the in-game alter ego of the BBC); and assorted anti-pursuit and riot control militarized drones. The constant stream of drone traffic adds a distinctly cyberpunk element to the city (while also resonating with contemporary culture and directions of technological evolution), but it also introduces one of the most substantial gameplay innovations into the Watch_Dogs formula. One of the fundamental gameplay elements in Watch_Dogs has always been “hijacking” security cameras, i.e. “hacking” into them with your mobile device to gain a new perspective on a particular location, scout enemy positions, and leapfrog from camera to camera to solve puzzles (as long as you have line-of-sight you can progress along a chain of CCTV installations). I’ve always appreciated this aspect of the Watch_Dogs gameplay loop in part because it is (usually) not reliant on combat encounters and offers novel approaches to platforming segments. In Legion, if you are struggling to get line-of-sight on a particular CCTV position or need to gain access to a harder to reach area, you are often able to hijack a passing drone, grabbing it out of the sky and piloting toward your objective. As you gain proficiency with this practice it affords some creative platforming and puzzle solving, as well as emergent approaches to clearing enemy encampments.

The London of Watch_Dogs: Legion is often quite beautiful; it is also often buggy, glitchy, and bizarre looking, owing to a host of persistent graphical issues. Yet at its best, when all the environmental elements are working in concert, you can get some dynamite scenes of Regent Street illuminated by a late afternoon sun, or a magisterial Westminster across the Thames (the Thames, on the other hand, is real rubbish: the river traffic is a ridiculous procession of pop-ins and low-texture polygonal watercraft). Aside from the near-future aesthetic embellishments the Legion designers largely leaned in to a realistic re-creation of London. The game’s map and designated districts bear close cartographic correspondence to its corporeal counterpart. I last visited London in 2016, and I have successfully recreated certain walking routes from that trip in Watch_Dogs’ London (as is my custom in these sorts of games...it may seem silly, but it’s how I prefer to play). Crossing the Golden Jubilee Bridges from Charing Cross to Southbank, or walking from the base of BT Tower to BBC Broadcasting House, provide pleasing pretensions of previous perambulations. While we’re on the subject of pedestrianism: One of the other street-level innovations that I think is worth mentioning is the addition of building access doors that open onto the sidewalk. These are one-way portals (you cannot use them to access a building interior, and indeed the only interior space that can be glimpsed through one of these open doorways is a black void), but they allow NPC figures (perhaps we should designate these PPCs...potentially playable characters?) to step out onto the street. It’s a neat feature that adds to the sense of a busy, bustling streetscape and adds to the immersive illusion of navigating a densely populated city sidewalk.

(A brief sidenote regarding transportation options: the Underground system is well represented throughout the map in the form of tube stations that function as fast-travel transit nodes. There are no functioning, ride-able metro trains, which is understandable [the Tube is wonderful but not really known for the excellent views it offers] while also a bit of a disappointment [I’m a sucker for functioning public transit in games...I rode every inch of rail track in GTA IV and V, and thoroughly appreciated views of the Chicago skyline while riding the L train in the original Watch_Dogs]. Also, while acknowledging the technical limitations and risks of feature creep or bloat, bicycles would have been a wonderful option for engaging with the rich cyclogeography of London  [maybe even for limited, dedicated courier activities?])

OK, so London is (mostly) beautifully rendered, but how can you engage with the game space? What opportunities are provided for exploring and interfacing with the environment through gameplay? Watch_Dogs: Legion is a bit of a letdown in this area, as the presence of environmental activities seems to have been scaled back in comparison with the earlier games in the series. This will surely be a trivial concern for some players, but I really enjoyed how side activities were embedded into the game world of the original Watch_Dogs’ simulacra of Chicago. You could encounter a shell game on a busy street corner; play chess in a coffee shop or have a drinking contest  in a bar. There were various augmented reality activities such as timed platforming challenges or fantastical virtual reality battle modes. My favorite side activities in the original Watch_Dogs were the QR code puzzles: portions of QR codes were painted along the sides of buildings throughout the city, so that viewing the completed image required a combination of exploration, platforming, and CCTV hijacking in order to discover a vantage point from which the code could be viewed from the right perspective. 

As I’ve already mentioned, the availability of side activities in Legion seems greatly scaled back. There are pubs where you can drink beer (triggering temporary audio-visual distortions) and play a game of darts (which I have found to be far too tedious and aggravating to be worth the effort). Most pubs also feature slot machines, but unlike the first Watch_Dogs where slot machines functioned as a playable gambling minigame, in Legion slot machines are hackable (meaning you can siphon a small amount of money with the push of a button) but are not playable. There are Parcel Fox delivery missions, which are OK: assorted A-to-B courier assignments with varying prerequisites for success, such as a countdown timer for parcel delivery, limits to the amount of “damage” a package may receive en route to the destination, and degrees of “wanted level” that will activate police pursuit of your contraband cargo. These activities are decent and provide a fun way to explore alleyways and other alternative routes around the city, particularly as you try to avoid automated checkpoint stations that will alert the police force to your location.

The other substantial environmental exploration activity is represented by “paste-up locations”: particular spots dotted across the city where you can apply a large-scale wheatpaste poster. These are typically located above street level (sometimes quite high up on a rooftop) and therefore require some figuring out how to reach the location.  I found this to be a fun diversion for a while, but the novelty wears off rather quickly. They are nowhere near as fun or satisfying as the QR codes from the first Watch_Dogs. The available designs or “stencils” that you can apply are limited to the point of feeling monotonous once you’ve used them all, I was extremely frustrated at the lack of a “checkmark” icon or some other signifier on the game map to indicate when a paste-up location had already been completed.

That leaves collectibles. There are hundreds of collectibles scattered across the game world. Seriously, there are just so many. I’m familiar with the general criticism of Ubisoft’s approach to open world design, that it offers exhaustive and repetitive collecting, but I don’t play many video games so I don’t have much firsthand experience with this phenomenon. I get it now. Look, I played all three Crackdown games solely for the joy of bouncing around the cityscape hunting agility orbs. This element of the Crackdown experience provides a wonderful “mindless” gameplay loop where you can just put on some music or a podcast and bounce around for dopamine hits and scratching the completionist itch. In Watch_Dogs: Legion this translates to commandeering a cargo drone that you can (slowly) ride around the city picking up collectibles one by one. It also lends itself to a similar experience to the above mentioned Crackdown approach, but after a while it is agonizingly tedious. I also appreciate having loads of content in a game, but Legion takes this to the point of absurdity. The amount of collectibles across the map seem self-replicating and endlessly proliferating. I’ve nearly maxed out all the available tech upgrades: how can there possibly be so many tech point icons on my map? Ultimately the most rewarding outcome of this gameplay experience are the aerial vistas it affords and the new areas of the city that you can discover while hunting for easter eggs (often leading me to research particularly interesting locations to discern the degree to which they were inventions of the designers or faithful re-creations of London locales).

There are some further notable examples of environmental storytelling that contribute to the overall atmosphere and accord with my personal experiences of London. For example, visible homelessness is pervasive in this virtual version of London. This is not an innovation in urban open world design (the Grand Theft Auto series has had unhoused NPCs since at least GTA 3...oftentimes these have been deployed as jokey “bum” characters or as exemplars of urban eccentrics [GTA IV had some notable examples of the latter], although GTA V adds a sharper political edge to these depictions with its frequent allusions to economic recession and the pointedly politicized Dignity Village encampment), but these depictions feel like an integral component of Legion’s world rather than isolated dioramas or window dressing. This is accompanied by explicit activist installations and political slogans (some have more teeth than others). The game also directly addresses Brexit and broader issues of immigration and refugee populations. An arena in the game’s Lambeth borough (I think the closest real world analogue is London Stadium, but I’m not sure...incidentally, I have particularly enjoyed the inclusion of baseball stadia in the previous series entries...the first Watch_Dogs begins in a baseball stadium during a night game [although it doesn’t resemble either of Chicago’s real world major league ballparks], and Watch_Dogs 2 features a fictional San Francisco ball club with its own stadium based on Oracle Park) has been re-purposed as a deportation detention facility called the Eurpoean Processing Center. 

These more politicized elements of Legion’s London lead us to a consideration of how the game engages with the ideological dimensions evoked by its thematic trappings. In the second part of this commentary I will focus on this aspect of the game, in particular how Watch_Dogs: Legion gamifies class solidarity and commodifies culture jamming.


City Space as Projective Medium: From Coronavirus Quarantine to Urban Uprisings

The current confluence of the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic and popular political demonstrations has provided strikingly urgent examples of how city space may be actualized as a projective medium. By “projective medium” I mean to describe a repurposing of urban environments wherein public space serves as a canvas not only for the circulation of artistic representations or political slogans but for the staging of interventions of imagination, a testing ground for potential futures. Within the past few months we have seen dramatic and unprecedented reconfigurations of public space: first in the widespread “lockdown” and “stay at home” measures designed to mitigate the viral transmission of COVID-19; and secondly with irruption of mass protests against police brutality and extrajudicial killings of people of color. Both of these “moments” have offered profound illustrations of the social production of space, as well as ways in which the physical infrastructure of the built environment is an inherently politicized terrain. 

In the early days of the Coronavirus quarantines reconsiderations of urban space focused on absence and withdrawal. Photographs of unoccupied Los Angeles freeways and deserted downtown districts circulated widely online. At the end of March the New York Times published a photo essay documenting quietude throughout the five boroughs with the title “New York Was Not Designed For Emptiness.” The fascination with emptied city spaces is certainly linked to visual tropes of apocalyptic fiction and representations of humanity’s end depicted so often in popular culture: the silent streets and vacant plazas served as visual confirmation of the otherwise “unseen” virus, and visceral reminder of our ultimately precarious civilization. The allure of these images may also be linked to a desire for (psychological) distance from the biological threat. Writing in the Verso Books blog, Rob Horning credited such photographs with reinforcing a sense of “exemption” from the vagaries of the natural world and from the virus itself:

“Our ability to appreciate these images doesn’t underscore our ultimate harmony or interconnection with the natural world and the life that purportedly re-emerges when the highways are finally vacated. Rather it lets us use mediation (our ability to consume representations) to rearticulate our exceptionality. We can assume the subject position of the camera and pretend that makes us immune to being objects in the world.”

The onset of “social distancing” induced an attitudinal shift in how we related to the shared spaces of everyday life. The withdrawal from public places to the atomistic dwelling of self-isolation created a sort of vacuum, opening up a space in which new meanings and relations could be introduced. In many cities around the world residents rediscovered the balcony as a link between the individual and communal worlds. Balconies have always served as liminal spaces between the publicity of the street and the privacy of the home. During quarantine these sites gained renewed significance as spaces for performance and communication. Neighbors socialized from across their respective railings, and a new routine developed where residents would gather to applaud medical workers from their balconies at appointed shift-change times.

The mass migration indoors prompted rediscovery of the built environment as communication medium in other ways. I am particularly fond of the various projects that involved projecting films onto the sides of buildings. In Rome the cinema organization Alice nella Città began scheduling regular projections of classic films, and encouraged any citizens with the ability to do so to implement their own screenings. In Berlin the Windowflicks project hosted screenings by projecting movies on the walls of residential courtyards. (On a somewhat related note, I was disappointed to learn that Vulcan Video, a beloved DVD rental business in Austin, TX and one of my most frequented locales when I lived in that city, did not survive the Coronavirus outbreak.)

At the end of May the insular isolation of “stay at home” measures reversed into a dramatic reclamation of the streets. In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands police, residents of Minneapolis turned out en masse in the neighborhood where he was killed. The initial days of the demonstrations saw vandalism and destruction of corporate businesses in the neighborhood beginning with an AutoZone store. (In addition to semiotically presaging the eventual advent of “autonomous zone” in popular discourse and U.S. urban imaginaries, the prominence of the AutoZone and other automotive businesses in the subsequent unrest throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul testifies not only to the dominance of car culture in U.S. spatial design, but also to the legacy of highway expansions and car-centric development that decimated predominantly Black urban communities throughout the 20th Century.)

During the first two days of protests a Target store nearby the site of Floyd’s death was thoroughly looted and vandalized. In addition to the store’s interior being effectively gutted, the exterior walls were blanketed with spraypainted messages. In the days that followed political graffiti and anti-police slogans became a ubiquitous visual element of the demonstrations unfolding in cities throughout the United States, even occupying part of the backdrop for Donald Trump’s infamous bible photo-op in Washington D.C. Here again the latent potential for the built environment to serve as a projective medium was dramatically actualized. The pervasive presence of political graffiti messages recalled the spraypainted slogans of the May 68 demonstrations in Paris, just as the scenes of civil unrest evoked the 1968 U.S. urban riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Over the past three weeks the urban uprisings have continued to spread throughout the U.S., perhaps reaching their temporary apogee with the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). The CHAZ designation refers to the occupation of a six-block area in central Seattle centered around the vacated East Precinct police headquarters. Since it’s emergence in popular discourse the message and meaning of the CHAZ has been the subject of public debate. Authoritarian discourses have demonized the occupation as a terroristic takeover, while more amicable readings of the space have characterized it in terms of a festival atmosphere with arts and music. Several early accounts featured images and accounts of a film screening in the CHAZ: participants watching Ava DuVernay’s “13th” on a projection screen set up in an occupied intersection.

As with the aforementioned outdoor cinema projects implemented under Coronavirus quarantine, the urban reimagining of the CHAZ features film screenings in urban space, a repurposing of city streets as movie theaters. It thus offers another opportunity to consider the built environment as a projective medium. Again, this sense of “projective medium” extends beyond merely repurposing urban infrastructure as a material support for communication. Yes, the occupied urban space of the CHAZ features murals, spraypainted slogans, and other forms of artistic and political representation. But the greater “message” of the occupation is a radical rethinking of the logics underlying the organization of urban life itself. The various artistic interventions launched in response to the COVID-19 outbreak similarly call into question certain unspoken assumptions undergirding collective dwelling.

 (In distinguishing between the “form” and the “content” of these creative repurposings of urban space it is important to recognize that the content in the respective cases is obviously significant. The CHAZ occupiers were screening a documentary about racial inequality in the United States, a subject clearly connected to the broader socio-historical context and political intent of Black Lives Matter protests. Would we interpret the scene differently if the CHAZ audience was watching “The Wizard of Oz,” or “Trolls 2”? Similarly, how would our understanding of the outdoor screenings in Rome and Berlin be altered if the organizers were projecting political documentaries instead of classic films?)

Both the Coronavirus pandemic and the urban demonstrations have prompted a reimagining of the structures that shape our daily lives. Rather than idle speculation or “mere” philosophical musings, the emergent issues underlying these provocations present themselves as urgent and unavoidable. They reveal the necessity of the radical reassessment of social reality.

Most of the questions prompted by the Coronavirus have to do with resuming “business as usual” in a way that will prevent another outbreak. What will work and schooling look like after the lockdown? Will telecommuting become the new norm? Should theaters and concert venues reopen to full capacity? Will any area of life return to its pre-pandemic state? The questions and demands voiced in the ongoing anti-racism protests feature a different focus, but they also call for sweeping structural reforms. Calls to “defund the police” have been explicated as a “reimagining” of what public safety and community-oriented state initiatives can look like. These twin crises thus raise awareness of infrastructural and social failures (of the healthcare system, of adequate preventative measures, of policing procedures, of systemic racism, etc.), but they also draw attention to failures of imagination. Questions about what kind of world we want to live in are increasingly superseded by questions of what kind of world will enable us to survive.

While the twin events represented by the global pandemic and anti-oppression uprisings therefore share significant similarities, they may be productively differentiated by the directional orientation of their respective inciting elements. The shock and disruption of the Coronavirus outbreak can be characterized as a movement inward driven by an outside impetus, whereas the protests represent an outward movement compelled by inner antagonisms. Social distancing and “safer-at-home” self-isolation measures were restrictive responses to an outside foreign force (foreign or alien in the sense that the virus is not human, not in any sort of xenophobic or Sinophobic sense as conveyed by the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” dysphemisms). The mass occupations of city streets and other urban spaces was an expansive outwardly-directed response to failures and contradictions within the society itself, including inherent racial injustice, class antagonisms, and a generalized precariousness engendered by neoliberal capitalism. The two movements thus represent two imperatives to reimagine our world: one compelled from without, the other incurred from within. (There were, of course, many interrelated and exacerbating factors connecting the pandemic response with the protests, such as the economic disruption, soaring unemployment, disproportionate health outcomes along racial lines, etc.)

One way to interpret the sudden transition from vacant, socially-distanced public spaces to massively occupied city streets is to view space as a blank slate onto which various forces or groups project their politicized messages. However, it would be misleading to consider the urban as an empty signifier, or city space as a neutral container subject to contestations over who gets to fill it with meaning. The built environment is always already a politicized terrain, shaped by value-laden design decisions and governed by policy and force. Urban space emptied of content does not reveal the material landscape as a merely objective fact or value neutral background for social life. Instead, both the images of emptied city streets in the time of Corona and the scenes of massive demonstrations in public space attest to a fact that the urban form shares with all communication media: the medium is the message.

Public space, the public sphere, and the urban as public realm

This essay was originally written as part of my PhD comprehensive examinations. It was written to address connections between theories of the public sphere and concerns about public space, and to conceptualize the urban environment as a public realm. 

Introduction

Questions of space have always been implicated with the concept of the public sphere, but the idea of space has been conceptualized and applied in various ways within this context. Carragee’s challenge for scholars to address the nexus between public sphere theory and the study of public space has a solid foundation in the pertinent implications for civic life, attempts to connect academic perspectives and planning disciplines, and his own analysis of the impact of urban design on the character of public interaction. I agree with Carragee’s assertion that a vital public sphere requires vital public spaces. I am less inclined to agree with his claim that communication scholars have been silent on the issue, as there have been moves to address the communicative implications of the built environment through approaches such as material rhetoric. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to consider how scholars of communication and other fields have approached this nexus, and how this line of inquiry might be extended.

To properly address this question about the relationship between public space and the public sphere it is helpful to define our terms. Both “public space” and “public sphere” have been used by different actors to signify differing meanings. The Habermasian formulation of the public sphere posited a novel form of social interaction facilitated by a network of institutions comprised by physical locations and mediated discourses. Following this model, scholars have understood the public sphere as a discursive space rooted in place-based communication as well as mediated exchanges. Catherine Squires has defined the public sphere as “a set of physical and mediated spaces” in which people come together to identify, express, and deliberate interests of common concern. Nancy Fraser has characterized the public sphere as “a theater” for social interaction where political activity is actualized through the medium of speech. The public sphere can also be understood as a particular kind of relationship among participants. This relationship is mediated by these historical forms of sociability enacted at specific points in space and time. Kurt Iveson refers to public spheres as “social imaginaries” that are always in the process of being formed. The public sphere has also been understood procedurally (or processually), as a normative ideal founded on a set of principles intended to guide interaction.

The meaning of “public space” may seem obvious, but this term too has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Notions of “public space” can be rooted in the physical characteristics of a location, the institutional structures and policies affecting a place, or the types of uses and activities undertaken in the space. Seyla Benhabib offers a procedural definition of public space. Understood procedurally, “public space” is any space that, through public address at a particular time, is transformed as a site of political action through speech and persuasion. In Benhabib’s formulation, “public space” is not merely “open” space, or physical, absolute, geographical space. More to the point, public space is never merely space in this physical sense. This represents an approach to public space that contrasts with Carragee’s view of public space as material, empirical, and concrete, as opposed to the public sphere which he sees as more conceptual and virtual. In Benhabib’s procedural definition these realms are not so clearly distinguished from one another.

This essay will further explore influential notions of public space, the public sphere, and their relationship to one another. The first section will review significant and influential approaches to this nexus as represented by three prominent theorists. The second section looks at how the contemporary city has figured as a key referent in discussion of public space and the public sphere. The third section considers how the introduction of networked communication technologies has complicated understandings this relationship. Finally, I conclude with some contemporary issues facing work in this area.

Three Models of the Public Realm: Arendt, Habermas, Sennett

Hannah Arendt was a political theorist who wrote about power, authority, totalitarianism, and democracy. In one of her best known and most influential works, “The Human Condition,” she surveyed different conceptions and enactments of human activity beginning in ancient societies. The second section of this book is dedicated to “the private and public realms.” According to Arendt, life in ancient Greek society was divided between the private realm and the public realm. The private realm was the sphere of the household, and the public realm was the site of “action”. Activity in the private realm was preoccupied with bodily necessities, whereas the public realm was free of these necessities and in which one could distinguish oneself through great works and deeds. Arendt further proposes a dichotomy of human life based on the concepts of “zoe” and “bios”. Both words are etymologically linked to mean “life,” but Arendt is distinguishing human activity into two modes: animalistic (zoe) and humanistic (bios). This distinction between zoe and bios is connected to Arendt’s notion of life in the market versus public space, which she also refers to as the private realm (oikos) and the public realm (polis). Arendt considers the market an impoverished place where subjects are treated as animals, mere consumers driven to satisfy bodily and selfish needs. In the context of the oikos, one’s human identity and individuality is of no importance: in order to purchase a commodity, you need only pay the appropriate price, regardless of who you are. In the public realm, by contrast, the individual identity of each subject does acquire prominence. Through public discussion subjects or speakers are recognized as unique human beings who are inexchangeable with anyone else. Without language, human beings live on the level of “laboring animals,” merely concerned with continuing their lives. Through the medium of linguistic communication, humans open themselves up to the existence of others as well as the existence of a world that is shared with others. This then is the key idea in Arendt’s distinction between the private and public realms: people live privately as animals, and as humans only in public. Arendt valorizes the types of relations in ancient cities such as Athens, but she distinguishes between the built environment and the polis. She says that the polis, properly understood, does not refer to the physical city-state but to the relations that emerge from acting and speaking together, regardless of where the participants are. “Not Athens, but Athenians, were the polis.”

Jurgen Habermas defined the public sphere as “the sphere of private individuals come together as a public.” Similar to Arendt, he also considers this “public” relation as rooted in and a consequence of discourse and communication. Habermas’ notion of the public sphere is based on an empirical study of voluntary social associations and literary practices that emerged in Europe in the 18th century. The emergence of a “debating public” and an ethos of local governance were tied to the development of “provincial urban” institutions. These included coffee houses, salons, and theaters. Habermas’ study of the bourgeois public sphere is not only an account of specific historical phenomena, it also represents a normative ideal for rational-critical debate and deliberative politics. As such, Habermas’ theory has been interpreted as distinctly aspatial, not concerned with physical spaces but rather only an abstract discursive space. Several critics have argued that in order for Habermas’ theory to function as both a historical social explanation and a normative political idea, as his study proposes, it must be founded in an understanding of situated contexts of specific communities.

Richard Sennett is an urban sociologist who has written extensively on city design, public life, and civic engagement. His first book, “The Uses of Disorder,” argued that excessively ordered environments stifle personal development, and that people who live in such environments end up with overly rigid worldviews and insufficiently developed political consciousness. Sennett calls for practices of city design that allow for unpredictability, anarchy, and creative disorder that will foster adults better equipped to confront the complexities of life. In “The Conscience of the Eye” Sennett suggests that the built forms of modern cities are bland and neutralized spaces that diminish contact and wall people off from encounters with the Other. His remedy for this condition is a creative art of exposure to others and city life that should instill an appreciation for and empathy with difference. “A city,” Sennett says, “should be a school for learning to live a centered life.” Sennett’s book “The Fall of Public Man” outlines the decline of public life since the 18th century. In the 18th century, Sennett argues, public and private space were more clearly delineated than today. The disappearance of public space in the 20th century is attributed to a rise in intimacy and narcissism associated with industrial capitalism. In an essay titled “The Public Realm,” Sennett situates his approach to public life in relation to Arendt and Habermas. Sennett describes Arendt’s model of the public realm as inherently political and based on public deliberation in which participants discard their private interests. He calls Arendt the champion of the urban center “par excellence,” as the population density of urban centers provides the condition of anonymity that he sees as central to Arendt’s ideal. Sennett considers Habermas less interested in place than Arendt, as his theory includes mass produced texts such as newspapers as sites for the public sphere. For Habermas, Sennett states, the public realm is “any medium, occasion, or event” that facilitates free communication among strangers. Regarding his own approach, Sennett defines the public realm as “a place where strangers can come together.” He emphasizes that the public realm is a place, traditionally understood as a location on the ground, but Sennett states that developments in communication technologies have challenged this sense of place. Today “cyberspace” can function as a public realm as much as any physical place. Sennett also argues that “the public realm is a process.” As is evident in the arguments from his books summarized above, Sennett believes that shared spaces that accommodate unplanned and unmanaged encounters between strangers are beneficial for personal and social development. His emphasis on incompleteness and process, as opposed to fixity and determination, recalls Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonistic Pluralism. Mouffe challenges the ideal espoused by Habermas that the deliberative ideal should be consensus reached by rational individuals. She argues that for freedom to exist the intrusion of conflict must be allowed for. The democratic process, Mouffe says, should provide an arena for the emergence of conflict and difference. Similarly Sennett says that daily experience doesn’t register much without “disruptive drama.”

The Modern City as Public Realm

In her book “Justice and Political Difference,” political theorist Iris Marion Young writes of city life as a normative ideal for communicative and political interaction. Young states that urbanity must be understood as an inherent aspect of life in advanced industrial societies, and that the material of our environment and structures available to us presuppose the forms of interactions that occur in these spaces. By “city life” Young refers to a type of social relation that she refers to as “a relation among strangers.” Urban experience, and in particular urban spaces, provide ideal conditions for the exposure to difference lives that a politics of difference should be predicated on. Young states that public spaces are crucial for open communicative democracy.

In “City of Rhetoric,” rhetorical scholar David Fleming argues that the city is the ideal context for the revitalization of the public sphere. He proposes an ideal space of relation that is between the intimacy of friends and family, on the one hand, and the mutual suspicion of strangers on the other. Fleming argues that the built environment and public space of the city is perfectly situated between users, relating and separating them at the same.

Don Mitchell has written about the “disappearance of public space” in the modern city. In a similar vein to influential critiques of the Habermasian public sphere, Mitchell states that the ideal of public space “open to all” has never been an existing state of affairs, but the ideal of public space circulates to powerful effect. For instance, Mitchell says, the circulation of the “open” public space ideal has served as a rallying call for successive waves of political movements to utilize space for activism and inclusionary ends.

Mediated Spaces and Mediated Spheres

Since Habermas’ formulation the idea of the public sphere has included elements of mediation. Habermas directly implicates the mass media in “The Structural Transformation,” citing the role of literature and the press in establishing the bourgeois public sphere, and the impact of television and other commercial mass media in diminishing the public sphere. The advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s spawned enthusiasm from some regarding the deliberative and participatory potential of the medium. To some, the Internet seemed to realize all the ideals of Habermas’ public sphere. It was universal, non-hierarchical, based on uncoerced communication, and enabled public opinion formation based on voluntary deliberation. By these principles, and many others, the Internet looked like the realization of the ideal speech situation. Iveson suggests that the procedural understanding of public space allows various media to be understood as “public spaces” because they facilitate the formation of publics. Other scholars have considered media as new “spaces” for interaction. Sheller and Urry have compared new media to Arendt’s “space of appearances,” suggesting that in the digital age this “space” may be a “screen” on which public matters appear.

Still other scholars have voiced opposing accounts of the relationship between virtual spaces and the ideals of the public sphere. Don Mitchell has argued that the Internet can never meet or surpass the street as a public space, saying the infrastructure of the medium precludes certain uses and political opportunities. Public space remains crucial because it makes it possible for disadvantaged groups to occupy the space in a way that is precluded in virtual space. This space is especially important for homeless people because it is also a space to be and live in; a space for living rather than just visibilization. Iris Marion Young also addresses the distinction between physical space and virtual space with her concept of “embodied public space.” She says that media can facilitate public address and formation, and in this sense is not dependent on physical space. To the extent that public space is shrinking, or that individuals are withdrawing from public space, there is a democratic crisis. She uses the term “embodied public space” to refer to streets, squares, plazas, parks, and other physical spaces of the built environment that she deems crucial to allowing access to anyone and enabling encounters with difference. These spaces allow varieties of public interaction that are fundamental to her notion of city life as a normative ideal.

Jodi Dean has persistently criticized the “inclusionary ideal” promoted by the internet as an ideology of technocracy that she calls “communicative capitalism.” Dean’s article “Why the Net is Not a Public Sphere” challenges claims that the Internet can enable the ideals of the public sphere. In the public sphere ideal, communicative exchange is supposed to provide the basis for real political action. Under conditions of communicative capitalism, these exchanges function merely as message circulation rather than acclamations to be responded to. Political theorist Robert Putnam posited a decline of social capital in U.S. communities since 1950 in his book “Bowling Alone.” Putnam cites evidence of civic decline indicated by decreased voter turnout, public meeting attendance, and committee participation. The book’s title refers to the fact that while the number of Americans who bowl has increased in past decades, the number of people who participate in bowling leagues has declined. He attributes this fall in social capital to the “individualizing” of leisure time enabled by television and the Internet. Sherry Turkle has similarly argued for a technologically-promoted decline of physical proximity and interaction in the book “Alone Together.” Iveson has responded to such criticisms by arguing that the “stage” and “screen” (or “print” and “polis”) should not be seen as mutually exclusive arenas. Rather, he points to examples where movements of co-present interaction were facilitated through, managed by, or arranged around mediated forms of interaction.

Conclusion

There are several areas where continued research into the relationship between public space and the public sphere could be productive. First, it is important to consider how networked technology and mediated communication have changed the use of public space. Have the dispersed networks of power, access, and participation diminished the potency of public space for realizing political agency? Are these changes reversing Arendt’s formulation of the public and private realms? Has the logic of the market short circuited the function of the polis? Have new uses of public space emerged, and have traditional uses disappeared? It is now common for bodies to occupy physical space while their gaze and consciousness are directed not at their environment but at their various devices. How does this change our understanding of and approach to public and shared spaces? What does mean in relation to Mitchell and Young’s arguments about the role of “embodied public space”? In light of pervasive mediation in daily life it is important to affirm the fundamental importance of physical locations as public space.

Secondly, it is important not just to consider physical and virtual space in a dichotomous relationship, but also how they interrelate. How are digital technologies and mediated communication intersecting with the use of public space, and vice versa? To be clear, the phenomena at the core of this question are not new. Habermas’ model of the bourgeois public sphere concerns the relation between mass media and association in public space. More recently, the political uprisings collectively referred to as the “Arab Spring” brought attention to this issue. After social media and text messaging were use to organize demonstrations in Cairo, Egypt that eventually led to the removal of president Mubarak, pundits and media theorists began referring to this social movement as the “Twitter revolution.” Again, it is important to differentiate between the means of communication used to exchange information and organize bodies, and the site of political protest as represented in this case by Tahrir Square.

Finally, the implementation of information technology into the built environment is raising questions about the role of technologies in public space and civic life. In a November 2016 article, urban media scholar Shannon Mattern considered this issue in relation to the implementation and subsequent shuttering of the LinkNYC terminals in New York City. The LinkNYC initiative involved replacing telephone booths throughout the sidewalks of Manhattan with kiosks that provided access to electricity and wireless internet service. The city government promoted the terminals as places where tourists could access maps and online information and New Yorkers could charge their cell phones. The resultant “misuse” of these terminals, exemplified by people using the service for watching pornography or illicitly downloading media, resulted in the program being suspended indefinitely. Mattern uses this example to argue the importance of “vital spaces of information exchange” in our public spaces. She suggests that ideologies of “data solutionism” have influenced planning commissions to the detriment of small, local, and analog data perspectives that she considers essential to urban life. Mattern encourages city planning boards and project committees to include librarians and archivists in their ranks in the interest of such spaces of information exchange. At stake, Mattern argues, is the nature and well-being of our democracy.

These are just a few of the issues and questions that I think should inform future research into the relationship between public space and the public sphere. My own work is informed by these questions, and my interest in “smart city” policies and practices of implementation seeks to extend and challenge the conceptual zones outlined in this essay. Related questions explored in my research include: changing conceptions of public and private infrastructure; shifting models of civic engagement; and the predominance of market rationalities and discourses in (re)shaping the built environment. These questions are likely to only increase in prominence in the foreseeable future, and unforeseen developments are always arising. The essential questions of public space and the public sphere, however, will remain of crucial importance in our increasingly interconnected collective lives.

City space and emotion: Affect as urban infrastructure

For a change of pace this week, I thought I’d write about affect in relation to the urban condition. Specifically I am going to focus on Nigel Thrift’s chapters on spatialities of feeling from his book Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Thrift begins the first chapter by characterizing cities as “maelstroms of affect,” and asserting the “utter ubiquity of affect as a vital element of cities” (p. 171). Thrift questions why “the affective register” has not formed “a large part of the study of cities,” and states “to read about affect in cities it is necessary to resort to the pages of novels, and the tracklines of poems” (p. 171).

I have to question what Thrift means by “the study of cities,” particularly in relation to the history of urban sociology. There is a lengthy history in this tradition of studying the affective register of cities, from Weber’s anomie and Simmel’s blasé attitude, through the emergence of modern criminology and social scientific studies of urban anxiety and the fear of crime.

There are, of course, prolific approaches available for studying cities. In addition to approaches from fiction and prose, and the aforementioned social scientific methods, there abound philosophical, psychogeographic, and theological engagements with urban life. One approach to the study of cities that has been especially amenable to the affective register is the domain of urban design and planning. Practitioners and commentators from this realm (who often, erroneously and unfortunately, mistake their practice for urbanism entire) have long used affective language to describe and design urban spaces: happy streets, friendly spaces, menacing buildings, etc.

Thrift is not explicitly discussing “smart” urbanization projects, but of course much of the analysis across these two chapters is directly applicable to such initiatives. Shockingly, Ernst Bloch also says much of relevance to smart cities in his 1929 essay “The Anxiety of the Engineer”. Thrift’s summation of Bloch’s “apocalyptic” vision of cities from that essay reads like a ripped-from-the-headlines encapsulation of contemporary urbanization trends: “Transfixed by the idea of a totally safe and calculable environment, the capitalist city is fixed and unbending in the face of unexpected events: ‘it has rooted itself in midair’” (p. 198). It’s a fantastic connection to make, though I despair at my ever-growing reading list.

Lastly, I want to touch upon Thrift’s discussion of the misanthropic city. My first reaction was to respond that cities aren’t misanthropic, people are; but then I recalled my recent trip to Las Vegas. Returning to the affective register of urban design, I must say that Vegas is certainly a misanthropic city. It is a city built for money, not for people. To the extent that it is built for people, it is designed not to affirm or edify humanity’s highest qualities, but is rather constructed to amplify our basest and most animalistic aspects. Compulsion, lechery, and stupefaction are the human attributes “celebrated” in that space. From an urban design perspective, Las Vegas is among the most misanthropic of cities.

Of course, Thrift is not referring to misanthropic urban design (although the invocation of infrastructure is an interesting, and perhaps fecund, reference point for urban affect), but to misanthropic attitudes and behaviors among urban denizens. I do not ascribe to calls for kindness and idealized sense of community in the city, as I find they are often simplistic and embarrassingly maudlin. Indeed, the disconnectedness and universal strangeness that has long been decried as manifestations of the inherent disharmony of urban life, are in fact principal among the reasons that I love life in the metropolis. Nevertheless, I do appreciate that amidst the anxiety and imminent catastrophe of urban life, Thrift finds spaces for kindness and hope.

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