Trump and the rhetoric of urban order

I rarely weigh in on national politics on this blog, and this post is not intended as an endorsement or a denunciation of any candidate. Although this post responds to recent remarks made by Donald Trump, I'm not interested in joining the pile-on critiquing his overall rhetorical style or campaign message, which seems overly easy and even superfluous at this point. Rather I want to focus on Trump's comments at the first one-on-one presidential debate last week regarding "law and order" and the "stop and frisk" program. These are topics I've thought and written about in regards to the use of "urban disorder" rhetoric in U.S. policy and policing practices. Trump's positioning himself as the "law and order candidate" and his appeals based on unruly "inner city" conditions recalls previous campaign rhetoric such as Nixon's 1968 campaign (see the above video). Furthermore, his support of "stop and frisk" policing directly ties his statements to a history of U.S. urban policies based on an order/disorder dichotomy.

Discourses based on a dichotomy of order and disorder have long been applied to urban spaces. In his classic historical survey of urban settlements, The City in History (1961), Lewis Mumford traced the development from early, “organically” developed Greek cities to more structured Hellenistic cities. Mumford describes this process as a transition “from supple ‘disorder’ to regimented elegance” (p. 190). A 2016 opera titled A Marvelous Order centers on the ideological struggle between urbanist Jane Jacobs and mayor Robert Moses in 1960s New York City. This battle of wills between Jacobs and Moses is seen by many to be emblematic of a historical opposition between urban planning schemes designed to order and regiment city spaces and populations, and the disorderly and unplanned activities and interactions that have long been characteristic of city life.

Cities and citizens have been “ordered” not only through planning schemes and infrastructure, but also through public policies and discourses. One aspect of my research focuses on how the term “disorder” has been employed across various discourses and analyses of U.S. cities, and how these discourses have influenced or supported policies of urban development. Through employing the language of disorder, these discourses have functioned pathologically to conceptualize certain citizens, spaces, and practices as either harmful or beneficial. 

Writers such as George Simmel, Robert Park, and Louis Wirth wrote about the turn-of-the-century American metropolis as a site of sensory overload and radical diversity. Disorder in these accounts was variously understood as criminal behavior, unregulated or unruly spaces, and perceived failures of integration and communication among different ethnic groups. Park in particular was concerned with broader problems posed by isolated ethnic enclaves and the weakening of social ties among city dwellers, as evinced in his analyses of immigrants and African Americans in U.S. cities. The sociology and criminology of the period was concerned with diagnosing and remedying the causes of disorder, and this diagnostic approach developed into the “social pathology” perspective. 

In his infamous report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” then Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1965) applied the social pathology perspective to theorize race relations in U.S. urban communities. Family structure was prioritized in Moynihan’s analysis, claiming that at “the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family” (p. 6). Moynihan emphasized incidences of unmarried and divorced women, “illegitimate” births, and the number of women-headed households to support his claim that “the family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable” (p. 7). Throughout the report, Moynihan refers to a “tangle of pathology” in which black women and children are ensnared, leading to the dissolution of families and thus the increase of violence and disorder in urban centers.

The Moynihan report has been cited as an important influence on the domestic programs enacted under President Lyndon Johnson, initiatives collectively known as The Great Society project. These programs focused on poverty and racial injustice, and also involved urban renewal and redevelopment efforts. Johnson outlined his vision of the Great Society in his 1964 commencement address at the University of Michigan. The Great Society, Johnson said, “demands an end to poverty and racial injustice,” and “is a challenge constantly renewed.” Johnson placed the state of urban America at the forefront of his Great Society vision, saying “our societies will never be great until our cities are great.”

In response to the urban race riots that occurred in several U.S. cities throughout the 1960s, President Johnson commissioned a working committee called the National Commission on Civil Disorders. The commission is also known as the Kerner commission, after Otto Kerner, chair of the commission and then governor of Illinois. Johnson directed the commission members to answer three questions in relation to the riots (Kerner, 1967, p. 1): What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again? In their report, the authors referred to the riots that occurred in Detroit during the summer of 1967, stating that the riots “again brought racial disorders to American cities, and with them shock, fear, and bewilderment to the Nation” (p. 1). One of the report’s best-known statements is that the nation “is moving toward two societies, one black, one white,” and that the recent race riots had “quickened the movement and deepened the division” (p. 1). 

In the recommendations section of the Kerner report, the authors dedicate a section to the issue of housing. In addition to calling for provisions for affordable housing in cities, the authors recommend against the further building of high-density “slum” housing projects. The building of such housing projects represent further attempts to impose rational order onto what were seen as chaotic and disorderly spaces, as seen in the modernist urban planning schemes of the 20th century. This philosophy of architecture and urban design is exemplified by the work of modernist designer Le Corbusier. The architect of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing project built in St. Louis in the 1950s was directly inspired by Le Corbusier’s architectural style and philosophy. 

While the modernist housing aspirations embodied in the Pruitt-Igoe project ended with collapsed walls and broken windows, students of urban life in America were soon preoccupied with broken windows of another sort. The broken windows theory of urban disorder was a significant influence on urban sociology and criminology for decades, and the implications of its approach to disorder can be seen today. In an article titled “The Urban Unease” (1968), J.Q. Wilson reacted to the U.S. urban riots of the 1960s with a view of cities rooted in the tensions between order and disorder.

Wilson eventually developed these ideas of neighborhood disorder into the broken windows theory, first outlined in an article written with collaborator George Kelling (1982). The authors encapsulate the broken windows perspective by stating “if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken” (p. 2, emphasis in original). As with broken windows that go unrepaired, the authors argue, “’untended’ behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls” (p. 3). Wilson and Kelling are not exclusively interested physical manifestations of disorder such as litter, graffiti, and buildings in disrepair, but present a larger argument that visible disorder (whether stemming from the built environment or from individuals inhabiting it), if left unchecked, will spread throughout a neighborhood.

Wilson and Kelling’s broken windows article proved very influential, and is credited with inspiring the implementation of policing practices implemented in cities throughout the United States. These policing programs have been referred to as “broken windows policing,” “zero tolerance policing,” and also, using Wilson and Kelling’s preferred term, “order maintenance policing”. In the 1990s, order maintenance policies based on broken windows theory were implemented by the New York City Police Department under police commissioner William Bratton and mayor Rudolph Giuliani. These policies were adopted as part of the city’s broader “Quality of Life” initiatives. During this period crime rates in the city decreased, and New York gained a reputation as one of the safest large cities in the country. In a 1998 address titled “The Next Phase of Quality of Life: Creating a More Civil Society,” mayor Giuliani praised the benefits of broken windows theory and zero tolerance policing, saying “broken windows theory works”. Describing the theory as the view that “the little things matter,” Giuliani called broken windows theory “an integral part of our law enforcement strategy”.

Trump's deployment of disorder discourses, and his appeals to the virtues of stop and frisk policing, recalls this history in starkly similar ways. A recent Trump campaign mailer includes a close up of Hillary Clinton's face juxtaposed against images of urban disorder: a brick building with boarded-up windows, and a pile of detritus including splinters of wood and chunks of concrete. The reverse side bears the message: "Donald Trump will strengthen our communities and protect our families. The first step is rebuilding, revitalizing, and reigniting our cities - like yours." In light of the epidemic violence in the historically segregated areas of Chicago (which Mr. Trump is correct to emphasize), and the recent and ongoing protests against police violence in cities such as Ferguson and across the country, these appeals should be considered within the context of the history of disorder discourses in U.S. urban policy. Much of the strain between vulnerable urban populations and police officers evident today can be seen as the legacy of policing practices instituted under the support of these discourses. With the urban unrest of the 1960s being evoked in political rhetoric and recalled in televised images of protests, we should consider carefully what is being promoted with calls to "reignite" our cities. 

Communication and the City conference: report from Seoul

This past June I was in Seoul, South Korea for the Communication and the City conference. The event was held at Yonsei University and co-sponsored by the Yonsei Communication Research Institute and the Urban Communication Foundation. It was a truly international conference, with participants hailing from around the world. Speakers included academic researchers, architects, urban planners, and Seoul city officials. Over two days presenters spoke about topics including risk factors facing urban populations, the role of storytelling and community media in neighborhood life, and the rise of the Asian megacity. I was particularly interested to learn more about the history of Seoul, and recent developments in its ongoing urbanization. This was my first visit to the South Korean capital, and I was overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of the sprawling metropolis.

The recent history of Seoul's development includes distinct periods of rapid modernization. One of these periods involved the demolition of traditional Korean homesteads and the displacement of residents from entire districts (this happened under the administration of a leader nicknamed "Mayor Bulldozer" by the locals). A second period is characterized by sustainability concerns, and is marked by the 1997 IMF economic crisis. In the wake of the economic crisis' ramifications, Seoul continued to modernize and developed some of the most advanced transportation infrastructure in the world. The drive toward modernization and investment in dedicated "economic zones" has resulted in networked urban districts like Songdo City, sometimes called the first full fledged smart city (or "u-city," with "u" designating ubiquitous computing infrastructure). In future posts I will share my thoughts and photos from my visit to Songdo, and some more thoughts on Seoul.

The unreal urbanism of Pokémon Go

Earlier this month the mobile-app game Pokémon Go was released in the U.S., and the game has been ubiquitous ever since. Aside from being a sudden pop culture phenomenon, the game's success poses some significant implications. First of all, this is clearly a breakthrough moment for augmented reality. Pokémon Go is not the first augmented reality game, nor is it the most ambitious, but it has undoubtedly brought AR into mainstream consciousness. Secondly, the success of Pokémon Go has led me to reconsider all my previously held assumptions about the uses of mobile apps and gamification for interfacing with urban spaces. I have historically been cynical about the prospect of using mobile games or AR interfaces to interact with urban space, since they usually strike me as shallow and insignificant, typically resulting in a fleeting diversion like a flash mob dance party, rather than altering people's perceptions of place in any lasting or meaningful way. Pokémon Go satisfies all the requirements of my earlier preconceptions, yet despite my best critical instincts, I really like the game.

The buzz about Pokémon Go had been building on various forums online, and after it was released it was virtually impossible to avoid Pokémon Go-related posts. Save for maybe 10 minutes with a friend's Game Boy in the late 90s, I've never played a Pokémon game and I preemptively wrote off Pokémon Go as yet another cultural fad that I would never partake in or understand. Curiosity got the best of my wife, however, and she downloaded the app and we walked around our neighborhood to test it out. To my surprise, the game was a lot of fun; our familiar surroundings were now filled with digital surprises, and we were excited to see neighborhood landmarks and murals represented as Pokéstops, and wild Pokémon hanging out in the doorways of local shops.  We meandered around discovering which of our local landmarks had been incorporated into the game, and each discovery increased my enjoyment of the app. Yes, the game is simple and shallow, but I was completely charmed. I downloaded the game so I could play, too.

Reactions to Pokémon Go have been as fascinating as the game's widespread adoption. Many news articles sensationalized the inherent dangers of playing the game: distracted players wandering into traffic or off of cliffs, people's homes being designated as Pokéstops and besieged by players, and traps being laid (using the games "lures") to ambush and rob aspiring Pokétrainers. There have also been insightful critical analyses of the game. An early and oft-shared article by Omari Akil considered the implications of Pokémon Go in light of recent police shootings of black men, warning that "Pokemon Go is a death sentence if you are a black man":

I spent less than 20 minutes outside. Five of those minutes were spent enjoying the game. One of those minutes I spent trying to look as pleasant and nonthreatening as possible as I walked past a somewhat visibly disturbed white woman on her way to the bus stop. I spent the other 14 minutes being distracted from the game by thoughts of the countless Black Men who have had the police called on them because they looked “suspicious” or wondering what a second amendment exercising individual might do if I walked past their window a 3rd or 4th time in search of a Jigglypuff.

Others questioned the distribution of Pokémon across neighborhoods, suggesting that poor or black neighborhoods had disproportionately fewer Pokémon and Pokéstops. Among urbanists, however, reaction to the game has been mixed. Mark Wilson at Fastcodesign declared that Pokémon Go "is quietly helping people fall in love with their cities". Ross Brady of Architizer celebrated the game for sparking "a global wave of urban exploration". Writing for de zeen, Alex Wiltshire boldly states that the game has "redrawn the map of what people find important about the world". City Lab contributor Laura Bliss proclaimed "Pokémon Go has created a new kind of flaneur". 

Others have been more critical of the game, with Nicholas Korody at Archinect retorting: "No, Pokémon Go is not an urban fantasy for the new flaneur". At Jacobin, Sam Kriss implores readers to "resist Pokémon Go":

Walk around. Explore your neighborhood. Visit the park. Take in the sights. Have your fun. Pokémon Go is coercion, authority, a command issuing from out of a blank universe, which blasts through social and political cleavages to finally catch ‘em all. It must be resisted.

Some, like Jeff Sparrow at Overland, drew direct parallels to the Situationists.

Writing for the Atlantic, Ian Bogost mediated on "the tragedy of Pokémon Go":

We can have it both ways; we have to, even: Pokémon Go can be both a delightful new mechanism for urban and social discovery, and also a ghastly reminder that when it comes to culture, sequels rule. It’s easy to look at Pokémon Go and wonder if the game’s success might underwrite other, less trite or brazenly commercial examples of the genre. But that’s what the creators of pervasive games have been thinking for years, and still almost all of them are advertisements. Reality is and always has been augmented, it turns out. But not with video feeds of twenty-year old monsters in balls atop local landmarks. Rather, with swindlers shilling their wares to the everyfolk, whose ensuing dance of embrace and resistance is always as beautiful as it is ugly.

Pokémon Go's popularity has led to many online comparisons to the Star Trek: TNG episode "The Game," in which the crew of the Enterprise is overcome by a mind-controlling video game. The game in Star Trek is not strictly-speaking an augmented reality game, but does involve projecting images onto the player's vision similar to an AR-overlay. Previous gaming and gadget fads have been compared to the TNG episode, notably Google Glass (for it's similarity to the eye-beaming design used to interface with the game in Star Trek) and the pervasively popular Angry Birds game (as evident in this parody video). The comparison has regained cultural cachet because, unlike Angry Birds which can be played on the couch, Pokémon Go is played in motion. This, of course, has contributed to the perception of the game's zombie-fying effects; we've grown accustomed to the fact that everyone's eyes are glued to a smartphone screen in our public spaces, but now there are whole flocks of people milling around with their eyes on their devices.

My cynical side is inclined to agree with the critics who see Pokémon Go's proliferation as proof positive of the passification and banalization of our society; the visions of Orwell, Bradbury, and Phil Dick all realized at once. But there's something there that has me appreciative, even excited about this goofy game. As my wife and I wandered our neighborhood looking for pocket monsters, we noticed several other people walking around staring at their phones. This is not an uncommon sight, but it is re-contextualized in light of Pokémon Go's popularity. "Look," my wife would say, "I bet they're playing, too." After a while she had to know for sure, and started walking up to people and asking, "Are you playing Pokémon Go?" Every person she asked was indeed playing the game. Then we were walking along with these people we've just met, discussing play strategies, sharing  Pokéstop locations, spreading word of upcoming lure parties.

One night around 10:30 last week we went into the Oakland neighborhood, home to both Pitt and Carnegie Mellon's campuses and a hotbed of  Pokémon Go activity. When we arrived, at least 20 people sat along the wall in front of the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial, smartphones in hands. We walked around the base of the Cathedral of Learning, where dozens of people in groups of two, three, or more were slowly pacing, stopping to capture a virtual creature. We crossed the street to Schenley plaza, where still dozens more people trekked through the grass, laughing and exclaiming and running up to their friends to share which Pokémon they had just got. Sure, most of these people were only talking to their own groups of friends, if they were talking at all, but it was still a cool experience. For me, the greatest thing was not which monsters I caught or XP my avatar earned; rather it was the energy, the unspoken but palpable buzz generated by all these people walking around in the dark of a warm summer night. Yes, I was giving attention to my smartphone screen, but what I remember most from that evening are the stars, and the fireflies, and the murmuring voices. Pokémon Go is promoting a sort of communal public activity, even if the sociality it produces is liminal at best. Yes, it is still shallow, still commercial, still programmed, but it's something; there's an energy there and a potential that is worth paying attention to.

Pokémon Go is not the be-all-end-all of augmented urban exploration, nor should be it considered the pinnacle of how mobile technology can enable new ways of interfacing with city space. But the game's popularity, and my personal experience using it, has given me hope for the potential of AR apps to enrich our experience of urban spaces and engender new types of interactions in our shared environments.

Columbus wins DOT Smart City Challenge

The Department of Transportation has selected Columbus, Ohio as the winner of the Smart City Challenge. The winning city will receive a $50 million grant to fund the development and implementation of networked and "smart" transportation infrastructure. From the Columbus Dispatch:

Columbus’ application includes several other transportation innovations, including an autonomous vehicle test fleet at Easton Town Center that would pick up passengers at the COTA terminal and deliver them nearer to jobs at the shopping center. 

Columbus also wants to increase electric vehicle access in the city and improve communication between vehicles and infrastructure, which could help reduce crashes. 

A key point in the city’s bid was how the money could be used to improve Columbus’ infant mortality rate. Officials have said that improving transportation options in poor neighborhoods could better connect new and expectant mothers to health care services. 

As a Pittsburgher who has been following the contest for several months, I was very disappointed that Pittsburgh did not win. Not only would it have been a welcome victory for the city and local industry, but it would have been perfect for my dissertation project.

I was genuinely impressed and even moved by Pittsburgh's video component of their proposal, which presented a people-first approach that acknowledged past planning mistakes and continuing concerns about disparities among residents. You can watch the video here.

You can watch the other finalists' videos and read the full proposals at Network World.

A colleague who watched each city's video presentation agreed with me that Columbus' video pitch was the weakest, though he cautioned that the videos are ultimately irrelevant in relation to the process of selecting the winning city.

The DOT has pledged to help the other finalist cities implement their proposed transportation initiatives, and Pittsburgh leaders have also declared their intent to follow through with their Smart PGH plan. 

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.

Wound Culture and Public Space: Mark Seltzer's concept of the pathological public sphere

Mark Seltzer: Serial Killers (II): The Pathological Public Sphere

Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 122-149

Seltzer’s essay on serial killers and the pathological public sphere immediately calls J.G. Ballard to mind. Eventually Seltzer does cite Ballard, but it is in reference to Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, a selection that renders the author’s omission of Ballard’s subsequent novel, Crash, all the more conspicuous (Crash was adapted into a film by David Cronenberg in 1996, the year after Seltzer’s article was published). The article’s introductory anecdote about Sylvestre Matushka, who engineered train wrecks and claimed to only achieve sexual satisfaction when witnessing these accidents, is obviously evocative of Crash. Ballard’s story follows characters who are sexually excited by car crashes, and stage car accidents and recreate famous wrecks. Seltzer cites The Atrocity Exhibition in order to borrow Ballard’s phrase and relate it to his own notion of the pathological public sphere: “spectacular corporeal/machine violence, a drive to make mass technology and public space a vehicle of private desire in public spectacle: the spectacles of public sex and public violence” (p. 124). Though he never refers to Crash, Seltzer’s language here could have come direct from the book’s dust jacket: “The coupling of bodies and machines is thus also, at least in these cases, a coupling of private and public spaces” (p. 125).

Seltzer’s argument is also evocative of a different Crash: the identically-titled but textually-dissimilar Crash, a 2004 film exploring race relations in contemporary Los Angeles through the interweaving of multiple characters and plotlines. Los Angeles is famous for its iconic freeway system, and the city is often regarded as the apotheosis of car culture, an alternatingly visionary or dystopic manifestation of car-dependent society. The film Crash uses the city’s freeway network as a thematic device, beyond the relation of the story’s interweaving plot threads and intersecting characters to the on-ramps and cloverleaf interchanges of L.A.’s freeways as seen from above. The film opens at the scene of a car accident one of these L.A. freeways, and the first lines of dialogue (spoken by a character riding in a car involved in the accident) establishes the thematic significance of the film’s Los Angeles setting:

Graham: It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.

Compare this sentiment with these words of serial killer Ted Bundy quoted in Seltzer’s article:

“Another factor that is almost indispensable to this kind of behavior is the mobility of contemporary American life. Living in a large center of population and living with lots of people, you can get used to dealing with strangers. It’s the anonymity factor.” (p. 133)

Seltzer does cite a Los Angeles-based film in his discussion of public and private space: the action-thriller Speed, a sort of wish-fulfillment Hollywood fantasy for Angelenos where the city’s congested freeways are cleared of all traffic and the hero’s speedometer never drops below 50 miles per hour. Seltzer notes the film’s use of “public vehicles of what might be called stranger-intimacy” (p. 125): elevators, buses, airplanes, and the city subway system. Seltzer’s highlighting of transit systems to illustrate the collisions of public and private space resonated with my own research in this area. Seltzer cites urban sociologist Georg Simmel’s account of “the stranger” in urban life; Simmel’s theories have influenced a great deal of urban studies, including theories of transportation and public space.

Toiskallio (2000) applied Simmel’s sociability to an analysis of “the interaction between the taxi driver and the fare as an example of an intensive urban semi-public situation where feasible and face-saving social interaction is needed” (p. 4). The term “semi-public” refers to that are neither public nor totally private, as taxicabs are neither public nor private transportation, but “paratransit” (p. 8). Such distinctions are further complicated by the recent advent of “car-share” or rideshare services such as Uber and Lyft. These services are essentially hired car services, and function much like taxicabs, but with significant differences. Most relevant to the current discussion is the fact that rideshare drivers do not drive company vehicles as taxi drivers do, but operate their private vehicles to transport customers. This situation transforms a person’s private car into a space of stranger-intimacy. There are consequences here not only for transformations of public and private space, but also the coupling of bodies and machines, as well as implication for affective labor and transportation services.

Urban Media Studies conference in Zagreb, Croatia: post-trip report

On September 24th and 25th, I was on hand for the Urban Media Studies conference, hosted at the University of Zagreb's Faculty of Political Science. The conference was organized by members of the ECREA temporary working group on media and the city. It was a thoroughly international event, with participants from across Europe and the United States, as well as Russia, Japan, and Brazil. It was also interdisciplinary, with various academic fields represented by scholars from communication, sociology, geography, and other faculties. In addition to academics, the participants also included artists, policy makers, and urban planners.

A key concept that I noticed appearing in several presentations is that of assemblages. Presenters spoke of ecologies and assemblages for staging mobilities, sites such as airports as assemblages of digital interfaces, and cities as communicative figurations involving constellations of actors and practices. 

Another recurring theme was visibility. Many participants highlighted the often imperceptible functioning of digital technologies. While they may not rely on the visible infrastructure of previous technology, these media regulate bodies in material ways, often establishing and enforcing otherwise unmarked borders. In his keynote address on staging mobilities, Ole Jensen stated that technologies must become visible to the community in order for them to realize them as a field for action. 

A recurring question, still unresolved, concerned the distinction between urban and rural. If this is a conference on urban media studies, could there be a rural media studies? With all the discussion of planetary urbanization, is the distinction between urban and rural still meaningful? Participants were divided on this issue. Some suggested that through the networking of the globe via media and ICTs, the "urban" has become the predominating way of life across the planet. Others argued that rural areas are very much an extant reality and way of life, and the distinction between urban and rural people and places is still very clear.

The conference program included an optional excursion to tour some of the housing developments built during Croatia's socialist period. I was impressed with beauty of central and historic Zagreb, so this excursion provided a fascinating view of parts of the city not normally visited by tourists (nor, as I learned, by locals). 

Our tour went not only around the socialist housing blocks, but also to the top of one. Despite the hazy and overcast weather, we had a spectacular view of Zagreb, the surrounding area, and into Slovenia. It was a wonderful addition to the program, and a personal conference highlight.

Fantasy Lands: 5 urban truths I learned at Disneyland

“This book … intends to establish Manhattan as the product of an unformulated theory, Manhattanism, whose program – to exist in a world totally fabricated by man, i.e. to live inside fantasy – was so ambitious that to be realized, it could never be openly stated.”

– Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York

On July 17, 1955, Disneyland opened its gates to the public for the first time. Opening day had its share of mishaps and technical hiccups, as would be expected of such an ambitious undertaking. Ultimately nobody seemed to mind, and the theme park was celebrated as a sensational success. The Disney theme park empire has only grown since then, with the original Anaheim attraction followed by the mammoth Disney World in Orlando, and international parks in Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Just earlier this week the company released new details about the staggeringly ambitious Shanghai Disneyland resort, expected to open next year.

In 2005, I was in attendance July 17th for the 50th anniversary celebrations at Disneyland. At the time I lived in Southern California, and even held an “annual passport” ticket that entitles the holder to multiple admissions for a year (not valid for admittance on the day of the anniversary, however). My then-girlfriend and I purchased our passes together, and made good use of them; we often boasted that the passports had paid for themselves several times over before they expired. For a while we managed a trip to the park every other Saturday. We spent so much time in Fantasyland we began to feel like citizens of the Magic Kingdom.

Of course, Disneyland doesn’t have citizens; it’s not a real town, there are neither residents nor residences (although Walt did keep an apartment in the Main Street fire station during the park’s construction). In Disneyland, everyone is a tourist (or an on-the-job employee, of course). For most people, a visit to a Disney park is a special occasion, maybe an annual event, perhaps even a once-in-a-lifetime vacation. Our regular visits afforded us the luxury of feeling familiar, being able to skip the overcrowded big attractions to discover something off the beaten path instead. Evincing a disdain for tourists that would rival any New Yorker, we weaved through slow moving crowds of gawkers and In a fake city, we really felt like locals.

Today is the 60th anniversary of Disneyland’s opening, and the occasion has prompted me to reflect on my experiences in Disney’s theme parks in light of my developing thoughts on urbanism. I’ve spent the past year immersed in literature on urban history, planning, and theory. Disneyland occupies a strange position in the world of urbanism. On one hand, the park has been acclaimed by planners and laypeople alike for embodying the principles of good urban design; on the other hand, its been decried for promoting the spread of cheap and generic environments, a corporate commercialized culture creeping beyond the theme park walls into the surrounding society. Looking back at my own experience, I had a surprising realization: Disneyland is where I learned to care about urban space. This will seem a sacrilegious sentiment to some, but as unbelievable as it may seem, it’s true for me. Recalling Baudrillard’s oft-cited claim that Disneyland’s artificiality mirrors the falseness of the surrounding civilization, it was within a simulated city that I came to appreciate the built environment. So inspired by this revelation, and in commemoration the park’s birthday, I have compiled the following list of five urban truths I learned at Disneyland.

1. Carriages, Monorails, and other People Movers: the city and transportation

Transportation is a crucial element of city life, and a huge issue in urbanism. Urban planners are so passionate about transport that there are books, web sites, and podcasts devoted exclusively to the subject. Of course, this is just stating the obvious; consider how contentious the clashes between the entrenched transportation industry and “rideshare” newcomers like Uber and Lyft, or the clamor for bike shares and light rail in your own city. Modes of transport are so integral to the urban experience, that certain cities can be defined by the transportation they are most associated with. Yes, there are elevated trains, double-decker buses, yellow cabs, and cloverleaf freeway interchanges in many cities, but the association is strong enough that each of these transport infrastructures can serve as a synecdoche for an entire city (Chicago, London, New York, and Los Angeles, for those comparing notes).

Transportation is a big deal in Disneyland, too. Walt Disney loved model train sets. So much so, he built a railroad in the backyard of his Los Angeles home. Dubbed the Carolwood Pacific Railroad, it featured a steam-powered locomotive large enough that his children and their friends could ride it around the yard. That’s a big toy train set by any rubric, but Walt dreamed of an even bigger set. The Carolwood Pacific Railroad was a key inspiration for the building of Disneyland; the park is encircled by train tracks, and could be considered the largest model train set ever built. Even if a visitor does not include a ride on the Disneyland Rail Road on their itinerary, the prominence of the train’s place in the park cannot be missed: the Main Street train station is the first building guests see upon entering through the main gates.

The Disneyland Rail Road is just the tip of the transportation iceberg. The original Disneyland parking lot was just outside the main gates; visitors could see Sleeping Beauty castle from their parking spot. Today visitors park in a humongous parking garage and ride a tram to the front gates, since the original parking lot is now the site of the California Adventure park (appropriately, the Golden State-themed amusement park has an entire area dedicated to California’s car culture: Cars Land). Disney World ups the ante even further: from the parking lot, you approach the Magic Kingdom via the Monorail. These specialized methods of arriving at the gates convey the sense that you are transitioning from the mundane world, and prepare you for a special experience. Aside from the Disneyland Rail Road and Monorail, classic attractions included the Autopia go-kart course, the Skyway tram, and the literally-named People Mover. All these options allow visitors to experience Disneyland at different speeds, different scales, and from different perspectives.

How you move through a space will affect your experience of that space, as well as how life develops within it. Street layout, transportation infrastructure, and accessibility obviously impact urban life in many important ways. What I am trying to evoke in this urban truth is something fundamentally experiential, even phenomenological. In several cities in which I’ve lived, I’ve had the experience of walking along a street on which I had previously only driven through. Even if it is a street that I have driven on many times, such as my daily route driving to work, my experience of the street on foot is entirely different than how I experience it through the window of a car moving at 50 mph. You can become aware of something that you had passed by dozens of times without ever noticing; it is a way of rediscovering a place for the first time. Essentially, how you move through the city affects your relationship to it, and opens new possibilities for interacting with your environment.

The profundity of this experiential difference may be a key factor in why visitors find Disneyland so delightful. Many Americans do not live in metropolitan areas with robust public transportation and walkable, pedestrian-friendly streetscapes. For someone like me, who grew up in a decidedly suburban environment characterized by the car-centric layout and lifestyle so common in the United States, a visit to Disneyland can be the first experience of walking for extended periods in an urban area. James Howard Kunstler, an urbanist and harsh Disney critic, writes about this phenomenon in his book The Geography of Nowhere:

Stripped of all its symbolic trappings and show-biz frosting, what Disney World sells is a scrap of public realm free of automobiles – or nearly so, except for a few props. […] As well as being free of cars, of course, Disney World is also free of the bad relationships imposed upon things and people by cars. Since there are so few places of any size with this characteristic in America, the experience is understandably exhilarating.

1. The Windows on Main Street: caring about the built environment

One effect of becoming a “local” at Disneyland was that I started caring about aspects of the park that I had not even noticed before. For example: how many visitors to Tomorrowland do you think give any thought to the color scheme of the area? I had visited many times without giving the issue any thought, but in the lead up to the 50th anniversary events Tomorrowland’s color scheme became a heated topic of discussion. When Disneyland opened, the colors of Tomorrowland reflected a 1950s space age conception of the future: whites, blues, greys. For some these colors were associated with rockets, space vehicles, and the sky itself. Others also associated the color scheme with a 1950s optimism about the future and promise of space travel. In the 1990s, the land was repainted with bronze and copper tones as part of a “future that never was” re-theming of the land. This change likely went unmarked by the majority of visitors, but to an invested few the color change represented an ideological shift from optimism to pessimism toward the space program. Interestingly, the area was repainted with the original color scheme in time for the 50th anniversary.

This degree of awareness and concern for the built environment that urban planners, particularly vocal members of the New Urbanism movement, have been advocating for some time. The fact is, much of the built environment goes unmarked because it is so unremarkable. Blank walls and oppressive structures that repel rather than draw the eye. Caring about your environment and its condition can be a critical element of community engagement, and is often relevant factor in neighborhood change. I believe the key difference is a matter of investment: financial, personal, and otherwise. Unlike in Disneyland, citizens can benefit from being invested in their environment because they actually have a stake in it. Unfortunately, urban dwellers often take this for granted until it is too late and someone else invests in their community and stakes their own claim.

1. Community of tomorrow: the planned city

In addition to his enthusiasm for designing environments and laying out transportation networks, there is evidence that Walt Disney dabbled in formal urban planning. In an article for Micechat.com, Sam Gennawey reports that Disney had one book on urban planning in his office: The Heart of Our Cities by Victor Gruen. Gruen advocated the “garden city” urban form that was very influential in the early 20th century. The urban planners and theorists working during this time had lived through a dramatic rise of industrial urbanism, and adopted a worldview characterized by a stark contrast between the pastoral, natural, and harmonious countryside, and the polluted, toxic, and chaotic city. These conditions contributed to a negative view of city life, and an anti-urban rhetoric that would dominate for much of the 20th century. The garden city movement was intended to right the imbalances of urban development and serve as a blueprint for harmonious cities. According to Gennawey, Gruen cited Disneyland as an example of ideal urban design. Indeed, comparing a map of Disneyland with the garden city layout reveals strong correspondences.

Walt Disney apparently shared some of the negative conceptions of city life that held sway during that time. Walt had grown up in a small town in Missouri, and it is believed that the layout and architecture of Disneyland’s Main Street was strongly based on his hometown. Much of Disneyland’s theming and narrative suggests not only nostalgia for past phases of American society, but also an idealizing of rural and small town life. This nostalgia must have resonated with many Americans in the 1950s, because Disneyland was a huge hit with the public. Disneyland had been built on Anaheim orange groves, a mostly rural area. But once the park opened and crowds began flocking to the site, the area surrounding Disneyland quickly developed with businesses seeking to profit from the crowds. The cheap motels and other questionable enterprises that popped up outside the park dismayed Walt; he felt they marred the family friendly environment he had worked so hard to establish at Disneyland.

Walt grew frustrated with his inability to control the urban development outside of his park, so he looked for a site where he could have control. Walt’s urban flight eventually led him to central Florida, where he clandestinely bought up swaths of land. This project was of course Walt Disney World, where Disney owned enough property they could build multiple theme parks and control the entire surrounding area. Now Walt could control what kinds of lodging and restaurants would be available to his guests outside the park, as well as make sure that even money guests spent out of the park would go to Disney.

The space available in Florida and the newly available level of control led Walt to take his urban planning ambition even further. EPCOT was not intended to be another theme park, but rather a real city. The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow combined garden city ideals of urban design with a technocratic utopian vision. Walt died before he could see his vision of EPCOT come to fruition; it never did, and the EPCOT Center that exists today is part theme park and, as James Howard Kunstler adeptly puts it, part “half-assed World’s Fair.”

Curiously, the town of Celebration, FL is often cited as EPCOT’s legacy. Celebration is a “master-planned” community developed by the Disney company and connected to the Walt Disney World property. Aside from that, Celebration bears no relation to the utopian city of tomorrow that Walt envisioned. Celebration reminds me of another Florida town: Seaside, another master-planned community, designed by the firm of renowned architect Andres Duany. Seaside is often acclaimed as an exemplar of good design, ostensibly because it follows the tenets and ideals of the New Urbanism movement in urban planning. This may be the case, but I have never understood the praise heaped upon Seaside. In no way does it strike me as a place I would want to live. The town looks clean and well maintained, sure; but it seems fake and lifeless, as well. There is a reason that Seaside successfully stood in for a movie set in The Truman Show.

I am not arguing that urban space needs to be chaotic or decrepit in order to be authentic; indeed, I think this is a common fallacy among urban enthusiasts and city dwellers alike. I am suggesting that attempts at “master-planning” and controlling urban space are inherently flawed, and are not conducive to thriving communities. Now, I recognize that neither Celebration nor Seaside are cities, nor are trying to design urban space. Nor am I criticizing the worth of New Urbanism; reading Duany’s book Suburban Nation was a revelatory experience for me, articulating and elucidating why I had found the built environment so unfulfilling throughout my life, and it is my favorite book on urban planning. Rather, I am citing these two well-known examples of master-planned communities to highlight and criticize the impulse toward total control of development. Planning is not urbanism entire, it is not the only means of understanding the city; focusing solely on planning cannot offer a complete perspective of life in the built environment, just as the city cannot be understood by considering only its architecture.

In regards to the planning impulse in cities: I believe the modern era’s counterpart to the garden city is the smart city. Smart city rhetoric seems to me reminiscent of much anti-urban rhetoric, as well as early social scientific studies of cities from the early 20th century. The idea is that the city is a chaotic, entropic environment that needs to be reigned in and made harmonious. Richard Sennett has written beautifully on the value of the uncontrollable and unpredictable elements of urban life, what he calls “the uses of disorder”. Smart city rhetoric suggests that increased information (through smart sensors tracking data ranging from traffic flow to energy consumption throughout the city) will actualize the efficient, rational, and harmonious city. It is Big Data as solution to the urban problem.

Aside from gentrification, Disneyfication is one of the most decried phenomena by residents of major cities today. Disneyfication refers to the proliferation of corporate and commercialized interests in urban space, often at the expense of local businesses or public interests who cannot afford to compete with such companies. The effect of this development is the spread of cheap and generic buildings and environment with no sense of connection to the unique place in which they are situated. You can walk into any chain drug store in Manhattan and never have to orient yourself to the layout, because it will be uniform across all the stores. Similarly, their storefronts will all have identical facades, leading to generic and generalized streetscape. The stores could exist in any city, there is no signifier connecting it to that specific location. This Disneyfication is a direct result of Disney’s successful theme park designs. It is possible to interpret the Disney narrative and see this as unintended consequences of good intentions: back in Anaheim, Walt was concerned that visitors to his park were being taken advantage of by unscrupulous hawkers and peddlers outside the Disneyland gates. Furthermore, he couldn’t vouch for the safety of enterprises undertaken off his property. Disneyfication could be seen as an outgrowth of this impulse to create “safe” spaces.

In The Conscience of the Eye, Sennett wrote: “A city ought to be a school for learning how to lead a centered life.” It’s a beautiful ideal, and one that cannot come to fruition in a planned and controlled environment.

1. Disneyland Hotel: the city for sale

In his essay “See you in Disneyland,” Michael Sorkin writes about the tourism and hospitality economy that developed around Disney World. Stating that at that time Orlando had more hotel rooms than Chicago or New York, he called Orlando “America’s capital of transience.” Disneyland is not a city; it is a resort, a playground for tourists. Guests pay to stay a while. This notion of city of transience, and city as tourist playground, has come to the forefront of city life today.

As economic practices continue to adapt to the changes of post-industrial capitalism, prominent new forms of labor and services have emerged. One of the most prevalent are the on-demand services sometimes referred to as the “sharing economy”. This emergence is exemplified in the popularity of services like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. The advent of car-for-hire services like Uber and Lyft has been tumultuous for taxi industries in major cities. Taxi drivers have protested in cities worldwide. Some cities have banned the taxi alternatives outright. Meanwhile, Airbnb (which essentially functions as a hotel alternative; ostensibly, private homeowners and tenants rent out their homes as accommodation) has received scrutiny in cities suffering housing crises, especially New York and San Francisco. Critics of the service view as essentially turning real cities into Disneylands: displacing residents in favor of a revolving door of transient tourists willing to pay the price of admission.

The issues raised by these services and their functions in urban economies lead to some fundamental questions the role of cities today. What is the city for? Should we view the city as a commodity? Or the city as service? For whom is the city? Who should the city be accountable to, and who should be accountable to the city?

These are questions I am currently considering in depth in my research. My home city of Pittsburgh does not face the housing shortages or Airbnb saturation of larger cities, nor is the taxi lobby here as robust as in Philadelphia, but Uber has established itself in the city. Uber has selected Pittsburgh along with a number of other cities for a hiring surge of new drivers. At the same time, the company has partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to run a research lab in the city to develop robotic, autonomous cars that will eventually obsolesce and replace all the drivers they have hired. One more example of the preeminence of transience in the contemporary city.

This discussion of transience leads us to the fifth and final urban truth:

1. Living in Yesterland: the city and change

Recently the web site Theme Park Tourist published a retrospective on a former Disney World attraction: The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter. The attraction (I’ll use EAE for short) existed in the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland from 1995 to 2003. I got to experience EAE sometime in the late 90s, and I remember it vividly. First of all, it was a golden era for Disney World’s Tomorrowland: the “New Tomorrowland” period, characterized by theming the area as a functioning futuristic city (complete with re-theming the People Mover as the Tomorrowland Transit Authority) and featuring such attractions as The Timekeeper, the revamped Astro Orbiter, and of course, EAE.

I was elementary school-aged, visiting the park with my family. We found ourselves in New Tomorrowland toward the end of a long Disney World day. My dad took me with him to ride EAE while Mom and my sisters went to do something more their speed. As detailed in the Theme Park Tourist series, EAE was particularly intense for a Disney attraction. In an effort to prevent unwary parents from taking tots on the terrifying attraction and leaving traumatized, Disney plastered with queue area with warning signs. I must’ve read every one of those warning signs as the ride line snaked through the holding pen. “Warning: The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter my be too frightening for small children.” “Portions of this attraction take place in a confined space and total darkness.” “Warning: this attraction features flashing lights and pyrotechnics.”

The warning notices were effective: I was terrified the entire time we were in line. I remained terrified during both of the pre-shows. I was terrified entering the main show room: a theater in the round, with three concentric rings of seats facing the center of the room. And when, after taking a seat, a Disney crewmember lowered restraints onto my shoulders and locking me in, I was petrified. But then the attraction proper got underway, and something wonderful happened.

The show was not nearly as unrelentingly vicious as I’d been imagining. Instead, it was a delightful combination of tongue-in-cheek humor, cutting edge special effects, and pop sci-fi storytelling. As the auditorium filled with screams (some genuine, some forced, some piped in through hidden speakers), I started laughing, and I continued laughing for the duration. The fears I had projected onto the unknown proved unfounded; the drama of a howling space beast breaking free of its cage and rampaging around the room devouring unwitting humans was nothing but good, clean fun. When it was over, I walked out grinning, and wanting to immediately get back in line for another go.

That experience of an amusement park attraction nearly twenty years ago has remained a potent and positive memory. As far as Disney vacation memories go, it’s easily one of my best; a fond recollection of being thoroughly impressed by a real E-ticket ride. It’s also a dear memory of time spent with my father. Sure, sharing a theme park ride may not register as much of an experience for the zealously cynical and jaded, but for me there was something unquestionably profound in that experience: while in line I was afraid and wanted to leave, but dad knowingly did not indulge my overblown anxiety (rest assured, I was old enough to handle to EAE). Having gone through the experience, I found that the ultimate cause of my anxiety had been my own imagination, and came out the better for it knowing it had been worth it. Joy was the reward for having faced my fear. This is a terribly important life lesson, irregardless of the medium through which it is communicated. The fact that a theme park is an artificial environment doesn’t preclude the possibility for real, meaningful experience to occur there.

The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter was closed in 2003 and overhauled into an attraction called Stitch’s Great Escape. In the new version, the berserk alien beast is replaced by a cute cartoon character who gets loose in the theater and farts in the audience’s faces. In fact, most of New Tomorrowland is gone. I have many other examples from various Disneyland attractions that have either been removed or altered. The disappearance of the Carousel of Progress; the addition of a Johnny Depp animatronic to Pirates of the Caribbean; the replacement of Star Tours with an entirely new version. Each of these irked me in some way. Perhaps you have your own examples. Changes like these can be affecting because they alter the landscape of our memories. If you return to those places, you can’t help but remember what used to be there, or how it was before. Such changes are not always experienced negatively, but they are noticed.

Returning to the question of city life, I am reminded of something Colson Whitehead wrote in The Colossus of New York:

No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet café plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Obviously, the maxim about “the only thing that is constant” does not apply only to cities, or to Disneyland. It is a universal precept, but one that can be difficult to accept, especially when it affects our pasts and personal histories. The city is change. Cities are not static, but constantly changing; that dynamism is integral to their vitality.

Urban Comm roundup: Smart cities, hostile architecture, and placemaking

Smart Cities

• Writing for Forbes, Rich Karlgaard reports on the smart-city champions, i.e. the countries and companies poised to benefit from the smart city boom:

I see three categories of winners. The first will be suppliers of digital technology, from high-speed telecom, cloud services and digital security to apps, for example, like Uber’s and Airbnb’s that use physical resources with greater efficiency. But these can get you only so far.

The second category will be traditional industry reborn. The trick will be to find breakthroughs in materials, construction and transportation–updates to the blood-and-sweat stuff that built the great cities of the 20th century. Will the winners be known names, such as GE, Mitsubishi, Tata and Samsung, or new players?

A third category will be the smart cities themselves. Leaders will likely create services that can be used to teach other cities, so their expertise will have value beyond the benefits enjoyed inside the cities. Smart cities will enjoy premium brands in a tough global economy, and they will attract talent. A great example is Singapore.

• Focusing on India's smart cities initiative, Arindham Guha outlines "three broad categories of investments in infrastructure and technology, all of which are required for delivering 'smart' urban services":

The first category is what we can call basic infrastructure—water or sewerage pipelines would fall under this group. Unlike developed countries, most Indian cities have significant shortages in this area.

[...]

[The] second category of technology investments in a typical smart city, which we can broadly call network level infrastructure. These are essentially a set of devices or sensors installed at specific points in the city-wide network which are used to monitor parameters related to service delivery.

[...]

Integrating information and communication technology (ICT) solutions constitute the third and final component of the smart city technology architecture. These solutions can be of two types. One set of ICT solutions usually help the city administration manage their internal functions like finance and accounting, human resources etc. The other set of ICT solutions are usually used to analyse data collected through network level sensors to generate potential decision options for the city administration to provide seamless and efficient urban services.

• CNBC contributor Nyshka Chandran asks, "Are India's smart cities too ambitious?":

"Smart city" remains loosely-defined in India and around the world, but many say the adoption of technology is a crucial element. Ambitious initiatives to build "smarter" cities include the use of data and digital infrastructure to manage energy and water usage to the creation of intelligent transport networks, according to a Brookings report earlier this year.

However, India will likely focus on fixing the lack of basic amenities and infrastructure such as housing, water supply, sanitation, and electricity in existing urban regions.

• Darren Pauli at the Register warns "your city's not smart if it's vulnerable":

"Real world hacker" Cesar Cerrudo has blasted vendors, saying they're stopping security researchers from testing smart city systems, and as a result they're being sold with dangerous unchecked vulnerabilities.

The warning will be detailed at RSA San Francisco this week, and comes a year after the IOActive chief technology officer found some 200,000 vulnerable traffic control sensors active in cities like Washington DC, London, and Melbourne.

Vendors don't want their kit tested, Cerrudo said, although there are now 25 major cities across the world taking the lead in deployment, such as New York, Berlin, and Sydney.

• AlterNet's Allegra Kirkland considers the "troubling social and political consequences" posed by smart cities:

Smart cities are loosely defined as urban centers that rely on digital technology to enhance efficiency and reduce resource consumption. This happens by means of ubiquitous wireless broadband, citywide networks of computerized sensors that measure human activities (from traffic to electricity use), and mass data collection that analyzes these patters. Many American cities, including New York, Boston and Chicago, already make use of smart technologies. But far more radical advances are happening overseas. Masda in Abu Dhabi, and Songdo, in South Korea, will be the first fully functioning smart cities, in which everything from security to electricity to parking is monitored by sensors and controlled by a central city "brain".

The surveillance implications of these sorts of mass data-generating civic projects are unnerving, to say the least. Urban designer and author Adam Greenfield wrote on his blog Speedbird that this centralized governing model "disturbingly consonant with the exercise of authoritarianism." To further complicate matters, the vast majority of smart-city technology is designed by IT-systems giants like IBM and Siemens. In places like Songdo, which was the brainchild of Cisco Systems, corporate entities become responsible for designing and maintaining the basic functions of urban life.

Hostile Architecture

• In an article for the Guardian, Alex Andreou considers the broader implications of anti-homeless spikes and other forms of defensive architecture in urban spaces:

From ubiquitous protrusions on window ledges to bus-shelter seats that pivot forward, from water sprinklers and loud muzak to hard tubular rests, from metal park benches with solid dividers to forests of pointed cement bollards under bridges, urban spaces are aggressively rejecting soft, human bodies.

We see these measures all the time within our urban environments, whether in London or Tokyo, but we fail to process their true intent. I hardly noticed them before I became homeless in 2009. An economic crisis, a death in the family, a sudden breakup and an even more sudden breakdown were all it took to go from a six-figure income to sleeping rough in the space of a year. It was only then that I started scanning my surroundings with the distinct purpose of finding shelter and the city’s barbed cruelty became clear.

[...]

Defensive architecture acts as the airplane curtain that separates economy from business and business from first class, protecting those further forward from the envious eyes of those behind. It keeps poverty unseen and sanitises our shopping centres, concealing any guilt for over-consuming. It speaks volumes about our collective attitude to poverty in general and homelessness in particular. It is the aggregated, concrete, spiked expression of a lack of generosity of spirit.

Ironically, it doesn’t even achieve its basic goal of making us feel safer. There is no way of locking others out that doesn’t also lock us in. The narrower the arrow-slit, the larger outside dangers appear. Making our urban environment hostile breeds hardness and isolation. It makes life a little uglier for all of us.

• Hannah Butler at Non Profit Quarterly reacted to Andreou's article with additional thoughts on "the fierce hostility of the urban landscape":

Creating urban spaces that reject human interactions affect us all. Not only do they prevent the homeless taking refuge; neither can the young mother find shelter from the rain or the elderly man a space to rest. It creates a physical manifestation of a hostility that we could all stand to be without, rather than encourage. These problems are not limited to New York City or to London, but are in fact a stubborn part of the architecture of modern city life, whether indented or accidental. However, they aren’t intractable.

• In a post on Medium, Justin Schumacher writes about the balance between security and liberty in relation to architecture:

Early on, the British did much as we have done since 9/11, installing barriers and bollards anywhere they might save some lives. But as the years passed, their approach became much more nuanced as they realized that over-securitizing public spaces drives away the public, which increases crime. This appears to happen in part because security features lead people to believe that crime is commonplace and increasing even if it is rare and decreasing, and in part because simply seeing security features causes anxiety and discomfort.

Placemaking & Tactical Urbanism

• Referring to it as a "rhetorical gimmick," James Russell says "enough of bogus 'placemaking'":

Unfortunately, Placemaking, as promulgated by its chief advocate, the nonprofit Projects for Public Spaces, is largely bogus, even though PPS rather presumptuously claims it “has the potential to be one of the most transformative ideas of this century.” After you hack through thickets of slogans and vagaries, Placemaking seems to comprise a community-driven process for designing public spaces (streets, sidewalks, plazas, squares, campuses, parks, and so on) that are mixed use, host a variety of activities for diverse audiences, and are well-connected to the larger city or town. All this has been mom & pop, apple-pie stuff in urban planning circles for decades, derived from the valuable 1960s work of the urbanist and author Jane Jacobs and the urban planner William H. “Holly” Whyte. The same ideas energized the 1990s New Urbanism that gave us Neo-historical neighborhoods, a few of them actually good.

Sadly, Placemaking could only gain currency because our building and development processes create so little that is inviting and memorable. America’s default is to assemble standardized real-estate products along roads engineered for auto throughput, and call it a day. Placelessness is so ubiquitous and such second nature that it is actually hard to think about what it takes to make a building or streetscape that’s appealing, that feels as if it belongs.

[...]

What are the lessons here? Making great places is a more organic and less mechanical process than PPS makes it out to be. Yes, the public must be involved, and yes some places should be active social mixing bowls. But some places—especially extraordinary natural features—should be left alone. In others, we should recognize that what is unique is sometimes strange (like Gasworks’ rusting ruins). Recall that the rail line that hosts the High Line Park escaped demolition only because two intrepid people cared.

• Annah MacKenzie of the Project for Public Spaces recently reiterated the organization's stance on space vs place:

Let’s start with Public Space. Outlining the role and value of public space has long been a subject of academic, political, and professional debate. At the most basic level public space can be defined as publicly owned land that, in theory, is open and accessible to all members of a given community—regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age, or socio-economic level.

[...]

Places, on the other hand, are environments in which people have invested meaning over time. A place has its own history—a unique cultural and social identity that is defined by the way it is used and the people who use it. It is not necessarily through public space, then, but through the creation of places that the physical, social, environmental, and economic health of urban and rural communities can be nurtured.

• Writing at The City Fix, Alex Rogala describes how "tactical urbanism is shaping cities for people, by people":

As many people increasingly rely on data-driven apps and platforms like Google Maps to navigate their cities, some skeptics have worried that our streets are losing their traditional element of chance, surprise, and mystery. Kopfkino (roughly, “head theater” in German) is a project to revitalize those aspects of the urban experience. Using a shopping cart as their base, a group of friends in Istanbul built a portable projector that casts users’ faces onto building facades when they peer into a laptop camera. Kopfkino invites the curious passerby to pause from his or her regular routine and discover a new experience in a familiar place.

DIY projects in public spaces like Kopfkino are popping up all over Turkey. However, unlike some other examples of tactical urbanism, Kopfkino likely wasn’t intended to be replicable or scalable. The point, however, is to challenge what it means to encounter other people in public space, and to revisit the idea that every city offers an individual and unique experience.

• Tactical urbanism is the subject of a current MoMA exhibition entitled Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities. In an essay posted at the MoMA website, Neil Brenner asks, "is 'tactical urbanism' an alternative to neoliberal urbanism?":

Especially in light of the stridently anti-planning rhetoric that pervades many tactical urban interventions and their tendency to privilege informal, incremental, and ad hoc mobilizations over larger-scale, longer-term, publicly financed reform programs, it seems reasonable to ask in what ways they do, in actuality, engender any serious friction against the neoliberal order, much less subvert it. In some cases, tactical urbanisms appear more likely to bolster neoliberal urbanisms by temporarily alleviating (or perhaps merely displacing) some of their disruptive social and spatial effects, but without interrupting the basic rule-regimes associated with market-oriented, growth-first urban development, and without challenging the foundational mistrust of governmental institutions that underpins the neoliberal project. The relation between tactical and neoliberal forms of urbanism is thus considerably more complex, contentious, and confusing than is generally acknowledged in the contributions to the debate on Uneven Growth. As illustrated in the list below, it cannot be simply assumed that because of their operational logics or normative-political orientations, tactical interventions will, in fact, counteract neoliberal urbanism. No less than five specific types of relation between these projects can be readily imagined, only two of which (1 and 5 in the list) might involve a challenge to market-fundamentalist urban policy. There are at least three highly plausible scenarios in which tactical urbanism will have either negligible or actively beneficial impacts upon a neoliberalized urban rule-regime.

Urban Communication: media infrastructure, neighborhood narratives, rhetoric & rebranding, and more

• In Urban Media Ecology news, several recent studies reported correlations between characteristics of the built environment and human health. A study from the University of Kansas (in my birthplace of Lawrence) found that "neighborhoods that motivate walking can stave off cognitive decline in older adults":

The researcher judged walkability using geographic information systems — essentially maps that measure and analyze spatial data.

“GIS data can tell us about roads, sidewalks, elevation, terrain, distances between locations and a variety of other pieces of information,” Watts said. “We then use a process called Space Syntax to measure these features, including the number of intersections, distances between places or connections between a person’s home and other possible destinations they might walk to. We’re also interested in how complicated a route is to get from one place to another. For example, is it a straight line from point A to point B, or does it require a lot of turns to get there?”

Watts said easy-to-walk communities resulted in better outcomes both for physical health—such as lower body mass and blood pressure—and cognition (such as better memory) in the 25 people with mild Alzheimer’s disease and 39 older adults without cognitive impairment she tracked. She believes that older adults, health care professionals, caregivers, architects and urban planners could benefit from the findings.

• Another research paper from researchers at multiple institutions "suggests that street design may have a larger impact on public health than previously thought":

By studying 24 California cities with an array of street design characteristics and their associated health data, the authors find that living in cities with high intersection density—a measure of compactness—significantly reduces the risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. A full-grid street pattern also is a factor in lower risk of obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease, as compared with full treelike patterns.

• At CityLab, Richard Florida posted a roundup of recent research studies on the health benefits afforded by walkable communities:

If walkability has long been an “ideal,” a recent slew of studies provide increasingly compelling evidence of the positive effects of walkable neighborhoods on everything from housing values to crime and health, to creativity and more democratic cities.

[...]

Walkability is no longer just an ideal. The evidence from a growing body of research shows that walkable neighborhoods not only raise housing prices but reduce crime, improve health, spur creativity, and encourage more civic engagement in our communities.

• Another CityLab article by Emily Von Hoffman looked at what architecture is doing to your brain:

I spoke with Dr. Julio Bermudez, the lead of a new study that uses fMRI to capture the effects of architecture on the brain. His team operates with the goal of using the scientific method to transform something opaque—the qualitative “phenomenologies of our built environment”—into neuroscientific observations that architects and city planners can deliberately design for. Bermudez and his team’s research question focuses on buildings and sites designed to elicit contemplation: They theorize that the presence of “contemplative architecture” in one’s environment may over time produce the same health benefits as traditional “internally induced” meditation, except with much less effort by the individual.

• As part of a directed study this semester, I've been studying the role of communication infrastructure in urban design, and particularly the parallel developments of mass media and the modern metropolis. Urban explorer Bradley Garrett recently wrote a piece for The Guardian about the massive infrastructure of underground London, including not just tube stations but communication infrastructure including Britain's deepest telephone exchange: 

The urban exploration crew I had worked with, the London Consolidation Crew or LCC, had long graduated from ruins and skyscrapers – it was the city in the city they were after, the secrets buried deep underground where the line between construction site and ruin is very thin indeed. The Kingsway Telephone Exchange was the crème de la crème, more coveted even than abandoned Tube stations or possibly even the forgotten Post Office railway we accessed in 2011.

Kingsway was originally built as a second world war air-raid shelter under Chancery Lane. These deep level shelters were, at one time, connected to the Tube and citizens would have undoubtedly taken refuge here during Luftwaffe bombing runs. In 1949 the tunnels were sold to the General Post Office where they became the termination for the first submarine transatlantic phone cable – the £120m TAT1 project. The system, meant to protect the vital connective tissue of the city in the event of terror-from-the-air (including nuclear attack), stretched for miles. It only had three surface entrances and contained a bar for workers on their off-hours, rumoured to be the deepest in the UK at 60m below the street. Although the government employed a host of people to maintain the tunnels, Kingsway was a spatial secret of state - part a trio of the most secure and sensitive telephone exchanges in Britain, along with the Anchor Exchange in Birmingham and the Guardian Exchange in Manchester.

• These photos of subterranean communication infrastructure contrast with images of above ground cables covering the urban landscape, as featured in this io9 post, "photos from the days when thousands of cables crowded the skies":

Before most cables ran underground, all electrical, telephone and telegraph wires were suspended from high poles, creating strange and crowded streetscapes. Here are some typical views of late-19th century Boston, New York, Stockholm, and other wire-filled cities.

Wires over New York, 1887, via Retronaut, retrieved from <http://tinyurl.com/kb9dns2>

• Joseph Stromberg at Vox recently wrote about the "forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of 'jaywalking'":

Auto campaigners lobbied police to publicly shame transgressors by whistling or shouting at them — and even carrying women back to the sidewalk — instead of quietly reprimanding or fining them. They staged safety campaigns in which actors dressed in 19th century garb, or as clowns, were hired to cross the street illegally, signifying that the practice was outdated and foolish. In a 1924 New York safety campaign, a clown was marched in front of a slow-moving Model T and rammed repeatedly.

This strategy also explains the name that was given to crossing illegally on foot: jaywalking. During this era, the word "jay" meant something like "rube" or "hick" — a person from the sticks, who didn't know how to behave in a city. So pro-auto groups promoted use of the word "jay walker" as someone who didn't know how to walk in a city, threatening public safety.

• William Eric Rinehart at Sweet Talk asks: Did a change in rhetoric give rise to cities?

Between the mega-village and the cities that came later lies the formation of the state. Ultimately, this is the world of stratification buttressed through religion. With it came the creation of differing social groups and distinctions based upon rank or property. Yet, the acceptance of social specialization required a new view of the world, a new rhetoric in the McCloskeyian sense. And once that jump was made, benefits followed. Clustered people allowed for more trade and specialization of work, leading to more wealth, prestige and better equipped armies. While still a brutal world, cities had the potential for stability, but it came at the expense of radical equality.

• Matt Stroud at The Verge recently wrote about the dream and the myth of the paperless city in Chicago:

But you can’t just flip a switch to reverse paper systems in place for hundreds of years, can you? Adobe first released its Portable Document Format nearly 20 years ago, yet many private companies, nonprofit organizations, libraries, law firms, courts — and yes, major city governments such as Chicago’s — have yet to embrace a world reliant on PDFs and devoid of paper records. Mayor Emanuel has agreed to change that. Or at least to try. In 2011, he announced plans to spend $20 million on efficiency improvements including changes to make the city less reliant on paper.

Will Mayor Rahm Emanuel change the way governments deal with paper? Or is the road toward a “completely paperless” government a long way off?

• At URBACT, Stefan Höffken and Chris Haller consider urban planning and the multi-dimensional communication era:

"Because urban planning has always been based on the gathering and exchange of information and – as a democratic process – on communication between different stakeholders, a change in the method of communication has a significant impact on decision-making throughout the process"

[...]

The quote at the beginning of this post was taken out of a paper by Stefan Höffken and Chris Haller, who set out to research how new medias were used for urban planning matters. They are refering to geographer Manuel Castells’ and Clay Shirky‘s work to describe the change from uni-dimentional communication towards a many-to-many exchange sphere that, so Shirky, is on the verge of becoming ubiquitous. Höffken and Haller provide interesting insights in how different tools can serve certain goals and complement each-other by surveying urban projects and institutions or civil society mobilizations on urban matters as different as Tulsa municipality and the Mediaspree campaign in Berlin.

• Emily Badger at the Washington Post reports that Uber is offering cities an olive branch in the form of their customers' trip data:

The company plans to partner first with Boston, sharing quarterly anonymized trip-level data with the city in a model that Uber says will become its national data-sharing policy. The data will include date, time, distance traveled and origin and destination locations for individual trips, identified only by zip code tabulation area to preserve privacy. Once held by cities, this information will be open to records requests, meaning that the public (and researchers) will have access to it, too.

Such data could help cities keep tabs on Uber and, for example, which neighborhoods the company is serving. Uber says, though, that it's primarily offering the data so that cities can better understand themselves.

A redesigned Los Angeles parking sign, retrieved from <http://tinyurl.com/nu5tr2z>

• Rosie Cima at priceonomics recently wrote about a designer's war on misleading parking signs:

Sylianteng first tried to redesign parking signs when she was living in LA and applying to grad school, in a project she called “To Park or Not to Park.” She reduced the usual jumble of signs and regulations to a single, holistic panel, which looked a lot like a Google Calendar – it was a grid of days of the week, broken into hours. The blocks of time when a parking spot was valid she shaded green, the blocks of time it was invalid she shaded red. She also simplified the rules she illustrated, working off the principle that people would much rather adhere to an overly restrictive regulation than get a parking ticket.

[...]

Her prototypes provoked a lot of commentary, discussion, and praise. She used this feedback to improve her designs. She printed out new prototypes, and taped those up. The feedback validated some of her central assumptions, among them: (1) a lot of current parking signs were very confusing, and (2) people didn’t care why they could or couldn’t park somewhere, they just didn’t want to be ticketed.

• At Tropics of Meta, South El Monte Arts Posse posted about mapping community narratives in El Monte and South El Monte:

The writing of social history needs to keep in mind the motivations and individual agency of the people participating in events as they happen. In interview after interview, people were aware of the larger structural forces, and yet made choices and actions in contradiction to expectations. Again and again we spoke with people who beat the odds, who pushed back against racism, and took it upon themselves to change circumstances and in many cases succeeded.

• Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian reports on neighborhood rebranding in London:

Similar semantic shifts are being attempted, with varying degrees of success, throughout the rest of London. Intrepid developers have discovered “Tyburnia”, an undervalued stretch of real estate between Paddington Station and Hyde Park. Meanwhile, the “Knowledge Quarter” is an attempt to rid King’s Cross of its association with prostitution by emphasising the new preponderance of cerebral institutions there. You could call it “brain-washing”. The Knowledge Quarter, incidentally, is one of 21 “Quarters” in London; there are also a dozen or so new “Villages”. Neighbourhood rebranding is often the linguistic leg of gentrification and, as such, follows a predictable pattern: “Villages” assert their legitimacy by emphasising community, while “Quarters” lend a gravitas to whatever noun they follow. Both have a cleansing effect on the associations that came before them.

• At NextCity, Nathan C. Martin considers why art, not Google, could revolutionize WiFi:

Remember a few years ago when television went digital and everyone had to get adapters or new TV sets? When that happened, what once were television channels became simply channels, a bulk of empty bandwidth that could host any variety of transmission. The Federal Communications Commission named it Super WiFi. The policies to regulate it are yet to be written, and a chorus is imploring the FCC to leave a large part of the spectrum open, or “unlicensed,” instead of auctioning it off. Those advocates tend to refer to the spectrum in spatial terms — a group of Stanford University economists likened the spectrum to a public park, a resource everyone should have access to. Mary Ellen Carroll speaks of it similarly. “It’s like public land,” she says. “It’s like Yosemite.”

• Finally, Emanuel Maiberg at Motherboard looks at homelessness in SimCity, and whether it is a bug or feature:

SimCity's homeless people are represented as yellow, two-dimensional, ungendered figures with bags in tow. Their presence makes SimCity residents unhappy, and reduces land value. Like many other players, Bittanti discovered the online discussions when he was searching for a way to deal with them.

At first, players wondered if they were having so much problems with the homeless in their cities because of a bug in the game. Like many of 2014's big-budget games that launched in broken or barely-functional states, SimCity originally would only work if players connected to EA's servers, which repeatedly crashed under the load of players. It seemed possible that the homeless problem in SimCity was simply a mistake.

"Has anyone figured out a easy way to handle the homeless ruining those beautiful parks you spend so much money on?" asks one player on EA' site. "Create jobs, either through zoning or upgrading road density near industry, that helped me a lot," another player suggests.

Smart Cities: India's initiative; technologized transport; democratic dilemmas and dystopian dangers

• Smart cities continue to be a hot topic for urban designers and commentators, even as the very definition of the term is debated. Kieron Monks at CNN recently addressed this in an article on the next generation of smart cities:

The urban planning equivalent of a Rorschach test, a "Smart City" can be taken to mean almost anything.

But by the most popular criteria; sustainable energy and development, open data and government, and integrated information, communications and technology (ICT) serving wide areas of a city, these ultra-modern hubs are on the rise.

• One site for this next generation of smart cities is India, where the Prime Minister has advanced a vision of building "100 smart cities":

Secretary of India's Urban Development ministry, Shankar Aggarwal interacted with the people and officials involved with the ambitious project.

Aggarwal said a smart city may have diverse significance for different groups belonging to various fields.

"The definition of smart city differs from person to person. One can say that smart design is smart city or smartly deployment of a city can be considered as smart city. If utilities are put forward in a smarter way can be defined as a smart city. Assimilation of all the things makes a smart city. If there is growth of economic activates, improvement of quality of life, that is a smart city," he said.

• Urban designer Alykhan Mohamed has written about the process of introducing "smart city" technology and infrastructure to ancient cities and holy sites, and the inherent challenges posed by the country's stark inequality:

Smart cities have the potential to transform India's cities, but unless the people who design them are sensitive to the reality that half a billion Indians are not even on the current grid, and almost a quarter of the country is illiterate, real change will not happen. Unless the engineering is combined with ingenuity to address fundamental political, social and economic weaknesses, smart cities will inevitably become another high profile megaproject; a false promise that does not realize its potential and becomes a burden, much like an empty Olympic stadium after games that promised much needed infrastructure and sustainable economic development.

• Writing for Forbes India, economic journalist K. Yatish Rajawat urges urban designers to "focus on liveable cities, not smart ones":

The current model of city planning is based on an outdated Le Corbusier concept that the city needs to be flat. Indian planners still believe that Chandigarh is the best city as it was planned by Corbusier, but it is not a smart city because you need a car to live in such a city. And dependence on a car means depending upon fast-depleting fossil fuels; it means commute as a part of daily life.

While small initiatives like Raahgiri are catching people’s attention as they reclaim the streets from cars for a few hours every week, what if it was part of a city’s design? That the streets belonged to people, and not to cars? A fundamental shift in even the way permissions are given for development and integration of public transportation has to be part of city planning. Then only can a city be livable; it has to be embedded in its planning and not in its sensors.

• A letter to Indian business daily Business Standard suggested that smart city design should also address drainage and agricultural concerns:

Another suggestion would be to make the city self-sufficient in terms of agricultural produce, so that in times of crisis it is capable of taking care of the basic requirements of the residents of the city. Of course, it seems to much to ask for in the current scenario but with advanced technological know-how it's not impossible.

• In the Straits Times, editor Han Fook Kwang recently argued that many urban issues in need of being "smarter" have nothing to do with technology:

But just as having a smartphone doesn't make you a smart person, a digitally smart city isn't necessarily one that's doing all the right things by its citizens and making their lives more pleasant.

In fact, a smart city with all the computers at its disposal can be doing many dumb things, and doing them even more quickly.

A really smart city (as opposed to being just digitally smart), on the other hand, knows what the right things to do are, with or without technology.

• Adam Greenfield at The Guardian writes that the "smartest cities rely on citizen cunning and unglamorous technology":

The true enablers of participation turn out to be nothing more exciting than cheap commodity devices, reliable access to sufficiently high- bandwidth connectivity, and generic cloud services. These implications should be carefully mulled over by developers, those responsible for crafting municipal and national policy, and funding bodies in the philanthropic sector.

In both these cases, ordinary people used technologies of connection to help them steer their own affairs, not merely managing complex domains to a minimal threshold of competence, but outperforming the official bodies formally entrusted with their stewardship. This presents us with the intriguing prospect that more of the circumstances of everyday urban life might be managed this way, on a participatory basis, by autonomous neighbourhood groups networked with one another in something amounting to a city-wide federation.

• In a recent article for the New York Times, Diane Cardwell reported on Copenhagen's new network of street-embedded LED lights:

The system, still in its early stages, has put Copenhagen on the leading edge of a global race to use public outdoor lighting as the backbone of a vast sensory network capable of coordinating a raft of functions and services: whether easing traffic congestion, better predicting where to salt before a snowstorm or, to the alarm of privacy advocates, picking up on suspicious behavior on a busy street corner.

Cities worldwide are expected to replace 50 million aging fixtures with LEDs over the next three years, with roughly half of those in Europe. Some are mainly interested in switching from outmoded technologies to one that uses less energy and can last for decades. But many others want to take full advantage of the LED’s electronics, which are more conducive to wireless communication than other types of lighting.

• Gordon Feller at The City Fix has also written on smart urban transportation systems:

Many cities are also using smart technology to integrate services between different areas of government. For example, Barcelona has undertaken an ambitious multi-year program, Smart City Barcelona, in order to efficiently ensure that city services reach all citizens. The city’s long-term plan involves government, residents, and the business community in developing and shaping the city’s technological initiatives. One of these unique solutions will be called CityOS (operating system), for which the city is currently seeking a developer. City officials envision this OS as an open platform that unites the various smart technology projects operating across the city. In particular, the OS is expected to improve the daily commuting experience as well as reduce the operating costs of transport systems.

• Finally, Steven Poole in The Guardian considers the dystopian dangers posed by such smart city initiatives, and whether "they will destroy democracy":

One only has to look at the hi-tech nerve centre that IBM built for Rio de Janeiro to see this Nineteen Eighty-Four-style vision already alarmingly realised. It is festooned with screens like a Nasa Mission Control for the city. As Townsend writes: “What began as a tool to predict rain and manage flood response morphed into a high-precision control panel for the entire city.” He quotes Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, as boasting: “The operations centre allows us to have people looking into every corner of the city, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

What’s more, if an entire city has an “operating system”, what happens when it goes wrong? The one thing that is certain about software is that it crashes. The smart city, according to Hollis, is really just a “perpetual beta city”. We can be sure that accidents will happen – driverless cars will crash; bugs will take down whole transport subsystems or the electricity grid; drones could hit passenger aircraft. How smart will the architects of the smart city look then?

[...]

One sceptical observer of many presentations at the Future Cities Summit, Jonathan Rez of the University of New South Wales, suggests that “a smarter way” to build cities “might be for architects and urban planners to have psychologists and ethnographers on the team.” That would certainly be one way to acquire a better understanding of what technologists call the “end user” – in this case, the citizen. After all, as one of the tribunes asks the crowd in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “What is the city but the people?”

Urban Media Ecology: light pollution, gender mainstreaming, urban marginality

• When I first read Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television several years ago I was inclined to agree with the bulk of the thesis presented: the dangers posed by the inherent biases of the television medium, such as the centralization of control and "the walling of awareness". One of Mander's arguments that I did not find persuasive was the section on the adverse health effects linked to exposure to artificial light. That part of the book seemed too "out there" for me at the time, though that part of the argument is one of primary reasons I think Mander's book should be included in the canon of Media Ecology literature. Well, I have since come to consider the artificial light argument as much more plausible. A recent article in The Guardian by Ellie Violet Bramley addressed the work of researchers investigating the potential long-term effects of exposure to urban light pollution:

Because humans evolved in a 24-hour light/dark cycle known as the circadian clock, any light after dusk is “unnatural”, Lockley says. When we are exposed to light after dusk, “our daytime physiology is triggered and our brains become more alert, our heart rates go up, as does our temperature, and production of the hormone melatonin is suppressed”.

Has the way city dwellers live, removed from natural light patterns, confused our bodies? “Not so much confused as shifted: we’ve been shifted later,” Lockley says. “What happens when people go camping? If you don’t have sources of electric light, then you go to bed earlier, shortly after the sun’s gone down, and you sleep for longer.” Every day we don’t go to bed at dusk, we experience what Lockley calls “mini jetlag”.

His colleague, Ken Wright at the University of Colorado in Boulder, conducted an experiment on camping. Wright found that for campers, midnight was the middle of the night: living in brightly lit cities has artificially lengthened our days. “We go to bed later, we don’t sleep as long, and we don’t know of the long-term health impact of changing,” he says.

• Clare Foran at CityLab reports on urban planners in Vienna experimenting with "gender mainstreaming":

The decision to look at how men and women used public transit wasn't a shot in the dark. It was part of a project aimed at taking gender into account in public policy. In Vienna, this is called gender mainstreaming.

Gender mainstreaming has been in place in the Austrian capital since the early 1990s. In practice, this means city administrators create laws, rules and regulations that benefit men and women equally. The goal is to provide equal access to city resources. And so far, officials say it's working.

Vienna has adopted gender mainstreaming in a number of areas of city administration, including education and health care policy. But nowhere has it had more of an impact than on the field of urban planning. More than sixty pilot projects have been carried out to date. As the size and scale of these projects increase, gender mainstreaming has become a force that is literally reshaping the city.

• Shana Harris at Figure/Ground recently posted an interview with Javier Auyero, director of the Urban Ethnography Lab at UT Austin,  on his work in sociology and urban marginality: 

Until quite recently, ethnographic studies of the lives of the urban pariahs in the Americas regularly failed to take into account one simple, essential, fact: the poor do not breathe the same air, drink the same water, or play on the same grounds than others. Theirs is an often-polluted environment that seriously affects their present health and future capabilities, and about which scholars, myself included, have remained silent for a long time. This silence is, as we argue in the book I co-wrote with native anthropologist Débora Swistun (Flammable), another incarnation of what Sherry Ortner famously called “ethnographic refusal.”

[...]

The book will come out in the Summer of 2015 and it’s called Invisible in Austin: Life and Labor in an American City, so you will have to wait! But to give you a preview, the book examines the lives of those living on “the other side” – the invisibilized, the “not talked about,” – of Austin, a thriving, rapidly growing, highly unequal, and segregated Texan technopolis. And it does so by taking an in-depth look at the ways in which individual lives (of an undocumented worker, a homeless woman, a cab driver, a domestic worker, an activist, etc.) intersect with larger social forces.

Gentrification and 'the fucking hipster show'; hostile architercure and defensive urban design

• In a post at the Jacobin blog, Anthony Galluzzo considers how the mainstream media's "fucking hipster" show mocks hipsters in the service of capital:

[Marxist geographer Neil] Smith offers a dry, but emphatically structural account of this process, which he first theorized in the late eighties with Soho and the Lower East Side in mind. Gentrification has since become central to neoliberal urbanization generally, and New York City in particular, under the developer-driven Bloomberg administration.

But why bother with “dry” and “structural” when you can tune-in to the “fucking hipster” show?

Unlike Smith’s rigorous Marxian analysis, most popular accounts from the spurious creative class mystifications of Richard Florida to standard issue conservative populist diatribes forget the larger forces and primary movers in this process, which is instead reduced, metonymically, to the catchall figure of the hipster.

[...]

On topics ranging from the capitalist dynamics of gentrification to the casualization of employment among ostensibly middle class Millennials, the “fucking hipster” show beats staid structural analysis every time — even for many members of the self-identified Left.

[...]

We should retire “hipster” as a term without referent or political salience. Its zombie-like persistence in anti-hipster discourse must be recognized for what it is: an urbane, and socially acceptable, form of ideologically inflected shaming on the part of American elites who must delegitimize those segments of a largely white, college educated population who didn’t do the “acceptable thing.”

The anti-hipster censure here includes a healthy dose of typically American anti-intellectualism, decked out in liberal bunting, subtle homophobia, and recognizably manipulative appeals to white, middle class resentment, now aimed at the lazy hipster, who either lives on his trust fund or, more perniciously, abuses public assistance, proving how racist templates are multi-use tools.

Our power elites’ rhetorical police action becomes increasingly necessary as large swaths of the people lumped under the hipster taxon slip into the ranks of the long-term un- and underemployed. Once innocuous alternative lifestyles could potentially metamorphosize into something else altogether. Better to frame “alternative lifestyle” in terms of avant-garde trend setting without remainder, providing suitably rarefied consumption options for Bloomberg’s new bourgeoisie, as they buy locally sourced creativity on Bedford Ave.

• Anti-homeless features in urban design became a trending media topic earlier this month after pictures of anti-homeless studs in London were shared on social media. The Mirror reports on the background and the eventual removal of the spikes:

Metal spikes designed to stop homeless people sleeping in the doorway of a London apartment block have been removed, after almost 130,000 people signed a petition calling for them to be taken out.

Pictures of the metal studs outside flats in Southwark Bridge Road were widely shared online last weekend, sparking outrage on social media.

Many criticised the spikes as inhumane, and compared them to those used to stop pigeons landing on buildings.

• An Atlantic article by Robert Rosenberger looks at how cities use design to drive homeless people away:

It has been encouraging to see the outrage over the London spikes. But the spikes that caused the uproar are by no means the only form of homeless-deterrent technology; they are simply the most conspicuous. Will public concern over the spikes extend to other less obvious instances of anti-homeless design? Perhaps the first step lies in recognizing the political character of the devices all around us.     

An example of an everyday technology that’s used to forbid certain activities is “skateboard deterrents,” that is, those little studs added to handrails and ledges.  These devices, sometimes also called “skatestoppers” or “pig ears,” prevent skateboarders from performing sliding—or “grinding”—tricks across horizontal edges. A small skateboard deterrence industry has developed, with vendors with names like “stopagrind.com” and “grindtoahault.com.”

[...]

An example of a pervasive homeless deterrence technology is benches designed to discourage sleeping. These include benches with vertical slats between each seat, individual bucket seats, large armrests between seats, and wall railings which enable leaning but not sitting or lying, among many other designs. There are even benches made to be slightly uncomfortable in order to dissuade people from sitting too long. Sadly, such designs are particularly common in subway, bus stops, and parks that present the homeless with the prospect of a safely public place to sleep.

[..]

The London spikes provide an opportunity to put a finger on our own intuitions about issues of homelessness and the design of open space. Ask yourself if you were appalled by the idea of the anti-homeless spikes. If so, then by implication you should have the same problems with other less obvious homeless deterrence designs like the sleep-prevention benches and the anti-loitering policies that target homeless people.

• In the Guardian, Ben Quinn writes that anti-homeless spikes are part of a wider phenomenon of "hostile architecture":

In addition to anti-skateboard devices, with names such as "pig's ears" and "skate stoppers", ground-level window ledges are increasingly studded to prevent sitting, slanting seats at bus stops deter loitering and public benches are divided up with armrests to prevent lying down.

To that list, add jagged, uncomfortable paving areas, CCTV cameras with speakers and "anti-teenager" sound deterrents, such as the playing of classical music at stations and so-called Mosquito devices, which emit irritatingly high-pitched sounds that only teenagers can hear.

[...]

The architectural historian Iain Borden says the emergence of hostile architecture has its roots in 1990s urban design and public-space management. The emergence, he said, "suggested we are only republic citizens to the degree that we are either working or consuming goods directly.

"So it's OK, for example, to sit around as long as you are in a cafe or in a designated place where certain restful activities such as drinking a frappucino should take place but not activities like busking, protesting or skateboarding. It's what some call the 'mallification' of public space, where everything becomes like a shopping mall."

Graeber on labor and leisure; the perils of hipster economics; and the educational value of MOOCs

• Following last month's post of David Graeber's views on "bullshit jobs," this Salon interview with Graeber discusses the failed forecast of universal leisure time:

Right after my original bullshit jobs piece came out, I used to think that if I wanted, I could start a whole career in job counseling – because so many people were writing to me saying “I realize my job is pointless, but how can I support a family doing something that’s actually worthwhile?” A lot of people who worked the information desk at Zuccotti Park, and other occupations, told me the same thing: young Wall Street types would come up to them and say “I mean, I know you’re right, we’re not doing the world any good doing what we’re doing. But I don’t know how to live on less than a six figure income. I’d have to learn everything over. Could you teach me?”

But I don’t think we can solve the problem by mass individual defection. Or some kind of spiritual awakening. That’s what a lot of people tried in the ‘60s and the result was a savage counter-offensive which made the situation even worse. I think we need to attack the core of the problem, which is that we have an economic system that, by its very nature, will always reward people who make other people’s lives worse and punish those who make them better. I’m thinking of a labor movement, but one very different than the kind we’ve already seen. A labor movement that manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people.

• In an article for Al Jazeera, Sarah Kendzior surveys the politics of gentrification and the perils of hipster economics:

Proponents of gentrification will vouch for its benevolence by noting it "cleaned up the neighbourhood". This is often code for a literal white-washing. The problems that existed in the neighbourhood - poverty, lack of opportunity, struggling populations denied city services - did not go away. They were simply priced out to a new location.

That new location is often an impoverished suburb, which lacks the glamour to make it the object of future renewal efforts. There is no history to attract preservationists because there is nothing in poor suburbs viewed as worth preserving, including the futures of the people forced to live in them. This is blight without beauty, ruin without romance: payday loan stores, dollar stores, unassuming homes and unpaid bills. In the suburbs, poverty looks banal and is overlooked.

In cities, gentrifiers have the political clout - and accompanying racial privilege - to reallocate resources and repair infrastructure. The neighbourhood is "cleaned up" through the removal of its residents. Gentrifiers can then bask in "urban life" - the storied history, the selective nostalgia, the carefully sprinkled grit - while avoiding responsibility to those they displaced.

Hipsters want rubble with guarantee of renewal. They want to move into a memory they have already made.

• At Mute, Dominic Pettman writes about the rise of MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) in higher education, and how commodification affects the value of learning:

In the pedagogic trenches, MOOCs are considered a symptom of wider economic patterns which effectively vacuum resources up into the financial stratosphere, leaving those doing the actual work with many more responsibilities, and far less compensation. Basic questions about the sustainability of this model remain unanswered, but it is clear that there is little room for enfranchised, full-time, fully-compensated faculty. Instead, we find an army of adjuncts servicing thousands of students; a situation which brings to mind scenes from Metropolis rather than Dead Poets Society.

[...]

For companies pushing MOOCs, education is no different from entertainment: it is simply a question of delivering ‘content.’ But learning to think exclusively via modem is like learning to dance by watching YouTube videos. You may get a sense of it, but no-one is there to point out mistakes, deepen your understanding, contextualise the gestures, shake up your default perspective, and facilitate the process. The role of the professor or instructor is not simply the shepherd for the transmission of information from point A to point B, but the co-forging of new types of knowledge, and critically testing these for various versions of soundness and feasibility. Wisdom may be eternal, but knowledge – both practical and theoretical – evolves over time, and especially exponentially in the last century, with all its accelerated technologies. Knowledge is always mediated, so we must consciously take the tools of mediation into account. Hence the need for a sensitive and responsive guide: someone students can bounce new notions off, rather than simply absorb information from. Without this element, distance learning all too often becomes distanced learning. Just as a class taken remotely usually leads to a sea of remote students.

[...]

Marshall McLuhan was half-right when he insisted that the electronic age is ushering in a post-literate society. But no matter how we like to talk of new audio-visual forms of literacy, there is still the ‘typographic man’ pulling the strings, encouraging us to express ourselves alphabetically. Indeed, the electronic and the literate are not mutually exclusive, much as people like to pit them against each other.

• Pettman also quotes Ian Bogost's comments on distance learning:

The more we buy into the efficiency argument, the more we cede ground to the technolibertarians who believe that a fusion of business and technology will solve all ills. But then again, I think that's what the proponents of MOOCs want anyway. The issue isn't online education per se, it's the logics and rationales that come along with certain implementations of it.