Place, Space, and Mediated Communication: Exploring Context Collapse 9781138227903, 9781138227927, 9781315394183

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Place, Space, and Mediated Communication

Place, Space, and Mediated Communication explores how new communications technologies are able to disrupt our spatial understanding, and in so doing, reorganize the boundaries of human experience: a phenomenon that can rightly be described as ‘context collapse’. Individual essays investigate ‘context collapse’ in a variety of geographical and temporal settings, including: the US drone war in Pakistan, social media and sexuality in Paris, privacy and privilege in Brazil, and videogames and resistance in Iran. This cross-disciplinary collection of essays demonstrates how communication and space are co-constituted, and models exciting new paths of inquiry for researchers. Place, Space, and Mediated Communication is suitable for students and scholars of media and communication studies, cultural studies, urban studies, and sociology. Carolyn Marvin is the Frances Yates Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, USA. She is the author of When Old Technologies Were New (1988) and Blood Sacrifice and the Nation (1999). Sun-ha Hong is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. His work investigates how new media and its data become invested with ideals of precision, objectivity, and truth through apparently non-rational means. His upcoming book is titled Data Epistemologies / Surveillance and Uncertainty.

Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies Series Editor: Barbie Zelizer

Dedicated to bringing to the foreground the central impulses by which we engage in inquiry, the Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies series attempts to make explicit the ways in which we craft our intellectual grasp of the world. Explorations in Communication and History Edited by Barbie Zelizer The Changing Faces of Journalism Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness Edited by Barbie Zelizer The Politics of Reality Television Global Perspectives Edited by Marwan M. Kraidy and Katherine Sender Making the University Matter Edited by Barbie Zelizer Communication Matters Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks Edited by Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley Communication and Power in the Global Era Orders and Borders Edited by Marwan M. Kraidy Boundaries of Journalism Professionalism, Practices and Participation Edited by Matt Carlson and Seth C. Lewis Place, Space, and Mediated Communication Exploring Context Collapse Edited by Carolyn Marvin and Sun-ha Hong

Place, Space, and Mediated Communication

Exploring Context Collapse

Edited by Carolyn Marvin and Sun-ha Hong

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Carolyn Marvin and Sun-ha Hong; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Carolyn Marvin and Sun-ha Hong to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Marvin, Carolyn editor. | Hong, Sun-ha editor. Title: Place, space, and mediated communication : exploring context collapse / edited by Carolyn Marvin and Sun-ha Hong. Description: London and New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Shaping inquiry in culture, communication and media studies | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016046636 | ISBN 9781138227903 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138227927 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315394183 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Communication—Philosophy. | Communication— Technological innovations. | Context effects (Psychology) Classification: LCC P90 .P53 2017 | DDC 302.2/01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046636 ISBN: 978-1-138-22790-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-22792-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-39418-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Introduction: context collapse and the production of mediated space

vii viii ix

1

CAROLYN MARVIN AND SUN-HA HONG

PART I

Proximity and its discontents 1

Drone media: grounded dimensions of the US drone war in Pakistan

11

13

LISA PARKS

2

Location-based services in Brazil: reframing privacy, mobility, and location

29

ADRIANA DE SOUZA E SILVA, MARIANA S. DE MATOS-SILVA AND ANA MARIA NICOLACI-DA-COSTA

3

Proximity awareness and the privatization of sexual encounters with strangers: the case of Grindr

45

CHRISTIAN LICOPPE, CAROLE ANNE RIVIÈRE AND JULIEN MOREL

4

Dispossession and the right to the city MARGARET KOHN

66

vi

Contents

PART II

Places on the move

81

5

83

The space of architecture as a complex context RICHARD WITTMAN

6

Revolution reloaded: spaces of encounter and resistance in Iranian video games

104

VIT SISLER AND EBRAHIM MOHSENI

7

Democracy, protest and public space: does place matter?

122

JEREMY NÉMETH AND EVAN H. CARVER

8

State, space, and cyberspace

146

DAVID G. POST

Index

153

Figures

3.1

One of our users’ typical Grindr homepage after connection (as photographed during an interview) 3.2a The main chat window 3.2b Chat functions, for sending pictures or a clickable geolocalized map featuring the user’s location 5.1 Thomas Cole, The Architect’s Dream, 1840 5.2 Plate 19 from Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand and Jacques Guillaume Legrand 5.3 Jacques-Germain Soufflot, section drawing for the church of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, 1769 5.4 The fire at San Paolo occurred on the night of 15–16 July 1823 5.5 Basilica of Sacré-Coeur, Paris, 1875–1914; detail of donor names inscribed on a wall in the choir 7.1 Example of site, ZCTA and city relationship

48 49 49 89 89 92 96 99 131

Tables

1.1 3.1 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6

Sample comments on “UAV Hits Taliban Column” video posted on YouTube Sample composition Transcript of the opening scene of Prince of Persia Transcript of the trailer of Assault on Iran Transcript of the opening scene of Dawn 8 (excerpt) Transcript of the opening scene of Garshasp Categorizing sites of resistance Ten of the largest public space protests in the US since 2000 Public space analytical framework (adapted from Lessig 2001, Németh 2012) Public space restriction classification criteria (see Németh 2010 for detail on scoring) Hypotheses regarding protest sites Site characteristics by frequency

20 50 106 108 112 115 126 128 129 130 132 137

Contributors

Evan H. Carver is a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Program in Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington. A former book editor, his research interests include the politics of public space, democratic decision-making in planning, environmental attitudes, and literary geography. He also holds a degree in German literature. Margaret Kohn is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Toronto. Her main research interests are urbanism, critical theory, the history of political thought, and colonialism. She is the author of three books including the prize-winning Radical Space: Building the House of the People (2003). Her most recent book is Political Theories of Decolonization (2011) (with Keally McBride). Christian Licoppe is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social Science in Télécom ParisTech in Paris. His recent work in mobile communication has focused on the development of methods to record and analyze the use of mobile communication in “natural” situations (such as mobility and transport settings) and on the use of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to understand the organization of mobile communication. Mariana S. de Matos-Silva graduated in Psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), where she also obtained both her MA and her PhD. In the last years she has been studying the psychological impacts of the use of the Internet. Ebrahim Mohseni is a PhD candidate at the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is also Senior Researcher at the Cyberspace Research Policy Centre at the University of Tehran, Iran. He is the author of Introduction to Video and Computer Games (2012) and Virtual City Studies of Tehran: Analytical Approach to Public Spaces (2010). Julien Morel is Associate Professor SES, Télécom ParisTech, France. He studies the natural organization of face-to-face and mediated interactions

x

Contributors

(mobile conversations, video communication, location-aware communities, augmented reality, and pervasive games). He also creates new video methodologies to study the uses of ICT in situations of mobility. Jeremy Németh is Associate Professor of Planning and Design at the University of Colorado Denver, and is currently a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Architecture at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre in Rome. He served as Chair of the Department of Planning and Design from 2012–2015 and Director of the Master of Urban Design Program from 2008–2015. Ana Maria Nicolaci-da-Costa is both a journalist and psychologist and is Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology and Vice-Dean of the Center of Theology and Human Sciences at PUC-Rio. From the mid-1990s on, her research has focused on the study of the psychological transformations resulting from exposure to and use of new digital technologies, mainly the Internet and cell phones. Lisa Parks is Professor and former Chair of the Film and Media Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she currently serves as Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (2005) and co-editor of Planet TV, Undead TV, and Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures. David G. Post is currently Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, Fellow at the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School, and a regular columnist at the influential Volokh Conspiracy blog on Washingtonpost.com. He is the author of In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (2008), winner of the 2009 “Exemplary Legal Writing” award from the journal Green Bag. Carole Anne Rivière is a researcher in sociology and a psychoanalyst who specializes in Jungian theory. She has worked on new forms of communication on the Internet in Europe and Japan. She specifically worked on the addiction to the Internet. Since she joined the Mines-Telecom Institute she has worked on innovations regarding new services. Vit Sisler is Assistant Professor of New Media at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. His research deals with the information and communication technology in the Middle East and educational and political video games. His work has appeared in the Communication Yearbook; European Journal of Cultural Studies; Information, Communication & Society; Global Media Journal; and the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Adriana de Souza e Silva is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University (NCSU). She is the co-editor

Contributors xi

and co-author of several books, including Net-Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (2011, with Eric Gordon), Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: Control, Privacy, and Urban Sociability (2012, with Jordan Frith), and Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces (2014, with Mimi Sheller). Richard Wittman is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His work has appeared in Grey Room, Representations, Histoire Urbaine, kritische berichte, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and elsewhere. He is the author of Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (2007).

Introduction Context collapse and the production of mediated space Carolyn Marvin and Sun-ha Hong

The goal of this volume is to explore the structures of feeling that underlie the twin registers of empowerment and discomfort that characterize our media age. What we call context collapse is the perception of social disturbance that accompanies technological advances in crossing distances and time zones in ways that reorganize felt boundaries of experience and rearticulate our sense of place in the world. This affective repositioning is especially important for the field of communication studies. Context collapse is the spatial rendering of a broader metaphor: disruption. In the contemporary moment, disruption speaks of the jagged path of technological rise and fall – and the newly emerging opportunities and vulnerabilities that accompany those shifts. Often these changes are laid at the feet of ‘new media’ which, as the exceptionalism of the name suggests, are presented as digital juggernauts transforming every aspect of the lives and institutions of dispersed global populations. Yet neither the causes nor effects of these ruptures can be wholly attributed either to social media protest or one or another discrete technological artifacts. These startling surfaces belong to a broader and deeper set of tectonic shifts. Global populations, institutions, and social practices are part of transformations at a scale and pace unseen since industrialization – and, like industrialization, they are setting in motion changes that will play out for centuries. Context collapse is the spatially inflected thread that links many sites and forms of this disruption. It includes, but does not privilege, new media as visible vehicles of these changes. Casting a larger and more complex net across contemporary human relations, context collapse indexes the many ways our sociotechnical infrastructure alters or dissolves previous frameworks of time and space, destabilizing and reorganizing them as shocks to the personal and institutional dimensions of our lives. Under the aegis of the Scholar’s Program of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, a distinguished group of scholars from law, history, sociology, urban studies, and communication convened in December 2013 to consider these new terrains of experience. That gathering, a one-day symposium, “Context Collapse: Reassembling

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the Spatial”, produced a collection of papers offered here as an exemplary path forward, both in the host discipline of communication, and in the human sciences generally. Concepts can’t always be traced to neat, singular beginnings, but origin stories may be instructive. Context collapse received an early – perhaps a first – moment of attention in a much widely circulated YouTube presentation from 2008. Anthropologist Michael Wesch deployed this metaphor to ruminate on the social and cultural implications of webcam practice, including vlogging [video blogging]. He emphasized the unpredictable and wondrous effects of new forms of networked communities. The field of communication had made much of new media already, new media being an elastic reference that has served as a signature focus in recent years. Along with other disciplines, communication has been slow to recognize digitization as a shift of epic historical proportions, or to trace out the astonishing diversity of its consequences. More often, analysis and theory have faithfully reproduced frames established for older generations of media. Conceptualizations of the internet have been driven by notions of radio and television as program-oriented and industrially produced. The dissemination of books as printed artifacts has modeled arguments about information dissemination online. Since the 1960s a particularly powerful narrative has been the technological compression of space and time. It seemed the indigestible concreteness of place might be at an end. The instantaneity of digital communication seemed poised to render the unique physical properties of locations invisible and negligible. Platonic anamnesis – knowledge as a lived convergence of history and experience – would be superseded by hypomnesis – exteriorized memory of pure, disembodied information. The materiality of space seemed to exit the picture: a frivolous obstacle for clean transmission to vault over: a minor obstacle to be vaulted over and disposed of by clean transmission. What Erving Goffman called the concrete activity frames of bodies were increasingly neglected. These developments in communication accompanied a wider trend toward disembodiment in the human sciences we now call the ‘linguistic turn’. In the ivory tower, place seemed a mere point at the intersection of flows rather than uniquely contingent and densely constituted. This reductive, utopian vision could not last. The material substrate of bodies, the singular circumstance of gender, race, and nations, the physicality and local experience of places: all resisted the purity of symbolic abstraction, and muscled back into the human sciences. The return of materiality has meant the return of places. In this so-called ‘spatial turn’, new attention is being paid to topographies and contexts in which situated bodies arrange and comport themselves. If flesh matters, then its particularized and felt dwelling places matter as well. Yet this ‘return’ was not to older theories of the world. The sociotechnical configuration of space and place has been too much disrupted for that.

Introduction 3

The task of scholarship confronting the contours of social and institutional forms made precarious by shifting technology has become studies of the dissolution and reconstruction of context. In many ways, context collapse may be said to describe lived conditions of postmodernity. We experience it as repeated shocks that destabilize anchored notions of time and space. Though context collapse does not begin with digitization, its abundance of felt change has inspired scholars to engage the spatial turn of digitization in innovative ways. Confronted by unaccustomed, often nascent, social morphologies and unanticipated forms of power that flow from newly linked technologies of transport and communication, we must re-think agency in rapidly shifting contexts, consider new parameters of time and memory, and ponder spaces arrayed in new experiential envelopes: as assemblages, as medium, as flows, as world substratum, as topologically folded and scaled, as networks of actants and intensities, as heterogeneous imaginaries. Early signs of such an approach came from Anthony Giddens’ narratives of modernity. Giddens recognized the ways that experiential reconstitutions of time and space in contemporary societies erect new zones of relational life. Emerging social systems, in his language, become disembedded. Before their eventual (and continuously unstable) re-entrenchment, we experience them as a state of social vibration, a crisis of systemic cohesion that opens up to unusual fluidity, to new contexts. David Harvey’s analysis of time-space compression exactly parallels what we call context collapse: a felt-as-imposed coming to terms with global reconfigurations of so-called settled frameworks and practices of sociability. As exemplified in this volume, specific contextual histories tell the story of their particular transformations and future implications. Anchoring institutions of trust and authority enact differentiated subjects’ perceptions of social expectations and obligations. These are reliant on material infrastructures that concretize and sustain them. Asynchronous, asymmetric communication with distant others through multiple platforms of self-expression destabilizes and transforms notions of trust and authority fostered by older systems. Populations that have suffered systematic invisibility discovered new possibilities online – along with new barriers to their fulfillment. Trust in traditional forms of job security has also fallen into decline, giving rise to new ethical postures and relationships. Increased capabilities of bottom-up and top-down surveillance foment new crises of power. And none of these adjustments moves in uncomplicatedly democratic or benevolent directions. This volume examines eight different contexts, an ensemble of porous and overlapping boundaries and scales that trace past and present context collapse. They focus on the city, an exemplary site of modernity. They include architectural encounters juxtaposed with circulating images. Online chatting consorts with printed pamphlets and video games, social media protests with efforts to resist them in material space. Private, public, and geopolitical

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spaces are fissured and fused in new ways. Visions of the Elsewhere are embedded in mediated encounters that have life and death consequences. The prospects for a Lefebvreian right to the city able to resist neoliberal property regimes are revisited. Imagined and actual conflicts are played out on new geopolitical terrains. The shattering of contexts entails not only changes in material, organizational, and technological structures, but how affect and experience grapple onto these new environments. The redrawing of lived spaces involves a renegotiation of how to be anxious, vulnerable, precarious. This is the theme of Part I, Proximity and Its Discontents. When embodied selves mix with new technologies, their contextual expectations must also adapt one way or another. The result is no simple binary of power and powerlessness. Rather, redistributed matrices of visibility become the lived consequence of new forms of digitization. Anonymity was the hallmark of modernist public space, a distinctive urban product of the industrial nineteenth century. To the extent that they remained unperceived, differences of belief, class, and sexual orientation were made unthreatening and safe. When contexts change, so do the rules of the game. The papers in this section present geographically and situationally diverse articulations of context collapse. From weaponized GPS tracking in war zones to local sociability, from Brazil to Pakistan, these papers offer contrasting case studies of how location-based digital awareness entails novel and fluid forms of contextual co-presence. The result is a modulation of anxiety among populations navigating publicly accessible space. In “Drone Media: Grounded Dimensions of the US Drone War in Pakistan”, Lisa Parks examines the consequences of context collapse as a stark reterritorialization and re-mediation of war in which physically separated combatants suffer different types of precarity. For centuries the co-presence of combatants, and on occasion spectators, constituted the social definition of war. Parks considers the notable proliferation of drone war–related imagery in the Western mediascape. Drone strikes reconfigure the history of proximity and asymmetric vulnerability in warfare against earlier notions of honorable combat. Despite extending close combat to a continental advantage, not even drone pilots escape vulnerability, though theirs is of a different order than that which doubles down on grounded targets. Each drone warfare combatant occupies a qualitatively different space of anxiety and danger in which physical accessibility and visibility are organizing principles. Parks shows that this relationship is further complicated by the mediated circulation of drone images. Even as they demonstrate the asymmetry of visibility and vulnerability, drone media call into question the reliability of ‘information’ about the many contexts around us, not only the life and death contexts of warfare. Parks probes the convergence of several contexts collapsed by drone technology: the ambiguous accuracy with which drone

Introduction 5

pilots perceive on-the-ground targets at a continental remove; the context in which targets with no warning of imminent destruction suffer its consequences; and the context of reliability and moral mobilization in which witnesses perceive war from afar. The searing loss of dependable contexts of proximity and visibility is laid bare. The parametrization of safety and exposure extends as well to bourgeois mastery of urban space. Adriana de Souza e Silva, Mariana S. de Matos-Silva, and Ana Maria Nicolaci-da-Costa’s “Location-Based Services in Brazil: Reframing Privacy, Mobility, and Location” explores the exposure to electronic predators felt by upper-class professionals in urban Rio de Janeiro. Their expectations of protective anonymity from digital surveillance misperceive new class vulnerabilities in an electronic age. As with the targets of drone pilots, this collapse of a previously reliable bubble of privacy subjects individuals to unseen and predatory inspection. Fears of surveillance by acquaintances, criminal eavesdroppers, and corporations fuel an electronic miasma of uncertainty and danger. An end to insulation is perceived as a loss of safety and status: a context collapse. Traditionally well favored and protected by a matrix of overlapping social arrangements, Rio’s professional class may have had less incentive to limn the spatial contours of a new digital environment than other, more marginalized populations. Christian Licoppe, Carole Anne Rivière, and Julien Morel study one such marginalized population in their paper, “Proximity Awareness and the Privatization of Sexual Encounters with Strangers: The Case of Grindr”, which investigates the digital gay sex market in Paris via the social networking app Grindr. Their chapter considers how selectively unmasking sexual desire among physically proximate others turns out to produce relatively efficient and safe conditions for initiating intimate encounters among gay users. Gay Parisians were traditionally attuned to the dangerousness of public space. This allowed them to adapt quickly to Grindr’s novel re-contextualization of proximity that segregates and assembles locationally co-present and like-minded users. The complex layering of seduction can now be streamlined and reduced to a focus on sexual availability. Context collapse brings new priorities and emphases to sociability – a shift that finds favor with some and regret with others. Context collapse also helps us understand new structural convergences of policy and economics. Margaret Kohn’s “Dispossession and the Right to the City” details the collapse of social contexts that shielded poorer populations from classes wielding economic power by examining the histories of ‘failed’ public housing projects such as Cabrini-Green in Chicago and Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. She examines the philosophical origins and stark consequences of accumulation by dispossession – a defining mechanism of urban neoliberalism since World War II. She considers both the prospects and limitations of Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ realized in access to public housing, to the commons as material support for a decent existence,

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and to public space. She argues that reformist demands for rights to housing in the form of rights of access to the city of capitalist domination offer little resistance to the inexorable exclusivity of private property rights. The result is continued economic, physical, and social dispossession through the literal physical collapse of public housing and material networks of social support. In her analysis, liberal rights thus conceived mitigate only the worst effects of inequality. But hers is not a defeatist narrative. Kohn points to policies enacted by some global cities to restrain market dynamics and create thriving spaces for dwelling. On this basis she proposes a heterotopic right to the city to pre-exist and exceed the conventional logic of democratic rights. Beyond its directly ameliorative impact, such a right brings to the fore unresolved tensions between abstract rights and lived realities of urban form and social embodiment, and offers a persistent goad to dominant ways of thinking about rights to the city. This re-thinking of the right to the city on multiple fronts aims both at a more just city and a deeper, thicker democracy. Part II, Places on the Move, addresses the mediated travels and uses of material places. While place is traditionally a physically anchored, immobile element of the visceral world, this section shows how converging contexts re-position spaces by dissecting and re-inserting them in novel and fluid forms of co-presence that reorganize previous boundaries of human experience. First, Richard Wittman’s “The Space of Architecture as a Complex Context” looks back at how new technological affordances were appropriated for re-framing familiar spatial imaginaries. The case he addresses is the nineteenth-century reconstruction of the Roman basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura. Efforts to fund a physical restoration of the basilica set in motion a global distribution of both the image and the meaning of the building. The pre-modern power of architectural presence was not so much duplicated as reconstituted through printing as a thoroughly modern form of circulation. Printing imposed a different experience of apprehending architectural form, namely a re-imagination of religious pilgrimage articulated through an imagistic attainment of the Elsewhere. Historically resurrecting the built environment as simultaneously present in the Here and the Elsewhere, Wittman demonstrates that our own practices of representing ‘location’ where it is materially absent possess instructive ancestors. If contemporary context collapse triggers anxiety for the future, history shows us surprising instances that have been forgotten or abandoned. The transmutation of the sacred basilica into a transportable Elsewhere infused architectural substance with a new type of bodily participation from afar. While the cultural assimilation of printing had already extended the presence of place beyond direct experience, Wittman shows that the campaign for the San Paolo was an important step in representation as a manipulation for the sake of the materiality of place. It laid the ground

Introduction 7

for a shift from the authority of bodily perceptions of interior depth to a distributed apprehension of surface appearances. This key challenge to the privileged status of direct physical engagement submitted architecture both to local interpretation by a schooled cadre and the distributed receptivity of a global religious community. What transpired was not so much the degradation of sacred space as a profound collapse of the context in which such space could be made meaningful and experienced. An intractable gradient of authenticity yielded to psychological approximation at a distance. A decidedly contemporary counterpoint emerges in the paper “Revolution Reloaded: Spaces of Encounter and Resistance in Iranian Video Games” by Vit Sisler and Ebrahim Mohseni. This paper explores Iranian geopolitical references in current trends of video game development. In the context of an industry dominated from the 1990s by Western developers, Occidental cultural biases and conventions steered the content and technical production of video game narratives. These placed the Middle East within Orientalist narratives of war, terrorism, and backwardness. Sisler and Mohseni show how Western techno-cultural biases were challenged by both independent Iranian game developers and the Iranian state. In that process two kinds of context have been collapsed. The first, embraced as overlapping agendas by the state and independent Iranian developers, overlays the conventional Western geopolitical divisions that still organize the medium with Iranian cultural codes that are resistant to Western content. The second is manifest along a temporal axis that allows independent developers to struggle covertly with the Iranian state. Where the Islamic Revolution of 1979 is the context for all state presentations of the nation, the Islamic worldview that structures this worldview frustrates independent developers’ mission of confronting their Western counterparts. Their solution consists of embracing pre-Islamic, Persian milieux, a mythical tapestry amenable to the civilizational grandeur to which the Islamic state aspires, but that also accommodates independent Iranian developers’ subversive agendas of personal freedom. Next, Jeremy Németh and Evan H. Carver’s “Democracy, Protest and Public Space: Does Place Matter?” explores the political agency of the built environment. Their chapter examines material features of specific sites as settings for protest for the purpose of identifying what are the contexts in which rights are made actual. Arguing that solidarity is most solid when manifested through bodies on the ground, Németh and Carver look for urban spatial features that correlate strongly with successful public protest in an experimental study that is the beginning of understanding political dimensions of material public space. From case studies of sites like New York’s Zuccotti Park, they hypothesize that such spaces will be accessible to transit, embedded in dense and diverse spaces, located in population concentrations, publicly owned, visible to government offices, open to crowds,

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near social movement organizations, and possessed of few behavioral controls or barriers to entry. As surveyed, the most strikingly frequent attribute of ‘successful’ protest sites was their geographic proximity to social movement organization offices – a context rarely featured in previous discussions of public protest. Németh and Carver also propose comparing such one-off protest sites to ordinary spaces where repeated citizen contact through routine activities may comprise unremarked but critical arenas of democratic life. For Németh and Carver, context collapse in relation to urban form is a matter of unrecognized combinations of material elements that foster political engagement broadly defined. Finally, in “State, Space, and Cyberspace,” David G. Post returns to the nation-state, the anchoring reality of our geopolitical imaginaries for centuries. Today that nation-state finds itself thoroughly perturbed by communicational and informational flows that defy its borders and make it the target of ongoing efforts to willfully collapse its material and social boundaries. Post argues that just as empires once gave way to nation-states, conceptions of sovereignty that are sedimented in three centuries of history will not survive present and future collapses of communicative context. He acknowledges the conceptual challenges of accommodating older geopolitical realities to a world in which all nodes of information are alleged to be equidistant from one another. Today’s many regulatory challenges are symptoms, above all, of a foundational shift in contextual relations that our existing legal languages and models are not yet equipped to sort out. This uncertainty frames a global moment in which an international system that has been made both stronger and weaker by irreversible technological change seems at once intractable and impermanent going forward. A printed cathedral; an app-powered vision for human intimacy; an urban architecture for political action: in each chapter, we find sets of relational expectations in a state of transition with unexpected implications for creating social and political winners and losers. Ecumenes of the twenty-first century are enmeshed in rearticulations of the near and the far, the public and the private, the trivial and the consequential, the national and geopolitical, the abstract and concrete. As we live in and through these rearticulations, spaces will come to be counted and classified differently than they have been for many decades. That this fact is unique neither to new media or our times makes it no less unsettling for subjects who are at once caught in, and the creators of, that transition. As culture and history intrude into video game fantasy and form, as promises of intimacy and privacy cut across heterogeneous spaces, as nations discover that building physical walls cannot keep out changes wrought by developments in communication and transportation, collectivities and institutions must evolve different, as yet unknown, senses for these new environments. This is what we mean by context collapse, and what is entailed by an analysis of ‘place’ today. A place may facilitate or constrain movement and gathering. Its materiality can stabilize

Introduction 9

or imperil institutional and political interests. It can enroll bodies and minds into new experiences – even from physically remote distances. When places change, when contexts collapse, we can expect far-reaching transformations in how we trust others, how we structure collective existence and engagement, and how experience becomes ‘personal’ or meaningful to us. Context collapse is thus a concept with the potential to sharpen and reorganize how communication scholars frame the social impacts of communications technology. Though space is only now seeking a place at the forefront of theorizing in the field of communication, we hope this collection finds an intellectual space for demonstrating how that inquiry might go forward and the insights it might generate. In conclusion, the editors warmly extend their appreciation and thanks to a tireless and dedicated group of graduate student scholars at the Annenberg School – Emily LaDue, Corrina Laughlin, Yoel Roth, and Aaron Shapiro – who energetically invited, organized, presented, and tended to the participants in the day-long symposium that produced these papers. Emily Plowman provided the administrative glue that held all our efforts together, for which we are eternally grateful.

Part I

Proximity and its discontents

Chapter 1

Drone media Grounded dimensions of the US drone war in Pakistan Lisa Parks

Editor’s Note: This chapter was originally written to include images of drone strikes and protests. Given their often uncertain provenance, however, the images could not be reproduced under fair use policies. Readers interested in knowing more about the images may contact the author at her personal website.1 Drone warfare is often imagined from positions of computer simulation, networked communication, and remote control, and writers ranging from Paul Virilio to P. W. Singer have commented upon the button-pushing interactivities and joystick robotics that define them.2 While critical analysis of these practices is crucial, there is often such a fascination with the game-like dimensions of drone warfare that there is a tendency to neglect what happens beneath the belly of the drone. This chapter explores visual media that depict grounded dimensions of a covert US drone war that has killed thousands of people in a remote area of Pakistan. Since 2004 the CIA has conducted a secret drone war in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, a contentious and hard-to-access rural region on the border of Afghanistan that is inhabited by Pashtun tribes, controlled by the Taliban, used by Al Qaeda operatives, and occupied by the Pakistani military. The FATA region is extremely difficult for international journalists and relief workers to access and locals have been punished for carrying cameras there. Despite the fact that the US drone war in Pakistan has been conducted as a “covert operation,” when I began conducting research on this topic in 2011 information about it abounded on the Internet. News organizations and citizen journalists have published reports about it. Photographers have taken risks to document it. And activists worldwide have protested it. Since 2009, when investigative reporter Jane Mayer broke the story about this CIA secret drone war in The New Yorker, a flourishing of “drone media” has emerged that includes photographs, video, maps, data visualizations, and infographics. These media have served as vital sources of information about a drone war that US leaders have refused to officially acknowledge.

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In this way, drone media have drawn attention to top-down surveillance practices that have generated new crises of power. Given the lack of US transparency, drone media are often cast in shadows of obscurity and confusion, and as such are part of a broader “context collapse.” Historically, the vetting of information during war was handled by state agencies and professional journalists. In the age of the Internet a greater volume of information and perspectives now circulate, but processes of authentication and verification have broken down. Now information is recognized as tenuous on every side. The result is a drone media formation ridden with uncertainty. Details about drone strikes are presented as unconfirmed or preliminary. Photos of drone strike scenes are missing captions and source details. Casualty and injury counts are approximate or non-existent. And victims’ names are unknown. Where the fog of war once seemed limited to the battlefield, it has drifted into the democratized circulation of images. Users/viewers not only seek out and customize their news, they must assess the provenance and credibility of the information they encounter. Drone media thus expose the difficulty of reliably grounding information in an apparently democratized online world. And, at a more general level, they suggest how the militarized drone – as an emergent technology of transportation and communication – is participating in the production of new contexts of power, crisis, and struggle. Since drone warfare has the potential to decimate and fracture lifeworlds – to literally cause contexts to collapse – it is essential that information about the technology’s use be subject to ongoing scrutiny and critique. To probe these issues further, this chapter critically examines several kinds of “drone media” – drone attack photos, aerial assault videos, and drone protest images that have circulated on the Internet. Rather than define “drone media” only as the aerial views of drone sensors, I conceptualize the term to include grounded visual documentation of sites, events, or bodies in a range of US military drone operations. My analysis is based on the collection and study of 72 drone attacks and 183 drone protest photos using Google image search in 2011 and 10 aerial assault videos on YouTube, Dvids, and Live Leak. In the process of building this visual archive, I examined these photos and videos in their online contexts and in isolation. I also studied them individually and comparatively in an effort to identify patterns in their depiction of grounded dimensions of US drone strikes. While my findings point to uncertainties that characterize drone media, rather than dismiss these media as “unverifiable” or “indeterminate,” I argue that they serve a vital function by generating tactical speculations about US drone killings, injuries, and damages in Pakistan that may never be fully acknowledged or accounted for by US officials. By tactical speculation I am referring to the earnest yet tenuous, persistent yet partial, resolute yet questionable properties of knowledge that arise when transparency collapses. As drone media convey grounded dimensions of drone attacks, they challenge the

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widely-held assumption that US military drones enable a remote and precise form of warfare that minimizes casualties and collateral damage for all involved. By helping to expose how deeply and profoundly this “surgical” method of warfare has affected lifeworlds on the ground, drone media model the kinds of knowledge practices that are needed when democratic states fail.

Drone attack photos Since 2004 there have been between 2,467 and 3,976 killed and 1,152– 1,731 injured by US drone strikes in Pakistan.3 Photographing scenes in the aftermath of such strikes is risky business. On one occasion the Taliban captured a man who was investigating drone attacks that killed civilians and held him for 63 days alleging he was a US spy.4 On another a 16-year-old Pakistani boy, Tariq Aziz, was mysteriously killed by a US drone three days after agreeing to be trained as a drone attack scene photographer.5 While the Taliban reportedly rigidly controls access to drone attack scenes, the Pakistani ISS and Minister of Interior have also been involved in monitoring and inspecting these sites to confirm casualties. In addition, a handful of professional journalists have managed to photograph some of them as well. Wire services such as Associated Press, Agence-France Press, Reuters, and Getty Images have distributed drone attack scene photos in international news outlets ranging from the BBC to PakAlert Press, from CNN to Indian Express. Whether taken by professionals or amateurs, drone attack scene photos often appear online without any or with minimal captions and credits. Some have been re-posted as general “stand in” images to accompany reports or commentaries on the US drone attacks rather than as illustrations or evidence of a particular attack, which is consistent with the general pattern of obscurity and confusion that has defined this CIA campaign. Within such conditions, the images that do surface and circulate online are all the more charged and loaded with the burden to communicate information about the drone attacks, even if their truth status is somewhat confusing or uncertain. Photographs of drone attack scenes depict areas on the ground in the aftermath of drone strikes and fit into three general categories: survivors in ruins; funerals; and dead or injured bodies. The first category features survivors and/or bystanders standing amongst and picking through ruins, presumably after a drone strike has occurred. An uncaptioned AFP-Getty photo from February 2011 and published on a blog/website called The Raw Story features several men standing next to a building in ruins destroyed in a US drone attack.6 The roof of the building has been blown away and turned into a pile of rubble and the re-bar that once held it in place is exposed and bent toward the ground. An uncaptioned photo that appeared on the Current News website on February 22, 2011, reveals a small boy standing in

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front of a mound of cement bricks and a barely standing structure with a gaping hole barely looms behind him as he looks into the camera. Another photo, from June 2009, shot by Tariq Mahmood, appeared on CNN’s website with the caption “Drone strikes are unpopular in the region because of the threat to civilians.” The photo features three men and a child picking through a pile of rubble above which two giant wooden crossbeams have fallen. When I looked for further detail about the photo on the Getty Images website I found another caption indicating the image had nothing to do with a drone attack and was in fact the site of a Taliban suicide attack in Peshawar. The caption indicated: “Pakistani residents stand amongst the rubble of a classroom after militants blew up a girls’ school on the outskirts of Peshawar on June 22, 2009.”7 Not only does this suggest editorial carelessness at CNN, it exposes the lack of specificity and generalized confusion that underpins much drone war reporting. Despite this, these and other photos of rubble are used to visualize the material effects of drone warfare, foregrounding the thick accumulations, blockages, and grounded messes that are vivid counterparts to the drones’ orderly cockpits and aerial viewfinders. The photos of ruins also serve as bold reminders that drone warfare is fundamentally an attempt to control the surface of the earth, to reshape and reform the material world. The second category of drone attack photos portrays funeral processions or gatherings to honor the dead. Photography at such events is often forbidden, but there is a vested interest in allowing the world to witness the effects of the US drone attacks and thus sometimes it is permitted. A Reuters photo taken in February 2009, which appeared on England’s Channel 4 website, features six caskets with white flags implanted in them as a crowd of over one hundred “Pakistani tribesmen” stands in the distance and they “offer funeral prayers for the [27] victims of a missile strike attack in Miranshah.” The caption indicates: “A suspected US missile strike destroyed a major Taliban training camp in Pakistan today, killing at least 27 people, said to be militants (Reuters).”8 Phrases of uncertainty such as “suspected US missile strike” and “said to be militants” are characteristic of drone attack reporting, though are applied unevenly as “major Taliban training camp” goes unquestioned. A photo that appeared in The Christian Science Monitor in June 2011 reveals four caskets propped on platforms in a rural location as about one hundred “Pakistani villagers” “offer funeral prayers for people reportedly killed by drone attack in Miranshah . . .” (my emphasis).9 Since most Muslim funerals occur within 24 hours after death, these photos capture hurried efforts to honor drone victims. While these images create a dividing line between the living and the dead, they do not distinguish the militant from the civilian and neither do many US drone strikes. On some occasions, funerals and cemeteries themselves have become drone targets. A 2006 photo taken by a Predator and later provided to NBC allegedly shows a group of almost 200 Taliban insurgents gathered for a funeral at a cemetery in Afghanistan. US military officers apparently wanted to attack

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targets within this group, but claim to have held off because the rules of engagement prohibit attacks on cemeteries.10 In 2009, however, a US drone attack on a funeral procession in the Makeen district of South Waziristan killed at least 60 people and left many others injured.11 Funerals and other public gatherings, including weddings, have been singled out for so-called “signature strikes,” which target groups of men believed to be associated with terrorists, but whose identities are not always known.12 The third category of drone attack photos foregrounds the damage drones do to the flesh, representing dead or injured bodies. These photos have been shot either at an attack scene, a hospital, or a funeral, and at times are used in a sensationalistic manner, often featuring children. One such image that has circulated on multiple websites comes from the South Asian News Agency (SANA) and shows the faces of three dead children as a triptych. One’s head is bandaged, another has part of his skull missing, and a third is charred and covered in dried blood. The photo’s caption asks, “Who will avenge the blood of these Pakistanis” and indicates that these “innocent children” were “murdered by American drones” in an attack on Dande Darpakhel that killed 12 people. Other photos in this category feature survivors wearing bandages, casts, or wearing prosthetics, emphasizing the long-term effects that the drone war has upon Pakistanis. A photo of 19-year-old Sadaullah Wazir is accompanied by a caption that indicates he was 15 when he lost both of his legs and an eye in a drone attack that destroyed his home and killed nine people.13 And an AFP/Getty photo posted on the Another World Is Possible website on August 12, 2011, reveals a wounded Pakistan boy being lifted from rubble by several men. Blood is smeared across his face and his eyes are barely open as men hurriedly try to save his life.14 While these photos document the fatal effects of the US drone attacks, it is important to remember that not all victims’ bodies can be found and represented. Some drone attacks are so devastating that human bodies are unrecognizable when survivors arrive on the scene. One man who lost his brother-in-law in a drone attack recounted that the damage was so severe that they could not even distinguish the bodies from one another – even the bones of the people were completely blown apart. The dead were completely unrecognisable. My brother in law’s coffin was tightly sealed and we were not allowed to open it to view anything. We had the coffin with us for 30 minutes before it was taken away for burial.15 In such cases, the explosive force of drone attacks further compounds the challenge of counting and accounting for casualties, whether “militants” or “civilians.” International law stipulates that it is the perpetrator’s obligation to properly identify every casualty after an attack, but the regulations for counting civilian casualties have been violated in US drone attacks in Pakistan and elsewhere.16

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So distressed by the US drone attacks in his homeland, journalist Noor Behram returned to Waziristan in 2008 after living and working abroad for several years, and spent three years trying to photograph as many drone attack sites as possible. In some cases, Behram arrived on scene minutes after an explosion and put his camera aside to dig through debris and search for survivors.17 By July 2011 Behram had photographed 60 drone attack scenes in Waziristan. Photographs from 27 of these scenes were featured in a London art exhibition at the Beaconsfield gallery entitled “Gaming in Waziristan” during the summer of 2011.18 Behram’s photos constitute the first publicly known, comprehensive photographic record of drone attack scenes in Waziristan and have become an essential dimension of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s effort to compile evidence that can be used against the US in legal proceedings related to the drone attacks in Pakistan. Many of Behram’s photos show the faces of dead children in close up just before burial. One features eight-year-old Noor Syed as her body is laid upon a stretcher before burial. Her lips are covered in bright red lipstick and yellow flowers tucked behind her ears softly frame her cheeks. Her head is wrapped in white cloth and her eyes are slightly open, but rolled back. Another dated August 21, 2009, features seven-year-old Syed Wali Shah who was killed, along with 9–20 other civilians, in an attack on Dande Darpakhel, Miram Shah, in North Waziristan.19 Yet another shows the face and upper body of a dead 10-year-old boy, Naeem Ullah, who was hit by shrapnel when a double drone strike hit a home and car in Datta Khel on October 18, 2010.20 Naeem’s hand is charred, his arms are burned, and his chest and shoulders are covered with white bandages. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that between 172 and 207 children have been killed in US drone attacks in Pakistan.21 By framing ruins, funeral processions, and injured and dead bodies, drone attack photos encourage viewers/users to imagine what it would be like to be on the receiving end of a strike, and have the potential to make the grounded experiences of drone warfare vivid, even palpable, as they circulate. While this potential exists, it is impossible for the viewer/user (or news agency) to determine whether the photos of rubble, funerals, and carnage are the actual consequences of US drone strikes. Since the strategy of a covert operation is to keep public knowledge about the operation limited and therefore “uncertain,” speculation and conjecture must be mobilized as tactics rather than seen as liabilities in efforts to glean information about US drone strikes. Reliable details about the locations, events, and subjects represented are not always a feature of drone attack photos, but this paucity of detail is understandable given that those who take such photos assume great risk with any number of powerful organizations, whether the CIA, the Taliban, or Pakistan’s ISS. While Behram’s drone attack photos are aligned with professional journalistic standards and institutional endorsements, many others are not. This does not prevent them from serving as viable platforms for imagining the grounded dimensions of US drone strikes. Given the potential for image fabrication and manipulation in the digital age, the authenticity of all images

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is uncertain, particularly as they circulate on the Internet. Recognizing this, Tiziana Terranova insists that networked images should not be thought of as records or documents, but as “bioweapons” that can affect or infect thought, behavior, and feelings in multifarious ways and thus intervene directly within power relations. She writes: It is no longer a matter of illusion or deception, but of the tactical and strategic deployment of the power of affection of images. . . . It is no longer a matter of truth and appearance . . . but of images as bioweapons, let loose into the information ecology with a mission to infect.22 Given this, the critical disposition toward images must extend beyond “truth” assessment or authentication alone and move toward an evaluation of their affective politics so that the question becomes: how and for whom is this networked image useful, meaningful, or disruptive? Rather than: is this real? This is not to say that accuracy is not important; rather, it is to recognize how power relations and image use have shifted in the context of digitization and the war on terror.

Aerial assault videos While drone attack photos convey details about the grounded dimensions of drone war in Pakistan, dozens of US aerial assault videos related to the war on terror have appeared on YouTube, Dvids, and Live Leak between 2001 and 2011. Released by the US Defense Department or leaked online, these videos feature attacks on targets in Afghanistan and Iraq (though not in Pakistan) by Apaches, C-130s, F-16s, and Predator drones. Many of the videos claim to represent “insurgents,” “terrorists,” or “enemies” on the ground participating in an alleged suspicious behavior in Iraq and Afghanistan. Voiceover communication on some of the videos reveals that this behavior can include such acts as carrying rod-shaped or heat-bearing objects, assembling on a rooftop or on a street, standing or digging in a field or near a roadside, riding motorcycles on desert roads, or participating in activities near a mosque. In contrast to drone attack photos, which are captured in the visible light part of the electromagnetic spectrum, aerial assault videos are often presented in infrared. In such sequences, targets appear as white or black blotches (depending on image processing selections) that signify moving bodies, or are identified as the buildings or vehicles in which these bodies seek cover.23 Once the targets are confirmed, those manning the aircraft drop a hellfire bomb or spray machine-gun fire on the targets below and they disappear into fiery explosions and clouds of smoke. While there are no leaked videos of US drone attacks in Pakistan, those showing UAV attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq are instructive as they demonstrate how strikes look from the perspective of drone sensors. One 16-second video entitled “UAV Hits Taliban Column,” which has been

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Table 1.1 Sample comments on “UAV Hits Taliban Column” video posted on YouTube I watch video like this when I’m having a bad day or am depressed. It perks me right up! Watching the bearded bad guys getting sent to Allah like this is a tonic! Sodnal 2 problems with UAV’s . . . 1) is that youll NEVER know whos in the blast radius – nothing to say shrapnel wont kill a kid who happened to be nearby and 2) this is a “war” where the average insurgent wouldnt say no to bringing his kids along for the ride UAV’s exist only as a political tool of war – “hey look no Allied forces have been killed for ages cuz we use loadsa UAV’s and Apaches instead!” – everyones happy . . . so long as nobody hears about the “collateral” in the media dannyday58218195 @Drcrazy93 pause the clip @0:01 the all black figure is a woman(last in line). Woman wear all black vails!! There all walking in single file and stay close to the buildings. @0:06 seconds what looks like a smaller figure(child?) break the line and go off to the left where 2 figures one being possibly the child’s mother quickly pull him back inline then BANG! he may of seen the dog and wanted to stroke it? Fuck knows really why they were killed but they didn’t look threatening to me. robtang10304 Snuff film. guyboy625 need some popcorn..I can watch this stuff all day. Have fun in your fucking paradise u low-life pieces of shit. I hope the dog was ok. gl797 @haskapaska They are truly regettable, i am unhappy about them and i wish they would never happen. Attacks on civilians, commited by whoever are a disgrace and i condemn BOTH sides for doing them. But my point is that these airstrikes, while they may lead to civilian deaths, are never purposefully targetted at civillians with the intention of killing them. On the other hand we have the taliban who will quite happily murder scores of their own people just to kill one or two NATO vis a vis the IED

viewed 124,521 times, was posted in June 2009 by fellfam09 (see Table 1.1). This video shows the viewfinder slightly panning right and left as walking people, appearing as black dots, are visible. Just as the viewfinder locates and focuses on a target, a missile plunges into the area next to a building, and a small object – likely a dog – can be seen running away from the blast.24 Another example, designed to showcase the US military’s restraint, is entitled “Afghanistan War: Proof of the Care Taken to Not Injure Civilians: UAV Aborted Attack.”25 In this aerial video, which has 5,470 views, US troops decide to abort an attack on targets because there are “friendly individuals with a goat in the vicinity.” The decision-making process is audible and we hear a commander direct the remote pilot to wait until the “friendlies” have left the “danger zone” and try again at a later stage.

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Sometimes these “death from above” sequences are released in US Defense Department press briefings or appear in cable TV news segments. In these contexts, the material is anchored and framed in relation to the ideological positions and strategies of the US government or the commercial news media. When these videos circulate on the Internet they can be commented upon, downloaded, shared, and/or re-circulated. My review of viewer comments posted in response to aerial assault videos reveals that the videos elicit an array of responses and extensive speculation and discussion, but there were two general tendencies. The first approaches these videos’ depiction of the killing or death of people on the ground as a source of entertainment and visual pleasure such that these sequences function as a kind of aerial snuff. The second tendency is to use the videos to scrutinize US military policies, actions, or violence, so that they function as aerial exposés that question the rules of engagement or condemn specific attacks. Table 1.1 contains a sampling of comments on “UAV Hits Taliban Column” to highlight these two tendencies and the contradictory status of the videos, which are used to both celebrate US targeted killings and to scrutinize, critique, and protest them. These aerial assault videos and the comments posted along with them suggest that US military drones participate in what Judith Butler calls the “differential distribution of precariousness.” As Butler suggests, “War is precisely an effort to minimize precariousness for some and to maximize it for others.”26 Here precariousness is registered along an axis of invisibility–visibility where US troops are invisible (even if audible) as weaponized aircraft hover above people who appear as moving dots of black or white (body heat), signaling the presence of “the targeted.” The levels of precariousness in these sequences are contingent upon differential access to aerial and terrestrial space, telecommunication, artillery, positions, and vantage points. Apprehending precariousness according to Butler requires a shift beyond “us and them” and “victim/perpetrator” paradigms such that these “frames of war” reveal precariousness for all involved. That is to say, precariousness is part of life for everyone, even for remote pilots situated thousands of miles away. It is registered in their heavy breathing and in the tension and anxiety in their voices, which are audible on some of the videos’ soundtracks. Precariousness also emerges in what we do not see framed such as the bad dreams, nightmarish visions, and unassimilable experiences of veterans’ futures. Former drone sensor operator, Brandon Bryant, manned a sensor ball at Creech and Canon Air Force Bases from 2007 to 2011. He worked on US drone operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen and participated in the killing of 1,626 people.27 When I interviewed Bryant in 2014, he attributed his PTSD to his experience as a sensor operator.28 Bryant has indicated in other interviews that he dreams about some of these deaths in infrared and recalls the first time he killed someone, explaining that he watched the body’s “hot blood” “hit the ground” and “start to cool off.” As Brandon recalls, “It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.”29

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Drone sensor operators not only witness horrific events in infrared, they wage aerial assaults based upon optics of suspicion. Bombings and killings are authorized again and again because people on the ground “appear to be” or “look like” or are “believed to be” carrying objects or moving in ways that “look suspicious.” In other words, the most tentative kind of knowledge is met with the most fatal kind of act. These conditions have led to a succession of “accidental” aerial assaults, whether on two Reuters journalists killed from above while walking on a street in Baghdad in 200730 or nine Afghani boys gunned down and killed by two Apache helicopters while they were gathering firewood in Eastern Afghanistan in March 2011. As Derek Gregory suggests, the permissible scope of “the target” has been widened in the context of late modern warfare, leading to a displacement of the concept of “the civilian” and, I would add, to the emergence of a targeted class.31 Particular inhabitants of Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and the Occupied Territories, for instance, have become part of a disenfranchised “targeted” class simply because they live in areas in which terror suspects may operate. In such areas anyone and everyone is at risk and daily life is haunted by the specter of aerial bombardment. As drone media visualize “the targeted” – whether in a drone attack photo or an aerial assault video – they reveal that asymmetric warfare creates new forms disenfranchisement for some and greater precariousness for all. A 2009 Brookings Institution study estimated that for every “militant” killed by a drone, there were 10 civilian casualties.32 A 2010 report from the New America Foundation indicated that since 2004, 32% (or approximately 1 in 3) of those killed in drone attacks were civilians.33

Drone protest media As the frequency and death tolls of US drone attacks in Pakistan escalated between 2009 and 2011, they were met with major demonstrations in Islamabad, Karachi, Peshawar, Multan, Lahore, and in London, Dublin, and Washington, DC. The Pakistani demonstrations were organized by a variety of political organizations such as Pakistan’s National Trade Union Federation, Labour Party, and Foundation for Fundamental Rights, among others, and have been documented by photojournalists, news agencies, and activists alike. The drone protest photos during this period not only reflected Pakistani citizens’ widespread discontent with the Zadari administration, they also sent a bold message to the Obama administration and US citizens. Many of the signs and banners featured in drone protest photos were written in English and included phrases such as “Down with American Drones,” “Stop Drones,” “Stop Killing of Innocent Trible [sic] Peoples. Victims of Drones,” “Obomba – Hands off Muslim Lands!” “USA Leave Us Alone,” “Thousands of Innocent Civilians Died of Drone Attacks. Who is Responsible??” “No to American Interference & Drone Attacks,” “Terrorist? CIA

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or Taliban? Ask the Victims of Drone Attacks!” “No to Drones. No to USA Aid. We can stand by ourselves,” “Bombing on Tribs [sic] Obama’s First Gift to Pakistan.” Many drone protest photos were taken during demonstrations in the spring of 2011, the notorious Arab Spring, when most of the world’s attention was focused on mass demonstrations in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria. While the Arab Spring uprisings, which attempted to oust the longstanding dictators of corrupt regimes, were celebrated as showcasing democracy in action, anti-drone demonstrations in Pakistan were largely ignored by the Western media, despite the fact that Pakistanis too have been fighting a corrupt regime. Indeed, Pakistani citizens found themselves between a rock and a hard place as their own government had authorized US drone attacks resulting in the killing of hundreds of civilians and injury of untold others. The particularities of the political situation in Pakistan, of which I have barely scratched the surface, makes the online circulation of drone attack and protest photos all the more significant for they carry and transmit Pakistanis’ urgent objections to the US drone war across nation-state borders and within the informational milieu. As we have witnessed in other countries in recent years, this capacity has become a crucial tactic in political movements against oppressive regimes, though it can also lead to a situation in which the world knowingly watches on as state-sanctioned violence against civilians persists (as we have seen in Darfur, Mali, Syria, Nigeria, and elsewhere). In her book Digital Media and Democracy, Megan Boler argues that the current historical conjuncture (defined by the war on terror) is characterized, on the one hand, by “a radical democratization of knowledge and multiplication of sources and voices afforded by digital media” and, on the other, by “blatant and outrageous instances of falsified national intelligence shielded from scrutiny.”34 She continues, “Because much footage is accessible in digital form (whether through official news sites or individuals posting footage), we have a new way of ‘constructing’ accounts to assuage our sense of having been lied to but having few ways to ‘prove’ it.”35 Drone media enable viewers/users to imagine and speculate about covert US drone attacks in Pakistan through multiple positions and modalities – the air or ground, perpetrator or victim, documentary or parody – as part of the process of grappling with the killing of thousands of people, including civilians and children, that US officials have refused to account for. Although Behram’s photos stand as some of the most “grounded” accounts of drone violence in Pakistan, parodic and fictional protest media can be as poignant and revelatory. India-based YouTube user sandeepsb1 produced a 56-second video called Death by Drone – In the Still of the Night and posted it on January 28, 2011. The video draws upon a repertoire of drone-related documentary photos found online to construct a fictional romance between a drone operator and a person on the ground. This air-to-ground romance

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is articulated through a rewriting of the 1956 doo-wop song “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins. On the soundtrack a male voice sternly utters: In the still of the night, watch me my love as I circle over you with caress. In the still of the night while you sit by your fire watch me, my love, hover over your darling face from Arizona with a joystick in my hand, soundless over you with love. And then I squeeze the red button and the hellfire slides out and cuts into your crosswired face. Such is my love. Such is my precision. The visual track opens with scenes of drones floating harmlessly through the sky and, after a round of gunfire is heard, a more cataclysmic vision appears. A massive hellfire explosion is followed by a series of photographs of drone attack victims’ funerals and dead bodies. The sequence closes with a photo of Barack Obama with the words “Yes!! We can” inscribed upon it. While drone attack and protest photos use conventions of realism to generate and extend political affection, this video functions in a highly self-conscious manner, using the saccharine spirit of the American pop song and the subversive sensibilities of mash-up to architect its romantic nightmare. In what feels like a happenstance homage to Hiroshima Mon Amour and La Jetée, the video confronts the psychic dimensions of drone warfare by casting the targeter and the targeted in an uncanny love that is orchestrated as a fatal air-to-ground affair. Here documentary drone attack and protest photos become a kind of raw material for a meta-level critique that points to their limitations and insufficiencies. If drone attack and protest photos have not changed the course of US drone policy by now, so the logic goes, then what will? This question leads sandeepsb1 to invent a more caustic drone media discourse. Documentary forms of drone protest media have helped to make transnational opposition to US drone attacks legible by highlighting its various locations, scattered constituencies, and array of positions. While the political specificities of these positions remain uncertain, the collective signage and bodies in drone protest photos place the US drone war in Pakistan into the digital public record, making it harder and harder to deny. When drone protest photos circulate online they can also build solidarities and activate speculative imaginaries. For instance, networked drone protest photos have the potential to link Pakistani demonstrators with American activists John Heid and Gretchen Nielsen who were arrested after they unfurled a banner declaring “War Is Not a Show” as they quietly stood near the Predator on display at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in March 2010.36 They forge alliances between Pakistani demonstrators and Peace of Action members who marched to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in January 2010 to protest the US drone program37 and with the so-called Creech 14 who were found guilty of trespassing during an April 2009 protest at Creech Air

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Force base in Nevada.38 Drone protest images connect survivors’ families in Waziristan with protesters at General Atomics Predator manufacturing plant in San Diego, the 200 Americans who swarmed the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, in October 2011 to protest a drone exhibit and were forced out of the museum and covered with pepper spray,39 and CODEPINK activists who gathered for the Drone Summit in Washington, DC, and sent a delegation to Pakistan in 2012.40

Conclusion This chapter has explored different types of drone media in an effort to explore some of the grounded dimensions of the US drone war in Pakistan. While drone media have helped to fuel the political (dis)affection that brings protesters together, drone attack photos, aerial assault videos, and protest media all constitute different ways of responding to epistemological and political uncertainty. While Behram’s work relies upon familiar journalistic aesthetic conventions to assert its truth claims, the aerial assault videos reveal the remote views and optics of suspicion that determine fates on the ground. In contrast, the Death by Drone parody resorts to bitter exaggeration to spotlight the inescapable uncertainties that emerge when states keep secrets and public speculation runs amok. As drone media generate a spectrum of epistemologies, they also reveal that decisions to kill from the air are often based upon logics of suspicion, speculation, and uncertainty. Drone pilots make decisions to strike targets based on close readings of distant views, and after conversations with parties situated within and beyond the designated mission area. Although targets are typically confirmed by intelligence on the ground, it is often difficult for remote decision-makers to differentiate “enemies” from “friendlies,” to discern a weapon from a piece of farming equipment, or to distinguish a boy from a man, and there have been numerous civilian casualties and injuries resulting from such confusions. Another video parody called The Ethical Governor resolves such errors by forecasting a future that removes the human element from drone warfare, delegating all decision-making to the drone itself. In these futurist scenarios drones select and destroy targets using a decision matrix, intervene only according to the rules of engagement, and assess guilt levels after an attack, de-activating weapon systems if the drone has killed too many people.41 What this parodic commentary suggests is the need to investigate further the perceptual dimensions of drone warfare – to explore and evaluate how remote pilots see, what they know, and when they strike. Even though drones are automated systems, the aerial views they acquire and the bombs they drop are received by humans at both ends. Because of this we cannot afford not to respond to and deliberate on this new form of warfare, and drone media help us to do just that.

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Acknowledgement The author thanks Carolyn Marvin, Sun-ha Hong, and other members of their editorial team for helpful feedback and comments on an earlier draft of this essay, and Abby Hinsman for research assistance.

Notes 1 Lisa Parks, “Drone Strike Photos,” flickr, uploaded 6 December 2016, https:// www.flickr.com/photos/cosmowink/albums/72157627702733205; Lisa Parks, “Drone Protest Photos,” flickr, uploaded 6 December 2016, https://www.flickr. com/photos/cosmowink/albums/72157627702470485. 2 Paul Virilio, Strategy of Deception, translated by C. Turner (London & New York: Verso, 2000); P. W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and 21st Century Conflict (New York: Penguin, 2009). 3 Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Casualty Estimates: Pakistan 2004–2015 CIA Drone Strikes, www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/dronesgraphs/. 4 Clive Stafford Smith, “For Our Allies: Death from Above,” The New York Times, 3 November 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/opinion/in-pakistandrones-kill-our-innocent-allies.html. 5 Ibid. Also see Pratap Chatterjee, “Bureau Reporter Meets Sixteen Year-Old Three Days before US Drone Kills Him,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism website, 4 November 2011, www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/11/04/bureaureporter-meets-16-year-old-just-three-days-before-he-is-killed-by-a-us-drone/. 6 Sahil Kapur, “67% of Pakistani Journalists Say US Drones Attacks Are Acts of Terrorism: Survey,” The Raw Story, 14 February 2011, www.rawstory.com/ rs/2011/02/14/67-of-pakistani-journalists-say-us-drones-attacks-are-acts-ofterrorism-survey/. 7 On the Getty website the full caption reads: Pakistani residents stand amongst the rubble of a classroom after militants blew up a girls’ school on the outskirts of Peshawar on June 22, 2009. Pakistan has been hit by a wave of deadly suicide bombs in recent weeks, attacks blamed on Taliban rebels seeking to avenge the campaign against them. The army confirmed that the offensive would be expanded into the lawless tribal areas along the Afghan border, the stronghold of feared Pakistan Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud and his fighters. See: Tariq Mahmood, Getting Images, www.gettyimages.com/detail/88615345/ AFP. 8 “Pakistan Drone War Photo Gallery,” Channel 4 News website, 14 December 2010, www.channel4.com/news/pakistan-drone-warfare-photo-gallery/display/ image/drone7. 9 Howard LaFranchi, “US Message in Drone Strikes: If Pakistan Doesn’t Take on Taliban, We Will,” The Christian Science Monitor, 28 June 2011, www. csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2011/0628/US-message-in-drone-strikes-IfPakistan-doesn-t-take-on-Taliban-we-will. 10 “U.S. Passes Up Chance to Strike Taliban,” NBC News, 13 September 2006, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14823099/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/ t/us-passes-chance-strike-taliban/#.V41TrK6-sXk; and David Hambling, “Why

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12 13 14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

27

Was Pakistan Drone So Deadly?,” Wired, 24 June 2009, www.wired.com/ dangerroom/2009/06/why-was-pakistan-drone-strike-so-deadly/. Nathan Hodge, “Deadliest Strike Yet in Pakistan Drone War,” Wired, 24 June 2009, www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/deadliest-strike-yet-in-pakistan-dronewar/. Also see Pir Zubair Shah and Salman Masood, “U.S. Drone Strike Said to Kill 60 in Pakistan,” The New York Times, 23 June 2009, www.nytimes.com/ 2009/06/24/world/asia/24pstan.html. This particular drone attack even has its own Wikipedia entry available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_June_2009_ Makeen_airstrike. Adam Entous, Siobahn Gorman, and Julian E. Barnes, “US Tightens Drone Rules,” The Wall Street Journal, 4 November 2011, online.wsj.com/article/SB10 001424052970204621904577013982672973836.html. “Drone Attacks in Pakistan Are Next Guantanamo,” Channel 4 website, 9 May 2011, www.channel4.com/news/drone-attacks-in-pakistan-are-next-guantanamo. Chris Woods, “The US Has Killed More Than 168 Children in Pakistan,” Another World Is Possible. . . blog, 12 August 2011, www.a-w-i-p.com/index. php/2011/08/12/the-us-has-killed-more-than-168-children. Asim Qureshi, “Interview with Family Devastated by US Drone Attack,” Global Research, 26 September 2010, www.globalresearch.ca/interview-with-familydevastated-by- us- drone- attack- the- dead- were- completely-unrecognisable/ 21199?print=1. Susan Breau, Marie Aronsson, and Rachel Joyce, “Drone Attacks, International Law, and the Recording of Civilian Casualties of Armed Conflict,” Oxford Research Group, 1 June 2011, www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/ briefing_papers_and_reports/discussion_paper_2. Saheed Shah and Peter Beaumont, “US Drone Strikes in Pakistan Claiming Many Civilian Victims, Says Campaigner,” The Guardian, 17 July 2011, www.guardian .co.uk/world/2011/jul/17/us-drone-strikes-pakistan-waziristan. “Gaming in Waziristan,” Beaconsfield Gallery website, 19 July–5 August 2011, http://beaconsfield.ltd.uk/projects/gaming-in-waziristan/. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “Obama 2009 Pakistan Strikes,” 10 August 2011, www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/10/obama-2009strikes/. Ibid., http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/10/obama-2010-strikes/. Chris Woods, “Over 160 Children Reported among Drone Deaths,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism website, 11 August 2011, www.thebureauinvestigates. com/2011/08/11/more-than-160-children-killed-in-us-strikes/. Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 142. For further discussion of infrared drone imagery, see Lisa Parks, “Drones Infrared Imagery and Body Heat, International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 2518–2521. Andrew Fell, “Taliban Hits Taliban Column,” YouTube, uploaded 20 June 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bgX9J_ZBC0. US Military Videos, “Afghanistan War: Proof of Care Taken Note to Injure Civilians: UAV Aborted Attack,” YouTube, uploaded 10 April 2010, www.youtube. com/watch?v=D3e7hB65Dv0. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London & New York: Verso, 2010), 54. Matthew Power, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior,” GQ, www.gq.com/newspolitics/big-issues/201311/drone-uav-pilot-assassination.

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28 For further insight into his experience, see Brandon Bryant, “Letter from a Sensor Operator,” in Life in the Age of Drones, ed. Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2017). 29 Ibid. 30 WikiLeaks produced a video related to this incident entitled Collateral Murder, https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/. 31 Derek Gregory, “‘In Another Time-Zone the Bombs Fall Unsafely . . .’: Targets, Civilians and Late Modern War,” The Arab World Geographer 9, no. 2 (July 2006): 88–111. Also see Derek Gregory, “The Everywhere War,” The Geographical Journal 177, no. 3 (September 2011): 238–250. 32 Daniel L. Byman, “Do Targeted Killings Work?,” Brookings Institute website, 14 July 2009, www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/0714_targeted_killings_byman. aspx?p=1; http://returngood.com/2009/07/21/brookings-report-confirms-highcivilian-death-rate-and-misses-the-point/. 33 Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, “The Year of the Drone: An Analysis of U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan, 2004–2010,” Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative Policy Paper, New America Foundation, 24 February 2010, https://permaarchives.org/media/2014/8/16/18/22/XSE6-SWPR/cap.pdf. Also see Dean Nelson, “One in Three Killed by US Drones in Pakistan Is a Civilian, Report Claims,” The Telegraph, 4 March 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/ asia/pakistan/7361630/ One- in- three- killed- by- US- drones- in- Pakistan- is- acivilian-report-claims.html. 34 Megan Boler, ed. “Introduction,” in Digital Media and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 14. 35 Ibid., 6. 36 “What Happens When You Protest Predator Drones,” Public Intelligence blog, 30 October 2010, http://publicintelligence.net/what-happens-when-you-protestpredator-drones/. 37 “Outside C.I.A. Headquarters, Protesting U.S. Drone Attacks,” Debra Sweet’s blog, 17 January 2010, http://debra.worldcantwait.net/2010/01/outside-c-i-aheadquarters-protesting-u-s-drone-attacks/. Also see photos from the protest available here: www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.293206967563.191705.744057563. 38 “DRONE-Resisting Sanitized Remote-Control Death,” Voices for Creative Non-Violence blog, http://vcnv.org/drone-resisting-sanitized-remote-controldeath. 39 Emma Brown and Del Quentin Wilber, “Air and Space Museum Closes after Guards Clash with Protesters,” The Washington Post, 8 October 2011, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post_now/post/2011/10/08/gIQAx0x2VL_ blog.html; Christopher Santarelli, “Protesters Pepper Sprayed at Air and Space Museum in Washington DC,” The Blaze, 8 October 2011, www.theblaze.com/ stories/2011/10/08/protesters-pepper-sprayed-at-air-and-space-museum-in-dc/; and Deborah Dupre, “Drones Kill Kids: Occupy D.C. Rights Defenders Shut Museum with Drone Exhibit,” Examiner.com, 8 October 2011, www.examiner. com/article/drones-kill-kids-occupy-d-c-rights-defenders-shut-museum-withdrone-exhibit. 40 CODEPINK, “Drone Summit: Killing and Spying by Remote Control,” 28–29 April 2012, www.codepinkarchive.org/article.php?id=6065; Code Pink, Code Pink Peace Delegation to Pakistan, www.codepinkarchive.org/article.php?id=6174. 41 johnbutlerA, “The Ethical Governor,” YouTube, uploaded 27 November 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96oR36im7cY.

Chapter 2

Location-based services in Brazil Reframing privacy, mobility, and location Adriana de Souza e Silva,1 Mariana S. de Matos-Silva2 and Ana Maria Nicolaci-da-Costa3

Introduction Location-based services (LBS) have become popular following rising smartphone penetration rates around the world. They comprise the fastest growing sector in internet and mobile technology businesses.4 LBS allow users to receive location-specific information, such as the location of the nearest restaurant or another individual, on their mobile phones. By helping users attach information to places, LBS are part of what Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva call net locality:5 a new social and spatial context in which digital networks are brought into public spaces. According to the logic of net locality, location is our entrance to the internet, and the information we access increasingly depends on where we are. Investigating the role of digital information in public space is critical for understanding the social implications of LBS use. When people disclose their location to others and to commercial partners, there are important ways in which the traditional meanings of privacy, mobility, and location are challenged.6 Locations now contain digital information, and interaction with this information shifts how people interact with each other and navigate cities. As Carolyn Marvin and Sun-ha Hong note in the introduction to this volume, when locations and places change, contexts collapse – and reform under new conditions. The boundaries and thresholds for trust and collective engagement transform when we turn to new kinds of media to render spaces legible. Studies of LBS that focus on developed countries have investigated the privacy issues that arise when personal location becomes public and tradeable.7 Additional studies have focused on how personal mobility, urban spaces, and sociability are affected by the widespread use of location services.8 There is also scholarship on how the meaning of location changes with the use of location-based services.9 We know much less about how perceptions of privacy, mobility, and location are shaped by cultural, historical, and economical forces. As such, we still lack a sense of how different socio-economic and cultural contexts influence the use of LBS, especially in the Global South where LBS are relatively new phenomena. Like other

30 Adriana de Souza e Silva et al.

papers in this volume, our study focuses on contexts in which new media technologies produce new forms of contextual co-presences, public anxiety, and perceptions of danger. Among developing economies, Brazil represents an important case. Brazil is the fastest growing economy in South America, and the fifth mobile phone market in the world in absolute numbers, having reached a cell phone penetration rate of over 100 percent (meaning that there are more cell phones than people in the country), with over 280 million devices by September 2015.10 The use of high-end services and smartphones is nonetheless restricted to a small part of the population concentrated in the middle and upper classes of the major metropolises in the country such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. To obtain an initial understanding of how LBS are challenging perceptions of privacy, mobility, and location in Brazil, we conducted a series of qualitative semi-structured interviews with residents of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Fortaleza, all major urban centers in Brazil. The study focused on middle- and upper-class smartphone users between 20 and 35 years old. This paper explores the use of LBS in these cities by focusing on: (1) the roles that the specific cultural and socio-economic contexts play in the adoption and appropriation of LBS, and (2) the extent to which the public location sharing is perceived as a threat to personal privacy. Our findings reveal that despite the growing popularity of smartphones in the country, users are generally not aware that their location can be tracked. Further, there is a contradiction between users’ claims they do not care about privacy and location sharing, and their skepticism of sharing location with other people, the government, and the police.

Literature review Despite initial fears that mobile phones would remove people from their physical surroundings,11 it is now evident that one of the most socially relevant characteristics of smartphones is their ability to connect people to locations and to other people nearby via LBS.12 Following the release of the GPS-enabled iPhone 3G and Google’s Android system in 2008, concerns about privacy and surveillance as they relate to location-aware mobile devices entered the discourse of mass media outlets.13 While personal location has typically been understood as private information, people are more willing to share their location with cell phone providers and members of their social network in order to receive location-based information. Location information has become a key type of aggregated data collected by marketing companies to understand consumer behavior. But these practices are often opaque to the users themselves, which generates an increased fear of losing control over their location information. Unlike studies that construe privacy as the ability to limit access to oneself14 or the right to be

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left alone,15 privacy in the context of location-aware technologies may be understood as the ability to control one’s surrounding space and locational information. In addition to perceptions of privacy, personal mobility is also affected by the widespread use of location services. In their study of the location-based game Mogi in Japan, Christian Licoppe and Yoriko Inada16 describe how individuals changed their route to work to play the game. Commuting by bus instead of the underground subway allowed them to collect in-game virtual objects throughout the city. Likewise, players grouped together to create “expeditions” in search of particular objects. In her study of the mobile social network (MSN) Dodgeball, Lee Humphreys17 reported that people used MSN as a form of social molecularization. That is, they sent updates about their locations to friends in their social network in order to move about the city from bar to bar or restaurant to restaurant. De Souza e Silva and Frith18 have speculated that the use of LBS may lead users to search for places depending on who is there (a friend, or a friendly review). Finally, the meaning of location has been amplified by the use of location-based services. The meaning of location, long a geographic marker, has moved increasingly into the realm of space and place. Locations are now embedded with dynamic digital information including tips, pictures, text, music, and personal profiles as well as geographic coordinates. Locations are connected to other locations via location-aware practices, and embedded with meaning. A number of recent studies have analyzed how LBS create new and renewed attachments to places and locations.19 Although many of the above-mentioned studies frame LBS from an American and European perspective, perceptions of privacy, mobility, and location are also shaped by cultural and socio-economic factors. Studies anchored in the developing world or the so-called Global South focus on cell phone use among rural populations,20 low-income communities,21 and migrant workers.22 Many adopt the information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) framework described by Donner,23 in which the use of technologies is viewed as a means of bringing economic development to individuals and small business.24 This approach is useful, but often overlooks the cultural, social, and economic diversity of developing world countries as well as the modes of adoption and appropriation that occur in specific places. Because the uses of high-end services in the Global South are believed to be similar to those in developed economies, there is a dearth of studies focusing on the uses of smartphones and location-based services among middle- and upper-income classes in developing world countries. Few studies have focused on creative appropriation practices among distinct social groups, including young people and artists. We contend that it is important to consider how middle- and upper-income classes use these technologies, since it is often these groups that drive marketing campaigns and technology development, and promote practices to other demographics.

32 Adriana de Souza e Silva et al.

While the vast majority of studies on the uses of mobile phones in the Global South focus on Africa25 and Asia,26 relatively little is known about Latin America. In the case of Brazil, research has focused on how mobile phones are used by low-income communities27 and for micro-coordination.28 Studies that focus on LBS are few and largely theoretical, though some empirical studies have focused on Foursquare.29 To address this gap in the literature, we focus on the use of LBS among middle- and upper-income classes in urban metropolises in Brazil. We addressed the following research questions: (1) How do smartphone users use and share location via mobile apps? (2) To what extent is location sharing with companies, the government, and other users perceived to be a threat to personal security or privacy?

Methods This study was carried out following the guidelines of the Underlying Discourse Unveiling Method (UDUM), developed by Ana Maria Nicolaci-da-Costa.30 This qualitative method unveils contents that lie behind explicit discourse. It assumes that these contents reveal the concepts and ideas of the social group to which the participant belongs. UDUM does not intend to verify hypotheses, but to explore respondents’ expressed opinions, beliefs, experiences, and feelings. UDUM stipulates that interview data should be analyzed in two different stages.31 In the “inter-participants” stage, participant responses are compared for recurrences. When these recurrences are identified, they are assigned content categories. In the “intra-participant” stage, each interview is individually analyzed for inconsistencies, contradictions, and incoherencies that might suggest underlying meanings. Researchers return to the first stage to verify the distribution and patterns of these seemingly inconsistent or contradictory replies. We looked for Brazilian residents of metropolises such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Fortaleza between 20 and 35 years old. The majority of participants – 23 in number – lived in Rio de Janeiro, while one lived in São Paulo and other lived in Recife. This age range was chosen in the belief that this age cohort is able to afford smartphones and to use them beyond their most basic features. All participants had been smartphone users for at least two months, a length of time considered enough for interviewees to become familiar with the device. All participants were suggested by friends and acquaintances, and contacted online. The semi-structured interview schedule was divided into two parts. The first collected identifying information about participants, including age, profession, schooling, smartphone model, and monthly plan used (prepaid or postpaid, with 3G or WiFi, etc.). The second aimed at investigating interviewees’ knowledge about their smartphone location features, how they used

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location-aware applications, if/how locative features impacted their movements through the city, their perceptions about locating someone and being located, about their location in relation to other users and corporations, about relationships between the cell phone carrier and the government, and larger privacy and security issues associated with locative applications. Interviews were conducted in Portuguese, and all authors are fluent in Portuguese and English. Data were collected during June and July 2013 through individual interviews conducted online in the chat environment selected by participants (Facebook and/or Skype). All participants were very familiar with online chats and were comfortable enough to express their opinions freely, as UDUM recommends.32

Data analysis A total of 25 people were interviewed, 14 males and 11 females aged between 19 and 38 years old. All had bachelor degrees (in a variety of fields including Engineering, Communications, Psychology, Law, Mathematics, and Web Design). Most (12 interviewees) had the latest versions of the iPhone, while nine others had different versions of Samsung Galaxy smartphones. The other four had devices from LG and Motorola. They had owned their devices for between six months and three years. All participants reported being fairly satisfied with their devices, and especially the large number of features they offered. Several older participants had more than one smartphone – often one for personal use and another for work. Most respondents (20) had smartphones with postpaid plans and unlimited data access. Respondents emphasized that although those plans are sold as unlimited, they are limited in practice because the phone providers tend to throttle connection speeds when users reach a certain number of megabytes.33 Some interviewees had prepaid plans that cost 50 cents per day of use with unlimited megabytes. Others reported having no data plan and used the internet via WiFi. Not having a data plan or having a restricted one did not prevent any of the participants from enjoying the many features offered by their smartphones. All respondents had a large number of applications. The more popular apps were Facebook (20 respondents), Whatsapp (17 respondents), Instagram (11 respondents), and Viber (4 respondents). Two major themes emerged when we asked how participants used their smartphones: how participants accessed location-based information, and how they shared location information with others.

Using location Although most participants used location-based apps on a daily basis, most were unaware that many apps can identify their location. Most did not know they could configure their smartphones to allow applications to capture

34 Adriana de Souza e Silva et al.

their geographical position or not. In these cases, interviewers taught participants to find the location services settings on their smartphones and to describe which applications were accessing their location. Some respondents were surprised to discover how many applications could request their location. For example, Marcos34 (22, lawyer) said: Wow! So many applications! Some I knew. . . . Others I imagined. . . . But some I would never imagine! [laughs] Manuela (20, student), was even more surprised: WOOOOW / how bizarre / I’m being more located than I imagined / . . . how come my camera has a locator, OMG / heeeelp . . . I’m scared. Despite not knowing that many applications can pinpoint their location, respondents indicated that they use some applications precisely because of this feature. This is the case of Google Maps, Waze, and other navigation applications used by all participants. Luciana (21, student) said she rarely uses Google Maps in Rio where she lives, but uses it frequently when traveling: I use Google Maps, of course, to find places I don’t know how to reach. . . . Well, here in Rio I rarely use it. I used it mostly when I was in the Netherlands and in the United States. It helped a lot! Other participants use Google Maps in their own city to find out the best directions to a particular place. Patrícia (35, manager) lives in São Paulo, a city known for its excessive number of vehicles. Google Maps is her ally when she wants to escape traffic jams, as she describes: I change my path because of Google Maps, as it shows routes with traffic jams / I escape the red line and choose the green one. João (23, computer technician) uses Google Maps in Rio in a similar way: I use Google Maps only to choose a path / like / which are the best [path] options to go somewhere. Although most users reported that mapping and navigation apps were their primary use of location-based services, many used apps that allowed them to read tips about bars, restaurants, concert halls, and the like. Leonardo (25, student) explained he uses the application Kekanto quite often: I use it almost every week. . . . As Kekanto finds every single bar, restaurant and shops based on my location, it is very useful.

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Tips written by other users are the main motivation for respondents to use applications like Kekanto. Those tips are especially useful outside their hometowns. When traveling, they use such applications to learn more about a hotel, a restaurant, or a city attraction. They usually choose places with good reviews and reject others with negative ones. Miguel (38, engineer) explained that negative comments about a restaurant influenced him to change his plans and go elsewhere: Yes, I’ve changed [my plans]. . . . You can have an idea [of the place]. . . . You see what they wrote and you quit going there [in case of bad reviews]. Despite finding tips useful, most participants said they did not write them. When they want to recommend or criticize an establishment, they rarely use applications in which tips are public. Most prefer using social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to share impressions only with their social network. This is what Carlos (21, student) usually does: [I] just [write tips] on Facebook / I always share information about interesting places I’ve been to with a photo and a description. Besides Facebook, Manuela (20, student) also uses Twitter to post comments about restaurants she likes: If [a bar/restaurant] is good, if it’s nice, cheap, if it’s worth going, I post a photo, I write about the place or I even post just a comment on Facebook, Twitter . . . The interviewees affirmed that location-aware applications are embedded in their daily lives. These applications are considered useful because they provide relevant information. When participants were asked about sharing their location, however, their discourses changed.

Sharing location With companies / providers When told by interviewers that by accessing LBS respondents were already sharing their location, many called this “inappropriate,” “unnecessary,” something with which they “disagree.” They saw no benefit in sharing their location with companies that benefit from having this information. In their opinion, companies benefit because they are able to send location-based advertisements (LBA), notwithstanding that LBA does not yet exist in Brazil.

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In their absence, SMS ads are quite popular – and are perceived as annoying, without bringing any advantages to users: I prefer not sharing [location with companies]. They would send me a lot of promotional SMS. (Pedro, 38, post office employee) Ricardo (38, City Police employee) also did not like the idea of sharing his location with corporations. He explained that he is usually bothered by SMS advertisements, and he would not like this to happen more often: I’ve been to a nightclub where it was mandatory to register your cell phone number. Now I receive SMS advertisements of every single event they have there. Only two interviewees reported no problems in receiving this type of advertisement. Miguel (38, engineer), stated he did not mind it, unless companies “polluted” his smartphone with spam. And Patrícia (35, manager) explained that not only does she not mind receiving SMS advertisements, but she benefits from the good deals. It is important to note that Patrícia works for a sales website that is developing a pioneer service for LBA in Brazil. Just as many respondents were unaware of disclosing their location to different companies, they did not realize they were sharing location with mobile phone providers. Most did not know that by simply using their smartphone their location is automatically tracked by the carrier. Luciana (21, student) thought that her provider could pinpoint her location only illegally, because she “has not authorized it.” When asked about sharing their location with cell phone providers, most participants reacted negatively. In their opinion, this made them targets for excessive and intrusive advertising: I wouldn’t like to make my location available to my carrier because Brazilian telemarketing is too annoying. (Jorge, 34, quality coordinator) Carlos (21, student) was also afraid of excessive mobile advertisement. He feared providers could sell location information to other companies without the consent of users: I don’t like this idea, I think it would be something entirely commercial, it [the information] would be sold to other companies that would send advertisements, promotions. I don’t know if it [location sharing with carriers] already happens, but I’m against it.

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Although participants considered location sharing with providers and companies inappropriate and unpleasant, it did not seem to cause great concern. Participants simply did not want to be bothered. With government and the police The idea of sharing location with the government and the police brought up mixed feelings. On the one hand, interviewees believed that disclosing their personal location to these institutions could contribute to their safety and security, for example, to find a stolen cell phone or kidnapped person. On the other hand, they doubted the authorities are capable of using location information efficiently. Pedro (38, post office employee) pondered: I don’t trust the government for anything. The government only serves itself. If they want my location, it will be for their profit somehow. Even Ricardo, an employee of the Rio de Janeiro City Police, agreed. For him, government or police access to people’s location information could be useful, but he believed this information would not be well used in Brazil: [Sharing location with the government / police] would be good if this information were correctly used. For example, if you suffer a lightning-kidnap it would be easy for the police to locate you. But in Brazil I don’t think it would work. Like Ricardo, Helena (21, student) suggested that if the government and the police were reliable, location information could help citizens. This, however, was not the case in Brazil: “It would help only if the police and the government really worked.” Even so, others argued that in some situations location sharing with the police could be helpful: I hate the police / the problem is that, in case of emergencies, if it is not the police, who is going to help? . . . But I don’t like the police and I don’t trust them. Carolina (21, student) also had mixed feelings: Depending on the situation [sharing location with] the police can be useful, but I don’t see any reason to share [location] with the government. . . . It’s absurd. Sharing with the police is absurd, but sometimes it can be a means for someone to ask for help.

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With other people Interviewees’ perceptions change when they consider sharing their location with other people. Eight respondents had the location-based social network Foursquare on their phones, but only three actually used it. Most respondents believed that disclosing their personal location information was dangerous, given the violent cities in which they live. Helena (21, student), for example, explained that where she lives in Fortaleza, there is so much violence that location sharing could be risky: Quite risky / Other people can access it; they’re going to know your location. Fortaleza is almost a war zone, you know? Jorge (34, quality coordinator) believes that location sharing can be useful in some situations, as when tracking someone. In other situations, however, it could be quite risky. He explains: “If a criminal tracks me, he can rob me. [He can steal] my car, cell phone, etc.” Other participants shared Jorge and Helena’s fears that strangers whom they did not trust might have access to their location information. They are aware that Foursquare users can restrict location information access to those they trust: “I only have friends; I block everyone else” (Helena, 21, student). If people are aware that they can restrict access to their location information, what do they fear? Rafael (22, student) explained: “What if someone hacks [my account] and kidnaps me?” In general, participants did not believe their information could be safe and restricted to their social network. For this reason, Felipe (22, student) chooses not to share his location with other people. Similarly, Jorge (34, quality coordinator) preferred not to disclose his location: [I don’t feel threatened] because I have the option of not exposing myself. I think that checking-in on Facebook or Foursquare makes you vulnerable. But that is optional.

Discussion It is well known that cell phones are an intrinsic part of life for most in the Global South.35 For our participants, smartphones and LBS have also become part of their daily lives. Our participants use smartphones to stay in touch with their tight-knit network of family and friends.36 They also reported using a variety of apps, of which the most popular were navigation services such as Google Maps. This is not unique to Brazil. Also not unique is the fact that smartphone users are normally unaware that they are sharing their personal location with cell phone providers and commercial partners.37 Our main finding in this study is that there is a paradox in the way people use location and share location. Despite being fairly familiar with navigation

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services like Google Maps, our participants did not realize that simply by using a mobile device their location is already being tracked at least by the cell phone company. Very few also realized that many of the applications they use capture their locations. The reasons our participants offered as to why people share or do not share location were related the particular socio-economic and cultural realities of Brazil. Many of our interviewees did not report great concerns about privacy. In an earlier study on media discourses about the use of LBS, we identified two privacy concerns: fear of top-down surveillance by private companies and government and fear of collateral surveillance by other people.38 What we found in the present study, however, is that we need to reframe fears of surveillance and concerns for privacy as feelings of annoyance, skepticism, and risk. Although most users were unaware they shared their location with cell phone providers and commercial partners, they were not much concerned with their privacy per se when they learned this fact during the interview. Instead, they were annoyed because they did not wish to receive LBA / SMS. Although the literature presents receiving services (and especially advertisements) on a mobile device as a cost / benefit bargain,39 interviewees’ answers do not support this conclusion. Most did not see a benefit, and believed companies would send them excessive advertisements. While Americans normally do not trust the government and fear governmental surveillance,40 our participants did not trust the government because they were skeptical about its efficiency. This strikes us as a Brazilian particularity and paradox. On the one hand, there is complete distrust of the government and the police. On the other hand, people acknowledge they need the police to protect them from crimes and everyday violence in big cities. Location with the police could make people safe, but people did not actually believe this would happen. Finally, collateral surveillance has been widely explored in the literature,41 mostly in the context of location-based social networks (LBSNs), such as Foursquare. Some collateral surveillance practices like using a social network to broadcast a location to “show off,” as Humphreys42 demonstrated in the context of Dodgeball, are not uncommon when using LBSNs. Fears of being surveilled by other social network users have been observed in Japan43 with location-based mobile games. As with our participants, LBSN users generally restrict the number of friends in their social network to protect their personal privacy.44 Fears of invasion of privacy related to location have been named locational privacy.45 Conceptions of privacy are not homogeneous across cultures, however, and are influenced by socio-economic differences.46 Although many countries protect privacy in their constitutions,47 what people understand as privacy varies across cultures and shifts across time. In Brazil, this fear of collateral surveillance should be analyzed in relation to personal security instead of surveillance or privacy, which often reflects a Western, if not American, perspective.

40 Adriana de Souza e Silva et al.

Our participants’ practices of protecting themselves by restricting the number of friends in their social network or not sharing location at all are also common elsewhere. What is particular to the Brazilian situation is the reason for adopting such practices. As the data emerged from the interviews, we realized that participants were more concerned about risk and personal security, rather than privacy per se. According to Dourish and Bell, “any notion of security . . . must implicitly or explicitly turn on questions of risk and danger.”48 In Brazil, the risks about which people are concerned emerge from the violent context in which they live. Kidnappings and thefts are a staple of media discourse. Cell phones are among the most stolen items in Brazil,49 and it is well known that criminals and prisoners have access to cell phones and social networks.50 Our participants did not believe that their information would be secure enough in these LBSNs to escape thefts and unwanted criminal surveillance.

Conclusions Many of the uses people make of smartphones among middle- and upper-income classes in Brazil are similar to those in other places in the world. People use cell phones to keep in touch with their closest family and friends, they use location-based applications mostly for navigation, and they are largely unaware that they are sharing their locations when using many features of their smartphones. Nevertheless, there are differences in perspectives and user approaches. For example, locational privacy has been a major concern when using LBS. But if privacy should be understood contextually51 and culturally,52 in the context of Brazil, what has been conceptualized as privacy in developed world contexts should be reframed as annoyance, skepticism, and risk. LBS designers should take into consideration the distinct cultural and socio-economic particularities of different countries when developing applications and should enhance network security features where sharing location with unwanted parties can cause personal harm. Future studies of the uses of LBS should investigate how such practices unfold in non-Western contexts and places where understandings of privacy take different forms.

Notes 1 2 3 4

North Carolina State University, USA. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. Kathryn Zickuhr, Three-Quarters of Smartphone Owners Use Location-Based Services, 2012, http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/05/11/three-quarters-of-smartphoneowners-use-location-based-services/. 5 Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva, Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (Boston: Blackwell Publishers, 2011).

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6 Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith, Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: Locational Privacy, Control and Urban Sociability (New York: Routledge, 2012); Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell, Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing (Boston: MIT Press, 2011); Christian Licoppe and Yoriko Inada, “Mediated Co-Proximity and Its Dangers in a Location-Aware Community: A Case of Stalking,” in Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces, ed. Adriana de Souza e Silva and Daniel M. Sutko (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 100–128. 7 de Souza e Silva and Frith, Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces; Irina Shklovski, Janet Vertesi, Emily Troshynski, and Paul Dourish, “The Commodification of Location: Dynamics of Power in Location-Based Systems,” in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, ed. Sumi Helal (Orlando, FL: Association for Computing Machinery, 2009), 11–20. 8 Jason Farman, The Mobile Interface of Everyday Life: Technology, Embodiment, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2011); Jordan Frith, “Splintered Space: Hybrid Spaces and Differential Moblities,” Mobilities 7, no. 1 (2012): 131–149; Lee Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Urban Public Space,” New Media & Society 12, no. 5 (2010): 763–778. 9 de Souza e Silva and Frith, Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces; Didem Özkul, “Location as a Sense of Place: Everyday Life, Mobile and Spatial Practices in Urban Spaces,” in Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces, ed. Adriana de Souza e Silva and Mimi Sheller (New York: Routledge, 2014), 101–116; Raz Schwartz, “Online Place Attachment: Exploring Technological Ties to Physical Places,” in Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces, ed. Adriana de Souza e Silva and Mimi Sheller (New York: Routledge, 2014), 85–100. 10 Teleco, Estatísticas de celulares no Brasil, http://www.teleco.com.br/ncel.asp. 11 Kenneth Gergen, “The Challenge of Absent Presence,” in Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance, ed. James Katz and Mark Aakhus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 227–241; Hans Geser, Towards a Sociological Theory of the Mobile Phone, http://socio. ch/mobile/t_geser1.htm; James Katz and Mark Aakhus, ed., Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Shaun Moores, “The Doubling of Place: Electronic Media, Time-Space Arrangements and Social Relationships,” in Media/Space: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age, ed. Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy (London, UK: Routledge Comedia Series, 2004), 21–37; Jukka-Pekka Puro, “Finland, a Mobile Culture,” in Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance, ed. James Katz and Mark Aakhus (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 19–29. 12 Adriana de Souza e Silva, “From Simulations to Hybrid Space: How Nomadic Technologies Change the Real,” Technoetic Arts 1, no. 3 (2004): 209–221; Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith, “Locative Mobile Social Networks: Mapping Communication and Location in Urban Spaces,” Mobilities 5, no. 4 (2010b): 485–506; Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva, Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (Boston: Blackwell Publishers, 2011). 13 Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith, “Locational Privacy in Public Spaces: Media Discourses on Location-Aware Mobile Technologies,” Communication, Culture & Critique 3, no. 4 (2010a): 503–525. 14 Alan Westin, Privacy and Freedom (New York: Atheneum, 1967). 15 Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 4, no. 5 (1890): 193–220.

42 Adriana de Souza e Silva et al. 16 Christian Licoppe and Yoriko Inada, “Emergent Uses of a Multiplayer LocationAware Mobile Game: The Interactional Consequences of Mediated Encounters,” Mobilities 1, no. 1 (2006): 39–61. 17 Lee Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007): 341–360. 18 de Souza e Silva and Frith, Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces. 19 Özkul, “Location as a Sense of Place,” 101–116; Schwartz, “Online Place Attachment,” 85–100. 20 Hernan Galperin, “Wireless Networks and Rural Development: Opportunities for Latin America,” Information Technologies and International Development 2, no. 3 (2005): 47–56; James Goodman, “Linking Mobile Phone Ownership and Use to Social Capital in Rural South Africa and Tanzania,” The Vodafone Policy Paper Series 3, no. 53 (2005): 53–65. 21 Araba Sey, “Managing the Cost of Mobile Communications in Ghana,” in Communication Technologies in Latin America and Africa: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol and Adela Ros Híjar (Barcelona: IN3, 2010), 143–166; Sebastian Ureta, “Mobilising Poverty? Mobile Phone Use and Everyday Spatial Mobility among Low-Income Families in Santiago, Chile,” The Information Society 24, no. 83 (2008): 83–92. 22 Pui-lam Law and Yinni Peng, “The Use of Mobile Phones among Migrant Workers in Southern China,” in New Technologies in Global Societies, ed. Pui-lam Law, Leopoldina Fortunati and Shanhua Yang (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific, 2006), 245–258; Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller, “Mobile Phone Parenting: Reconfiguring Relationships between Filipina Migrant Mothers and Their Left-Behind Children,” New Media & Society 13, no. 3 (2011): 457–470; Cara Wallis, “Mobile Phones without Guarantees: The Promises of Technology and the Contingencies of Culture,” New Media & Society 13, no. 3 (2011): 471–485. 23 Jonathan Donner, “Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of Literature,” The Information Society 24 (2008): 140–159. 24 Jonathan Donner, “Microentrepreneurs and Mobiles: An Exploration of the Uses of Mobile Phones by Small Business Owners in Rwanda,” Information Technologies & International Development 2, no. 1 (2004): 1–22. 25 Jonathan Donner and Shikoh Gitau, New Paths: Exploring Mobile-Centric Internet Use in South Africa. Paper presented at the Pre-Conference on Mobile Communication at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association, Chicago, 2009; Jeffrey James and Mila Versteeg, “Mobile Phones in Africa: How Much Do We Really Know?,” Social Indicators Research 84, no. 1 (2007): 117–126; Sey, “Managing the Cost of Mobile Communications in Ghana,” 143–166. 26 Madianou and Miller, “Mobile Phone Parenting,” 457–470; Madanmohan Rao and Mira Desai, “Boom in India: Mobile Media and Social Consequences,” in Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies, ed. James Katz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 389–402. 27 Leonardo Abreu, Um estudo sobre a usabilidade de telefones celulares com usuários de classes populares baseado em critérios ergonômicos (Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, 2010); Adriana de Souza e Silva, Daniel M. Sutko, Fernando A. Salis, & Claudio de Souza e Silva, “Mobile Phone Appropriation in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro,” New Media & Society 13, no. 3 (2011): 363–374; Sandra Silva, “Telefonia móvel e questões de gênero: aspectos socioculturais da apropriação de telefones celulares entre mulheres

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29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47

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em situação de vulnerabilidade social,” Diálogo Regional sobre Sociedad de la Información (2011). Lucia Cipriano and Ana Maria Nicolaci-da-Costa, “Celulares pagos por empregadores: benefício ou malefício?,” Psicologia: Ciência e Profissão 29, no. 1 (2009): 147–159; Ana Maria Nicolaci-da-Costa, “‘Tudo ao mesmo tempo’: realidade ou ilusão?,” Psicologia: Ciência e Profissão 31, no. 3 (2011): 602–615. Andre Lemos, “Cidade e mobilidade. Telefones celulares, funções pós-massivas e territórios informacionais,” MATRIZes 1, no. 1 (2009): 121–137; Andre Lemos, “Mídias locativas e vigilância. Sujeito inseguro, bolhas digitais, paredes virtuais e territórios informacionais,” in Vigilância e visibilidade: espaço, tecnologia e identificação, ed. Rodrigo Firmino, Fernanda Bruno and Marta Kanashiro (Porto Alegre, RS: Sulina, 2010), 61–93; Paulo Victor Sousa and Rodrigo Cunha, “Entre o ser e o estar: a representação do eu e do lugar no Foursquare,” in Mídias sociais: saberes e representações, ed. José C. Ribeiro, Thiago Falcão and Tarcízio Silva (Salvador, BA: EDUFBA, 2012), 31–46. Ana Maria Nicolaci-da-Costa, “O campo da pesquisa qualitativa e o método de explicitação do discurso subjacente (MEDS),” Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica 20, no. 1 (2007): 65–73. Ibid. Ana Maria Nicolaci-da-Costa, Daniela Romão-Dias, and Flavia Di-Luccio, “Uso de entrevistas on-line no método de explicitação do discurso subjacente (MEDS),” Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica 22, no. 1 (2009): 36–43. Unlimited plans whose speed drops when a user reaches a certain threshold is a common practice among Brazilian cell phone carriers. All names have been changed to preserve anonymity. Interviews were originally in Portuguese. Translation by the authors. ITU 2013, Market Information and Statistics (STAT), http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ ict/statistics/index.html. Rich Ling, Taken for Grantedness: The Embedding of Mobile Communication into Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). de Souza e Silva and Frith, Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces. de Souza e Silva and Frith, “Locational Privacy in Public Spaces,” 503–525. Louise Barkhuus and Anind Dey, Location-Based Services for Mobile Telephony: A Study of Users’ Privacy Concerns. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the INTERACT 2003, 9TH IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Berkeley. de Souza e Silva and Frith, “Locational Privacy in Public Spaces,” 503–525. de Souza e Silva and Frith, Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces; Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice,” 341–360; Christian Licoppe and Romain Guillot, “ICTs and the Engineering of Encounters: A Case Study of the Development of a Mobile Game Based on the Geolocation of Terminals,” in Mobile Technologies of the City, ed. John Urry and Mimi Sheller (New York: Routledge, 2006), 152–163. Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Urban Public Space,” 763–778. Licoppe and Inada, “Mediated Co-Proximity and Its Dangers in a Location-Aware Community,” 100–128. de Souza e Silva and Frith, “Locative Mobile Social Networks,” 485–506. Andrew Blumberg and Peter Eckersley, On Locational Privacy and How to Avoid Losing It Forever, http://www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy. Dourish and Bell, Divining a Digital Future. Daniel Solove, Understanding Privacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

44 Adriana de Souza e Silva et al. 48 Dourish and Bell, Divining a Digital Future, 151. 49 Jeferson Ribeiro, Governo fará campanha para evitar comércio de celulares roubados, http://g1.globo.com/Noticias/Brasil/0,,MUL1436617-5598,00-GOVER NO+FARA+CAMPANHA+PARA+EVITAR+COMERCIO+DE+CELULARES+ ROUBADOS.html. 50 Paulo R. G. Vaz, Carolina Sá-Carvalho, and Mariana Pombo, “A vítima virtual e sua alteridade: A imagem do criminoso no noticiário do crime,” Revista Famecos 1, no. 30 (2006): 71–80. 51 Solove, Understanding Privacy. 52 Dourish and Bell, Divining a Digital Future.

Chapter 3

Proximity awareness and the privatization of sexual encounters with strangers The case of Grindr Christian Licoppe, Carole Anne Rivière and Julien Morel

Introduction One important – if not the main – use of location-aware mobile applications is to provide users with location-related information about other persons with whom they may interact both on screen and ‘in real life’. Initially developed around mobile gaming,1 they have more recently been integrated into mobile social networking applications,2 such as Dodgeball3 or Foursquare.4 As with many location-aware services, the increased opportunities for the discovery of mutual proximity offered by smartphone-mediated location awareness plays a crucial role as a resource for the initiation of encounters.5 One crucial feature of such mobile services is how it reshapes the way users may experience their environment, involving distinctive forms of embodied experience.6 Location-aware mobile users experience contexts as ‘hybrid ecologies’,7 which they inhabit by weaving together mobility and sociality in a constant rearticulation of onscreen and ‘real life’ perceptions and actions. As existing spatial contexts undergo breakdown and reformation, there emerge practical tactics for navigating their localities; context collapse can thus mean new opportunities for its inhabitants. The mobile application we will consider, called Grindr, pioneered the integration of location awareness into what was basically a digital dating service. Web-based dating services have been around for some time. While often professing to support the initiation of romantic encounters through profile-matching, they may also be used for managing quick series of brief and short-lived sex-oriented encounters.8 It has also been shown that the design of such digital dating systems (offering a wide array of potentially ‘consumable’ profiles to be searched from) has contributed to the reification and marketization of such encounters.9 As we will try to argue here, bringing mobility and location awareness into a

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digital dating service design promotes an orientation towards immediacy and spatial proximity as crucial resources for the emergence of social encounters with strangers, and more specifically the recognizable kind of social encounters for which immediacy might be a relevant concern. Based on an analysis of how Grindr users notice and select potential contacts, we will discuss how such a location-aware mobile application is used mostly as a resource for the initiation of a particular framing of the encounters, which participants call a ‘plan cul’ in French (which we will translate here as a ‘one-night stand’, though it does not necessarily involve spending the night together). The repetition of fleeting sexual encounters with strangers constitutes a particular ‘sexual script’,10 one which articulates the intrapsychic level of sexual arousal with conventional interpersonal patterns of interaction and recognizable cultural scenarios. Grindr users are mostly male homosexuals, and such a sexual script had already been a part of their group culture. Before the digital age, the initiation and achievement of quick encounters of a sexual nature between male homosexuals had traditionally been confined to particular public places, while constituting a deviant, and often illegal, conduct.11 Such practices have been the subject of ethnographic research, with a focus on urban gay communities, cruising gay bars and other public places.12 Interactionist sociology has also shown how such a minority-oriented management of public places involves the development of specific interactional competences.13 Impersonal sexual encounters with anonymous strangers occur in particular public places, the knowledge of which indexes membership. They also involve mobility (just to get there), and some degree of risk (there might be no potential partner there; alternatively, since these are public places, they are also accessible to potentially hostile groups). It therefore comes as no surprise that first personal ads in the press14 and, more recently, web-based dating services have provided a significant alternative for managing such encounters from a distance, also allowing them to occur in more private places. By virtue of Grindr being available on mobile devices and affording location awareness, the application furthers the organization and achievement of such ‘one-night stands’ from and within the home. In that respect, such a process could be seen as symmetrical to ‘the parochialization’ of public spaces in which the use of location-aware social networking applications leads to a form of ‘privatized’ habitation of public spaces.15 By combining the kind of immediate availability that was the mark of public spaces colonized by male homosexuals for sexual purposes with the spatial disembedding of spatial contexts afforded by online social networks, Grindr can be argued to ‘afford’ and ‘privatize’ quick sexual encounters with strangers, harnessing daily mobilities as a resource for this process, and deeply reshaping the urban experience of that particular community along the way.

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In this paper, we will focus more specifically on the way Grindr users navigate through town and the app interface; that is, how they articulate attention and mobility practices so that serendipitous opportunities for sexual encounters of a certain kind might emerge. Proximity combines with images to frame an orientation to the Grindr interface which couples perception and action in a particular way. The Grindr interface and its gallery of portraits, ranked according to an index of spatial proximity with the user, are scanned for cues which project a typical kind of encounter – the script of which is geared towards projecting the physical appearance and spatial proximity of potential partners, the immediacy of the encounter, with an end towards sexual gratification and its commodification. In this particular orientation to the Grindr interface, the response to a suitably attractive and proximal profile is to experience desire and initiate contact, i.e. an exchange of text messages, as soon as possible. Bruno Latour has famously argued that human action occurs in an environment of things which infused it with morality.16 As we will see, Grindr offers us an example of how sexual arousal may be experienced through the screen-mediated perception of spatial proximity (and ensuing possible availability) of potentially willing strangers. Location-aware technologies, shared expectations and social concerns are embedded at all levels of sexual scripts, whether intrapsychic, interpersonal or cultural. In Grindr encounters, sexual arousal, patterns of interaction and cultural framings of possible encounters are hybrids of human and technology: proximity awareness and mobile media become constitutively tied to the experience of sexual arousal.

The Grindr application Grindr is a mobile social networking application based on location awareness. Users fill in a profile which becomes accessible through the website – one which is biased towards physical appearance (age, weight, height, ethnic origin, interest, relational status) and includes a photograph and tagline. This profile becomes visible to other users based on spatial proximity (or independently of proximity if declared a ‘favorite’). When a user connects to the website, he sees a mosaic of other profiles, ranked mostly according to spatial proximity (Figure 3.1). As he moves, his homepage evolves accordingly, displaying transient, mobility-driven arrays of potential partners. The salience of the proximity index in the homepage strongly links potential encounters with spatial proximity. However, there is some residual ‘memory’; unless the user relaunches the application, the contacts who have ‘appeared’ previously will remain on the list, although many of them may no longer be proximate. When the user elects to click on an image, the profile and spatial distance of that person becomes visible, and a mobile chat application may

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Figure 3.1 One of our users’ typical Grindr homepage after connection (as photographed during an interview).

be launched from there. That mobile chat application includes two special functions of interest materialized as specific one-click affordances, i.e. the possibility of sending pictures and one’s location (through a map figuring one’s location, as in Figure 3.2b). The Grindr application functions in the male gay community as a resource to support encounters of an intimate nature. It is therefore used as a mobile dating application – mobile both in the sense of being accessible on smartphones (which makes it usable in mobility settings) and in the fact that spatial proximity (achieved through mobility practices) enables potential contacts.

Figure 3.2a The main chat window.

Figure 3.2b Chat functions, for sending pictures or a clickable geolocalized map featuring the user’s location.

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Table 3.1 Sample composition Age Number (Living with partner)

18–24

25–34

35–44

45–55

Total

4 (1)

7 (3)

6 (4)

6 (4)

23 (12)

Fieldwork We recruited twenty-three male users of Grindr through an ad in a wellknown gay publication. Participants were chosen so as to represent a variety of age groups, with some living alone and some living with a partner (Table 3.1). We conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with all of them. These semi-structured interviews were focused on their uses of Grindr. During the interviews, the participants were also invited to launch the Grindr application and to navigate the site while commenting that experience to the interviewer in order for us to get a more concrete and situated perspective on what they do. All but two of our interviewees were using the freeware version of the application. Four of these twenty-three users agreed to be involved in a more thorough research protocol over a period of one to two weeks. A video recording application was installed on their phone, which they could choose to launch to record their mobile screen activity during extended sequences of Grindr use. They also agreed to wear camera glasses to record the wider context of their activity for a few sessions.17 Though we did not specifically ask for this, most of the recordings (the mobile screen captures and with the camera glasses) were done at home. In the case of the camera glasses, this was less a factor of privacy than of the glasses’ intrusive appearance. These recordings gave us a sense of the actual experience of a Grindr session and how it involves navigating through the application itself, and between the phone and the larger context. For lack of space, and because we focus here on the pre-contact selection of partners and the framing of potential sexual encounters with them, we will leave the discussion of initial contacts by instant messaging for another paper.

Experiencing urban mobilities and public places through the mediation of Grindr Organizing meetings with strangers close by from the home and in the home: the ‘privatization’ of casual hookup practices with strangers Encountering potential partners has always been an issue for homosexuals within the context of a hetero-normative society, one which has often pushed gay practices towards deviance and even illegality. In larger, more

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tolerant urban cities where gay communities are well established, there are specific locales for hooking up with potential gay partners such as bars and saunas. Wherever such urban resources are lacking, a kind of gay colonization of specific public places at particular times tends to develop. Beaches, parks or even public toilets in the case of the ‘tearoom trade’18 become known as potential meeting points within the community. Members of the community have developed specific interactional expertise for manipulating the conventions of ordinary conversation so as to recognize one another’s mutual interest in ‘ordinary’ public places in a way which remains mostly unavailable to co-present heterosexuals.19 In all cases, gaze and embodied conduct (and talk to a lesser extent) are key resources to convey a shared sense of an emergent intimate encounter between initially unacquainted gay participants in public places. Mobile-based dating systems provide a resource to hook up with strangers, thereby minimizing the risks and dangers involved in the gay ‘colonization of public places’. This was particularly noted by interviewees who were living in less tolerant environments such as small towns or the countryside, where there are also less occasions to meet and recognizing one another is more difficult: In the countryside it (Grindr) is a way to recognize gays, since there is no concentration of fags, as in Paris. It’s true that if you are in Clermont-Ferrand, out in the sticks, being able to see if there is somebody around, that’s useful. (A., 23 years old) But this is true as well in more urban environments, where the very availability of Grindr highlights the negative side of some older urban meeting places: For me, digital dating systems answer our needs and allow us to meet people normally. I am not speaking of gay bars where one can meet the same way as in heterosexual bars. But traditional hook up places, such as public toilets, where one has to meet at night in a dirty place, that sucks. From this point of view, Grindr makes things cleaner. Me, I am too young, but I did it once in (small provincial town), just to see. It was at the municipal swimming pool. It’s not dirty, but you have to hide, to go after ten at night, and when you’re young, you’re really fresh meat. (P., 23 years old, living with a partner; our emphasis) Not only do the traditional public meeting places appear to be riskier, they are also more uncomfortable (e.g. it may be raining, or cold) and the outcome of the whole thing there remains uncertain: There is less disappointment (with Grindr) than on the ground: I remember a time when I used to go often (in the city) . . . to the river

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banks. Sometimes when I arrived at eleven at night it sucked: there was nobody any more. And you had to get yourself to move and walk a few miles to get there. (R., 45 years old) Such concerns regarding ‘efficiency’ also show our interviewees’ affinity towards what previous studies have described as the ‘market’ orientation of gay hookup activities, particularly towards strangers. This orientation entails the negotiation of sexual encounters involving only minimal obligations, and towards the maximization of (sexual) benefits and the minimization of the work required to obtain these. In that respect, Grindr clearly appears as a resource for a much more efficient kind of market place for the exchange of sexual services with strangers than traditional gay meeting points. Precisely because it is a mobile application, Grindr severs the link between the search for potential partners and specific locales, especially public places where one is always potentially under the gaze of others, and where one’s behavior is accountable with respect to public norms and institutions. Though Grindr is significantly used on the move, it is also extensively used at home: Before Grindr I was going out more. Grindr makes you stay in, makes you lazy. When one is single, without Grindr, one has to work up the energy to go out for drinks, in gay places or at friends’. (S., 31 years old) While older, internet-based dating services are also used at home, and may even occasionally be used to hook up with strangers for short-term affairs,20 there is a significant difference between these and Grindr, which is the systematic use of location awareness to discriminate potential partners close by, who can be met quickly: I may be home, and when I don’t want to go out, I launch Grindr, or if I want a one-night stand. If it happens that there is someone close by, and we both agree to it, it becomes an easy matter. (C., 40 years old) From the start, the use of Grindr at home is oriented towards casual hookups more quickly than what may be expected from attending gay bars or saunas in person. In that sense, the availability of Grindr and its around the clock location awareness allow what we could call a privatization of practices of casual hookups with strangers and makes more salient the risks and ‘dirtiness’ of some urban meeting points (in turn potentially making the latter

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more attractive for certain people or in certain sexual scenarios). But as (urban) public places may also be defined as the kind of places where we meet or expect to meet strangers,21 where we are ‘thrown together’ with strangers, the other side of such a privatization is also to make the home a place where one may get in touch with and encounter quasi-strangers, for expectedly short-lived encounters of an intimate nature, at least in two different senses. First, because the vicinity of the home is not just a neighborhood of familiar places and faces, but is turned by Grindr into a domain of numerous potential hookups with unacquainted partners all day long, all week long: I have used it in all the neighboring areas around my home. Particularly at night, when there is nobody hanging around. Streets are empty. Then you have no choice, you look at Grindr. And then it’s awesome, there is always someone connected. It’s mega-easy 24 hours on, there is always someone. It’s incredible, it never shuts down. (R. 45 years old) Second, and perhaps most characteristically, one has to open one’s door to virtual strangers for intimate encounters, which both makes the home accountable to the gaze of virtual strangers, and raises issues of trust – a point to which we will come back later. Using Grindr on the move: reconceptualizing the city as an entanglement of mobility trails As Grindr is available as a mobile application on smartphones, it can be used throughout daily mobilities. Users may thus connect on the move or even at work. Then the aim is not to initiate a quick encounter, for this may often not be feasible or practical, but to visualize potential gay contacts in the vicinity of one’s current location. One might thus use Grindr in areas that are rich or poor in terms of proximate contacts, and particularly new contacts with whom one may not have been previously acquainted. Some urban configurations become particularly relevant for new encounters, providing corridors of mobility: At home in M., it’s a bit always the same persons, except for those who are just passing by. So err . . . there are people passing in the RER (one of the Paris public transport systems) I live near Charles de Gaulle there is a lot of passage with people connecting by train or by car. So there are necessarily new faces appearing, new people. I send them messages, for the usual ones (i.e. Grindr users) I already know them or I have already met them. (J., 45 years old)

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Thus Grindr provides a kind of membership category-based location awareness and experience of urban public locales, which is triggered (a) by the use of the Grindr application, and (b) by the user’s own mobility paths vis-a-vis that of other urban denizens and Grindr users. The anthropologist Tim Ingold has opposed transport to mobility and wayfaring to occupation.22 In transport, people are displaced from one site to another without being affected by their movement. They ‘occupy’ successively the locations where they come to stop. Space appears as a network of transport-connected locations. In mobility, people are travelers or wayfarers, experiencing movement as a nexus of constant development, as a trail in which the traveler and his/her environment are indistinguishable and constantly evolving. Places are not occupied but inhabited. Space is understood as a meshwork, an entanglement of such developing trails. Above, J. is reconceptualizing the city in exactly this latter sense – as what Ingold would call a ‘meshwork’ of mobility trails. The denser the meshwork, the more opportunities for serendipitous Grindr-mediated encounters, that is ‘trail-knotting’, which the Grindr user discovers on screen as he treads along – just as the urban flâneur discovers new vistas of urban landscape as he proceeds. The city is not just an urban context. It is a developing environment of entangled mobility trails, potentialities which are constantly unfolding through the mobility-occasioned awareness of unfamiliar potential contacts all around. In that sense, Grindr, and perhaps location-based mobile social networking applications in general, tend towards a partial reshaping of the experience of the industrial metropolis: the anonymous occupants of mass transport systems moving in indifferent cityscapes may become urban wayfarers attuned to the continuing change in their vicinity. Some Grindr users have developed a practice characteristic of this ‘wayfaring’ orientation commonly described as ‘fishing’ or ‘trawling’. It involves keeping the application on during extended periods of time or the whole day, so that potential contacts ‘encountered’ along one’s daily mobilities remain visible on the homepage as long it is not refreshed. The messages sent by connected strangers who have discovered their mutual proximity thanks to the application are also stored. Contacts and messages are therefore kept to be checked later on, for instance when in the quiet of one’s home in the evening: Or else it is as if I were a trawler, and I go to some area, and at the end, I look at what I have gathered in my net, that is I look at the messages I have got while moving around. . . . For instance, if I go to a woman friend’s to work or to have a coffee, she lives in another part of Paris and there will be different boys around. When I get out of the subway, and here I am thinking of a particular friend who lives in the Buttes Chaumont, I have launched the app and I have put the phone in

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my pocket. I don’t bother about it. When I leave, the unread messages appear and I keep them for consultation when I leave the area. (M., 23 years old) Such practices provide evidence for the way the uses of Grindr in the gay male communities are constantly oriented towards meeting new potential contacts: I have exhausted what was around my home . . . then I move to see if there is something else elsewhere, and I go fishing. Hop, I will throw my net some place and look at what happens. I gather the messages, it’s a bit like throwing one’s net at sea. (S., 31 years old) When one is thus ‘throwing one’s net’, one is cruising the city as a reservoir of serendipitous opportunities to meet potential partners along the way, as a mobile body roaming across the city and unfamiliar locales in the course of one’s everyday projects. Such ‘fishing’-like uses of Grindr also rearticulate the experience of urban mobility with the privatization of encounters with strangers, for the new contacts made during the day are usually scanned and maybe acted upon later on, in the ‘privacy’ of one’s home. Hybrid ecologies: using Grindr in traditional gay public hookup places The generalized use of mobile phones and smartphones in public places has raised issues regarding the division of attention between the screen and the larger environment into a public debate issue. Location-aware mobile social networking applications23 are specific in the way that they perform public places as ‘hybrid ecologies’.24 Through the mediation of screens and the interface design of location awareness, persons and places (and the spatial relationship of the user with them) may be experienced either through the usual mediation of senses (such as the gaze) or through that of the mobile screen (seeing someone nearby as a dot on a map on screen, or as a source of messages on a chat application, for instance). Experiencing traditional gay public places with one’s smartphone at hand and the Grindr application launched turns them into ‘hybrid ecologies’ in which one’s gaze continuously alternates between a screen and bodies: On the other hand I saw a funny thing in Andalusia. I was on the beach at Torre Molinos, a gay beach. They had provided Wi-Fi on the beach so that people might connect to Grindr. Everyone was looking down at their smartphone. I did it too, but it spoils the seduction. I have experienced seduction at a beach, where we were gazing at one another. I

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don’t know, there was a little something, while there, everybody is on the smartphone, we don’t speak to one another. (S., 31 years old) People one can see around on the beach are also monitored on screen. The slightly nostalgic tone of the previous comment is worth noticing. It rests on a traditional contrast between (a) physical encounters as continuously evolving events, one outcome of which would be the transformation of a person into an object of seduction, a process which is assigned a positive value, even though it may not be an enchanted romantic moment but a rigidly scripted and emotionally constrained event within the ‘meat market’ orientation of casual hookups in public places, as referred to by several interviewees, and (b) a negatively-valued profile-oriented, ‘colder’ choice on the mobile phone (based on cues such as pictures, pseudonyms, profiles, taglines, prior history of Grindr use, etc.) which would turn a stranger into a potential partner prior to any actual face-to-face interaction. An experience which epitomizes ‘hybrid ecologies’ is that of being co-present with someone one is also interacting with on screen through a location-aware mobile application. The public space version of that particular experience involves co-presence in a public place with someone one is unacquainted with ‘in real life’ but with whom one has been interacting on digital networks. This particular someone is therefore not the anonymous stranger described by urban sociology, nor is he an acquaintance in the usual sense (one might not know his name or be unable to visually recognize him, etc.). The Grindr version involves being in a gay bar with someone one has ‘met’ on Grindr, as in the following account: (Once I) happened to see a guy near me in a bar, and between what he emanated and what he had put on his profile, I found that (difference) completely paradoxical and I told him so. He looked much better on the profile than he actually looked. But it was not a question of his physical appearance, but more what he was emanating. It was (on the profile) like “open guy, kind and positive” and here was a guy who was scowling and did not appear to be easygoing at all. I sent him a message, he looked down and he did not even answer it. I was almost in front of him and he saw very well, and he did not have the balls to reply, even on Grindr. (C., 40 years old) This small account highlights some characteristic features of the experience of inhabiting public places qua ‘hybrid ecologies’. The lived work of producing such an encounter involves the constant monitoring of the ‘physical’ environment and the location-aware onscreen environment to identify and manage potential discrepancies and misalignments (here between the Grindr

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profile and the actual visual and auditory impressions made by the physical presence of the same person). What goes on ‘in real life’ and what goes on onscreen are taken as mutually elaborative. Moreover, such a situation is ‘augmented’ in terms of communication resources: conversation can be managed either as co-present talk, or more discreetly through the channel of the mobile phone application (posited in the account above as involving a lesser degree of accountability).

Proximity awareness and gay hookup practices The use of geolocation distinguishes Grindr and similar applications from the usual internet-based services. Geolocation is not an additional or peripheral gadget, for it provides a kind of proximity awareness which is at the very core of the Grindr experience. To understand the way proximity works here, it is necessary to describe a particular type of sexual hookup between strangers – one which is relatively widespread in the male gay urban culture, though it can also appear in heterosexual conducts as well. Called ‘plan cul’ (‘one-night stand’) in French, this practice has some distinctive features which we summarize here from a previous study.25 The ‘plan cul’ involves strangers who are attractive in this particular framing of sexual activities precisely because they are anonymous strangers. The encounter is expected to be short-lived and not to develop into a relationship (although this may happen, it is rather rare and unexpected, and the whole thing becoming something else altogether). As such, it is repetitive, and is often described as a consumption process, targeting others framed as objectified commodities (often referred to as ‘meat’ or ‘fresh meat’). Such a consumption involves a process metaphorically evoked as ‘hunting’ (to which the ‘fishing’ metaphors used in the previous section are obviously akin) to initiate new encounters with similarly oriented gay strangers. The origin of the ‘plan cul’ is taken to lie in a powerful, almost uncontrollable sexual drive, in line with a representation of male sexuality described as ‘sexual essentialism’ in gender studies. Male urban homosexual communities seem to promote an exacerbated version of such sexual essentialism in their orientation towards ‘plans cul’ or ‘one-night stands’ as a core, and almost definitional, experience. ‘One-night stands’ constitute a recognizable and shared sexual script26 in which a particular sexual encounter is construed as surging from an irrepressible sexual impulse targeting unknown others. Those are literally objects of desire in that the sexual desire focuses on schematic and objectifiable properties of the potential unknown partners such as their sexual preferences (for instance active/passive) or their appearance, but even these may be overlooked. Personal biographies are deemed irrelevant, and not even to be discussed (for this would lead to a different type of encounter altogether). The encounter itself is to develop in a bubble, dissociated from all the other domains of social conduct of the participants,

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which it supposedly doesn’t affect, and which don’t affect it either. This involves specific ‘insulation work’ on the part of the participants in order to make this plausible. Moreover, such an encounter is oriented only towards an immediate gratification and it allegedly does not contribute to any form of subjectivation. It is not expected that the outcome of such an encounter will be psychologically or socially fulfilling, that is that the participants might be changed by the experience or that a relationship might develop between them. Within the insulated domain of sexual experience governed by this script, ‘life’ appears as a repetition of similar sexual encounters which leaves their protagonists possibly sexually satisfied but unchanged. Grindr users seem to operate mostly within such a script. One of our older interviewees thus describes his own orientation towards such sexual scripts in general, that is before and after Grindr: to me not to do anything (not having sexual encounters), it’s a frustration. I am not saying do it all the time and be only in a state of avidity. But for me there is something sound in responding to one’s impulses. If I don’t respond to my impulses, I will accumulate something in me, and it won’t go well. When you are very much sex-oriented, it’s the way it is, and guys are like that. For me if it’s only sex, it’s not unhealthy, even if you are with a regular partner. How many times have I fucked with guys whose name and age I did not know? I did not care. That’s the reality of sex when it is bare and animal. Grindr, it’s mostly this. (R., 45 years old) The dominant Grindr usage therefore involves the immediate, one-shot, repetitive ‘consumption’ in public places sometimes construed as ‘meat markets’ of commodified, nameless and story-less partners, and seems to push such male ‘sexual essentialism’ to its limits: “I use it all the time. When you need to fuck, there you go” (R., 45 years old). This framing orientation seems even to preclude the possibility of a relationship developing when it might be possible: “for me it’s sexual, it’s driven by impulse. Right, maybe the guy might be interesting, but so be it. It’s driven by the impulse. I want sex, I go and have sex” (C., 40 years old). Whatever one might initially be looking for, it’s as if the very use of the application were ‘pushing’ towards that particular script, and constituting a specific ‘affordance’ for such a framing of potential encounters as one-shot, quick and immediate, and of a sexual nature: I found it (Grindr) was very simple and it was really for a consumption of fast sexual encounters. Even if, in the beginning, one has the impression that one may find all types of relationships, one realizes that most are only looking for sexual relationships. (S., 31 years old)

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This script is recognized by Grindr users whether they share it or not. Those who try to use Grindr differently precisely define what they do in contraposition to this dominant script: “I have been going there (on Grindr) for one year, one year and a half. . . . I’m disappointed because people there are only looking for sex” (M., 40 years old). They often describe themselves as a minority who use Grindr with different interests (that is meeting people to establish an enduring form of relationship) either because of stable preferences or special personal circumstances (such as using Grindr differently when one is feeling, for instance, a bit ‘down’). And they all describe Grindr as disappointing, or requiring a thick skin to manage repeated rebuttals from others operating within the main script: Me, I like things that are well established with a (relation-oriented) encounter. . . . I have to calm people (on Grindr). I say to them “I am not like this”. I get rejected, but it is not serious if they reject you. You let the matter drop, that’s all. . . . In the end I have encountered nobody that way, there has been no follow-up. (E., 43 years old) It is a rare and remarkable thing indeed that something else develops from the main script of Grindr usage: I have met no enduring relationship. A lot of sexual encounters, I can’t tell how many. Friendships, none, well there is this one person I see on a regular basis. We talk, we phone. It’s become friendly. Initially, I met him on Grindr for a one-night stand. He is someone living with a partner, actually. We call one another, we don’t meet often but we’ve had a chance of going for a drink, a meal, it’s not sexual anymore. (J.-M., 45 years old) The notion of sexual script allows us to construe sexual practices as inherently social (and not just biologically driven) and based on shared normative expectations regarding the collaborative accomplishment of recognizable sexual encounters. The notion of sexual script also articulates the coalescence of fantasies and arousal at the intrapsychic level with embodied patterns of interaction and cultural scenarios shaping the temporal unfolding of a recognizably sexual encounter.27 Such cultural scenarios and embodied patterns of interaction approximate what Erving Goffman calls ‘activity frames’; resources for participants to recognize what they do together as relevant to a particular and recognizable activity.28 Sexual ‘one-night stands’ involving no tomorrows are such a type of activity frame which involve a cultural scenario and distinctive patterns of interaction. The kind of proximity awareness which Grindr makes visible in the design of its interface both supports and reinforces the script of the recognizable sexual scenario

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‘one-night stand’ with a stranger. Proximity awareness acts as a cue for immediacy and availability, and thus becomes an integral part of sexual arousal. Grindr users weave together close spatial proximity and the possibility of having quick encounters of a sexual nature. Having a suitable potential partner close by triggers the possibility of a quick encounter, while simultaneously reinforcing a normative orientation which makes proximity a condition of the encounter itself. Faraway contacts are often discarded just on the basis of their location, either at the very start (contacts are ranked according to their distance from the user on his Grindr homepage) or later on through the map exchange feature in the chat: With me, the location is important. When it’s too far, one does not feel like hooking up. Farther than one subway stop, it’s too far. And then one sends the map feature and they get the point immediately. It’s better than to say I am there and so on and so forth. It’s an app which is made to meet people in real life, face to face. (A., 23 years old) In a previous study, we demonstrated that the discovery of mutual proximity with someone one knows or can relate to has the important interactional consequence of making conditionally relevant the initiation of an encounter.29 This may occur in person, or on landline phones when someone mentions that a mutual acquaintance is close by.30 Such instances of ‘mutual proximity discovery’ have become more frequent now with mobile phones, over which it is commonplace for conversationalists to mention their locations.31 Making such ‘mutual proximity discovery’ a commonplace, almost constant feature of the urban experience is a central feature of location-aware mobile applications.32 The use of these has thus increased the possibility of proximity-induced encounters to a degree that was unknown before. This particular and general normative treatment of proximity awareness may thus also support Grindr-mediated encounters. The proximity criterion which is so salient for almost all users is not just related to efficiency and quickness in the management of an encounter; it also frames particular expectations regarding the encounter, and the encounter itself: The geolocation, it sometimes makes people dumb. People get obsessed with that criterion. It’s like, well you live more than one mile away from me, or even more than half a mile, then we don’t talk. Some have told me: well no, you’re too far away, I’m not speaking to you. And some even include it in their profile: “at more than one kilometer I won’t move”. For me, it depends on the kind of thing I’m looking for . . . when I am in a phase in which I want to meet someone to know him, then I don’t care as much. (S., 31 years old)

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Turning spatial proximity into a requirement, and using proximity awareness to enact it, dovetails with the characteristics of the ‘plan cul’. That particular script is nicely contrasted in the quote above with another script, ‘meeting someone’, that is encountering someone to get to know him in a way that some relationship may develop over time. Phenomenologists have argued that to a man with a hammer in his hand, the world looks like it is made of nails. There is something similar at play here. Since proximity is made salient in the interface design, so are the cultural framings of possible sexual encounters for which such a proximity would be relevant, that is immediate, one-time-only sexual trysts: “One will say that Grindr is faster with respect to websites, and one knows what one might want. Grindr it’s really one-night stands. It’s for fast hunts, fast encounters” (P., 44 years old). To a ‘Grindrian’ with a smartphone in his hand and the location-aware application open, the world appears to be made of potential quick sexual rendezvous with strangers, while all kinds of other potentialities for which proximity and immediacy are not as relevant (such as relationship-oriented encounters) recede into the background. Grindr’s design, including proximity awareness, similarly supports and reinforces the orientation of users towards the framing of their sexual practices as frequent and one-off, evoking consumption and market-like transactions. Proximity awareness makes the organization of quick encounters a trivial matter in two respects. First, it makes the connection to a significant number of potential partners a constant possibility. Second, it supports an orientation towards quickness and immediacy by highlighting spatial closeness. The combination of availability and the expectation of immediacy based on spatial proximity reinforces the sense of Grindr-mediated encounters as consumption: “If you want everything right now, obviously you have everything around you, so you choose, you shop around. That’s the goal. It’s good, it’s very good. Its quickness, quick consumables” (D., 39 years old). One crux of this entanglement of Grindr with gay male sexual essentialist scripts for sex-driven encounters seems to be precisely the emotional and embodied connection Grindr users appear to experience between their perception of spatial closeness (the sense of which is provided by mobile interface-mediated proximity awareness) and sexual arousal. The sense of spatial proximity is also mediated by pictures and profiles, the access to which cannot be separated from proximity awareness, for the Grindr interface provides pictures linked to profiles and ranked by proximity (see Figure 3.1). So pictures constitute a key trigger, before initiating a contact and also after: On Grindr, if you don’t like the face of the guy, you tune it out. Eventually you don’t take the risk of being disappointed. Or, when one gets disappointed, it is because the picture does not correspond to the product. (A., 23 years old)

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Pictures thus provide a sense of the desirability of a potential contact, qua commodity. But it’s not just the picture in itself, it is the picture plus the spatial proximity of its subject which projects immediate availability, and leads to arousal: Just the fact of knowing, right, that you have three guys, four guys within a radius of 500 meters, a distance you can easily walk, will perhaps make you tell yourself, well, I might do a one-night stand right now, more than if they were two kilometers away. The distance, the proximity enable the arousal. Proximity, if there is some feeling, it may work. It stimulates, it creates desire. (A., 23 years old) Proximity, taken as a visual cue provided by the socio-technical infrastructure, the feeling of immediate availability it entails, and sexual arousal are so deeply entangled that the sexual drive cannot be represented any more as emanating from the depths of the individual psyche. Not only are intrapsychic, interpersonal and cultural levels entangled in the production of recognizable sexual activities (an idea which was at the core of the sexual script concept), but we see here that such an entanglement also hybridizes the human with the technology. In Grindr encounters, sexual arousal and desire are mediated by the design of the Grindr interface and the location awareness technology as well as by cultural scenarios or interpersonal patterns of interaction.

Conclusion Grindr enables gay users to weave together different strands of prior practice into a distinctive use. There was the use of web-based dating sites, which are mostly used/searched on computers and from the home. These might mix gay and heterosexual users and allow the organization of one-shot sexual encounters (though these had to occur in larger time frames than with Grindr, since proximity had to be discovered in the course of contacts) while being promoted as supporting the build-up of long-term, romantic relationships. Grindr also takes from these websites their orientation towards profile-based matching and reification of encounters. Grindr also builds on the particular gay practice of meeting more or less covertly with strangers in pre-defined public places for quick and often clandestine sexual encounters. Grindr users weave these strands of practice through the mediation of the mobile application interface and affordances into a distinctive user scenario and scripting of potential encounters: quick sexual encounters between strangers (that is, something to be done within the half hour) based on location awareness. This has two important consequences regarding the reshaping of the spatial context. First, the practice of quick, immediate

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sexual encounters with gay strangers is ‘privatized’. Instead of being initiated and taking place in uncertain and potentially dangerous public places, they can be organized from home and usually happen in the home of one of the participants. Second, it redefines the experience of the city and of urban mobility. As one usually exhausts rather quickly the available gay strangers in one’s own neighborhood, many Grindr users keep their application open during the day, thus ‘fishing’ for potential new contacts in the course of their daily activities. The whole city then appears as a potential fishing or hunting ground, and mobilities are augmented with the possibility of stocking contacts along the road, just as the mobile Grindr users are augmented with the mobile application kept alive on their smartphones. Routine commutes may thus become ‘fishing’ trips. Grindr users are seen to operate within a dominant ‘sexual script’, in which encounters are perceived as arising from a ‘pure’ uncontrollable sexual drive (at the intrapsychic level), focused on the repetitive, one-off and fast sexual consumption of unknown, objectified others in what is sometimes described as a ‘meat market’ (at the interpersonal and cultural levels). Encounters may thus be framed as separate and disembedded from all other domains of sociality. Such a sexual script pre-exists Grindr, particularly in the gay male community. However, Grindr both supports it and reinforces its significance. The combination of others appearing as pictures and profiles and proximity awareness enable a tighter articulation between availability and immediacy on the one hand and the particular sexual scenario summarized as the ‘plan cul’ (or ‘one-night stand’) on the other. The perception of spatial proximity appears embedded in the very emergence of the sexual impulse which allegedly ‘drives’ the production of the sexual encounter. We have here an example of how location awareness and mobile social networking infrastructures materialized into the particular design of a mobile dating application may blend into the social and experiential fabric of the sex drive itself (within a distinctive and recognizable script) and performatively enact such a script. One might eventually wonder about the relative ease with which Grindr users open the door of their homes to strangers they don’t know for such an intimate sort of encounter. The interactional disembedding of the encounter with respect to individual social and cultural attachments and to developmental concerns is at the origin of this somewhat paradoxical kind of trust. While our conventional notion of trust posits it as grounded into mutual knowledge, for many Grindr users it is precisely when their contacts display an orientation towards disregarding any interest with the provision of personal information and the development of relationships that they can be trusted for a one-shot home tryst. Should the initial contact display any interest for personal preferences or narratives, the possibility of such an encounter at home framed by the script of the ‘one-night stand’ recedes, for it involves being sure that when the encounter is over, it will be as if nothing

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at all had happened on a relational level, and the temporary partners won’t look back in a different way (which would involve further contact and potentially embarrassing accountabilities). The kind of trust required in the typical use of Grindr cultivates a desire for mutual ignorance rather than mutual knowledge.

Acknowledgements This work was funded by the ‘Social network chair’ of the Institut MinesTelecom (http://chairereseaux.wp.mines-telecom.fr/), which we thank for its support.

Notes 1 Christian Licoppe and Yoriko Inada, “Locative Media and Cultures of Mediated Proximity: The Case of the Mogi Game Location-Aware Community,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no. 4 (2010): 691–709; Adriana de Souza e Silva and Larissa Hjorth, “Playful Urban Spaces: A Historical Approach to Mobile Games,” Simulation & Gaming 40, no. 5 (2009): 602–625. 2 Adriana de Souza e Silva and Daniel Sutko, Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces (New York: Peter Lang, 2009); Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith, “Locative Mobile Social Networks: Mapping Communication and Location in Urban Spaces,” Mobilities 5, no. 4 (2009): 485–505. 3 Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (New Brunswick, Canada: Transaction, 1970). 4 Jordan Frith, “Constructing Location, One Check-in at a Time: Examining the Practices of Foursquare Users,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Texas (2012), http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/8064/1/etd.pdf; Jordan Frith, “Turning Life into a Game: Foursquare, Gamification and Personal Mobility,” Mobile Media and Communication 1, no. 2 (2013): 248–262; Christian Licoppe and M.-C. Legout, “Living Inside Location-Aware Mobile Social Information: The Pragmatics of Foursquare Notifications,” in Living inside Mobile Social Information, ed. J. Katz (Dayton, OH: Greyden Press, 2014), 109–130. 5 Licoppe and Inada, “Locative Media and Cultures of Mediated Proximity.” 6 Jason Farman, Mobile Interfaces: Embodied Space and Locative Media (London: Routledge, 2012). 7 Andy Crabtree and Tom Rodden, “Hybrid Ecologies: Understanding Cooperative Interaction in Emerging Physical-Digital Environments,” Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 12 (2008): 481–493. 8 Pascal Lardellier, Les réseaux du cœur (Paris: Francois Bourin Editeur, 2012). 9 Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 10 John Gagnon and William Simon, Sexual Conduct (Chicago: Aldine, 1973). 11 Gavin Brown, “Urban (Homo)sexualities: Ordinary Cities and Ordinary Sexualities,” Geography Compass 2, no. 4 (2008): 1215–1231. 12 Humphreys, Tearoom Trade. 13 Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: The Free Press, 1963), 142–143.

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14 H. G. Cocks, Classified: The History of the Personal Column (London: Random House, 2009). 15 Laud Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Urban Public Spaces,” New Media and Society 12, no. 5 (2010): 763–778. 16 Bruno Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society, ed. W. Bijker and J. Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 225–258. 17 For an example of the application of such an observation protocol to the use of public places, see: Christian Licoppe and Julien Figeac, “Direct Observation of the Use of Smartphones on the Move: Reconceptualizing Multi-Activity,” in Mobility and Locative Media, ed. A. de Souza e Silva and M. Sheller (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015), 48–64. 18 Humphreys, Tearoom Trade. 19 Goffman, Behavior in Public Places. 20 Lardellier, Les réseaux du cœur. 21 Lyn Lofland, The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1998). 22 Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011). 23 De Souza and Frith, “Locative Mobile Social Networks.” 24 Crabtree and Rodden, “Hybrid Ecologies.” 25 J.-F. Bayart, Le plan cul. Ethnographie d’une pratique sexuelle (Paris: Fayard, 2014). 26 Gagnon and Simon, Sexual Conduct; John Gagnon, “The Implicit and Explicit Use of the Scripting Perspective in Sex Research,” Annual Review of Sex Research 1 (1990): 1–44. 27 Ibid. 28 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). 29 Christian Licoppe, “Recognizing Mutual ‘Proximity’ at a Distance: Weaving Together Mobility, Sociality and Technology,” Journal of Pragmatics 41, no. 10 (2009): 1924–1937. 30 For a landline phone example, see: Erving Schegloff, “Notes on a Conversational Practice: Formulating Place,” in Studies in Social Interaction, ed. D. Sudnow (New York: The Free Press, 1972), 75–119. 31 Christian Licoppe and Julien Morel, “Interactionally Generated Encounters and the Accomplishment of Mutual Proximity in Mobile Phone Conversations,” in Interaction and Mobility: Language and the Body in Motion, ed. P. Haddington, L. Mondada and M. Neville (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), 277–299. 32 Licoppe and Inada, “Locative Media and Cultures of Mediated Proximity.”

Chapter 4

Dispossession and the right to the city Margaret Kohn

One of the key methodological principles of spatial analysis is attention to the concrete, material, and everyday life. The starting point of this paper is a particular case of “context collapse”: the destruction of public housing projects in the United States funded by the Hope VI program. This program provided federal funds for the demolition of more than 100,000 severely distressed public housing units and promoted mixed-income neighborhoods and rent subsidies as alternatives. Together with market-driven gentrification, these programs have displaced inner-city residents from central cities. This paper examines the strengths and limitations of Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” as a way of understanding the harm of dispossession and the possibilities of resistance.1 Does a right to housing help secure the right to the city or does it undermine this goal by reinforcing the individualistic ethos of rights? In order to answer this question, I draw on the work of Henri Lefebvre, who thoughtfully explores the relationship between place, justice, and rights.

The collapse of public housing The term collapse is often employed metaphorically to suggest some sort of breakdown. In the case of public housing in the United States, however, collapse is a literal description of the physical transformation of buildings into rubble and debris. Scholars have pointed out that the physical destruction of public housing is one component of the shift away from social democratic/ welfarist urban policy toward a neoliberal approach to the city.2 The expansion of public housing in the post-war period was predicated on two key ideas: a normative principle of social solidarity and a political theory about the efficacy of government in carrying out large-scale projects. In the United States, both of these emerged out of the experience of the Great Depression and the mobilization of World War II. One of the first major public housing initiatives was the construction of the Pruitt-Igoe towers in St. Louis, Missouri. The complex was built in the early 1950s and was composed of 33 eleven-story high rises. Accounts emphasized the flaws of modernist

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architecture and the pathologies of residents as key factors in explaining the dystopian social and physical environment.3 In fact, St. Louis was undergoing major demographic change in this period due to de-industrialization. The population of the city as a whole declined by 50% and unemployment increased dramatically. Today the site of the former housing project is wilderness and surrounding poor neighborhoods are also in a state of physical decay. Blocks of stately brick homes still stand but many are abandoned, partly deconstructed, exposed to the elements and overgrown with vegetation. In some ways, the history of the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago reassembles Pruitt-Igoe. Cabrini-Green was originally conceived as housing for returning World War II veterans, but the project was expanded to accommodate blacks who were arriving in large numbers from the south. Since white aldermen blocked the construction of integrated public housing in their wards, the only way to meet the demand was the construction of high density housing in industrial or minority areas.4 Federal guidelines also mandated very low construction costs and eligibility rules that excluded all but the poorest residents; together, these had the effect of concentrating poverty. After completion, 15,000 very low-income people lived in 24 poor-quality high-rise towers and low-rise townhouses. Like Pruitt-Igoe, Cabrini-Green came to be described through a “discourse of disaster” which pathologized residents and the built environment of the development. In both cases, the local housing authorities did not provide adequate funds for building maintenance, which meant that tenants were forced to pay high rents, the buildings fell into disrepair, and many units became uninhabitable. The last of the Cabrini-Green towers was demolished in 2011. This collapse was the culmination of a decade-long plan to restructure public housing in Chicago by razing the most dilapidated housing stock, renovating other units, expanding the availability of vouchers for private rentals, and creating new mixed-income developments with integrated social housing. Funding came in part from Hope VI, a Federal Program. The Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA) “Plan for Transformation” called for the demolition of 48,000 deteriorating units that were to be replaced with 25,000 new or reconstructed units, including 9,000 designated for senior citizens.5 The geographic, demographic, and political contexts, however, differ considerably between the two cases. The demolition of Pruitt-Igoe took place in the context of white flight to the suburbs, which exacerbated ongoing economic and population decline in the inner city. The market value of the land was low and the site has not been redeveloped. In Chicago, the reverse is the case. Cabrini-Green is located in proximity to Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile and Lincoln Park. Given the economic vitality and growing population, the site of Cabrini-Green had enormous potential for profitable redevelopment. It has been redeveloped as a mixed-income community and

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townhouses and condos have sold for over half a million dollars. The housing crash in 2008 did weaken the market for these units considerably and the related decline in property tax revenue has also slowed the construction of replacement public housing, but construction of the new neighborhoods is moving forward. A new neighborhood has emerged phoenix-like from the debris, but it is not home to the public housing residents who used to live on the site. Despite a consent decree guaranteeing displaced public housing residents a right of return, strict eligibility rules including annual drug testing, limits on visitors, and credit checks have made these new, mixed-income communities less accessible than the housing they replaced.6 Only 400 former Cabrini-Green residents have been allocated apartments in the new mixed-income townhouses built on the site. A comprehensive overview of empirical research on the CHA Plan for Transformation found that less than half of the original 26,199 families who were displaced and guaranteed a “right of return” were still in the public housing system and 2,163 had been placed in mixed-income communities.7

The right to housing and the right to the city In order to counter the “discourse of disaster” that was used to pathologize public housing projects, the residents of Cabrini-Green asserted a counter-narrative that emphasized home, community, and human rights.8 Tenant leaders and activists asserted that housing was a human right. Scholars and activist groups have also employed the language of rights in order to challenge the displacement of low-income residents through gentrification, foreclosure, and demolition of public housing.9 Unlike more familiar rights such as the right to free speech or the right to a fair trial, the right to housing is a normative or political demand rather than a constitutional right. What exactly is implied by this claim? In The Urban Revolution, Henri Lefebvre argued that the right to the city is something distinct from the right to housing.10 I think that this claim was meant to encourage people to think more radically. The right to housing could be construed as a claim to access the existing capitalist city. Lefebvre’s “right to the city,” on the other hand, was a call to re-imagine a city oriented to use value, play, and new modes of production and exchange. Is the right to housing simply a reformist strategy or could it be a way of advancing this more general right to the city? The right to housing is frequently mentioned as one of a longer list of social rights, such as education, healthcare, and food security. In a famous essay, “Citizenship and Social Class,” T. H. Marshall distinguished between three components of citizenship: civil, political, and social.11 The civil component protected individual freedom through the classic negative liberties: freedom of speech, property ownership, religion, association, and limits on arbitrary punishment. The political component refers to the right to exercise equal power in authoritative political institutions. For Marshall, these

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were not conceived of as abstract universal rights but rather as principles of social organization that emerged historically. Social rights were an outgrowth of civil and political rights; they were asserted by newly enfranchised worker-citizens who began to use their political power to promote policies meant to mitigate the inequalities produced through capitalist development. Social rights rest on the claim that the basic pre-conditions necessary to realize equal freedom and political power should also be equalized. In other words, things like education, healthcare, adequate food and shelter should be provided to citizens who cannot acquire them in the market. The right to housing is one kind of social right. In places such as India, Brazil, and South Africa, social rights have been explicitly included in the constitution. State constitutions in Belgium, Finland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden also specify either a right to housing or include provisions specifying that the provision of adequate housing is a state responsibility.12 Other countries have passed statutes guaranteeing a legally enforceable right to housing. For example, in March 2007, French legislators passed a law known as the “Droit au Logement.”13 When displaced urban residents claim that “housing is a human right” they are at least in part drawing on this social rights tradition, but I think that this captures only part of their claim. Tenant activists challenged the Chicago Plan for Transformation in order to secure alternative housing, but many were not satisfied by the alternative offered to displaced residents. The alternative was the “Housing Choice Voucher Program,” which subsidized the cost of market rental housing for low-income people. The vouchers are a less robust guarantee of housing since landlords are not required to accept them and many landlords in fact discriminate against voucher holders. In places with a strong rental market, only the least desirable units and neighborhoods are accessible to voucher holders. Another issue was the fact of displacement itself and the loss of a range of non-commodified goods that are attached to place. These include community, security, informal networks of reciprocity, access to public spaces, and proximity to jobs. A voucher for an apartment on the periphery of Chicago would fulfill the right to housing but would not prevent the wrong of displacement and the harm of a certain kind of homelessness. By homelessness I do not mean the lack of shelter but rather the experience of living in a place that feels alienating because it is cut off from a broader social and cultural context for dwelling. A narrow “right to housing” rests on the assumption of fungibility. One residential unit can be easily replaced by another and therefore moving from one place to another does not entail a harm. Sometimes this may, in fact, be the case. Moving from one unit to another within a building or neighborhood may not be too disruptive. Social ties can be maintained and employment and cultural activities are still accessible. Yet even small geographic distances can have enormous implications for social ties and access to public goods. One only need to look at the difference in prices commanded by

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homes in “good” versus “bad” school zones to recognize that even one block can make an enormous difference in securing access to particularized public goods. All sorts of positive or negative externalities such as environmental conditions and public transit access are produced by micro-geographies and are reflected in dramatic differences in home prices.14 This shows how much place matters and belies the claim that displacement is not harmful when some form of alternative housing is provided. The right to housing is complicated because physical space is limited in a way that health or education are not. It is also very different from the right to free speech or a fair trial, which can be universalized more easily. Your right to a fair trial makes my right more secure but your right to a housing unit leaves one less place for me to live. The city is more open and dynamic than a housing unit, but it is also bounded and limited. Far from being open spaces, medieval cities were walled and exclusive. They were organized as corporations for the benefit of members. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, poor relief was a local responsibility and American cities such as Boston restricted residency in order to exclude inhabitants who might need assistance. There was a careful distinction between “inhabitants” and “unsettled” strangers who did not have a legitimate claim on communal beneficence. Strangers could be physically prevented from entering a town or “warned out” of the jurisdiction by authorities.15 Contemporary cities do not have the authority to exclude legal residents of the polity, but they have adopted indirect measures in order to restrict residence and access. The long history of exclusionary zoning is well known.16 By mandating minimum lot and dwelling sizes and banning multi-family units, towns and neighborhoods have excluded workers and poor people from residency.17 Some towns such as the suburbs of Richmond have blocked intra-urban bus service in order to prevent poor black inner-city residents from accessing the surrounding areas. These strategies of physical separation, of inclusion and exclusion, remind us of the way that physical space differs from other activities and interests that are protected by rights. Someone else’s right to a fair trial or protection from unreasonable search and seizure does not diminish my own enjoyment of these same protections. In fact, it would probably strengthen my own security if these principles become more widely respected. The right to housing, however, is very different because two claims to possession of physical space are mutually exclusive. At least when the right to property is conceived as exclusive ownership and the right to exclude, one person’s claim to a particular house or apartment has the effect of preventing the access of others. Anyone who has unsuccessfully bid on a house or competed against dozens of other applicants for a rental apartment recognizes that this is true. Some people acquire sought-after housing while others are forced to live in the suburbs, in overcrowded conditions, with relatives, or even on the street. In some places the street itself is an exclusive space, not available for sleeping or

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resting.18 “Public” housing too is often inaccessible; it is allocated to a small number of families who are still in need after years or sometimes decades on a waiting list. This account depicts physical space as a limited resource and describes the attempt to acquire housing as a zero-sum game. But is this really the case? Cities can become denser in order to accommodate more people in the same geographic area. Through vertical construction or careful design, more people can live in the same amount of space. Large, exclusive spaces could be shared and rendered accessible to more people. Perhaps we need to challenge the view of place as something private and best enjoyed alone or with small groups of intimates. Public and common spaces, for example, become more vibrant, vital, and appealing precisely because they are crowded with other people. This variety can itself be a source of visual delight and social opportunity. People choose to live in cities because the concentration of other people makes it possible to build networks with others who share idiosyncratic tastes, to encounter strangers, and to have new experiences. This more optimistic and perhaps utopian account of space as open, complex, accessible, malleable, and inclusive undoubtedly contains some truth, but it co-exists uneasily with a more exclusive and territorial relationship to place. This reflects contradictory desires for both order and disorder. One part of the psyche wants comfort, habit, routine, predictability, control, and familiarity. This part is threatened by encounters with others who do not follow the same informal codes of behavior: people who seem to transgress unwritten rules and thereby cast doubt upon the legitimacy of these rules. Since we cannot directly control the behavior of others we must rely on norms and conventions to secure the compliance of others. This may be one reason why minor signs of transgression or difference can cause such disproportionate anger and fear. On the other hand, part of the allure of the contemporary city is precisely its variety, novelty, and even sublime character. The city stages many forms of difference: ethnic neighborhoods, sports-and-entertainment spectacles, the scale of the financial district, the menace of the favelas, the festival of the plaza. In Lacan’s account of the psyche, the superego is not the source of prohibition but rather the site of a kind of incitement: the command to enjoy.19 This command, however, is also the source of anxiety because it compels us to disrupt the comfort of routines and exposes us to experiences of guilt or disappointment that comes from the inability to enjoy. This approach to the psyche, I believe, helps us understand the inclusionary and exclusionary impulses in cities. It also explains the popularity of a variety of new urban and suburban forms: the New Urbanist community, the “mixed-income” downtown development, the bohemian, gentrifying neighborhood, the industrial-heritage mall or arts complex. What all of these have in common is the way they promise a certain kind of enjoyment without really jeopardizing security and predictability.20

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At first, this account may seem antithetical to the theme of this chapter with its emphasis on urban justice and rights. A psychoanalytic approach seems to cast doubt on the viability of the fundamental assumptions that underpin a theory of rights: universalism, abstraction, and reason. At the end of the chapter I will return to this objection and argue that certain kinds of rights claims actually expose the ideological character of dominant understandings of rights in a way that can advance urban justice. For now, however, I want to emphasize that the language of property rights is important politically because of the way that it helps sustain the tension between these two impulses. By sustain the tension I mean that it helps limit the stronger exclusionary tendencies in cities. The claim to a “right to the city” is necessary because of the strength of the structural and cultural tendencies towards exclusion. As Neil Smith, David Harvey, and others have pointed out, this exclusion is primarily economic in character.21 Gentrification follows a cycle of disinvestment and re-investment. The built environment is formed, in part, through accumulation by dispossession. This began with the dispossession of indigenous peoples and continues with the destruction of informal settlements and public housing projects today. Yet there is also a great deal of variation in the ability and willingness to use political regulation to facilitate or limit dispossession and displacement. For example, in post-war Amsterdam, between 70% and 90% of new construction was social housing, and by 2003 55% of housing stock was owned by 14 non-profit subsidized housing associations.22 In contrast, New York City, the largest public housing authority in North America, provides public housing or rent subsidies to 7.6% of the city’s population.23 This contrast underscores the fact that different global cities can still respond to structural forces by restraining or facilitating market dynamics. The right to public space, to the city, and to housing as well as the values of solidarity, equality, and local justice are the discursive terrain on which men become conscious of exclusion and frame their opposition to it.

Lefebvre and Marx So far I have suggested that the right to housing is an important dimension of the right to the city. It is a dimension of social rights but it also exceeds the logic of redistribution and welfare insofar as it rests on a claim to particular places that are not fungible. The right to housing can be something more than a claim to shelter when it insists on the value of home, connection to community, and access to collective value materialized in the city itself. This interpretation runs counter to the Marxist view that rights are depoliticizing. In this section I will summarize the reasons why Marxist critics have reservations about the concept of rights and respond to these arguments. In exploring this issue, Henri Lefebvre is a helpful guide because he was both a proponent and critic of the right to the city. Lefebvre’s critique of

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rights drew explicitly on the key Marxist text: On the Jewish Question. In an untranslated book, Le manifeste différentialiste, Lefebvre provided a gloss on Marx’s On the Jewish Question.24 According to Lefebvre, Marx’s critique of rights was based on an objection to the reductionist character of political emancipation. Political emancipation bifurcates the human being into economic and political man. The role of citizen or moral person is abstracted from the underlying social conditions and therefore emancipating political man has no real effect. According to Marx, after acquiring political rights, the Jew may become a citizen but the social order remains deeply Christian. Similarly, the worker may gain the right to vote but the capitalist economic order is presupposed and protected. The key to Lefebvre’s reading of Marx is this issue of abstraction. He insists that written law is ineffective and real change is achieved at the level of “moeurs,” in other words, social practice.25 Lefebvre’s formulation, however, is a bit misleading. The problem with civil and political rights under liberalism is not excessive abstraction but rather excessive embeddedness. By this I mean that the liberal understanding of rights fails to abstract the rights-bearing individual from social relations. The link between citizen and property owner is actually reinforced and the two identities are conflated rather than separated. The obligation of government and thus the responsibility of the citizen, as Marx explains, is to protect civil society as an arena for competition and the fulfillment of private interest. For Marx, the real problem with rights is not abstraction but mystification. The status of equal citizen with political rights serves to naturalize and legitimize social inequality. The liberal approach to rights involves a kind of sleight of hand. By liberalism I mean to describe an approach that encompasses an equal right to political participation and a set of individual rights (particularly property) that are naturalized as pre-political. The political rights are not abstracted; instead, they are understood as intrinsically linked to the other rights of bourgeois man, such as the right to private property. Lefebvre reaches this conclusion when he points out that real change is possible only if we reject the basic presupposition that the source of law (droit) is private property, and this would require a social revolution. Lefebvre pointed out that the range of rights was continually expanding in his day. Le manifeste différentialiste was published in 1970 and this post-68 period saw the growth of rights claims emerging out of new social movements, including the rights of children and women.26 Lefebvre treats these rights as part of a war of position that can achieve real improvements for excluded groups, but he also insists that they tie people to a system of domination. For Lefebvre, rights will always be contradictory as long as they are conceived in reformist terms. The reason is that these reforms serve to reinforce the prestige of the state.27 In a sense, the emancipatory side of rights strengthens a mechanism of domination.

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This discussion helps clarify the two main critiques of rights from the left: First, the rhetoric of rights mystifies power by deflecting attention from the production of inequalities to struggles over how to mitigate the worst effects. Second, it is a kind of governmentality in so far as it produces subjects who see the state as the source salvation. In other words, a rights-based claim upon the state increases the power of sovereign authority and therefore is ambivalent at best. With these critiques in mind, we can better understand the distinctiveness of Lefebvre’s right to the city. I think this right may have been intended as an attempt to rework the meaning of rights in response to Marx’s critique in On the Jewish Question. In asserting a right to the city Lefebvre challenges the bifurcation of civil and political society. The right to the city does not build on the right to private property. Given the scale and diversity of the city, it is difficult to imagine it as another variant of the typical models of private property: the body, the home, the castle. From the perspective of private property, a right to the city is incomprehensible. No person can own a city as private property. This is a consequence of the definition of the city that Lefebvre provides in The Urban Revolution. After introducing the broader concept of the urban, he disaggregates the urban into component parts. According to Lefebvre, Level M (mixed, mediator, intermediary) is the level of the city.28 It is what remains when you look at a map of the city and remove all of the privately owned buildings and all of the “global” institutions such as ministries, prefectures, and cathedrals. What remains are streets, squares, parish churches, community centers: an ensemble that links together the site and the structures that surround it. Although the legal titles to these mixed spaces of the city include a patchwork of forms of ownership – corporate, individual-private, and state-public – the spaces themselves are experienced phenomenologically as a commons. Lefebvre’s concept of oeuvre captures this idea of a commons that is not imagined as a state of nature but rather a collective, creative construction.29 From this perspective, the right to the city could be described as a hetero-right. Heteros is the Greek work for “other.” Just as Foucault and Lefebvre used the term heterotopias to describe other spaces – places both inside and outside of the dominant order – a hetero-right highlights the otherness of rights that are both inside and outside the framework of liberal rights. The right to the city is a logical impossibility insofar as no one can assert a conventional property right to the city. The right to public housing functions in a similar way. The right to public housing asserts something which is contradictory. It claims a property right to something which is not, in fact, a possession. Asserting a right to public housing is a polemical claim that juxtaposes the property right of the public housing agency as a landlord, the political right of the public as a group of citizens, and the social rights of people in need of housing. It exposes the instability of the “public” as a subject, a bearer of rights, and a desired object.

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Jeremy Waldron has made a similar argument, albeit in a somewhat different way. In his seminal essay “Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom,” he points out that the subject of rights is an embodied subject.30 In order to be free, the individual must be able to actualize freedom in the external world. This means that people need a place to carry out basic life functions such as sleeping, eating, and other physical functions. Hegel recognized this and it is the reason that he identified the right to private property as the foundational right. Insofar as homeless people have no place that they may legitimately carry out basic life functions, they effectively have no right to existence. Drawing on this analysis, Waldron argues in favor of collective property rights that ensure access to a place where basic needs can be met. He suggests that genuine freedom is possible only insofar as society is communist, in the sense of protecting a commons where the homeless have a right to be. The dispossessed person’s right to the commons is also a hetero-right. It is a rights claim that casts doubts on the dominant way of thinking about rights. It highlights the paradox that the right to property is also the basis of dispossession. It reminds us that the right to private property cannot be universalized because there is always a limiting moment when there is no more commons to be appropriated and one person must violate another’s right or be left without “as much and as good.” Unlike Locke who assumed that the laborer’s share of greater productivity would be a fair and attractive alternative, Rousseau recognized this for what it was – a birthright for a bowl of pottage. The third example of a hetero-right is the right to public space. This claim was forcefully advanced by the Turkish protestors in Taksim Square and echoed similar claims by the Indignados in Spain and the global Occupy movement. All of these movements asserted a right to public space. Some of the occupiers framed their actions in the familiar language of free speech and protest, but the courts pointed out that extended occupation of physical space is distinct from the discursive content of the message to be conveyed and therefore not a protected form of speech.31 It is tempting to respond that the government is simply wrong, that the physical occupation of a park or square is one of the few ways to gain the visibility and the media attention that sparks deliberation. This response is correct but it is also partially disingenuous and strategic in attempting to fit the protests into the category of political speech, which has political legitimacy and a certain degree of legal protection. Many of the protesters in all three movements were claiming something more radical than simply a platform for dissent. They were claiming to express the will of the people outside of the framework of the democratic state. A demos that is not organized through the institutional form of the sovereign state is a paradoxical notion. It is paradoxical because the term demos seems to describe a people constituted through political order.32 If this is true, then a pre-sovereign demos is a logical impossibility. This is described

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as the “paradox of democratic legitimacy.”33 This concept draws attention to the way that the people as a political category is created through institutions yet the people must also somehow pre-exist the founding moment that constitutes the demos. The political act of constitution is itself something that cannot be authorized by the sovereignty that it establishes. It is this gap between the people as a constituent power and the people as constituted by the political order that the protesters exploit. Their right to the plaza is a hetero-right in the sense that it asserts something which exceeds the conventional logic of rights. This does not mean that the state is illegitimate or that some institutional way of resolving conflict is unnecessary. It does imply, however, that while the government may act on behalf of the demos, it does not replace the demos. This distinction between the demos and state functions primarily to ensure that the state does not become totalitarian and foreclose contestation over the question of what the people will, which is something which can never be permanently fixed.34 When I say that hetero-rights exceed the conventional logic of rights I do not intend to invoke the increasingly popular notion of “emergent” or “aspirational” rights. Aspirational rights describe normative principles that are not judicable within the current legal system but may be invoked to guide public policy. Hetero-rights may be aspirational rights but they are something more and also something less. They are more because they expose the limits of dominant ways of thinking about political problems but they are less in the sense that they cannot be realized through gradual expansion of existing rights without coming into conflict with others. Do the rights to the city, to housing, and to public space have the same features as the civil and political rights that Marx subjected to critique? The main objection to Jewish emancipation was that such emancipation could be granted without fundamentally changing the Christian underpinnings of the state. This is not true of the rights to the city, to housing, and to public space. To recognize the people’s right to occupy public space would be tantamount to reconfiguring the notion of state sovereignty. The right to housing challenges the right to private property. Invoking these rights does not mystify the real distribution of power, it exposes it. The second Marxian objection to rights is the sovereigntist objection. In Dispossession, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou makes a version of this argument. They write, Even when we have our rights, we are dependent on a mode of governance and a legal regime that confers and sustains those rights. And so we are already outside ourselves before any possibility of being dispossessed of our rights, land, and modes of belonging.35 One response is that the rights claims described above are not addressed to the legal regime and therefore do not simply strengthen the prestige of the

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state and reinforce the dependence of the citizen. This response, however, is only partially true. The anarchist component of the protest movements did try to imagine, create, and sustain alternative modes of organization outside of the state, but my sense is that a larger group of participants and supporters did not aspire to an anarchist utopia; they sought a deeper democracy and a more just city. Asserting popular sovereignty outside the institutional structures of a formally democratic state is not the same as imagining no state. It is reformist in that it challenges the bureaucratic and technocratic state in the name of the people. It also reminds us of the distinction between the government, the people, and the majority as well as the conflicts that unite and divide them.

Conclusion The right to housing is not necessarily a hetero-right. It can also be formulated as a fairly conventional social right. In the 1970s and 1980s, lawyers and activists in the United States began to promote the “right to shelter” as a way to force unresponsive and underfunded municipal governments to address the growing problem of urban homelessness. In Callahan v. Carey, the New York State Supreme Court recognized a right to shelter. It based its decision on a part of the state constitution that guaranteed aid and care to the needy. Although the decision did result in the expansion of emergency services, it did little to address to underlying causes of homelessness, let alone provide broader solutions for affordable housing in New York City. In so far as the right to housing means vouchers for current public housing recipients or emergency shelter beds for eligible street people, then this is quite far from what Lefebvre had in mind. Yet even this limited recognition and expansion of social rights is an important step. The disruptive effect comes when we consider the tensions exposed by the recognition of these rights. This could be the tension between the visceral and the theoretical registers or the normative and the structural. Spatial analysis is a particularly powerful tool for highlighting these tools and exposing them to critical reflection. An abstract right to housing is actually quite easy to endorse. For many people a homeless shelter in their neighborhood is something very different. Examining justice in particular places and contexts is important because it enables what Slavoj Žižek calls a “parallax view.” In contemporary political theory, justice in nation-states (Rawls) and then global justice (Pogge) have been the dominant scales of inquiry. The concept of global justice expands the extent of political and moral obligation and highlights global inequalities, but it does so in a way that rests on and reinforces the distance between the moral agent and object of concern. It is relatively easy to affirm an obligation to distant others when this obligation entails something like support for a tax on global resources extraction. It is very different when it requires living in proximity to a public

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housing project or a busy bus station. In these latter cases, there is a strong experiential and subjective dimension and it is precisely this visceral connection that abstraction erases. The parallax was a principle that astronomers used to measure distances from objects in space. By comparing the distance from two different points, they were able to estimate the position of the object. The method employed here is something similar. It is not the obvious point that social phenomena appear different from different perspectives. Instead, by noting the distance between justice when examined up close, in cities and neighborhoods, and what it looks like from far away, we may gain a better understanding of the concept.

Notes 1 Edésio Fernandes, “Constructing the ‘Right to the City’ in Brazil,” Social & Legal Studies 16, no. 2 (2007): 201–219; David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (New York: Verso, 2012); David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27, no. 4 (2003): 939–941; Mehmet Bariş Kuymulu, “Reclaiming the Right to the City: Reflections on the Urban Uprisings in Turkey,” City 17, no. 3 (2013): 274–278; Peter Marcuse, “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City,” City 13, no. 2–3 (2009): 185–197; Margit Mayer, “The ‘Right to the City’ in the Context of Shifting Mottos of Urban Social Movements,” City 13, no. 2–3 (2009): 362–374; Mark Purcell, “Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and Its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant,” GeoJournal 58, no. 2–3 (2002): 99–108. 2 Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 3 Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972). 4 Preston H. Smith, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 5 Ben Austen, “The Last Tower,” Harpers, May 2012, http://harpers.org/archive/ 2012/05/the-last-tower/. 6 Lawrence J. Vale and Erin Graves, “The Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation: What Does the Research Show So Far,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning Report (2010). 7 Specifically, 12,309 families were still receiving housing support from CHA. Some of the decrease is due to normal attrition: some families move to market housing, others leave Chicago, and some residents die or become ill and no longer live independently. By comparing attrition under the plan to normal rates of attrition, scholars estimate that 17.5% of the affected residents lost access to public housing services. There is also dispute about the number of families placed in mixed-income communities. One scholar estimated the number at 1,035; the higher figure comes from the CHA. See Vale and Graves, “The Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation.” 8 Edward G. Goetz, “The Audacity of HOPE VI: Discourse and the Dismantling of Public Housing,” Cities 35 (2013): 342–348. 9 Peter Marcuse, “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City,” City 13, no. 2/3 (2009): 185–197; Mayer, “The ‘Right to the City’ in the Context of Shifting Mottos of Urban Social Movements,” 362–374.

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10 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 11 T. H. Marshall and Tom Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class (London: Pluto Press, 1992). 12 Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, The Right to Adequate Housing: Fact Sheet, no. 21 (2009). 13 Thomas Byrne and Dennis P. Culhane, “The Right to Housing: An Effective Means for Addressing Homelessness?,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change 14, no. 3 (2011): 379–390. 14 William A. Fischel, Homevoter Hypothesis: How Home Values Influence Local Government Taxation, School Finance, and Land-Use Policies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 15 Lawrence J. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 22. 16 Richard F. Babcock and Fred P. Bosselman, Exclusionary Zoning: Land Use Regulation and Housing in the 1970s (New York: Praeger, 1973). 17 James Clingermayer, “Heresthetics and Happenstance: Intentional and Unintentional Exclusionary Impacts of the Zoning Decision-Making Process,” Urban Studies 41, no. 2 (2004): 377–388. 18 Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford Press, 2003). 19 Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2011). 20 Michael Sorkin, Margaret Crawford, Langdon Winner, Neil Smith, Edward W. Soja, Trevor Boddy, Mike Davis and M. Christine Boyer, Variations on a Theme Park: Scenes from the New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). 21 Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996); Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005). 22 Susan S. Fainstein, The Just City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 23 About NYCHA Fact Sheet, http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycha/html/about/factsheet. shtml. Accessed December 2013. 24 Henri Lefebvre, Le manifeste différentialiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). 25 Ibid., 45. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 47. 28 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 80. 29 Ibid., 101–103. 30 Jeremy Waldron, “Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom,” UCLA Law Review 39 (1991): 295. 31 Margaret Kohn, “Privatization and Protest: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Toronto, and the Occupation of Public Space in a Democracy,” Perspectives on Politics 11, no. 1 (2013): 99–110. 32 Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 33 Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 34 See Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, translated by David Macey (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1991) and Miguel Abensour, Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Movement (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2011). 35 Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013).

Part II

Places on the move

Chapter 5

The space of architecture as a complex context Richard Wittman

1 The phrase “context collapse” was first coined to describe a phenomenon that is experienced when communicating via social media.1 It stemmed from the realization that, while the Internet offered a potentially infinite audience for one’s communications, it also, by this very fact, made it impossible to perform the rhetorical adjustments of language and gesture that one typically makes during a face-to-face interaction. Consequently, the various roles or identities that one normally keeps distinct in ordinary life overlap and are superimposed upon one another. If you tweet to your friends that you’ve robbed a liquor store, and then the police come to arrest you, you can blame context collapse. While most of the literature on context collapse has focused on communication, the concept presupposes a spatial dimension. The innumerable digital communications of our networked era all involve the transfer of data from one place to another place; much of that content, whether visual, discursive, or aural, either implicitly or explicitly, represents remote or even imaginary places. From the immersive representations of virtual reality environments to the lowliest text message, we are constantly involved with places other than the one currently inhabited (“where r u?” is said to be the most frequently sent of all text messages). But if the information age plunges us into an ocean of remote access, it is not unknown to feel that one’s experience of the actual and immediate physical context is sometimes attenuated or neglected amid all those other contexts that some fraction of consciousness attends to. Our networked world might seek to remedy this with yoga, meditation, and mindfulness workshops, but the longing for a greater sense of presentness extends at least as far back as the genesis of phenomenological philosophy in the early twentieth century. Indeed, the history of the contemporary era’s fragmented spatial consciousness goes back further even than that – back to the genesis of Western modernity and its unprecedented conception of space as undifferentiated, infinite, and objective.2 Traditional notions of space had instead conceived

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of the world in terms of essentially meaningful, qualitatively differentiated places; the modern tendency, instead, has been to regard location in space as contingent rather than necessary. This, in turn, has favored the feverish and continual development of new technologies – from the printing press to digital communications – that exist to represent things in places other than where they are materially present. Yet it is important not to overstate the exceptionalism of even a long modernity. There is nothing new about representation itself: even a prehistoric observer of cave paintings experienced a kind of divided consciousness, since all representation directs consciousness to that which is represented, with some inevitable attenuation of one’s attentiveness to the actual context. Pre-modern people were also obviously aware of other places, whether nearby or distant, or perhaps even non-proximate in an entirely different way, such as Paradise or Parnassus. Like us, they too had to manage the competing realities of the place where they found themselves and the cherished or dreaded elsewheres that sometimes preoccupied them. To a degree, spatial contexts have always been susceptible to overlap and collapse, and the greater part of human artmaking has always sought to harness and make something of that possibility. The difference in this regard between the present and one or two millennia ago is in part a matter of quantity and saturation, but it is not only that, even if contemporary anxieties and dislocations sometimes make it seem that an unbridgeable gulf separates our fragmented consciousness from the serene presentness of an imagined past.

2 Over a decade ago, David Summers proposed in his magnum opus, Real Spaces, that art for most of humanity and over most of history has been a matter of spatiality more than visuality, notwithstanding modern Western assumptions to the contrary; and that a truly intercultural history of art must start from a consideration of how the arts have shaped and represented various kinds of space across different cultures and eras.3 (For years, the working title of the book was The Defect of Distance, a phrase borrowed from a sixteenth-century treatise on images.)4 Among the many themes analyzed in Summers’s remarkable study, the common practice in pre-modern cultures of using architecture to represent remote or mythical sacred places received less coverage than one might have expected. It is a fact that buildings and the places where they stand generally refuse to budge (although, as Annabel Wharton notes, angels are known on a few special occasions to have managed it);5 it was probably architecture’s very nature as an immobile art of place that, paradoxically, gathered to it so much responsibility for facilitating virtual voyages. Sometimes the sites that buildings represented were themselves buildings, for instance the Kaba’a in Mecca, towards which every mosque longingly turns; sometimes they were

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emblematized by buildings, for instance the Heavenly Jerusalem described in the Book of Revelation, an image of Paradise whose precise measurements were frequently incorporated into the design of medieval cathedrals. Political conquests or allegiances were also often announced by buildings that pointed beyond themselves to other places; an imposed foreign manner of building could remind a conquered people of their subjection, while an evocation of the architecture of a distant ally might offer local reassurance and give pause to enemies. Such representations of other places made a public statement, and helped communities render their world more comprehensible by folding the expanses of geopolitical or sacred space into their local space. They served a public function, one for which architecture – as the public art par excellence – was ideally suited. We moderns prefer to use some form of image when we wish to represent a building or place scrupulously, but ancient and medieval commentators regarded images as inherently unreliable for the transmission of descriptive information. Pliny and Galen advised writers against using images in their texts on account of the inevitable changes that every hand-drawn copy would introduce into them.6 When it was impossible to do without an image, ancient authors could be very resourceful; the astronomer Ptolemy went so far as to supply numeric codes that each reader could use to generate his own astronomical charts.7 Such wariness about the stability and trustworthiness of technical imagery remained common into the Middle Ages, when, in the world of architecture, technical knowledge regarding the generation of form continued to be communicated by memorizable geometrical procedures rather than via copyable graphic prototypes.8 It can be tempting to attribute such attitudes to nothing more than technical limitations that were later overcome with the invention of printing, since printing made the mechanical reproduction of reliably indexical images common. But the evidence is quite clear that there was actually very little interest prior to printing in reproducing precise physical appearances when it was a question of representing or evoking a distant building or site. Superficial appearances were still regarded as merely superficial in cultures that saw the materiality of the world as saturated with symbolic or sacred properties. The modern concern with appearances has as a corollary the easy dissociation of appearances from the embodied being of the place or object itself: the image of an object’s appearance is autonomous in its disembodied abstraction. But the earlier concern with the symbolic or the sacred considered such properties to inhere in a real way in the substance of objects. The privileged manner of representing important places or buildings was therefore, and not surprisingly, via indexical substitute, which is to say, via the use or reuse of actual physical elements or relics.9 The best known example in the West is probably the reuse of columns from pagan temples (aka spolia, or “spoils”) in the churches of the Early Christians, a recycling that proclaimed the triumph of Christianity by converting the old

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gods to the one true God. But the practice took infinite forms.10 The famous bluestones at Stonehenge were arduously transported from over 250 miles away, likely by people who yearned to make that far-off site somehow, and for some unknown reason, present on Salisbury Plain.11 In ancient Rome, the Pantheon offered a model of the cosmos that evoked the Roman Empire on its floor via a gridded display of marbles quarried from every corner of the Roman world.12 And the phenomenon was by no means confined to Western Europe. During the classic period in Khmer civilization, stones for the buildings of the new capital at Angkor were quarried from Phnom Kulen mountain, also known as the Mountain of Indra, King of the gods, and identified with both Mt. Meru and Mt. Kailash in India; Angkor was thereby saturated with the presence of the gods, and became a kind of simulacrum of their distant mountain dwelling place in India.13 When the great Ottoman architect Sinan was building the dome of his Selimiye mosque in Edirne, he mixed in mortar procured from the dome of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul – mortar which itself was said to contain earth from Mecca and saliva from the Prophet Muhammad; through this geographical gesture, he assimilated both the architectural lineage and the sacred significance of his new building into its very fabric.14 When indexical substitutes were unavailable, elsewhere was most typically made present via non-visual or conceptual forms of reference. Richard Krautheimer offered a classic example of this in his famous study of Western European medieval “copies” of the rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the building that stands over the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem.15 None of the “copies” Krautheimer examined bore much visual resemblance to the rotunda in Jerusalem, nor to one another, but they all had a plan that was either circular or at least a centrally-planned polygon, and they all made prominent reference to the numbers eight or twelve in their architectural supports – just as the rotunda in Jerusalem is circular in plan, and is supported on eight piers and twelve columns. Krautheimer concluded that because the form of the circle and the numbers eight and twelve had a plethora of highly favorable symbolic associations for medieval Christians, these geometrical and numerical properties had been regarded as the truly essential properties of the rotunda in Jerusalem, and thus as the essential parts to reproduce.16 Similar examples of this kind of non-visual representation could be multiplied across cultures. The infinitely detailed prescriptions for the mensuration and proportioning of Hindu temples offered by vastusastric literature stems in part from the belief, attested to by Hindu inscriptions, literature, and folklore, that the great peaked shikharas of Hindu temples represented Mt. Kailash, the mountain on which Siva built his palace.17 For the builders of the ninth-century Great Mosque in Kairouan, Tunisia, geometry was the representational hinge: for they arranged the 414 colored columns of their prayer hall in such a way as to evoke the octagonal plan of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.18 One could go on.

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Would it still be possible to speak of “context collapse” in such an economy of representation? One in which deceiving the senses was not exactly the point? To use the exact phrase would probably be to risk anachronism, but there can be no doubt that the experience such buildings provoked could disrupt the typical quotidian experience of space and time. The mosque in Kairouan seems to have evoked the Dome of the Rock so that the circumambulation practices observed in Jerusalem could be virtually reenacted by local worshippers. (Indeed, it may even be that the Dome of the Rock – with sacred rock at its core and a design adapted for circumambulation – was itself designed as a substitute for the Kaba’a shrine in Mecca, which was in the hands of a rival caliph when the Dome of the Rock was being built.)19 Such buildings were in the business of conjuring what might be termed a non-pictorial virtual space; a space vividly present in the mind, even within the materiality of the very different real space that conjures it.20 The twelfth-century French cleric Suger can hardly be taken as typical, but he offers us the rare advantage of having described how his experience of a very special architectural monument – his new abbey at Saint-Denis – transported him out of the physical space the monument occupied. It is a famous passage: Thus when – out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God – the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner.21 The collapse of Suger’s contexts occurs via the senses, to be sure; but he understands that experience not as a disruption of the correct perception of space and time, but rather as a peeling back of the veil of everyday blindness – as a true apprehension of the deeper reality lying beyond the mere surface of things (beyond the “slime of the earth”). The barrier between the earthly and heavenly realms remains permeable to insight and understanding, and the occasional collapse from one into the other is regarded as epiphanic rather than merely disorienting.

3 As early modern scientific developments began transforming understanding of perception, it became harder to feel that the mind perceived objects directly and as they really were. Perception instead became an effect of light reflecting off objects, moving in regular ways through a geometrically and

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mathematically objective space, and finally acting on the observer’s sensory apparatus. In such a framework, perception became fundamentally subjective. But if this pictorialized conception meant that appearance took on a new importance (since, in a sense, it was all one had now), and if this in turn pointed the way towards greater empiricism in human inquiry, it was equally true that appearance was now distinguished from, and thus more easily detached from, substance. These apprehensions all worked against ancient ideas about the inherently symbolic or sacred character of places and objects.22 Present for most of these changes, and very possibly contributing towards many of them, was printing, that starting point for the long development of the modern information society. Mario Carpo has described how the sudden availability of reliable printed images of classical buildings enabled architectural imitation and representation to transform itself, in the mere space of fifty years, into something it had never been previously: a visual act focused on surface appearances rather than on symbolic or sacred content. Indeed, Carpo argues that the development of Renaissance classicism in architecture was in substantial measure the result of the codification of the classical orders by the Italian architect Sebastiano Serlio, and their subsequent dissemination as copyable models via Serlio’s printed book and the others that followed in its wake.23 This transformation was more or less complete by 1530, and its swiftness suggests that printing functioned more as enabler than as cause; the deeper causes should probably be sought instead amid the epistemological changes described in the previous paragraph. Indeed, at the risk of oversimplifying, there is much to be said for the argument that printing was only invented once European society began wanting what printing made possible. Printing also accelerated the transformation of the builder’s relationship to the historical time and geographical space of architecture. Carpo observes that the Pantheon and Coliseum were not places in Rome but places in books for many Renaissance architects.24 By the eighteenth century, books like Fischer von Erlach’s Entwurff Einer Historischen Architectur (Leipzig, 1725) were making buildings as far as China graphically available as well.25 Thus on one hand printing opened up new possibilities for the imagination to range, sometimes disorientingly, across space and time; at the same time, it played its part in helping snuff out traditional understandings that had made spatial contexts permeable to one another through symbol and sacrality. Printed architecture books abstracted places into portable information, easily stockpiled in convenient, timeless proximity on a bookshelf, in violation of their real dispersion in physical space and chronological time. This in turn stimulated a more promiscuous style of looking and imagining, and opened the potential for a new kind of context collapse – one most compellingly illustrated by the early nineteenth-century American painter Thomas Cole in his work The Architect’s Dream (Figure 5.1). Here we see the architect, sprawled amid his books atop a giant column, surveying – or rather imagining – a landscape into which the architectures of disparate times and places have been compressed as easily as if they were on a piece of paper (Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.1 Thomas Cole, The Architect’s Dream, 1840, oil on canvas, 53 × 84 1/16 in., Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, Ohio). Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in memory of her father, Maurice A. Scott, 1949.162 (Image Source, Toledo).

Figure 5.2 Plate 19 from Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand and Jacques Guillaume Legrand, Recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre anciens et modernes, remarquables par leur beauté, par leur grandeur, ou par leur singularité, et dessinés sur une même échelle. Paris: Ecole Polytechnique et chez l’Auteur, 1801 (Université de Strasbourg, Service Commun de la Documentation).

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Between 1650 and 1750, in the context of a second and more sociologically effectual phase of the print culture revolution, architectural print culture began in certain parts of Europe to bleed beyond the limited world of architects and their elite patrons. As more and more readers tapped into the spatially exploded, informational public sphere, and began encountering debates and discussions about faraway buildings, a public began to develop that enjoyed relationships to buildings and places that were unprecedentedly free of any embodied spatial experience.26 Shortly after its foundation in 1671, the French Royal Academy of Architecture launched a national campaign that aimed to buttress national glory by weaning readers of books and periodical literature off of their provincial architectural preferences, and educating them in the Academy’s refined, rationalistic standards of classical good taste. Director of the Academy François Blondel warned his readers that “There are Nations who, in growing accustomed to bizarre sounds, have come to find them agreeable, even though there is nothing about them capable of giving pleasure,” and that therefore, “we should not find it strange that there are Men who like the Gothic buildings to which they are accustomed.”27 Blondel’s observation came at the head of a didactic textbook that offered a chance of escape to any reader who felt a shiver of self-recognition at these words. But the corollary of that entrée into elite culture was to be separation from the culture of one’s less literate, Gothic-loving neighbors, whose aesthetic preferences were henceforth to render them comparable to a faraway savage nation. Like any process of acculturation, this “civilizing” project drove a cultural wedge between readers and non-readers within existing face-to-face communities. It also shifted the referent for judgment of local places and objects from the standards of one’s local community to the critical standards of a remote metropolitan elite. With this shift, architectural experiences that had once served to bind one to a local community could be transmuted into experiences that alienated one from it. Architectural discourse around the year 1700 was concentrated in this gap between the spatial logic of the local, and that of people with a wider perspective informed by their reading. This tension was explicitly thematized in a remarkable manuscript written in northern France in the opening decades of the eighteenth century by an otherwise obscure figure named Jean Pagès.28 Pagès was an indefatigable booster of his home city of Amiens, and above all of its magnificent Gothic cathedral, and in his desire to better understand that monument he had turned to the new architectural books published by the Royal Academy. He was soon conflicted, however, as he tried to relate his own way of understanding his cathedral to the way these books encouraged him to understand it. In 1709 Pagès put these troubled thoughts on paper in a manuscript that related a fictional dialogue between two characters called Philambien and Pariphile, who Pagès imagined on a walking tour

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of Amiens Cathedral.29 The name Philambien combined Greek and Latin to mean “Lover of Amiens,” while the name Pariphile combined Greek and French to mean “Lover of Paris.” Thus the local Philambien relates to the cathedral as someone steeped in stories about the generations of Amienois who had worshipped and left their mark on the cathedral; the building is for him “incomparable,” a word he uses repeatedly. His engagement with the cathedral is deep on local knowledge, but ignorant regarding its place in any larger history; his horizon is limited, but what lies within it is rich. Pariphile instead comes to the building full of book learning. He is able to discuss its place in the history of architecture, and to appraise and criticize its formal qualities with respect to the ideals he has read about and seen in books and in other buildings. The cathedral is for him utterly comparable: his approach is not limited to this one context, but rather constantly ranges across the time and space of architectural history to form a more relativistic assessment. The two characters occupy the same physical spaces as they move through the cathedral, but their minds range across totally different terrains. Pagès himself, of course, participated in both spatial logics – that of the book from Paris and that of the experience in Amiens – but it is also telling that he cannot integrate them, and must separate them into different voices. The public architectural debates of the eighteenth century made it clear to architects and patrons that the success or failure of new buildings would henceforth be decided by publics largely composed of people who might never experience them at first hand; people who, as members of engaged but spatially dispersed reading publics, would know the buildings only at a distance, from criticism and descriptions. It did not take long for this to have an effect on both theory and design. Textural or spatial effects that could only be experienced in person receded in importance, while those aspects that could be adequately represented in printed form gained. These latter aspects more often than not turned out to concern questions of meaning, as conveyed usually by the historical and cultural resonances of particular forms or narratives associated with a building. The church of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, the biggest royally sponsored project of the French eighteenth century, offers probably the best example of this.30 Built at a time when the socio-political fabric in the capital was fraying, Sainte-Geneviève was intended to be a royal monument at once reconciliatory and authoritative. As such, it became the first state-sponsored building in France to break with academic notions of classical purity in favor of a hybrid of Gothic and classical elements. The architectural debates of the past seventy-five years in France had revealed that many ordinary people regarded Gothic as France’s genuine national architecture. This inspired the architect of Sainte-Geneviève, Jacques-Germain Soufflot, to embed semiotically “popular” Gothic elements within his classical framework (Figure 5.3).

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Figure 5.3 Jacques-Germain Soufflot, section drawing for the church of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, 1769, highlighting the Gothic nature of the dome supports (Document conservé aux Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-Sur-Seine; Cliché Atelier photographique des Archives nationales).

In the copious official literature surrounding the church, these Gothic structural elements and spatial effects were associated with the nation, the people, and their indigenous cunning and grandeur. The classical elements of the church were instead associated with the universalism of the Roman Catholic Church and the divine right authority of the Catholic monarch.31 Was all this visible to contemporaries who walked into the building? Surely not. But in some senses it hardly mattered, since those who walked into the building only formed a part – and not necessarily the most important part – of the public for the building. The real public for Sainte-Geneviève was national and even international, and for that constituency, the building came to them. It came in a series of texts and, to a lesser extent, printed imagery. But even those who did visit the building were likely to have an experience that had been aggressively predetermined by an official explanatory discourse that referred to the French past, the history of both Gothic and classical architecture, as well as the principles underlying contemporary political struggles. In a manner surprisingly familiar to us moderns, the “there” of architectural experience at Sainte-Geneviève proved to be manifold and polymorphous.

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Eighteenth-century producers of architecture were not sanguine about what they began perceiving as the fragmented, referential consciousness of the contemporary spectator. Already by mid-century, theoreticians were warning that architecture would end up a delicacy for erudite connoisseurs if it did not learn how to communicate its meanings and functions to ordinary people in more legible and more quickly perceptible terms.32 The projection of legible “character” thus became the central theme of architectural theory for three-quarters of a century, though with little perceptible success in helping architecture to address itself more effectively to laymen.33 Amid the deep uncertainties that followed the French Revolution, a yearning for more certain pasts (no doubt coupled with literalistic readings of Winckelmann’s thoughts about the imitation of ancient art) yielded an unexpected phenomenon: the erection of stone-and-mortar replicas or near-replicas of celebrated historic buildings. Napoléon’s generic Roman temple monuments in Paris are well known, but much more specific were the new monuments of the Ludwigstrasse in 1830s Munich, where an ambitious King Ludwig I commissioned a copy of the Renaissance Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence alongside several other buildings that were obvious paraphrases of Roman and Florentine prototypes; all in the earnest hope that the heroic character of their original builders might rub off on their modern users.34 These buildings combined the older and newer norms of representation we have been discussing: they were immobile, architecturally scaled, and they commanded real space; yet they imitated with reference only to surface appearance (indeed, the imitation generally did not touch the interior), and it was their meaning – that is, the historical narratives associated with them – that had made them worth imitating. Such buildings ultimately remained exceptional, favored primarily by conservative rulers who were negotiating new political realities (which perhaps helps explain their disconcerting mix of new and old thinking).35 But most architects and theoreticians were, if anything, inching in the opposite direction, recognizing that the debate over character had been a failure, and that the connections binding forms to concepts (binding, say, civic virtue to classicism) were purely contingent, or even arbitrary. Certainly mounting evidence pointed in that direction. By the 1840s, the Gothic Revival was ultra-Catholic in England, secular republican in France, and nationalist in Germany. Early in the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo famously considered the question of whether the nostalgia and incertitude of recent architecture indicated that architecture had lost its old position as humanity’s chosen vessel for the expression of collective hopes and beliefs. In one of the “architectural chapters” of his Notre-Dame de Paris (1829), a chapter entitled “This Will Kill That,” Hugo offered a vision of history divided into two broad ages.36 First there had been the age of architecture, defined by a hierarchical, site-specific regime of information in which “architecture was the great book of mankind, man’s chief form of expression . . . the great script of

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the human race.” The Gothic cathedral offered the purest product of this paradigm. But this age had been succeeded by the age of printing, in which thought became “more imperishable than ever”: “You can demolish a great building, but how do you root out ubiquity?” Hence the idea that the book had killed architecture. After the invention of printing, all architecture had been able to do was dress itself up in the garb of its glorious past and, like a faded movie star, pine for the old days. For Hugo this shift reflected social progress from a theocratic age, in which the elites concentrated society’s material and intellectual wealth in elaborate buildings, to a democratic age, when those riches were instead placed cheaply and easily at the disposal of everybody. Implicit in this scheme was the realization that printing had broken the hold of place on humanity, opening up unprecedented possibilities for the liberating informationalization of what historically had been subject to the tyranny of immobility and embodiment. Thirty years ago, the historian Neil Levine revealed that Hugo had been assisted on this chapter by the young Henri Labrouste, who as an architecture student in the 1820s had developed a highly relativistic, historicist understanding of architectural history.37 Labrouste, influenced by Saint-Simonian thought, saw the modern world as defined by its informational economies, its collapsing spatial frontiers, its increasing mobility, and its more horizontal forms of social structure.38 He took it as self-evident that architecture could not play the same role in the modern world as it had in earlier centuries, and that it was pointless to use the historical styles in the present. Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, a working-man’s library located across the street from Soufflot’s church in Paris, was an attempt to imagine what contemporary architecture could, instead, aspire to.39 Here Labrouste devised a spectacularly legible building that, in a variety of ways, acknowledged and even celebrated architecture’s submission to the print paradigm. The exterior of the library was covered with the graven names of great men from across the historical ages, picked out with red paint; this conflation of architectural façade and printed page was itself like a catalog that legibly announced the collection of books standing on the inner side of the wall. In the library’s great interior staircase, Labrouste installed a giant copy of Raphael’s famous painting of the School of Athens. Raphael’s original was in the Papal library in the Vatican; also catalog-like, it showed the great men of ancient science and philosophy assembled in an imaginary setting, which in Labrouste’s staircase offered a pictorial reiteration of the names inscribed on his library’s façade. And by implicitly evoking that other library in Rome, closed and hierarchical (and full of manuscripts), Labrouste drew attention to the politically progressive aspect of his own institution, which offered the riches of human culture to ordinary citizens. The mere fact that the mural was so manifestly a copy pointed to the fact that the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève could only accomplish its progressive mission because of printing. Labrouste’s decor unapologetically

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championed the democratic value of reproduction, and even the fragmentation of spatial consciousness that attended it. The social gains offered by this new world of informational ubiquity, Labrouste seemed to suggest, far outweighed any dilution that might afflict the aesthetic aura of the original, or any disruption to the stability of our presentness in place.40 Labrouste’s library was an open vote for the referential spatial consciousness of modernity; for Pariphile, not Philambien.

4 The city Labrouste’s library used as its foil – Rome – was regarded by then almost as a museum of pre-modern social, political, and intellectual structures. Governed by a theocratic gerontocracy that saw itself as the unchanging guardian of eternal truths, Rome hosted virtually no productive economic activity and consequently possessed only a tiny and ineffectual bourgeoisie. Roman public life was tightly controlled by the Church, and what press there was offered official accounts of events and orthodox cultural commentaries, not genuine debates and alternative perspectives. One could even argue that this head of the Catholic world was ontologically opposed to the new informational world: for if an informational public sphere depends on abstraction, the Catholic religion remains intrinsically invested in the material and the physical. It is centered on the concept of the incarnation of God, which is ceremonially reenacted in the Church’s central ritual, the Mass, where the body of Christ is assimilated into the worshipper’s body, which is itself then promised resurrection after death and eternal physical survival. Catholic tradition is generally rooted in practices of embodiment: pilgrimages, processions, the cult of relics, sacred spaces, and the whole apparatus of “outward signs.” And yet it was in Rome that one of the most remarkable instances of early nineteenth-century architectural context collapse unfolded – an example that combined modern and pre-modern elements in uncanny ways. The Roman basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura was founded in the fourth century atop the burial place of the martyred Apostle to the Gentiles, Saint Paul. By the early nineteenth century, the venerable San Paolo was one of the most historic and architecturally intact of all the Early Christian churches in the city. Then, on 15 July 1823, it was gutted by fire (Figure 5.4).41 After a contentious debate, Pope Leo XII finally announced in 1825 that San Paolo was too damaged to be repaired and would therefore be rebuilt as it had been before the fire.42 But since the impoverished Church was unable to afford such a massive project, Leo also called upon the whole Catholic faithful to contribute to the reconstruction. He sold the project as a kind of symbolic reconstruction of the Catholic Church itself, which had indeed been backed onto its heels in recent decades by the spread of ideas like separation of Church and state and religious tolerance, by the

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Figure 5.4 The fire at San Paolo occurred on the night of 15–16 July 1823 (from Giuseppe Marocchi, Dettaglio del terribile incendio accaduto il di 15 luglio 1823 della famosa basilica di S. Paolo di Rome. Rome: Stamperia Ajani, 1823) (author).

anti-Catholic realignments born of the French Revolution and, more locally, by the injuries and humiliations born of a series of French occupations of Rome, including the abduction and death-in-exile of Pope Pius VI. And so, in January 1825, Leo sent an encyclical letter to the Catholic bishops and archbishops of the entire world, lamenting the loss of the venerable old basilica, reminding his readers in vivid terms of the debt all Catholics owed

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to Saint Paul for his sacrifice, and instructing them to solicit donations for the basilica’s reconstruction from their flocks.43 This document was commented upon at length in the official Diario di Roma in Rome, and from there the text appeared in newspapers elsewhere in Italy.44 Pamphlets and broadsheets in Rome targeted the functionaries of the Papal States, urging them to compete with one another in their generosity. Abbots, bishops, and archbishops printed fundraising texts that were circulated within their jurisdictions around the Italian peninsula, and were sometimes also republished in Catholic periodicals.45 Personalized appeals were directed at Catholic nobles around Europe.46 Within weeks, news of the fundraising effort was being reported by journals in Madrid, Paris, and Vienna; before long, American Catholic papers in Charleston and Baltimore were reporting on it as well.47 To stimulate emulation, lists were published periodically in the Diario di Roma giving the name, location, and amount contributed by each donor to the reconstruction. These lists echoed the geographical spread of information about the project. The first list (or nota), published in two parts in December 1825 and January 1826, described donations from high-ranking members of the Catholic hierarchy, starting with Pope Leo himself, and then from a series of less exalted donors mostly from the Papal States.48 In the second nota (April 1826), the reach expanded to include a series of Spanish donors, a handful of donors in Ireland and England, and a scattering of figures from around France, the Netherlands, Germany, and even as far as Greece.49 By the third nota (August 1826), the Atlantic Ocean had been crossed, with a substantial donation coming from the Seminary of Montreal in Canada.50 Over the next six years, donations continued to come in from around Europe but also from beyond. In the fifth nota (June 1827), there was a donation from “sig. Jucan Jose Ruis di Guatemala in America”; the sixth nota (June 1828) reported a gift from the former Plenipotentiary Minister of the Emperor of Brazil to the Holy See and another from the Bishop of Quebec; the seventh nota (June 1829) included significant gifts from the bishops of Nueva Segovia and Nueva Caceres in the Philippines; in the tenth nota (June 1832), there was news of a Signore Bruni who had collected some 40 scudi from “diversi benefattori di America.”51 By then, fundraising had slowed to a trickle, but seven years later, in 1840, a new pope – Gregory XVI – would seek to reinvigorate funding with a second encyclical inviting contributions. This new campaign was even more global than the first, with the full text of Gregory’s encyclical being reprinted as far afield as in the Bengal Catholic Herald of Calcutta.52 This extraordinary effort was probably the first global fundraising drive in history, and it certainly marked the first time a building had constituted a genuinely global public for itself. The Roman Church had accomplished this by marrying two very different ways of thinking about the nature and meanings of space. On the one hand, there was the physical basilica of San

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Paolo, standing in real space, marking the burial place of a sacred human body, and regarded therefore as possessing special powers (San Paolo was a place of pilgrimage, and one could obtain remission of sins by visiting it at appointed times). The massive effort to rebuild this basilica aimed to keep the old basilica’s various powers alive, not just its sacred qualities but also its potency as a historical referent: just as all the old guidebooks had marveled at old San Paolo’s power to make one feel magically transported back to Early Christian times, so the new one also hoped to bring to life for the nineteenth-century visitor those heroic early days when Ambrose and Augustine and Gregory the Great were laying the foundations of a vigorous and growing Church. Much of the applied marble revetments and classical ordinance of the interior of the new basilica were fashioned out of the shattered marble columns of the old basilica – a painstaking effort that, far from representing an economy, required an extraordinary investment of labor. Thus the conception underlying the new San Paolo remained grounded in a typically pre-modern sense of the inherently meaningful qualities of material objects, and of an anagogical permeability between temporal and sacred realms. Yet because it was necessary to look beyond the pope’s realm for funds, the Church also found it necessary to reconstitute this embodied, immobile, sacred place as information: to translate Saint Paul’s memorial monument into words, pictures, and narratives on printed pages. These were then sent to Catholics spread across the planet, a majority of whom, it seems safe to say, had never visited the site and never would; an audience for whom, in many cases, the representation conjured by print was the object of devotion, more so than stones and mortar most would never see. The Church’s ideology of embodiment, and the principled refusal of modern abstraction implicit in it, seems to have posed no obstacle to those Catholics around the world who responded to these entreaties by opening their purses, hoping that some part of themselves might take its place among the blocks and beams of Paul’s new temple in Rome. In some subsequent campaigns of this sort, the names of the donors would not be printed on a paper list for circulation, but rather engraved on the building’s actual stones. An example may be seen at the Catholic basilica of Sacré-Coeur in Paris, a highly controversial and confrontational monument redolent of right-wing politics that was built by international subscription in the late nineteenth century (Figure 5.5). This strange informationalization of pilgrimage suggests a reverse-engineered fundraising drive: whereas the drive sends out representations of the basilica to every scattered donor, here it is the donors who are each represented in the basilica. These inscribed names conjure the invisible presence of all those people who, physically present in actual contexts elsewhere, are or were also fleetingly at Sacré-Coeur at some given moment, whenever a thought or a picture or a smell activates their imagination. Like the Pantheon’s marble floor, the stones of Sacré-Coeur suggest a kind of empire gathered in one

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Figure 5.5 Basilica of Sacré-Coeur, Paris, 1875–1914; detail of donor names inscribed on a wall in the choir (author).

place; an empire of the like-minded. But here those other places are not indexically present as remotely-sourced marbles – as relics, in other words; instead, they are represented informationally, by characters cut into uniform blocks of Euville limestone. As a place made up of many places, Sacré-Coeur – like San Paolo – reveals itself to be a building of modernity that professes to be at war with modernity; one that sternly rejects the ambiguities of modern spatiality even as it is testifying to them, and even monumentalizing them.

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Notes 1 d. boyd, Faceted ID/Entity: Managing Representation in a Digital World, MA Thesis, MIT, Cambridge, 2002; M. Wesch, “YouTube and You: Experiences of Self-Awareness in the Context-Collapse of the Recording Webcam,” Explorations in Media Ecology 8, no. 2 (2009): 19–34; A. E. Marwick and d. boyd, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience,” New Media & Society 13 (2011): 114–133; Jenny L. Davis and Nathan Jurgenson, “Context Collapse: Theorizing Context Collusions and Collisions,” Information, Communication & Society 17, no. 4 (2014): 476–485. 2 Summers has termed this “metaoptical space” (David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism [London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2003], 555–564). 3 Summers, Real Spaces. 4 Ibid., 11. The text is: Gabrielle Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane, (Bologna, 1582) (Gabrielle Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, translated by William McCuaig, introduction by Paolo Prodi [Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012]). 5 Annabel Wharton, Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 51. 6 Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing, translated by Sarah Benson (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2001), 20. 7 Ibid., 21. 8 Ibid., 28; Joseph Rykwert, “On the Oral Transmission of Architectural Theory,” AA Files 6 (1984): 14–28; Mathes Roriczer and Hanns Schmuttermayer, Gothic Design Techniques: The Fifteenth-Century Design Booklets of Mathes Roriczer and Hanns Schmuttermayer, ed. Lon Shelby (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press; London: Feffer and Simons, 1977). 9 In Selling Jerusalem, Annabel Wharton has documented the progressively dematerialized fashion in which Jerusalem has been represented over the ages, beginning with relics in antiquity, which offered a taste of the physical reality of the site to those who were far from it, and concluding with digitized images that offer a disembodied illusion of it. 10 See the many essays, covering various traditions, in: Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney, ed., Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). 11 Anthony Johnson, Solving Stonehenge: The New Key to an Ancient Enigma (New York: Thames and Hudson 2008). 12 The marbles on the Pantheon floor come from Ethiopia, Numidia, Greece, and Asia, which roughly correspond to equidistant quarters of the empire (Mark Wilson Jones, Principles of Roman Architecture [New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000], 184; Rolf M. Schneider, “Coloured Marble: The Splendour and Power of Imperial Rome,” Apollo 154, no. 473 [2001]: 7–8). 13 Michael D. Coe, Angkor and the Khmer Civilization (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 101. 14 Gülru Necipoglu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 241. 15 Richard Krautheimer, “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture’,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 1–33. 16 Ibid., 9–10; on medieval copies, see also Günter Bandmann, Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning, translated by Kendall Wallis (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2005), 49–51.

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17 Michael W. Meister, “De- and Re-Constructing the Indian Temple,” Art Journal 49, no. 4 (1990): 396–397; Sonit Bafna, “On the Idea of the Mandala as a Governing Device in Indian Architectural Tradition,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59, no. 1 (2000): 26–49; Jose Jacob, “Opening the Eye: ‘Seeing’ as ‘Knowing’ in Vastusastra (Indian Architectural Theory) According to the Treatise Manasara,” Chora 5 (2007): 201–226. 18 Christian Ewert and Jens-Peter Wisshak, Forschungen zur almohadischen Moschee (Mainz: P. v. Zabern, 1980), 15–20 (figure 20). 19 Summers, Real Spaces, 151. 20 Virtual space is generally associated with the representation of three dimensions in two (Summers, Real Spaces, 431 ff.). 21 Erwin Panofsky and Gerda Panofsky-Soergel, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 63–65. 22 A pithy discussion of medieval and modern understandings of metaphor remains Otto Von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), xix–xxi. 23 Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing, 42–56. 24 Ibid., 46. 25 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Eurocentrism and Art History? Universal History and the Historiography of the Arts before Winckelmann,” in Memory and Oblivion, ed. Wessel Reinink and Jeroen Stumpel (Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer, 1996), 35–42; Kristoffer Neville, “The Early Reception of Fischer von Erlach’s Entwurff einer historischen Architectur,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 66, no. 2 (2007): 160–175. 26 This paragraph is based on my book, Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (London: Routledge, 2007). 27 François Blondel, Cours d’architecture, volume 1 (Paris: De l’imprimerie de Lambert Roulland, 1675), 170. 28 Richard Wittman, “Local Memory and National Aesthetics: Jean Pagès’s Early Eighteenth-Century Description of the ‘Incomparable’ Cathedral of Amiens,” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 259–279; and Richard Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007), 42–49. 29 Jean Pagès, “L’Auguste Temple, ou Description de l’Eglise cathédrale de nôtre Dame d’Amiens,” (1708, with later interpolations through 1723), in volume 1 of Pagès’s “Notices historiques sur la ville d’Amiens” (Bibliothèque communale d’Amiens, ms 829 E [10 volumes]). The nineteenth-century publication of Pagès’s text is abridged and suppresses its dialogue format (Jean Pagès, Manuscrits de Pagès, Marchand d’Amiens. Ecrits à la fin du 17e et au commencement du 18e siècle, volume 5 [Amiens: A. Caron, 1862]). 30 For a more detailed account, see Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere, ch. 9. 31 For example: Julien-David Le Roy, Histoire de la disposition et des formes différentes que les Chrétiens ont données à leurs temples, depuis le règne de Constantin le Grand jusqu’à nous (Paris: Desaint & Saillant, 1764); Jean-Baptiste Bernard, La reconstruction de l’église de Sainte-Geneviève, ode au roi (Paris: H.D. Chaubert, C.Hérissant fils, 1755); Jean-Baptiste Bernard, La reconstruction de l’église de Sainte-Geneviève, ode présentée au roi, le 2 juillet 1755, revue depuis et corrigée considérablement par l’auteur (Paris: Vve Thiboust, 1764).

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32 Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere, 118–120. 33 Marc Grignon and Juliana Maxim, “Convenance, Caractère, and the Public Sphere,” Journal of Architectural Education 49, no. 1 (1995): 29–37; Vittoria Di Palma, “Architecture, Environment and Emotion: Quatremère de Quincy and the Concept of Character,” AA Files 47 (2002): 45–56; Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Werner Szambien, Symétrie, goût, caractère (Paris: Picard, 1986). 34 See the various articles in Romantik und Restauration: Architektur in Bayern zur Zeit Ludwigs I 1825–1848, ed. Winfried Nerdinger (Munich: Hugendubel, 1987). In English, see: Kathleen Curran, The Romanesque Revival: Religion, Politics, and Transnational Exchange (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 57–68; Joshua Hagen, “Architecture, Urban Planning, and Political Authority in Ludwig I’s Munich,” Journal of Urban History 35, no. 4 (May 2009): 459–485. 35 A remarkable example occurred a little earlier in Potsdam in the 1750s and ’60s when Frederick the Great’s architectural advisor Francesco Algarotti instigated the construction of a series of copies of Palladio palazzos (David Watkin and Tilman Mellinghoff, German Architecture and the Classical Ideal, 1740–1840 [London: Thames and Hudson, 1987], 19–21). 36 Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris, translated by John Sturrock (Harmondsworth, New York: Penguin, 1978), 188–202. 37 Neil Levine, “The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Architecture and Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève,” The Beaux-Arts and NineteenthCentury French Architecture, ed. Robin Middleton (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 138–173. 38 Neil Levine, “The Romantic Idea of Architectural Legibility: Henri Labrouste and the Neo-Grec,” The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, ed. Alfred Drexler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 325–416. 39 The classic analysis remains Levine, “The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Architecture and Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève.” 40 Labrouste in turn got his ideas from the eighteenth-century writer, Jean-François Viel de Saint-Maux, whose Lettres sur l’Architecture were published in 1787. See Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere, 1–2. 41 See Elisabetta Pallottino, “La nuova architettura paleocristiana nella ricostruzione della basilica di S. Paolo fuori le mura a Roma (1823–1847),” Ricerche di Storia dell’arte 56 (1995): 30–59; Michael Groblewski, Thron und Altar: Der Wiederaufbau der Basilika St. Paul vor den Mauern (1823–1854) (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 2001). The present author is presently working on a new study of the post-fire reconstruction of the basilica of San Paolo. 42 Pope Leo XII, Chirografo della Santità di Nostro Signore Papa Leone XII in data dei 18 settembre 1825 sulla riedificazione della Basilica di S. Paolo nella via Ostiense . . . (Rome, 1825). 43 Pope Leo XII, Ad plurimas easque gravissimas [Sanctissimi domini nostri Leonis Divina Providentia Papae XII Epistola Encyclica ad omnes patriarchas, primates, archiepiscopos, et episcopos: Ad plurimas easque gravissimas / Enciclica di N. S. Leone per la divina provvidenza Papa XII a tutti i patriarchi, primati, archivescovi, e vescovi: Ad plurimas easque gravissimas] (Rome: Presso Vicenzo Poggioli Stampatore Camerale, 1825). 44 Gioacchino Ventura, [untitled article], Il diario di Roma 20 (12 March 1825): 1. 45 For example, Cardinal Brancadoro, Intimazione di collette per la riedificazione della sacrosanta basilica di San Paolo, 2nd ed. (Rome: Bartolini Tipografia Arciv.,

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48 49 50 51 52

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1825); “Lettera Pastorale di Monsignor Luigi Lambruschini Arcivescovo di Genova per far concorrere i suoi diocesani con generose offerte alla riedificazione del tempio di S. Paolo,” Giornale Ecclesiastico di Roma 4 (October–December 1825): 131–139. Ludwig, Prince of Bavaria. [Letter to Carlo Fea of 15 May 1825] (Rome, 1825). Oesterreichischer Beobachter no. 89 (30 March 1826): 377–8; Gaceta de Madrid no. 41 (4 April 1826): 161; “Nouvelles Politiques,” L’ami de la Religion; Journal Ecclésiastique, Politique et Littéraire 47, no. 1216 (5 April 1826): 239; “Rome,” United States Catholic Miscellany 6, no. 7 (2 September 1826): 54; Friedens und Kriegs Kurier, no. 268 (9 November 1826): 1; “Foreign News.” Niles’ Weekly Register 31, no. 784 (23 September 1826): 59. Il diario di Roma 102 (24 December 1825): 5–7; Il diario di Roma: Notizie del Giorno (January 1826): 1. Il diario di Roma: Notizie del Giorno 29 (12 April 1826): 1. Il diario di Roma: Notizie del Giorno 61 (2 August 1826): 1. Il diario di Roma: Notizie del Giorno 50 (23 June 1827): 1; Il diario di Roma: Notizie del Giorno 25 (28 June 1828): 1; Il diario di Roma 50 supplement (23 June 1829): 1–2; Il diario di Roma 52 (30 June 1832): 2. “St Paul’s at Rome,” Bengal Catholic Herald (Calcutta) 1, no. 8 (1 May 1841): 99–102.

Chapter 6

Revolution reloaded Spaces of encounter and resistance in Iranian video games Vit Sisler and Ebrahim Mohseni

I sneak into the dark corridors of an Israeli military base. As I silently move through these spaces, I carefully watch out for surveillance cameras and Israeli soldiers who can easily terminate my mission to find and rescue a kidnapped Iranian nuclear scientist. My name is Muhammad Marzoghi, and I am an elite member of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement commandos. Yet as I move through the base, I am relatively immobile, seated in front of my laptop, to which I am linked via various game controllers. I am playing Resistance, an Iranian video game produced by the government-sponsored Tebyan Institute in 2008. Muhammad Marzoghi is my virtual identity, one of many McLuhanesque possible “extensions” of my body.1 Tarik Sabry argues that the “overabundance” of media technologies and floating signifiers of the other has undermined the role of place as a necessary element of cultural encountering.2 According to Sabry, witnessing or encountering other cultures now has little to do with physical space, and has become a symbolic phenomenon. Video games are one such type of nonphysical space where cultural encountering takes place.3 As video games become globally pervasive media, it is crucial to critically study the symbolic and ideological dimensions of in-game representational politics in relation to contested spaces of conflict and political hegemony. This chapter analyzes the virtual spaces of Iranian video games and links them politically and historically to the places of their production. The focus of this chapter is on video games as spaces of encounter and resistance, as heterogeneous imaginaries of cultures and identities, and as assemblages of myths, ideologies, and gaming logic. It is based on an examination of more than twenty video games developed in Iran between 2005 and 2011 and interviews with major Iranian game producers.4 In accordance with the overarching topic of this volume, this chapter examines video games as one of the visible vehicles of the newly emerging opportunities and vulnerabilities that accompany disjunctures in global cultural flows. Video games are inherently transnational by virtue of their industrial, textual, and player practices. The technological advances and geopolitical references in current video games enable players’ experience

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crossing distances and time zones in ways that reorganize felt boundaries and rearticulate sense of place. Nevertheless, video games are designed, developed, and played in situated contexts, where the material substrate of bodies and concrete political, cultural, and societal circumstances resist the purity of symbolic abstraction. This chapter focuses on the personal, institutional, and procedural dimensions of video game production in Iran. In contradiction to the notion of digital communication as rendering the unique physical properties of locations negligible, this chapter emphasizes the physicality and local experience of place and discusses the video game development in Iran in the context of sociotechnical configurations that are continuously challenged and reconstructed. Both authors of this chapter grew up in the 1980s, belonging to the “video game generation”.5 Video games were an important part of childhood and teenage years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, both in Iran and Eastern Europe. Given the logic of global cultural flow, we both played very similar games, originating mostly in the United States or Western Europe. One of the popular games of these times was Prince of Persia, an action based quasi-historical game produced by the US-based company Brøderbund Software in 1989. Despite the similarities, the “situatedness” of our gaming, i.e. the linguistic, political, economic, cultural, ideological, material, and spatial dimensions of us playing Western games, was significantly different. Whereas for many children in the Eastern Bloc Prince of Persia was the first encounter with “Iran”, for Iranian kids it was one of many encounters with Western Orientalist fantasies. Edward Said has in his classic work discussed the Western culture’s long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia, particularly the Middle East.6 He has analyzed social and political implications of Orientalism as the source of the inaccurate cultural representations that are the foundation of Western thought towards the “The East” and that have served as implicit justifications for the colonial and imperialist ambitions of the European powers and of the United States. Although Prince of Persia is highly acclaimed for its outstanding graphics and sound and constitutes a milestone for its genre,7 it is also a prominent example of “digital Orientalism”.8 In the game, the player takes on the role of a young hero whose task is to escape from a labyrinthine dungeon and duel scimitar-wielding turbaned guards to save the Sultan’s beautiful daughter from the tyrannical Vizier. The opening scene of the game is transcribed in Table 6.1. Prince of Persia utilizes visual motifs such as turbans, scimitars, and carpets; character concepts such as viziers, sultans, and princesses; and topoi such as palaces, minarets, and harems. Yet, these elements do not hail from any particular period of Iranian history; in fact, most of them do not relate to Iran at all. While the palace in the introduction bears the traces of the

106 Vit Sisler and Ebrahim Mohseni Table 6.1 Transcript of the opening scene of Prince of Persia Opening screen. Through a pointed arch, framed by arabesque tiles, we see a large palace, loosely resembling Mughal architectural style, with minarets standing in a rocky barren desert dotted with palm trees. Text: “Brøderbund Software presents a game by Jordan Mechner.” Text: “Prince of Persia”. Text (framed by geometrical and semicalligraphic motifs): “In the Sultan’s absence the Grand Vizier Jaffar rules with the iron fist of tyranny. Only one obstacle remains between Jaffar and the throne: the Sultan’s beautiful young daughter . . .” 8-bit video game graphics. Large room with decorated round arches and white columns resembling Alhambra. Woven carpet with geometrical patterns and colorful blankets form a bed on the floor. In front of the carpet stands the young Princess with long hair and hands in front of her chest, in clothing revealing her arms and shoulders. The Princess turns towards the door. The Grand Vizier Jaffar, an old man with turban and long white beard, enters the room. The Vizier tries to hug the young Princess. She backs away in disgust. The Vizier raises his hands and casts a spell. A large hourglass appears in front of him. He leaves the room. The Princess stands motionless with her head bowed. Text (framed by geometric and semi-calligraphic motifs): “Marry Jaffar . . . Or die within the hour. All the Princess’s hopes now rest on the brave youth she loves. Little does she know that he is already a prisoner in Jaffar’s dungeons . . .”

8-bit computer music with an Arabic theme. Music culminates.

Dramatic music.

Sound of opening doors.

Slow music. Ticking of the clock.

8-bit computer music.

Indian Mughal architectural style, the room in the second scene resembles the Spanish Emirate of Granada. Similar ahistorical assemblage applies to clothing, decoration, and characters; or to the calligraphy which is seemingly Arabic yet ineligible. As the author of the game Jordan Mechner says, he was inspired by the tales of A Thousand and One Nights while designing the original game: One day I sat down at last and read The Arabian Nights. In those pages, I met my prince and princess, sultan and vizier, over and over

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in different guises. Shape-shifting, they peered out at me from behind different personas, like the broken fragments of a magic mirror. Maybe the reason the land and characters of The Arabian Nights are so perfect for a video game is because they are themselves dreams.9 Philipp Reichmuth and Stefan Werning argue that the study of Orientalist topoi and rationales in video games requires understanding the specificity of interactive media and the logic of their production.10 The game producers draw from a rich field of Oriental topoi and representations that is well established in Western culture. In other words, the imagined Orient is a complex cultural metasign that “is” everything that can be associated with it and could be applied successfully in a video game design with a “Middle Eastern” theme.11 The player topography – i.e. the parameters of spatial construction and orientation – sets video games apart from narrative media like film and literature and links them more closely to spatially oriented media like architecture.12 Similarly to A Thousand and One Nights, the imaginary space of Prince of Persia symbolically connects different times and places – Mughal India, Abbasid Baghdad, or Spanish Andalusia. Recalling Edward Said’s work, Prince of Persia recreates Iran as a timeless and exotic entity. Naively and ahistorically, it conflates Arab and Indian imagery – constructing Iran as a place without history, excluding it from the discourses of modernity and obscuring its contemporary reality.13 As Reichmuth and Werning note, Said’s hypothesis that the Western imagination conflates historical fantasies with contemporary reality does not hold well for video games.14 Games portraying a contemporary and a historical or quasi-historical Iran constitute separate categories, using different imagery, narrative, and gameplay. An emblematic representation of contemporary Iran in a Western video game is the first-person shooter Assault on Iran produced by the US company Kuma/War in 2005, which imagines future direct American military engagement with Iran. In a story depicting US special commandos sent to terminate Iran’s nuclear program, Iranian soldiers are featured as enemies. The trailer for the game is transcribed in Table 6.2. Assault on Iran presents itself as a possible real-world scenario, schematizing complex political relations into a simplistic polarized frame. The use of real footage and satellite images of real places and people (Natanz facility, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan) is combined with a persuasive narrative having questionable grounding in the real world (“Diplomacy has failed”, “Regime change seems impossible”). The same level of realism extends to the weaponry of US soldiers (CH-47 Chinook helicopters) and virtual environments reconstructed in the game (Ruhollah Khomeini posters and murals), yet not to the anonymous Iranian soldiers and civilians.

108 Vit Sisler and Ebrahim Mohseni Table 6.2 Transcript of the trailer of Assault on Iran White text on a black screen: “For 18 years Iran has secretly pursued nuclear weapons.” Real satellite image of the Iranian Natanz Fuel Enrichment complex. Text: “Diplomacy has failed.” Real footage from UN meeting. Detail of the Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Text: “Regime change seems impossible.” Real footage. Detail on a large poster of the Ruhollah Khomeini. Cut. Detail of a group of Iranians in loose civilian clothes, shouting loudly and waving AK-47s and RPGs. Text: “Is nothing to be done?” Text: “Today KUMA presents an alternative.” Video game graphics. Detail of US Marine aiming rifle in a Middle Eastern environment. Cut. Detail of three US soldiers firing on a civilian car in night vision. CH-47 Chinook helicopter is landing on the ground. Cut. US commando runs along the landed helicopter with rotors on. Cut. US commando with rifle stands under banner with Ruhollah Khomeini. Text: “Destroy the materials.” Video game graphics. Large barrels explode in an empty warehouse. Text: “Destroy the knowledge.” Video game graphics. US commandos shoot at Iranians in civilian clothes in an anonymous bureau. Iranians fall to the ground covered in blood. Text: “Leave no trace.” Video game graphics. US commandos run to Chinook helicopter waiting on the ground. Night vision. Cut. Detail of Iranian building. The building explodes. Text: “Assault on Iran”.

Dramatic, fast-paced music. Music continues. Music continues. Music continues. Music mixed with human shouting. Human shouting continues.

Shouting culminates. Drums start to beat. Dramatic music with drums.

Sound of helicopter.

Dramatic music. Sounds of multiple explosions. Dramatic music. Sound of firearms.

Dramatic music. Sound of helicopter. Sound of explosion.

Music culminates.

As Ed Halter argues, unlike photography, computer-generated imagery has no natural relationship to any real-world referent.15 Thus, this relationship must be demonstrated, constructed, or asserted by other means. The real footage used in the game and the emphasis on visually realistic graphics legitimizes the “realistic-ness” of the fictitious scenario and its implications.

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Nina Huntemann has compared war games like these with the Why We Fight war movies made by Hollywood in the 1940s, with the distinction that these games pay more attention to How We Fight.16 By the same token, Assault on Iran focuses on technical information about weaponry and technology of war but fails to provide deeper background for understanding a possible conflict and its consequences. In this respect, Zhan Li argues that the virtual representation of war in video games engages the public in a participative mimesis within the confines of instrumental media systems, detaching it from actual communicative reasoning.17 The militarization of the conflict drama, having reinforced the polarized frame of the good Self and the evil Other, obviates deeper explanation of the political crisis.18 The virtual representation of Iran in Assault on Iran accords with the schematizing frameworks that dominate contemporary Western media and politics. As Mehdi Semati argues, the stereotypic US narrative of the Islamic Republic of Iran depicts it as a state ruled by a handful of “mad mullahs”, labeling it as “theocratic society”, “fundamentalist society”, or “rogue nation”.19 According to Semati, such labels, regardless of their analytical inanity or political and diplomatic efficacy, masks Iran’s reality, which is far more complex.20 Regarding the Reichmuth and Werning’s argument that games portraying a contemporary and a historical or a quasi-historical Middle East constitute separate categories, the above-mentioned case studies, albeit anecdotal, confirm broader tendencies in the representation of the Middle East in Western video games we have discussed elsewhere.21 The representation of contemporary Iran in video games tends to be conflictual, focuses on war scenarios and crises, uses mostly first-person shooter or real-time strategy video game genres, utilizes hyperrealistic visual imagery, and uses the “real” Islamic Republic of Iran as its referent. On the contrary, the quasi-historical representation of Iran tends to be fantastical, uses mostly adventure or role-playing game genres, focuses on romanticized and heroic narratives, and utilizes eclectic visual imagery of the non-existent “Orient”. Both Prince of Persia and Assault on Iran have shaped Iranian video game production. In 2008 and 2011, we have conducted interviews with major video game producers in Iran.22 Despite the heterogeneous nature of their production and motivations, the producers share a relatively coherent set of concerns that shape their design outcomes and production strategies. Most producers explicitly mentioned Prince of Persia or Assault on Iran as offering important incentives for video game development. These include striving to create “authentic” representation of Iran (as opposed to the Western representation), showing the outside world the richness of the history and culture of Iran, and utilizing the “educational” (or persuasive) potential of video games.23 Before exploring the virtual spaces of Iranian games, let us examine Iran as a place of production. Our concern here is, in the words of Arjun

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Appadurai, what is the place of locality in schemes of global cultural flow?24 Appadurai describes a world where electronic media are transforming the relationships between information and mediation, and where nation-states are struggling to retain control over their populations in the face of a host of transnational movements and processes.25 In this sense, Appadurai perceives locality as primarily relational and contextual rather than as scalar or spatial; as a complex phenomenological quality, constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity, and the relativity of contexts.26 Taking a different tack, John Agnew describes the debate over the terms space and place; particularly the disputes between the abstract spatial analysis which tends to view places as nodes in space reflective of the spatial imprint of universal physical, social, or economic processes and the concrete environmental analysis which conceives of places as “milieux that exercise a mediating role on physical, social and economic processes and thus affect how such processes operate”.27 Agnew argues that the view of place as a location on a surface where things “just happen” – rather than the more holistic view of places as the geographical context for the mediation of physical, social, and economic processes – has been implicitly adopted.28 Finally, there is another perspective, which challenges both the dominant meanings of space and place, arguing that the world is increasingly “placeless” as space-spanning connections and flow of information, things, and people undermine the rootedness of a wide range of processes anywhere in particular.29 Information and communication technologies and digital media, especially, have been cited as making places obsolete.30 As Thomas Friedman has argued, software and global network have “made us all next-door neighbors”.31 Contrary to the perspective of “placelessness”, in which place is being lost to an increasingly homogenous and alienating sameness,32 the notion of place is extremely important for our analysis of Iranian video games – as a milieu that mediates and affects political, social, and economic processes of video game production in Iran. Iran’s digital environment is controlled and censored through a complex mixture of legislative and non-legal ploys. The Islamic State that came to power after 1979 defined itself predominantly in a cultural sense.33 The twin aims of the cultural policy of the new state were based on the destruction of an imposed Western, alien culture and its replacement with a “dignified, indigenous and authentic Islamic culture”.34 The state began to develop a range of institutions and regulatory bodies to implement and safeguard the Shiite Islamic culture of Iran. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance was given the specific tasks of managing and running the press, charities, and religious endowments.35 Recently, the Ministry has been charged with overseeing the development of a rating system for foreign games and, more importantly, approving all domestic Iranian video game production prior to its

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release.36 In 2006, the government approved the establishment of the Iran Computer and Video Games Foundation under the supervision of the Ministry.37 The aim of this Foundation is twofold: to boost economic growth in the video game industry segment, and to subsidize the development of authentic Iranian and Islamic games.38 The first games produced within this regulatory environment were a clear reaction to the representation of Iran in American video war games. As one of the producers, the Cultural Institute Tebyan,39 affiliated with the Islamic Development Organization,40 states: Computer games can be used for positive or destructive means. The latter represent games preparing the public for military campaigns, such as attacks on Iraq or Afghanistan, and misrepresenting Muslim forces. Authors of these games misuse their monopoly for developing and publishing games. . . . Therefore we aim to develop games in accordance with Islamic and Iranian values.41 This brings us to the notion of video games as spaces of resistance. Official Iranian video games can be perceived as what Henri Lefebvre in another context calls “counter-discourses”.42 Appropriating Lefebvre, we might understand these as responses built on “authentic” memories and places to hegemonic spaces of representation created by the US video game industry. One example is the third-person shooter game Dawn 8 that attempts to foster national pride through the digital reconstruction of a victorious battle from the Iran-Iraq war. Developed by Tebyan in 2007, this game recalls an operation of the same name during which Iranian forces captured the Fao peninsula in 1986. The opening scene of the game is transcribed in Table 6.3. As was the case in Assault on Iran, the opening of Dawn 8 combines real footage (victorious Iranian military; defeated Iraqi soldiers) with computer-generated graphics and sounds (tribute to Iranian Revolutionary Guards; digital portrait of Ruhollah Khomeini; makeshift bunker where the player’s mission starts). Similarly to its US predecessor, in Dawn 8 the real footage both legitimizes the virtual recreation of a real-world scenario and sets it in an ideological and political frame. The Iran-Iraq war is a meaningful point of reference in Iranian society. Iran experienced a bitter, eight-year war with Iraq that produced significant death, injury, and destruction. The impact of the war remains very visible in Iranian life. Because of the war issues of security supersede all other matters in public life; war veterans have been elevated to national hero status and enjoy rapid ascension up available socio-economic ladders; and a culture of martyrdom, sacrifice, and defense has been strengthened.43 In particular, the Sacred Defense (Defaa-e Moghadas), referencing the invasion of Iran by Iraq, is periodically commemorated by rallies, memorials, and murals.44 In this respect, Dawn 8 is a space of both resistance – in the sense that it resists

112 Vit Sisler and Ebrahim Mohseni Table 6.3 Transcript of the opening scene of Dawn 8 (excerpt) White text on a black screen (in Persian): “In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful”. Real footage from the Iran-Iraq war. Dramatic orchestral music, drums. Iranian soldiers march in a barren Sounds of airplanes. environment. One of them shows a Vsign to the camera. Text: “Mission: Dawn 8”. Male voice (in Persian): “Name of the mission: Dawn 8”. Real footage. Iranian soldiers fire Machine gun fire. Orchestral music machine guns and RPGs from trenches. continues. Text: “Location: Fao province”. Male voice: “Location of the mission: Fao province”. Real footage. Detail of Iranian soldier firing Explosions. Heroic music starts. a RPG. Cut. Iraqi tank explodes in flames. Video game graphics. Member of the Heroic music continues. Male voice: Iranian Revolutionary Guards holds a “Aim of the mission: Cutting off the RPG and turns in slow motion against enemy’s grip on the Gulf, securing the digital red flames in the background. Gulf, distancing the enemy’s firepower from the Southern cities of the Islamic Republic of Iran . . .” Real footage. Iranian soldier ties a Male voice continues: “. . . overtaking Pasdaran military headband with the missile silos and communication towers name of Imam Hussein to his head. belonging to Saddam’s regime, ceasing the export of Iraqi oil from shipping harbors in the Gulf, and . . .” Real footage. Damaged military ship lies Male voice continues: “. . . finally, motionless and half sunk near the shore. destruction of the empty illusion of the invincibility of enemies of Iran along with demonstrating the military might of Islam in the forever-Persian Gulf”. Real footage. Iranian soldier prostrates Heroic music continues. in prayer. Computer-generated military music. Video game graphics. The interior of a makeshift bunker made of sandbags. Portrait of Ruhollah Khomeini hangs on the right. AK-47 gun and military radio stand in the corner. On the left is a large green banner with the inscription: “Ya Aba Abdullah” (the title of Imam Hussein). The game starts.

Western representations and supports the Iranian state agenda – and memorialization. By reenacting the famous battle, players directly participate in the heroism and martyrdom of Iranian soldiers. As Gholam Khiabany notes, the central Iranian state plays a major role in defining national “culture”, promoting certain traditions and heritage,

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and discarding or marginalizing others.45 According to Khiabany, even “Islam” and “Islamic culture” in Iran has come to be defined in a particular way and alongside the interests of the national state.46 The game Dawn 8 is an emblematic example of a game promoting the “Islamic and Iranian values” as understood by the government. The game is a part of a larger project called Memorable Battles (Nabardhay-e Maandegar), a series of war games virtually recreating famous battles from modern Iranian history. These state-sponsored games emphasize the Shiite Islamic culture, legitimate defense of rights, and culture of martyrdom and resistance. At the same time, the games in the Memorable Battles series could be perceived as a part of an ongoing “de-Westernization” of the Iranian cultural and media production.47 Another “counter-discourse” game by Tebyan directly engages ideological and struggle with the United States and Israel. The previously mentioned first-person shooter game Resistance is set in the year 2015. Players control Hezbollah commandos sent to Israel to seek and destroy a secret military program. This game is a clear response to Assault on Iran, appropriating its framework and game mechanics but reversing its narrative and polarities.48 Here we briefly introduce the sites of official video game production in Iran. Usually, governmental institutes like Tebyan or Sepah (The Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution)49 produce a concept or script which is then contracted to individual software studios that develop the game relatively independently. In addition to developing games for the governmental institutes, they design and develop their own games that may differ significantly from government-contracted production. Whereas the Iranian government utilizes video games to promote Islamic values and foster national pride, independent producers maneuver within and around the state’s interests to construct their own distinctive virtual worlds.50 This opens up a new dimension of thinking about Iranian video games as spaces of contestation. While governmental games offer resistance to US schematizations, independent producers deal with both the dominant framework set by the US industry and their own government’s regulation and control. When thinking about Iran as a place of production, we must bear in mind a sense of place, in the words of Yi-Fu Tuan, not only as geographic location but as social position and political order in relation to the sometimes conflicting hegemonies of the state and the global environment.51 The virtual spaces of independent games are achieved by negotiating the funding and restrictions of the Islamic state and the visions and finances of private entrepreneurs. Unlike government games that adhere to the official communication policy of the Islamic state, the spaces of gameplay constructed by independent designers reflect personal experiences, values and beliefs. As Puya Dadgar, the manager of Tehran-based Puya Arts Software, told me, he was disturbed by the way his university colleagues in the US perceived Iran. So he decided to create a video game with an Iranian hero based on Iranian history and

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culture “that would help people understand Iran”.52 Similarly, Farshad Samimi told me that his company Tahlil Garan Tadbir produces its games for a foreign audience so “people can understand the Iranian culture and see that Iran has two thousand years of history”.53 For these designers, video game development is intertwined with self-representation and identity construction. Independent producers often deal with Iranian history and mythology. For instance, the action role-playing game Garshasp is based on the epic poem Garshasp Naame and is, according to its authors, “a symbolic recreation of the spirituality, grandeur and mythical atmosphere of ancient Persia”.54 The game has been initially developed by a Tehran-based company Fanafzar Sharif, yet it has been completed by Texan Dead Mage Studio, where the members of the original team moved.55 The opening scene of the game is transcribed in Table 6.4. The game Garshasp feels and plays like any other generic fantasy action role-playing game. Yet, unlike most US and European games of the fantasy genre, which are dominated by the Anglo-Saxon mythological canon, Garshasp’s narrative and audiovisuals are thoughtfully inspired by Persian mythology. As such, the hero confronts “Ashmoogs” instead of goblins and “Deevs” instead of demons, while these creatures’ depictions and attributes follow their mythological roots.56 Similarly, the story revolves around the struggle between good and evil inspired by the stories of Shaah Naame and Garshasp Naame. Importantly, the authors focus on the pre-Islamic history of Iran, including its Zoroastrian heritage, and on its connection to the world’s great civilizations. As they say: The treasure trove of Persian mythology contains within it some of humanity’s oldest and most profound myths. They recount a rich and ancient culture, meaningful literature and exciting legends that bring to life the excitement of Iranian civilization in all its glory – an experience often lost in the daily travails of modern life.57 This statement brings us back to video games as spaces of encounter – not with the Oriental other, excluded from the constructive discursive of modernity, but with the other’s deliberately constructed self-representation. As Puya Dadgar, the author of the historical game Quest of Persia, told me, “Unlike Prince of Persia, Quest of Persia is one hundred percent Persian, from music to environments, up to characters.”58 This emphasis on authenticity permeates Iranian game production as a whole. Though game production in Iran is subject to friction and competition among factions within the regime, conflicts among various government agencies, and the tensions between the state and the private sector, independent and state producers share the concern that Iran and Iranians are misrepresented in global video game production and strive to create

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Table 6.4 Transcript of the opening scene of Garshasp We see barren rocky mountains under a dark sky. Camera slowly moves around the cliffs.

Garshasp, a tall and muscular dark haired male, is sitting next to a fire on a mountain cliff. He is dressed in a leather tunic and boots, wears bracelets with Persian engravings, and yields a broad sword.

Sound of wind blowing. Male voice: “Those days have been wiped out of memories. The days when the raging river of Eternal Time still flowed, and the vast lands of Persia were drowning in the chaos of war and fire of anarchy.” Male voice continues: “In those days, those old days, Great Garshasp, a mighty Persian warrior, was still young and seeking to make a name for himself. Little did he know of the incredible destiny ahead. The destiny that became legend; the poems the bards sang and stories the merchants carried to the four corners of the land of Persia.” The sound of a wind is interrupted by a shriek. A sword clinks.

Garshasp rises in alert and draws a sword. A number of Ashmoogs, goblin-like creatures, jump down from the cliff and attack Garshasp. In a brief and brutal skirmish, Dramatic music. Sounds of a battle, Garshasp kills all the Ashmoogs. Garshasp’s shouting, and Ashmoogs’ shrieks. Garshasp holds the last of the Male voice: “Ashmoogs! Those evil Ashmoogs above the ground and man-eating creatures only left their dens examines his face. Then he throws the on command of a Deev. Seeing them in creature off a cliff. mountains was unexpected to such an extent that Garsharp immediately felt a premonition about dreadful events happening in his town, Aryasp.” Sounds of a battle. Cut. We see an arena in the town of Aryasp. A Deev, a demon-like creature in a horned helmet with a large sword, is fighting a Pahlevan (a Persian hero) in an arena. The Deev kills the Pahlevan and takes Deev’s victorious cry. his mace. He raises his head to the sky and cries. Cut. The game starts.

“authentic” virtual representations of Iran.59 Nevertheless, the “authenticity” as constructed by these games takes different forms. On the one hand, the governmental games promote a specific understanding of Iranian identity and values, emphasizing national pride, defense against outside aggression, and Shiite Islamic culture. The ultimate point of reference of these games is the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The independent or semi-independent

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games, on the other hand, use Iranian mythology and pre-Islamic history as their referents, including tacit hints to the Zoroastrian past. They emphasize the link between ancient history and contemporary Iranian reality and actively communicate with the global audience through shared codes and game patterns. Symbolically, while governmental games are mostly sold at government-sponsored Basiji shops, independent games are widely available in ordinary game shops alongside foreign video game production.60 In Media Archaeology, Erkki Huhtamo describes how topoi – that is, clichés or mental schemes found originally in oral culture and literature – spread to all spheres of life. He argues that no matter how dominant “media culture” may have become in the contemporary world, it does not constitute an all-encompassing realm.61 Rather, it coexists with and may even be embedded in other cultural formations. As Huhtamo suggests, topoi from other realms, including ancient ones, reappear within the contemporary media-cultural context.62 We have seen that the topoi Iranian games use to recreate “authenticity” come from ancient Persian mythology, Iranian history, and the ideology of the Shiite Islamic state. On a symbolic level, these games are, in the words of Puya Dadgar, “one hundred percent Iranian”. Yet both independent and governmental games frequently appropriate the genres, rule systems and game mechanics of their Western counterparts. As Stéphane Natkin and Liliana Vega argue, a video game is essentially an imaginary universe.63 The main defining aspects of this universe include the global scenario (topology, main characters, nature, and hierarchy of the levels), images and sounds, the principles of the gameplay (modalities, goals, rules, game mechanics), and the ergonomic principles (interface, game learning).64 From this analytical perspective, the Iranian games “authentically” create new content in the first two categories of the defining aspects (global scenario, images and sounds), i.e. on the visible and audible layers of a game, yet appropriate the remaining hidden layers, i.e. gameplay and ergonomic principles. The motivation for such appropriation may differ: while the Iranian government perceives American video games as a successful propaganda tool, and utilizes their principles in a process of “de-Westernization” of cultural production, independent producers deliberately use the same principles in order to assert their belonging to the global gaming community.65 As Laudan Nooshin has noted in another context, there is a sense of universalizing and a global consciousness in the independent cultural production in Iran, which stands in contrast to the isolationist brand of nationalism that has been promoted by the government since 1979.66 In most cases, by analyzing the rule systems and game mechanics of the above-mentioned Iranian games we can identify the concrete American games that have served as direct or indirect inspiration for the Iranian designers. For example, while Garshasp appropriates the rule system of God of War, the game Resistance is clearly inspired by Tom Clancy’s

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Ghost Recon. As Reichmuth and Werning note, the rule system governing the player’s interaction is a level on which cultural bias may be communicated.67 A semiotic reading of game rules describes both built-in signification and the game mechanics as a projection space for player disposition.68 While the content of the game may consist of Iranian topoi, the rule system that gives it a form reflects American or Western cultural values. In the case of first-person shooters, it is the topos of the lone invincible warrior outnumbered by enemies and yet winning against the odds. In the case of role-playing games, it is the topos of life as an individual development project carried out by acquiring new skills and advantages. In the case of strategy games, it is the model of the world as consisting of quantifiable variables offering everyone an equal possibility to “win” if properly managed.69 As such, what emerges from the Iranian game production is a story of hybridization and cross-cultural exchange rather than “authenticity”.70 Huhtamo suggests that topoi are not limited to literary traditions but can also manifest as designs.71 We argue that video game rule systems and game mechanics are the new topoi of the digital age. They migrate between cultures and places and significantly influence local cultural production, fitting adaptively into existing cultural templates and cleavages.72 As such, new technologies help reconstitute and reorganize spatial relations. As Doreen Massey puts it, the notion of specificity (local uniqueness, a sense of place) derives neither from some mythical internal roots nor from a history of isolation but from the absolute particularity of the mixture of influences found together there.73 New information and communication technologies, including video games and the networked and imaginary spaces they define, are “always grounded somewhere and in someone’s socio-spatial imagination”.74 Instead of perceiving Iranian video games as dematerialized spaces of representation and resistance, it may be more useful to think of them as a new form of “place-making projects”.75 The virtual spaces of governmental games are meant to shape actual reality in Iran and are utilized as tools for real political struggle. By contrast, independent games are produced in order to change the social and economic reality in which their producers live in wealthy North Tehran. Cultural production in Iran is a site for political contestation and struggle, where social relations are reproduced.76 According to Semati, culture – as a set of practices in everyday life, acts of representation, and structures of meaning – is constitutive of the social order.77 In this sense, Iranian video games, both governmental and independent, provide a vivid illustration of the ways in which Iranians live with the constraints and opportunities that are given to them, and “how they have productively and creatively managed to live with the globalization and the Islamic state”.78 In the last decade, the diaspora network, the emergence of a cosmopolitan youth culture, and the Internet have all served to link Iranian youth to

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a transnational cultural network.79 In turn, these young people’s own cultural production, be it in a form of music or video games, reflects growing cosmopolitanism and secularism, as well as cultural dialogue with the outside world, particularly the West. The concepts of identity and authenticity emerging from these processes are contesting or downplaying the elements of national identity promoted by the government. As Nooshin notes, the government is thus caught between seeking to appease those who accuse it of abandoning the original aims of the Revolution and its awareness that the enfranchisement of the current generation is “essential for the continued political existence of the Islamic Republic as a nation polity”.80 Video games have created new possibilities for transnational forms of communication, bypassing the intermediate control of the nation-state and establishing new connections between producers, audiences, and publics. This opens up a final perspective of looking at Iranian video games; that is as spaces of heterotopia, as elaborated by Michel Foucault. Iranian video games are spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions, in spaces of otherness that are neither here nor there, and simultaneously real and imaginary.81 They are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible”.82 Comprising Iranian topoi and Western rule systems, the tension between spaces of imagination and production, and contestations between state ideology and private entrepreneurial visions, Iranian video games constitute heterogeneous spaces where cultural authenticities and hybridities are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.

Acknowledgements This chapter is based on a lecture delivered by Vit Sisler at the symposium Context Collapse: Reassembling the Spatial organized by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, 6 December 2013, and stems from fieldwork research conducted by Vit Sisler and Ebrahim Mohseni in Tehran in 2008–2011. The authors would like to thank Carolyn Marvin and Shadi Harouni for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of the text; Hamid Roustaie, Farshad Samimi, Puya Dadgar, Arash Jafari, and Bahram Borghei for the interviews; and Rioushar Yarveysi, Hamed Rajabi, and Houman Harouni for the invaluable help. The finalization of this chapter was supported by the Institutional Development Plan 2015 of the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague.

Notes 1 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964). 2 Tarik Sabry, Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: On Media, the Modern and the Everyday (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 11.

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3 Vit Sisler, “Videogame Development in the Middle East: Iran, the Arab World and Beyond,” in Gaming Globally: Production, Play and Place, ed. Nina B. Huntemann and Ben Aslinger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 251–272. 4 We have played the video games in Farsi and examined them via content analysis. We have used shot-by-shot analysis for the examination of the audiovisual layer of the games, textual analysis for the examination of the in-game narrative and other paratextual materials (booklets, websites, manuals), and Petri Net analysis for examining the games’ gameplay. We have recorded the interviews with developers in Farsi and/or English in Tehran in 2008. We have obtained additional information from the designers via email communication in 2008–2011. 5 John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004). 6 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 7 L. R. Shannon, “Playing at War, Once Removed,” The New York Times, 11 August 1992. 8 Vit Sisler, “Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2008): 203–220. 9 Jordan Mechner, Beyond the Legendary Game: The Legend Itself, 2007, https:// web.archive.org/web/20090415092356/http://princeofpersiathegraphicnovel. com/prince.html. For the sequels of Prince of Persia, Mechner drew inspiration also from Ferdowsi’s Shaname and the stories of Ibn Battouta (see also Jordan Mechner, The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985–1993, 2011, http:// jordanmechner.com/ebook). 10 Philipp Reichmuth and Stefan Werning, “Pixel Pashas, Digital Djinns,” ISIM Review 18, no. 1 (2006): 46–47. 11 Reichmuth and Werning, “Pixel Pashas, Digital Djinns,” 46. 12 Ibid. 13 Sisler, “Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games,” 203–220. 14 Reichmuth and Werning, “Pixel Pashas, Digital Djinns,” 47. 15 Ed Halter, From Sun Tzu to Xbox, War and Video Games (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006). 16 Media Education Foundation, Militarism & Video Games: An Interview with Nina Huntemann, http://web.archive.org/web/20031002152720/http://www. mediaed.org/news/articles/militarism. 17 Zhan Li, The Potential of America’s Army the Video Game as Civilian-Military Public Sphere, Unpublished Master’s Thesis, MIT, 2004, http://dspace.mit.edu/ handle/1721.1/39162, 118. 18 Sisler, “Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games,” 210. 19 Mehdi Semati, “Living with Globalization and the Islamic State,” in Media Culture and Society in Iran, ed. Mehdi Semati (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–13. 20 Ibid., 3. 21 Vit Sisler, “From Kuma\War to Quraish: Representation of Islam in Arab and American Video Games,” in Playing with Religion in Digital Games, ed. Heidi A. Campbell and Gregory Price Grieve (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), 109–133; see also Sisler, “Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games,” 203–220. 22 Vit Sisler, “Digital Heroes: Identity Construction in Iranian Video Games,” in Cultural Revolution in Iran: Contemporary Popular Culture in the Islamic Republic, ed. Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 171–191. 23 Ibid. 24 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

120 Vit Sisler and Ebrahim Mohseni 25 Ibid., 189. 26 Ibid., 178. 27 John Agnew, “Space and Place,” in The SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, ed. John A. Agnew and David N. Livingstone (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2011), 317. 28 Ibid., 317. 29 Ibid., 318. 30 Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). 31 Ibid., 12. 32 Agnew, “Space and Place,” 318. 33 Annabelle Sreberny and Gholam Khiabany, Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 25. 34 Mahmoud Alinejad, “Coming to Terms with Modernity: Iranian Intellectuals and the Emerging Public Sphere,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 13, no. 1 (2002): 25–47. 35 Sreberny and Khiabany, Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran, 25. 36 The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has to approve (through the Iran Computer and Video Games Foundation) the establishment of any video game development company, the establishment of “game nets” (cybercafés for playing games), the production of individual video games, and the organization of video game tournaments. See Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, http://www. farhang.gov.ir/fa/memberhelp/mojavez/bonyad. 37 The statute of the National Foundation of Computer Games (Bonyaad-e Melli-e Baazihaa-ye Raayaanei) was ratified in the 584th session of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution (Shoray-e Aaly-e Enghelab-e Farhangi) on 21 June 2006. The foundation was subsequently founded on 10 July 2006. In 2012, it has changed its English title to the “Iran Computer and Video Games Foundation.” 38 Iran Computer and Video Games Foundation, About Us, http://irvgame.com/ aboutus.aspx. 39 The Cultural Institute Tebyan (Moassese-e Farhangi wa Ittelae Rasani-e Tebyan) was established on 11 September 2001, with the aim “to disseminate information on religious affairs, introduce rich Islamic culture and promote Islamic viewpoints through information technology,” http://english.tebyan.net/. 40 Sazman-e Tablighat-e Islami, http://old.ido.ir/en/en-default.aspx. 41 Tebyan, Resistance, 2008 [video game]. 42 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991). 43 Sreberny and Khiabany, Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran, 4. 44 Sisler, “Digital Heroes: Identity Construction in Iranian Video Games,” 178. 45 Gholam Khiabany, Iranian Media: The Paradox of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2010), 12. 46 Ibid. 47 Alinejad, “Coming to Terms with Modernity: Iranian Intellectuals and the Emerging Public Sphere,” 25–47. 48 For detailed analysis of the game Resistance see Vit Sisler, “Palestine in Pixels: The Holy Land, Arab-Israeli Conflict, and Reality Construction in Video Games,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 2, no. 2 (2009): 275–292. 49 The Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution (Sepaah-e Paasdaaraan-e Enqelaab-e Eslaami) is a branch of Iran’s military, founded after the Iranian revolution in 1979, intended to protect the country’s Islamic system. 50 Sisler, “Digital Heroes: Identity Construction in Iranian Video Games,” 179.

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51 Yi-Fu Tuan, “Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective,” Progress in Geography 6 (1974): 211–252. 52 Sisler, “Digital Heroes: Identity Construction in Iranian Video Games,” 179. 53 Ibid., 180. 54 The Art Book of Garshasp (Dead Mage Game Studio, 2011). 55 Maxim Bardin, “Garshasp Developers,” Linux Gaming News, 2011, http:// linuxgamingnews.org/2011/05/12/garshasp-developers/#.VBh15i5_uec. 56 See The Art Book of Garshasp (Dead Mage Game Studio, 2011) and John R. Hinnells, Persian Mythology (New York: P. Bedrick Books, 1985). 57 The Art Book of Garshasp (Dead Mage Game Studio, 2011), 4. 58 Sisler, “Digital Heroes: Identity Construction in Iranian Video Games,” 180. 59 Sisler, “Videogame Development in the Middle East: Iran, the Arab World and Beyond,” 251–272. 60 Sisler, “Digital Heroes: Identity Construction in Iranian Video Games,” 180. 61 Erkki Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in Media Archaeology, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California, 2011), 27–47. 62 Ibid. 63 Stéphane Natkin and Liliana Vega, “Petri Net Modelling for the Analysis of the Ordering of Actions in Computer Games,” in Proceedings of Game-ON (London: EUROSIS, 2003), 82–92. 64 Ibid., 82. 65 Sisler, “Digital Heroes: Identity Construction in Iranian Video Games,” 188. 66 Laudan Nooshin, “The Language of Rock: Iranian Youth, Popular Music, and National Identity,” in Media Culture and Society in Iran, ed. Mehdi Semati (New York: Routledge, 2008), 69–93. 67 Reichmuth and Werning, “Pixel Pashas, Digital Djinns,” 46. 68 Ibid. 69 Sisler, “From Kuma\War to Quraish: Representation of Islam in Arab and American Video Games,” 130. 70 Sisler, “Videogame Development in the Middle East: Iran, the Arab World and Beyond,” 267. 71 Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” 35. 72 Agnew, “Space and Place,” 328. 73 Doreen Massey, Power-Geometries and the Politics of Space-Time (Heidelberg: Dept. of Geography, University of Heidelberg, 1999), 22. 74 Agnew, “Space and Place,” 328. 75 Sarah Green, Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, “Scales of Place and Networks: An Ethnography of the Imperative to Connect through Information and Communications Technologies,” Current Anthropology 46, no. 5 (2005): 807. 76 Semati, “Living with Globalization and the Islamic State,” 8. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Nooshin, “The Language of Rock: Iranian Youth, Popular Music, and National Identity,” 85. 80 Ibid. Quoted text comes from Alinejad, “Coming to Terms with Modernity: Iranian Intellectuals and the Emerging Public Sphere,” 35. 81 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias,” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46–49. 82 Ibid., 49.

Chapter 7

Democracy, protest and public space Does place matter? Jeremy Németh and Evan H. Carver

Introduction On October 11, 2011, people began gathering at Frank Ogawa Plaza in central Oakland. By the middle of the afternoon, at least 600 protestors had assembled there. Some wore Guy Fawkes masks. Some waved handmade placards with slogans like “Do you feel it trickle down? The 99% don’t!” Others were there just to show solidarity with a movement for economic justice that had swept the country. Seven months later, hundreds gathered in the same spot to demonstrate for immigrant rights, and in March 2013 dozens of students assembled to raise awareness for lack of access to higher education. Early on the morning of July 14, 2013, an unregistered group of citizens assembled at Westlake Park in downtown Seattle to protest what they saw as the miscarriage of justice in the Trayvon Martin murder trial. By the afternoon, their numbers had swelled to the hundreds, and they departed on a parade through downtown Seattle, clogging traffic throughout a meandering route through the city that eventually took them back to Westlake Park, where they unfurled banners, waved signs, chanted and conducted multiple interviews with news media. What makes spaces like Frank Ogawa Plaza and Westlake Park ripe for protest? Why do protests seem to naturally take place in some spaces but not in others? What is it about these spaces that make them conducive to a wide variety of political demonstration? Many have discussed the importance of public space for democracy, and others have debated the institutional and political arrangements that might create the conditions for a “thicker” democracy, but few have gone further to understand what spatial arrangements or conditions of public space itself – as well as its surroundings – might increase the potential for an active democracy.1 In this chapter, we re-center material space in the construction of the political. In the context of time-space compression, of “context collapse,” it is the coming together of bodies in solid, concrete space that is the “only available tactic of resistance for those who do not carry weapons.”2 Place can be seen as both physically anchored and immobile but also mediated

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and structured through the transmission of images of actions occurring in such material spaces. As we will argue, virtual and material space are mutually constitutive – for one, the Occupy Movement started as a virtual forum and morphed into a physical occupation of Zuccotti Park, among other sites. Then it successfully spread around the world mostly due to images transmitted on social media; this virtual transmission begat more physical occupations, images of which were transmitted via virtual fora, and so on and so forth. Indeed, there is a unique linkage between the virtual and the real. Both are needed to gain a better understanding of issues, for political organizing, for education, for building solidarity. One needs real spaces to break down barriers and create a more equitable society.3 Therefore, we ask whether there exists an “architecture of democracy,” or certain “real spaces” and physical arrangements that provide conditions for a coming together of bodies, for collective dissent.4 It would be reasonable to focus our exploration on, say, the content of the speech act itself, but could it also be possible that the design, management or location of the public space itself could structure the size, scale and even existence of the protest? If we can argue that certain features might preclude protest – such as a space’s location in a private, gated community – then it is at least plausible that certain characteristics of space might allow, facilitate, encourage or, at the very least, not limit protest. Our aim in this paper is to re-center material space in the performance of democracy while acknowledging that the production of space relies on both conceptual and material realms. We attempt to answer these questions through a pilot study of ten sites of large protests in the US since 2000. One of the goals of this study was to test a rubric for assessing the “publicness” of a physical space by amending Lessig’s model for virtual space.5 Our model, first developed by Németh,6 assesses a space through its physical (design), code (management) and content (symbolism, human factors) layers, each of which has a number of constituent variables. From this small pilot study we notice several compelling trends among the sites for all three layers. Although they do not indicate causality, these trends suggest several avenues for future research. Findings may help geographers, social movements and civil rights activists think through the complex relationship between physical and political space. But before discussing the findings in depth, let us elaborate on what we mean by public space and why we believe it so important for democratic societies.

Democracy and public space More than 75 years ago, the US Supreme Court7 claimed that public space’s primary function is for “assembly, communicating thoughts between public citizens, and discussing public questions.” From the sidewalk soapboxes of

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the Industrial Workers of the World to the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s to the recent uprisings in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia, city streets, parks and plazas have always played home to acts of protest and dissent. To be clear, the existence of space itself – even if officially designated a “free speech zone” – never guarantees it will house protest or collective action (and more often guarantees it will not). In fact, we would argue, public space in name alone is never public: it only becomes public through its occupation by individuals and groups claiming a right to shape the city in accord with their own desires.8 In this reading, public space is both physical and conceptual, both material and political. Although technology opens up new avenues of publicness and exchange, material space is where we still exercise our most important values. From the Civil Rights Movement to the Occupy Movement, social movements have used physical space to enable linkages across issue areas, even in an era of ubiquitous digital communication. One of our central premises, however, is that material space – as opposed to virtual, online space – is a necessary, albeit insufficient condition for revolutionary, transformational protest, for reasons related to visibility, citizenship and face-to-face communication. Protest is about being seen and heard, about asserting the right to amass in public space, and about making people listen.9 Protest in material space publicizes and make visible dissent.10 Visible protest helps disadvantaged groups voice their claims to a broader public, to the powers that be. Marginalized groups make themselves counted when they make appearances in public. When we walk past a homeless person we are forced to confront our biases and reflect on our complicity in a system that allows such inequity and disparity. In the material city, the political representations of this homeless person are experienced in a way they cannot be felt online. In this way, protest in material space is fundamental to concepts of citizenship, or the right to engage in the various forums and alliances that constitute governance.11 By engaging in visible protest, then, members of social and political movements become citizens. The Internet empowers individuals to customize their online experience and the types and sources of information they receive, but this benefit may have paradoxically negative consequences for democracy and community. The ability to discount, even dismiss, alternative viewpoints may “impoverish the diverse experiences that sustain a pluralistic culture.”12 Online, politicians or virtual passersby can delete an email or close a screen, whereas traditional demonstrations and protests parade through downtowns and require the attention of non-participants that likely benefit most from hearing such dissent. None of this is to say that technology is not integral to democracy – the recent Twitter Revolution in the Middle East bears this out – yet it was digitally-transmitted images of actual protests in Tahrir

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Square, for example, that inspired revolution across the Middle East and North Africa. The media transmission of messages from material to virtual space (and back) is key. Stories rarely run without an “image.” And though online petitions or message boards may garner hundreds of thousands, even millions, of signatories, and Facebook posts thousands of “likes,” media outlets will not cover the great bulk of them. But if a few dozen protestors show up downtown, the news cameras will almost surely be there. Media outlets are savvy producers (and consumers) of iconic protest images such as the famous AP photo of Tiananmen Square “Tank Man” Wang Weilin. Protest groups have also become increasingly aware and responsive to media reporting techniques, acknowledging the presence of cameras by holding signs intended to engage audiences outside the protest itself. From burning a flag of a western nation to demolishing a statue of a deposed former leader, iconic moments are seized upon as stage sets and photo-ops meant to incite a broader, often foreign, audience. Babak Rahimi13 notes that such images haunt the public imagination and are frequently used as both provocation and inspiration for future protest events, including those that never take place in material space. A shift from material to more conceptual notions of public space reflects a societal shift away from face-to-face communication in favor of virtual social networks.14 Smith and Low argue that social and political theorists who use the term public space are more concerned with the diminution of the political public realm than with material bricks-and-mortar – but that “the spatiality of the public sphere potentially transforms our understanding of the politics of the public.”15 Political scientist John Parkinson worries that a focus on metaphorical conceptions of public space is deleterious to democracy. He joins urban geographers and sociologists in arguing that “democracy depends to a surprising extent on the availability of physical, public space, even in our allegedly digital world.”16 Decoupling political space from material space weakens democracy, he argues, by isolating political elites from the concerns of the masses. This erodes the sense of solidarity that underlies any effective and robust democracy and de-emphasizes how social structures are embedded and reproduced in the built environment of cities.17

Methodology Site selection Earlier researchers have argued for a careful analysis of sites of resistance to strengthen our conceptions of democracy.18 What defines a site of resistance? Following Irazábal,19 we focus in this paper on ordinary places that host extraordinary events (italicized quadrant of Table 7.1).

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Table 7.1 Categorizing sites of resistance Event Place Ordinary place, ordinary event Ordinary place, extraordinary event Extraordinary place, ordinary event Extraordinary place, extraordinary event

The types of spaces that interest us occupy a central and symbolic role in the spatial politics of a city. Thus, we selected the ten US sites that hosted large protests since 2000. Except for Zuccotti Park, all these sites regularly host demonstrations, are permanent parts of their respective urban landscapes and function primarily as open space. Major protests in “free speech zones” set up during political conventions, for example, would occupy the lower right quadrant. We are not concerned in this paper with everyday, ordinary places that host everyday, ordinary protests in which a handful of dedicated persons dutifully show up to support the cause championed by their organization. We wish to understand the spaces of events that aim to change the system by assembling masses of people around common sets of issues, as spaces with the potential to “expand dramatically the spaces of citizenship.”20 This is not to downplay smaller, everyday actions. Some argue that these everyday cracks in the armor of the state – “a thousand tiny empowerments” – have a more powerful cumulative effect and prime the pump for that extraordinary event.21 Indeed, Irazábal provides a rubric for understanding these events: the spaces that interest us host “history-making,” not only “life-making,” actions.22 History-making events transcend our ways of thinking and operating in the world. They are unique and transformative episodes in the life of society. Their deeply political nature brings together masses of citizens around a set of central issues and forms “cracks in the lifeworld.”23 Life-making events and practices occur in the plazas, atria and streets of the city, “spaces of banal transgression.”24 Some, including Kohn,25 and Amin and Parkinson,26 are quite critical of the “one-off” rather impersonal event. They note that what breaks down stereotypes and builds interpersonal trust is repeated contact with others over shared interests (the community garden is an exemplar). In particular, spaces that host history-making events are disappearing at an alarming rate. Their very visibility and centrality imperil their existence given recent shifts that threaten civil liberties and dissent in the name of security (for one). Németh27 and others show that since September 11, public and private officials in most cities in the western world have deployed a discourse of anti-terror security as their rationale for tightening security and fortifying our streets, sidewalks and spaces. The result is a threat to the very publicness that makes cities vital and attractive. These measures limit civil liberties by controlling behavior, limiting movement and downgrading the

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quality of city life.28 Graham, for example, argues29 that anti-terror policies limit rights and undermine wider public dissent, social activism and popular protest. Warren argues that officials enacting the War on Terror have used security policies to legitimize the “prevention, repression and control of mass citizen political mobilization in cities.”30 The spaces in our study deserve attention, therefore, as all of them have hosted major protests in spite of these shifts. In this study, we focus solely on singular, bounded sites. Although streets often host major protests, they are not normally built to host protesters and are not “ordinary” spaces in the sense described above. Since street demonstrators typically march and move down the road, their longer-term occupation of any piece of ground is quite rare. Although street rallies can be more powerful than protests in designated public spaces,31 especially by shutting down automobile traffic, they “less visibly demonstrate the scale of displeasure, and are thus less effective for the making of public claims.”32 We used a Google search in September 2013 to assemble our chosen sites from secondary data. We looked for geographic distribution and distribution across content areas (i.e., we did not want all protests to be under the 2011 Occupy banner). Though five study sites were occupied in 2011, all of the sites – with the important exception of Zuccotti Park – had longer histories of demonstration and are generally iconic public gathering places.33 The sites we chose are listed in Table 7.2. Site evaluation It is important to note that we do not aim to prove causality or statistical significance with this exploratory and descriptive work. We think of this study as an assessment that allows us to confirm some suspicions and ask more questions than we answer. The value of our findings is to have confirmed some of our suspicions, rejected or modified others, and invite future research, outlined in the conclusion. We recognize that in relying on second-hand data we have omitted one of the most important components of protest, namely the experience of people. We anticipate that future research will “ground-truth” our findings with surveys, interviews and even participant observations to better understand whether the emergent patterns we found were serendipitous, spurious or otherwise. Some have speculated that protest in an ordinary space is a function of its “looseness,”34 its (lack of) history of insurgency35 or its geographic centrality.36 The assessment tool we use to think empirically about why certain spaces might be prone to extraordinary events was developed by Németh,37 who adapted a heuristic from Lessig38 originally intended to explore the freedom of the virtual space of the Internet. The model consists of three constitutive layers: physical layer, code and content. These layers are not mutually exclusive and certain features can fit in more than one layer. In

Atlanta Boston Chicago Denver

Woodruff Park Dewey Square Daley Plaza Civic Center Park

Date

Oct. 1–25, 2011 Oct.–Dec. 2011 March 27, 2013 Oct. 2011– Jan. 2012 L.A. Plaza Park Los Angeles May 1, 2013 Wisc. State Cap. Grounds Madison Feb. 25– June 14, 2011 Zuccotti Park New York Sept. 17– Nov. 15, 2011 Frank Ogawa Plaza Oakland Oct. 10– Nov. 14, 2011 Independence Mall Philadelphia March 13, 2013 (monthly) Westlake Park Seattle Jan. 13, 2013

City

Site

Occupy Wall Street Occupy Oakland Marijuana legalization Gun control

5000–15,000 100–1000 100–500 200–500

1 day 1 day

34 days

2 months

May Day/ immigrant rights 1 day Public employees Daily over a period of weeks

“Thousands” Up to 12,000

2 weeks 70 days 1 day Over 2 months

Duration

Occupy Atlanta Occupy Boston School closure Occupy Denver

Cause

100–1000 100–1000 700–900 100–1000

Size est.

Table 7.2 Ten of the largest public space protests in the US since 2000

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Table 7.3 Public space analytical framework (adapted from Lessig 2001, Németh 2012) Publicness layer Variable category Geographic level Example variables Physical

Access

Code Content

Design Management Demographics Symbolism

Neighborhood Site Site Site Neighborhood Site

Proximity to transit Presence of fences Size Opening hours, policing Income, employment, diversity Age of site, monuments

general, the physical layer includes programming, spatial relationships, location, adjacencies, mobility, access restrictions and aesthetics. The code layer includes management techniques such as laws, regulations, surveillance and policing norms. The content layer includes actual use and behavior, user characteristics and symbolic perceptions of space related to monuments, memory and history. To assess the physical, code and content characteristics of the ten selected sites, we identify five groups of variables. Under the physical layer are access and design; under the code layer is management; and under content are demographics and symbolism. We hypothesize that not only do the characteristics of the space structure its occupation, but also its location in the city.39 We analyzed the ten spaces at both the site and neighborhood level – more accurately, the zip code tabulation area or ZCTA (see Table 7.3). (Refer to Appendix A for data collection and measurement on individual variables.) Site-level data collection and analysis We determined the physical characteristics of each site through Google Earth satellite imagery, Google Streetview photos, photos posted on Flickr and other public photo sharing sites, and news reports of demonstrations that have occurred at the site. For Civic Center Park (Denver), Westlake Park (Seattle), Zuccotti Park (New York City) and Independence Mall (Philadelphia), site visits confirmed the information we gathered remotely. We collected information about site management from parks department websites or information posted by the entity that manages the site. Where no specific management information was given about a particular site, we assumed that it was governed by the rules that apply to all parks in the given city. We coded and scored for comparison using the simple assessment method outlined by Németh40 (see Table 7.4). Specifically, we grouped characteristics into access controls, which include bollards, planters, gates or fences located at ingress points; behavioral controls, which include posted signs prohibiting activities like photography or loitering, or design features to

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Table 7.4 Public space restriction classification criteria (see Németh 2010 for detail on scoring) Control

Minor Restriction

Major Restriction

Access

Few physical impediments to access but entrances not blocked Behavior limited by physical or legal restrictions Sporadic security presence

Several physical impediments to access or entrances blocked Behavior limited by both physical and legal restrictions Daily security presence

Behavior Surveillance

discourage actions like sitting or gathering in a small group; and surveillance measures, which include security guards and other human surveillance. For this study we were unable to obtain information about human surveillance. We assumed that all sites, being in city centers, have video surveillance. To assess historical importance and symbolism for each site, we made some important assumptions. Assuming that older parks or plazas are repositories of significant symbolism or occupy a “center of gravity” in a community, we sought the dates of construction of the sites. These data were typically available on parks department websites or through local historical societies and libraries. In some cases a local business improvement district or advocacy group had “adopted” the site and posted additional information about the site’s history and monuments or public art located there. We attempted to assess how the space has been used historically for political demonstration. Since not every demonstration was covered in the media, and since the scales of demonstrations are famously difficult to assess, we scanned a variety of news sources to establish the frequency, duration and nature of demonstrations in order to form a gestalt picture of each site’s political importance over time. Neighborhood- and city-level data collection and analysis To be clear, when we use the term “neighborhood” we actually mean the Zip Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA). The ZCTA is a statistical area defined by the US Census having the same boundaries as a US Postal Service ZIP code. While almost no ZIP code corresponds directly to what local residents would call a neighborhood, we used this geographical level for analysis for several reasons. The breadth and uniformity of demographic data collected at the ZCTA level renders analysis relatively easy. ZCTAs are also contiguous and almost always of a relatively “natural” polygon shape (i.e., not contorted or gerrymandered). And because they are typically so small – the median size of the ten ZCTAs in our study is about a square mile – they give a good sense of the area within easy walking distance. Figure 7.1 shows the relative sizes of site, ZCTA and city for a typical case. ZCTA physical characteristics were drawn from the US Census’s American Community Survey (ACS) (2011) as well as Google Maps and

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Figure 7.1 Example of site, ZCTA and city relationship.

Walkscore.com. Although Walkscore provides some measure of the walkability, bikeability and transit connectivity of a location, we combined these scores with Census-reported commuting behavior from the site’s ZCTA for a richer picture of mobility at the sites and across their respective cities. To compare sites’ demographic and socioeconomic neighborhood contexts, we again used ZCTA data from the ACS. To determine racial and ethnic diversity, we use Blau’s Index41 with ACS data on race and ethnicity. Following Knudsen and Clark,42 we counted Social Movement Organizations (SMOs) as an aggregate of three subcategories of registered businesses as reported in the Census’s Zip Code Business Pattern survey: (1) Environment, Conservation and Wildlife Organizations (NAICS 813312); (2) Human Rights Organizations (NAICS 813311); and (3) Other Social Advocacy Organizations (NAICS 813319).

Hypotheses From our own experience and a review of the literature, we expected that a few variables would be found across a wide range of sites. Table 7.5 shows eleven hypotheses regarding patterns we expected to see across these ten sites. They are discussed below.

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Table 7.5 Hypotheses regarding protest sites Layer

Category

Geography

Descriptor Hypothesis (“These protest sites will . . .”)

Physical Access

Neighborhood Connected . . . be highly accessible via multiple forms of transit. Physical Access Neighborhood Dense . . . be located in dense neighborhoods. Physical Access Site Open . . . have very few physical/ symbolic barriers to entry. Physical Access Site Central . . . be located near the center of population gravity. Physical Design Site Large . . . be able to accommodate large crowds. Code Management Site Free . . . have few behavioral controls, rules and regulations. Code Management Site Public . . . be publicly owned and operated and permit large gatherings. Content Demographics Neighborhood Diverse . . . be located in racially, ethnically or economically diverse areas. Content Demographics Neighborhood Engaged . . . be located in neighborhoods with high numbers of SMOs. Content Symbolism Site Visible . . . be visible from major government buildings. Content Symbolism Site Historical . . . have historical significance in their host city.

Findings We tested each hypothesis (in italics below) to determine whether these descriptions (e.g., dense, diverse) are likely to be found in or around a strong majority of the sites. Physical layer Connected Hypothesis: Protest sites will be highly accessible via multiple forms of transit. We assume that protestors need easy access to a site by foot, bike, car or public transit in order for a protest to reach a critical mass.43 This is especially true for protests that expect to last more than a few hours; few would be likely to park their car for many hours or days to participate in a protest.

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Finding: Correct. We find that all ten spaces are very connected by transit and are very walkable and bikeable. All ten have dramatically better Transit Scores than the city overall; five sites have a Transit Score of 100. Nine of ten sites are within walking distance (0.25 miles) of a subway or light rail stop. All ten sites have a better Walkscore than the city overall; nine sites have a Walkscore 90 or higher. Eight of ten sites have an intersection density higher than the 140/sqmi required for LEED ND certification as a sustainable neighborhood.44 Dense Hypothesis: Protest sites will be located in dense neighborhoods. This hypothesis is related to concepts of access and diversity. With regard to access, the concentration of people, facilities and infrastructure provide the thresholds needed to support high connectivity and low cost of transit.45 With regard to diversity, dense settlement patterns can also facilitate interaction and encounter with diverse social forms, divergent cultural movements and dissenting ideas.46 Finding: Correct. Eight of ten sites have higher population density than their overall cities. The median density of the ten sites’ ZCTAs is 11,060/sqmi, and median weighted density of the ten cities is 7,877/sqmi. Open Hypothesis: Protest sites will have very few physical or symbolic barriers to entry. A site must be easy to enter and exit so that a relatively uncoordinated group of demonstrators can assemble there with little challenge.47 In addition, the site must look like a public area or park so passersby know that what is happening there is of public importance.48 Finding: Correct. Only two sites in our study have significant accessrestricting design features: Philadelphia’s Independence Mall and Madison’s Capitol Grounds have walls or fences surrounding most of the site. All eight other sites are accessible on all or most sides without protesters having to negotiate portals or significant grade changes. Critically, the interior lawns or open areas of all sites are visible from the outside. Central Hypothesis: Protest sites will be located near the population center of the city. People from across the entire city should have comparatively equal access to the site in order for the protests that occur there to reflect issues of interest to a broad sector of the population.49

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Finding: Incorrect. Using ArcGIS software, we calculated “population centroids,” or the population “center of gravity” for each city. We were surprised to find that while all the sites are well-connected and highly walkable, only one site (Madison’s Capitol Grounds) is within walking distance of the city’s population centroid. Seven of the ten sites are more than five miles from the population centroid. Large Hypothesis: Protest sites will be able to accommodate large crowds. Extraordinary political demonstration involves many, many people amassed in a single open space (as opposed to strung out along streets, as in a parade). However, sites must not be so large as to dwarf any crowd that might gather there.50 We estimated that sites will be at least five acres, or roughly a large city block, but no larger than ten acres. Finding: Inconclusive. Only three of the sites are between five and ten acres. The median size of all ten sites is just 2.65 acres, or roughly two football fields. Two of the sites (Zuccotti Park in New York and Westlake Park in Seattle) are less than one acre in size. Code layer Free Hypothesis: Protest sites will have few behavioral controls, rules and regulations. In order to be conducive to relatively spontaneous demonstration, a site must not be heavily policed or have onerous restrictions on assembly.51 Finding: Correct. Only two sites have unusually strict regulations on hours of access and group usage. The parks are typically open from dawn until dusk and require permits only for exceptionally large groups. All have posted rules. Two sites are worth describing in greater detail. As a National Park, Independence Mall is subject to much stricter access regulations than all the other sites. It is open only from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Groups larger than 25 persons require special permits. Many of the surrounding facilities included within the park require paid tickets for entry, creating an overall environment of control. Independence Mall, which houses the Liberty Bell and the site of the approval of the Declaration of Independence, does have so-called First Amendment zones, but they are no more physically accessible than the rest of the park. The irony of this is difficult to miss.

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Public Hypothesis: Protest sites will be publicly owned and operated and permit large gatherings. Though we acknowledge the wide range of management practices in both public and privately owned open spaces, we assume that on average publicly owned spaces will be easier to access and more likely to allow the political behavior we are interested in.52 Finding: Correct. Only one site, Zuccotti Park in New York, is entirely privately owned. All the other sites are public parks overseen by city parks departments or, in the case of the sites near Colorado’s and Wisconsin’s state capitols, a state parks agency, or in the case of Independence Mall, the National Parks Department. Content layer Diverse Hypothesis: Protest sites will be located in racially, ethnically or economically diverse areas. We assume that neighborhoods that are diverse polyphonic places are more accepting of the expression of alternative viewpoints in public.53 Finding: Inconclusive. All ten sites have equal or lower rates of racial and ethnic diversity than their host cities. Socioeconomic diversity was impossible to determine given available data. Most sites have higher rates of employment in the Census-defined “professional/managerial” sectors, but most also have lower median incomes. Three sites were noticeably better off than their surrounding cities and one was noticeably poorer. ACS data are conclusive on this question, and this remains an important area for further research. Engaged Hypothesis: Protest sites will be located in neighborhoods with high numbers of Social Movement Organizations (SMOs). We assume that neighborhoods with an existing climate of activism, i.e., a proportionally high number of SMOs, will be more amenable to spontaneous street protest. Finding: Correct. As anticipated from Knudsen and Clark,54 the dense, walkable neighborhoods around these sites are home to numerous social movement organizations. The scale of this advantage was remarkable. Nine

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of ten sites (all except Denver’s Civic Center) have a higher proportional concentration of SMOs than their host cities, and many are much, much higher. The ZCTA of Atlanta’s Woodruff Park has nearly eight times as many SMOs as would be predicted for its population. Visible Hypothesis: Protest sites will be visible from major government or legislative buildings. We assume that demonstrators want to deliver their message to political decision-makers as directly as possible in a way that is impossible to ignore.55 Finding: Correct. Five of ten sites are immediately adjacent to a major government or legislative building. All ten sites are within a mile of such buildings. Historical Hypothesis: Protest sites will have historical significance in their host city. For a protest to have maximum impact, it should occur in a part of town that residents, leaders and the media associate with important events in the city’s history or important elements of the city’s identity.56 Finding: Inconclusive. Our sites are of various ages. Four of ten sites did not exist before 1950. Four have well over a century of history as important meeting places in their communities. Dewey Square, L.A. Plaza and Independence Mall are among the earliest and most famous public fora in the country – indeed, each predates US independence. A long history is not a prerequisite for political demonstration, however. Seven sites regularly host protests or demonstrations (Denver’s Civic Center, Chicago’s Daley Plaza, Los Angeles’s L.A. Plaza, Madison’s Capitol Grounds, Oakland’s Ogawa Plaza, Philadelphia’s Independence Mall and Seattle’s Westlake Park). Two sites rarely see protests (Atlanta’s Woodruff Park and Boston’s Dewey Square). Zuccotti Park was the epicenter of Occupy Wall Street but had no other history of political demonstration and has not seen much demonstration since.

Discussion We categorized these findings in Table 7.6 below based on layer (left) and geographic analysis (right). Each descriptor is followed by the number of sites to which it applies.

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Table 7.6 Site characteristics by frequency (refer to Appendix A for measurement table) Physical Connected Dense Open Central Large

Code 10 Free 8 Public 8 1 3

Content 8 9

Diverse Engaged Visible Historical

Site 0 Open 9 Central 10 Large 6 Free Public Visible Historical

Neighborhood 8 Connected 1 Dense 3 Diverse 8 Engaged 9 10 6

10 8 0 9

Physical layer Most of the findings relating to the physical layer are not surprising. A place must be easy to get to and easy to enter if it is to host large, somewhat spontaneous gatherings. Some findings are more nuanced. Following Parkinson,57 we find that size does matter. Specifically, a site must be large enough to accommodate a significant number of people, but not so big so that even a huge crowd would look small. A site on the scale of New York’s Central Park (843 acres) would swallow most public protests. Indeed, we find the median size of the sites is 2.65 acres, roughly the size of two football fields. Proximity to a major government or legislative building is another physical factor worth discussing. Parkinson58 argued for demonstration sites visible from a “government assembly building,” and ideally right next to one. In our findings, proximity to such buildings is correlated with protest but physical adjacency is not required. Code layer We found that publicly owned places are more likely to be open to the public. By contrast, privately owned Zuccotti Park is part of New York City’s development incentive program in which developers are allowed to stretch building sizes beyond normal limits in exchange for building open space. These “bonus spaces” are required to remain open 24 hours a day – so in the case of Zuccotti, ownership requirements actually make it more open.59 On the other end of the management spectrum is Boston’s Dewey Square. Part of the larger Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston, Dewey was established by the Massachusetts legislature as “a public park and traditional open public forum”60 to encourage open congregation and dialogue. During

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the Occupy Movement in late 2011, protesters were allowed to remain for days on end and were evicted only when the camp spilled over into neighboring plazas and park areas. Content layer It could be that demographic homogeneity is conducive to solidarity, which is conducive to political demonstration, though we make no such claim in the present study. That said, the presence of nearby social movement organizations may be more predictive of public political demonstrations than any other factor.61 As noted, ACS data allow only a crude assessment of neighborhood socioeconomic diversity. They do imply that many of the neighborhoods under consideration contain a diverse blend of bankers, business people, politicians, service employees and blue-collar workers, though a sufficiently thorough analysis of such indicators is beyond the scope of this study. Further quantitative research could examine, for example, the presence of local union members. Qualitative research could also establish whether extant social and political networks in diverse neighborhoods lead to more political demonstration. It may be that some blend of well-educated and powerful residents, underemployed residents and unionized workers are particularly conducive to political demonstration. Nonetheless, there seems to be a meaningful role for physical context as well as the design and management characteristics of the site itself.

Conclusions and future research In this pilot study we notice several compelling characteristics. At the level of the physical layer, all spaces are very accessible to public transit and are situated in highly walkable neighborhoods. Most lack significant barriers to entry, such as fences or concrete dividers. All the sites are relatively small, averaging just 2.65 acres. At the level of the code layer, all but one site are publicly owned, and all sites but one operate with relatively permissive rules and access hours. At the level of the content layer, all ten spaces are within one mile of a major government institution, and the surrounding neighborhoods exhibit high levels of social activism (as measured by registered social movement organizations). These neighborhoods tend to be less ethnically diverse but more economically diverse than their host cities. We suggest several avenues for future research. First, it would be useful to scale up the number of observations to a level capable of yielding statistically significant results. Variation with regard to location (especially non-US examples) and types of space are desirable for future research. It would be fruitful to compare our results to the characteristics and features of ordinary spaces and ordinary events, the everyday sites of “banal transgression,”62

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since the iconic and impersonal spaces studied in this article may do less to break down stereotypes and build trust than everyday spaces that foster repeated contact with others over shared interests (the community garden as exemplar).63 Similarly, Miraftab and Wills urge scholars to focus less on studying dissent in invited spaces, i.e., officially-sanctioned protest spaces, in favor of the everyday, invented spaces of citizens.64 Nonetheless, inquiry into iconic spaces of protest remains important. Since September 11, officials in many western cities have relied on a discourse of anti-terror as their rationale for tightening security and fortifying the public realm, thus legitimizing repression of massive political mobilization. That these spaces and the spaces studied here have hosted major protests in spite of these attempts to curtail them is quite remarkable and, we believe, worthy of further study. Future research should also determine whether certain descriptors co-vary. If a site is centrally located, is it likely to be in a neighborhood that is more or less diverse? If a site is located near a major government office, will site behavior be managed more or less stringently? One finding suggests that large-scale restrictions as in Philadelphia and Madison will not discourage protest if the site is highly visible, historic and right-sized. A relative lack of population density in the surrounding neighborhood (as in Los Angeles and New York) may not discourage protest if the site is well-connected, visible, open to physical access and free from excessive behavioral regulation. Most importantly, future investigation should address the relationship between features of physical space and the content of protest. Do certain types of protests correlate with certain types of spatial arrangements? Do different kinds of protests deserve different types of spaces? Recent shifts toward a more conceptual notion of public space may reflect a societal shift away from face-to-face communication in favor of virtual social networks. Decoupling political space from material space risks weakening democracy by isolating political elites from concerns of the masses, thus eroding the sense of solidarity that underlies effective and robust democracy, and deemphasizing the social structures embedded in the built environment of cities.65 This article suggests a re-centering of material space in the context of protest and democratic action.

Notes 1 Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory,” International Political Sociology 3, no. 4 (2009): 353–377. 2 Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 43. 3 Ron Shiffman and Anastassia Fisyak, “Programming Public Space: A Conversation with Carlton Brown,” in Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and the Occupation of Public Space (Oakland, CA: New Village Press, 2012), 377.

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4 John Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6–7. 5 Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House Inc., 2002). 6 Jeremy Németh, “Controlling the Commons: How Public Is Public Space?,” Urban Affairs Review 48, no. 6 (2012): 811–835. 7 Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization 1939, 307 US 496. 8 David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27, no. 4 (2003): 939–941. 9 Neil Smith and Setha Low, “Introduction: The Imperative of Public Space,” in The Politics of Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1–15. 10 Clara Irazábal, Ordinary Places/Extraordinary Events: Citizenship, Democracy and Public Space in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2008), 15. 11 Alisdair Rogers, “The Spaces of Multiculturalism and Citizenship,” International Social Science Journal 50, no. 156 (1998): 201–213. 12 Margaret Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2004), 211. 13 Babak Rahimi, Between Digital Activism and Material Space: Internet Activism in the Iranian 2009 Post-Election Uprising. Paper presented at Context Collapse: Reassembling the Spatial, University of Pennsylvania, 2013. 14 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001); Harrison Rainie, Lee Rainie, and Barry Wellman, Networked: The New Social Operating System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 15 Smith and Low, “Introduction,” 6. 16 Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space, 2. 17 Ibid., 6–7. 18 Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods, 2. 19 Irazábal, Ordinary Places/Extraordinary Events. 20 Ibid., 16. 21 See Jeffrey Hou, ed., Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (New York: Routledge, 2010); and Leonie Sandercock and Peter Lyssiotis, ed., Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2003). 22 Irazábal, Ordinary Places/Extraordinary Events; Richard Flacks, Making History: The American Left and the American Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 23 Irazábal, Ordinary Places/Extraordinary Events. 24 Ash Amin and Michael Parkinson, “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity,” Environment and Planning A 34, no. 6 (2002): 959–980. 25 Margaret Kohn, “Homo Spectator: Public Space in the Age of the Spectacle,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 34, no. 5 (June 2008): 467–487. 26 Amin and Parkinson, “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City.” 27 Jeremy Németh, “Security in Public Space: An Empirical Assessment of Three US Cities,” Environment and Planning A 42 (2010): 2487–2507. 28 Peter Marcuse, “Urban Form and Globalization after September 11th: The View from New York,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26, no. 3 (2002): 596–606. 29 Stephen Graham, ed., Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). 30 Robert Warren, “Situating the City and September 11th: Military Urban Doctrine, ‘Pop-Up’ Armies and Spatial Chess,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26, no. 3 (2002): 614–615.

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31 See Faranak Miraftab and Shana Wills, “Insurgency and Spaces of Active Citizenship,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 25, no. 2 (2005): 200–217; and Kurt Iveson, Publics and the City (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). 32 Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space, 208. 33 We excluded the National Mall in Washington, DC, for several reasons. It would have been inappropriate to compare a city that is the seat of American government to other cities with only local- or state-level political significance. In addition, the Mall is guarded by the US Capitol Police, a federal law enforcement entity difficult to compare to local police, parks departments, and private security firms that oversee the other sites. And though the Mall has been the site of some of the best-known demonstrations in US history, those have often been of a national character and populated by people living outside the city. 34 Karen Franck and Quentin Stevens, ed., Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life (New York: Routledge, 2006). 35 Hou, Insurgent Public Space. 36 Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space. 37 Németh, “Controlling the Commons: How Public Is Public Space?” 38 Lessig, The Future of Ideas. 39 See Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space. 40 Németh, “Security in Public Space.” 41 Peter Michael Blau, Inequality and Heterogeneity: A Primitive Theory of Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1977). 42 Brian B. Knudsen and Terry N. Clark, “Walk and Be Moved: How Walking Builds Social Movements,” Urban Affairs Review 49, no. 5 (2013): 627–651. 43 See Paul Stangl, “Locating Protest in Public Space: One Year in San Francisco and Los Angeles,” California Geographer 50 (2010): 37–57; Knudsen and Clark, “Walk and Be Moved.” 44 U.S. Green Building Council (2009). LEED for Neighborhood Development, http://www.usgbc.org/neighborhoods. 45 Knudsen and Clark, “Walk and Be Moved,” 621. 46 Ibid. 47 Németh, “Security in Public Space.” 48 Setha M. Low, On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). 49 See Stangl, “Locating Protest in Public Space”; and Tim Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” Environment and Planning D, Society and Space 28, no. 1 (2010): 17. 50 Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space. 51 Németh, “Security in Public Space”; Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods; and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, “Privatization of Public Open Space: The Los Angeles Experience,” Town Planning Review 64, no. 2 (1993): 139–167. 52 See Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods; and Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. 53 See Irazábal, Ordinary Places/Extraordinary Events; and Franck and Stevens, Loose Space. 54 Knudsen and Clark, “Walk and Be Moved.” 55 Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space. 56 See Julie-Anne Boudreau, Nathalie Boucher, and Marilena Liguori, “Taking the Bus Daily and Demonstrating on Sunday: Reflections on the Formation of Political Subjectivity in an Urban World,” City 13, no. 2–3 (2009): 336–346; Taru Salmenkari, “Geography of Protest: Places of Demonstration in Buenos Aires and Seoul,” Urban Geography 30, no. 3 (2009): 239–260; and Nelson K. Lee,

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60 61 62 63 64 65

Jeremy Németh and Evan H. Carver “How Is a Political Public Space Made? – The Birth of Tiananmen Square and the May Fourth Movement,” Political Geography 28, no. 1 (2009): 32–43. Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space. Ibid. Arthur Eisenberg, “Some Unresolved Constitutional Questions,” in Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and the Occupation of Public Space, ed. Rick Bell, Lance Jay Brown, Lynne Elizabeth and Ron Shiffman (New York: New Village Press, 2012), 74–87. M.G.L.A. ch.306 §3(a)2 (“An Act Authorizing the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, Inc., to Operate, Manage, and Maintain the Rose Kennedy Greenway”). See Knudsen and Clark, “Walk and Be Moved.” Amin and Parkinson, “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City.” See Robert D. Putnam and Lewis M. Feldstein, Better Together: Restoring the American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003). Miraftab and Wills, “Insurgency and Spaces of Active Citizenship.” Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space.

Access

US Census Count per TIGER, municipal sqmi GIS services Google Maps Count

Census blocks/ sqmi city

# of bike paths

% public trans to work Census blocks/ sqmi ZCTA

US Census ACS Percentage 2007–2011 US Census ACS Percentage 2007–2011 US Census TIGER Count per sqmi

% walk to work

Bikescore

Walkscore.com

Bikescore site

Walkscore

Transitscore

Unit measured

Walkscore.com

Walkscore.com

Source of data

Walkscore site

Neighborhood Transitscore site

Variable

Appendix A: data table from Chapter 7

Discrete, unbounded

Continuous, unbounded

Discrete, bounded Discrete, bounded Discrete, bounded Continuous, bounded Continuous, bounded Continuous, unbounded

Type of variable

None

None

None

None

None

Further analysis?

0–infinite None

0–infinite ArcGIS analysis

0–infinite ArcGIS analysis

0–100

0–100

0–100

0–100

0–100

Range

(Continued)

Higher than city score Higher than city score Higher than city score Higher than city score Higher than city score Higher than CNU designation of 150/sqmi Higher than CNU designation of 150/sqmi Higher than zero

Threshold to confirm hypothesis

Site

Site

Design

Management

Demographics Site

Site

Access

(Continued)

Median household income ZCTA % below poverty ZCTA % owneroccupied ZCTA Median age ZCTA

Control – Behavior (0–2) In a BID

Public or private

Size of space

Distance to pop centroid, streets Distance to nearest subway/ LRT Control – Access (0–2)

Variable

Miles

Google Maps

Years

Percent

Percent

US Census ACS 2007–2011 US Census ACS 2007–2011 US Census ACS 2007–2011

Continuous, bounded Continuous, bounded Continuous, unbounded

None

Coding

None

None

None

0–infinite None

0–100

0–100

0–infinite None

Dichotomous N/A

0–3

N/A

Continuous, unbounded

Coding

0–infinite Entry of sites’ vertices

0–2

Ordinal

Dollars per year

Further analysis?

0–infinite Entry of the two points 0–infinite Entry of the two points

Range

Dichotomous N/A

Continuous, unbounded

Ordinal

Continuous, unbounded Continuous, unbounded

Type of variable

N/A

N/A

Acres

US Census ACS 2007–2011

Secondary literature Secondary literature Secondary literature

Daftlogic.com (Google Maps)

Google Streetview, N/A Flickr

Miles

Unit measured

Google Maps

Source of data

Roughly equal to city Roughly equal to city Roughly equal to city

Roughly equal to city

Not in a BID

Lower than 2

Public

Between 5 and 10 acres

Lower than 2

Lower than 0.25 miles Lower than 0.25 miles

Threshold to confirm hypothesis

Symbolism

Site

US Census ACS 2007–2011 US Census ACS 2007–2011

% w/HS degree or higher ZCTA % w/bachelor degree or higher ZCTA % in managerial/ prof/exec ZCTA % unemployed ZCTA Diversity ZCTA (Blau index) Persons of color ZCTA (Blau index) SMOs

Statues and monuments History of protest

Prox to house of gov’t Age of site

Pop density ZCTA

Years

Secondary literature Secondary literature Secondary literature

Count per year

Count

Miles

Count per sqmi

Percent

Count

(Ratio)

(Ratio)

Percent

Percent

Percent

Percent

Unit measured

Google Maps

US Census ACS 2007–2011

US Census ACS 2007–2011 Percent of SMOs US Census ACS in ZCTA 2007–2011

US Census ACS 2007–2011 US Census ACS 2007–2011 US Census ACS 2007–2011 US Census ACS 2007–2011

Source of data

Variable

Continuous, unbounded Discrete, unbounded Discrete, unbounded Discrete, unbounded

Continuous, unbounded

Discrete, unbounded Continuous, unbounded

Continuous, unbounded Continuous, unbounded Continuous, bounded Continuous, bounded

Continuous, unbounded Continuous, unbounded

Type of variable

Index calculation Index calculation

None

None

None

None

Further analysis?

0–infinite Tabulation and scoring

0–infinite None

0–infinite None

0–infinite None

0–infinite ArcGIS analysis

0–infinite Tabulation of SMOs 0–100 Tabulation of SMOs

0–1

0–1

0–100

0–100

0–100

0–100

Range

More than zero

More than zero

Less than 0.25 miles Built before 1950

Higher than proportional to population Higher than city

Higher than city

Higher than city

Roughly equal to city Roughly equal to city Higher than city

Roughly equal to city Roughly equal to city

Threshold to confirm hypothesis

Chapter 8

State, space, and cyberspace David G. Post

I have been accused many times of taking things too literally – not the worst failing for a law professor to have, perhaps, but nonetheless aggravating to friends and family (and students!). Invited to the conference which would birth this book, I focused my thoughts on its subtitle, “reassembling the spatial.” My first thought was: Has the spatial become somehow “disassembled”? When? How? The answer of course is that yes, it has. The familiar trope that “the world is a smaller place” – though not literally true, of course: in 3-D space, the world is the same size as it was 30 or 100 or 5000 years ago – reflects this pretty succinctly. “The world is a smaller place” long ago entered the realm of the cliché – and like most clichés, it didn’t start out life as a cliché but became one over time, because it expressed something that seemed so true, so often, to so many people; through constant repetition, it no longer really even needed to be noticed or even mentioned in polite society. It’s not a smaller place, but it sure seems like one – smaller, surely, to anyone who remembers the world as it was in 1980, let alone 1950. That “communications technologies” of all kinds have been largely responsible for changing this perception and making the world seem like a smaller place – the Internet foremost among them, but also including a number of other rather extraordinary-in-their-own-right precursor networks of the last 150 years or so of human existence, from the telephone networks, to the TV and radio networks, cellular phone networks, and even, I suppose, the global network of fax machines – is also a cliché. In the time it took for you to read just these first few paragraphs of my paper, you could have had a brief conversation with a colleague in Australia, read a blog posting that she pointed you to which is hosted on a server in Brazil, and bought a pen from a vendor in Tokyo. Yes, you could have done all of these things in 1980 or 1950 – they just would have taken more time. Orders and orders of magnitude more time. It’s just faster now. “Just faster” in the way that Superstorm Sandy, compared to a fine autumn mist, is “just more water in the air.”

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Einstein was correct: Time and space are connected to one another, and our perceptions of them are connected to one another. We very naturally think of those individuals with whom we are communicating in Australia and Brazil and Tokyo as being “closer” to us than they used to be because we can now communicate instantaneously with each of them (or all of them simultaneously), and we quite naturally think of “people with whom we can communicate instantaneously” as being “close by” – perhaps because during most of human history, people with whom we can communicate instantaneously were – had to be – close by. And it’s not just that the Internet makes the world seem “smaller.” More interestingly and not so obviously, it also seems to have a strange new geometry. The remarkable thing about the shape of the Internet – the one characteristic of this network that was not present in any of its historical predecessors – is this: Any point on the network can communicate with any other point on the network, virtually instantaneously. On this Internet, you can reach anyplace, from anyplace, equally easily and equally quickly. So in that sense, all points on the Internet are equidistant from all other points. That’s a strange geometry indeed. You may recall learning the concept of the “locus” in Geometry 1, as in “the circle is the locus of points that are equidistant from a single point in 2 dimensions, and a sphere is the locus of points equidistant from a single point in 3 dimensions.” On the Internet, the locus of points equidistant from any single point is all other points. And the locus of points equidistant from each of those other points is, again, all other points. That is a geometry we didn’t cover in Geometry 1. It’s a challenging geometry to think about, a pretty serious dis-assembling of space – momentous, I would suggest. It will have implications that are profound and far-reaching into many corners of human life and many domains of knowledge and practice, because many corners of human life and many domains of knowledge and practice take the geometry of 3-D space for granted, just as they take, say, gravity, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or the need for oxygen to sustain life, for granted. It is difficult, for me, to think of any organized human endeavor – from architecture to accounting to anthropology to entertainment to urban planning to political organizing – that will not be substantially challenged when the constraints of physical 3-D space on which they were quite naturally based are no longer present (or are, at the very least, deeply attenuated). This is no less true of the object of my own study – the law – than it is for these other domains of organized human activity and knowledge. Assumptions about space, and about the shape and reality of the physical environment in which human activity takes place, are very deeply embedded in the law – in many of its fundamental principles, and doctrines, and institutions, in our notions of what law is, and where it comes from, and why we do or don’t obey it. The international legal order consists – in large measure – of

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entities (nation-states) whose powers, including their power to make law, are – again, in large measure – circumscribed by lines on the 3-D surface of the globe – borders and boundaries. Very basic principles of jurisdiction, dating back to Rome in the fifth century bc, relate to and rely on the 3-D space within which sovereigns, and the institutions that support them, can legitimately operate, and beyond which their power is diminished or non-existent. Similarly, ancient principles of lex locus delictii and lex locus contractu – that the law of the place of the tort, or of the contract, controls – still play a very fundamental role in the international legal regime, in our law and the law of many other places. But where do things happen, when they happen on the Internet? Where is the Internet, exactly? I said it (along with others) 20 years ago and I can say it today: This makes for some very difficult problems in the law, and we have not made much progress solving them. Here’s an example, plucked, as they say, from the headlines. A brief story in the November 6, 2013, New York Times tells of a ruling by a French court that Google must remove from its Internet search results all images of a former Formula One car racing chief, Max Mosley, at an orgy, including all links to images from a 2008 British newspaper report that included photos and a video of Mr. Mosley participating in a sadomasochistic sex party and which described Mr. Mosley’s activities as a “sick Nazi orgy.”1 Mosley, according to privacy analysts quoted by the Times, by pursuing legal action in France, was “taking advantage of more stringent data privacy legislation in [France] compared with either the United States or Britain.” The French court ordered Google to pay Mosley one euro in compensation, and to filter out nine images of Mr. Mosley, accessible over the Internet (or to face a fine of 1,000 euros every time one of the proscribed images is found through its search engine). The company, the Times story drily notes, “said it would appeal the decision.” I should hope so. This is a conflict between the world of SPACE and the world of NO-SPACE, or maybe better: Old Space and New Space, Real Space and Virtual Space. Think of it this way: The French court – an institution whose very authority is of course very closely tied to a physical place, constituted by the citizens of that place and answerable to them via processes and procedures they have chosen – says: “You, Google, are sending unlawful material into France and causing harm there. When you stand outside our borders and lob (information) grenades into our territory – France – you must face the consequences of your actions. If you want to do business with French citizens, you must comply with French law. Those are established principles of international law, and we demand, order, you to stop displaying those photographs.” To which Google replies: “Wait a second, that’s not what’s going on. Showing these pictures is perfectly lawful where we are, under our law. We’re not lobbing information grenades into France – French Internet users

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are coming to California (virtually), where they retrieve information that we have made available to them there, and they then transport that information back to their computers in France (or wherever they may be located). They may have an obligation to comply with French law when they bring material back ‘into France’ from ‘over the border’ (just as visitors from Romania may have an obligation to comply with Romanian law when they bring material back into Romania), but surely we don’t. You’re trying to export French law outside of your borders – controlling what entities standing outside of your borders may do, making the whole Internet comply with your law.” “No, no, no,” says the French court, “that’s what you, Google, are trying to do! You’re trying to export your law – US law, with its more expansive protection for the freedom of speech – outside of your borders.” And Google responds: “If we have to comply with French law because we are sending material into France, we must comply with Romanian, and Brazilian, and all other law, too. Every point on the Internet is equally accessible from anywhere and everywhere – remember? It cannot be that our activity is subject to all of those diverse bodies of law simultaneously – can it?” And on and on it goes. It’s a scenario we’ve seen many times before and will be seeing many, many more times in the future – information/activities lawful in one place but not in another. There is no more fundamental question in the law than the one it poses: Whose law applies to my conduct? Does Google have an obligation to obey this order from the French court, or not? I think it’s fair to say that the international legal order is struggling, thus far unsuccessfully, to come up with an answer, or answers, to this question as it is posed in the world of Internet space and Internet geometry. The answer was pretty clear in the world of 3-D space and 3-D geometry, because the relevant legal actions were localizable in the world of 3-D space and 3-D geometry. If French readers were actually coming, physically, to California and buying the latest issue of Google: The Magazine and bringing it back with them into France, the answer was “No, Google has no obligations under French law, and no obligation to obey French law, and a French court may not legitimately impose punishment on Google for failing to comply with French law.” On the other hand, if Google were mailing the magazine into France, the answer was “Yes, by the act of entering France, Google has subjected itself to French law, and has an obligation to obey the orders of a duly-constituted French court.” But that was then, and this is now, and I don’t know what the answer is now, and I’m not sure anybody does. And it’s not just Google that has this problem, of course – it’s all of us. Anyone who is, like Google, offering up information that can be accessed from anywhere, equally easily, on the global network – even if just a

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Facebook page – faces the same question and the same “problem”: In regard to what I am doing on the network and the information I am sending and receiving on the network, to what extent do I have an obligation to comply with the many diverse legal regimes that are out there, legal regimes whose very existence is premised on lines in 3-D space? Mapping that geometry onto the new geometry of the network is no trivial undertaking. Is there a part of the Internet where French law applies, and another part where US law applies, and another where Brazilian law applies – like Real Space? Or do all of them apply equally, everywhere? Or something else? Or does law get made in some kind of new way, more appropriate for this New Space? This is all very destabilizing, though it is just one of the many ways in which Old Space and New Space come into conflict when it comes to Internet law and Internet governance. One other illustration, briefly. The representatives of these geographically-defined entities – the governments of the world – have had little or no control over the manner in which the technical underpinnings of the Internet have been and continue to be set, the rules and technical protocols underlying Internet communication that allow the Internet to do the extraordinary things that it does. (Or the extraordinary thing that it does – moving messages from one place to another, quickly and reliably.) That system is under intense pressure as Old Space is making its demands heard. Over the past two or three years, there has been a marked intensification of efforts by those sovereign states to insert themselves more directly into these standards-setting processes – in the UN, the ITU, and ICANN – to participate in formulating those rules and protocols, and perhaps even to exercise a kind of governmental veto power over those decisions. New Space-based institutions – global and networked without reference to geography – are resisting this move, and the battle has been joined. What role should the sovereign states play in formulating the underlying rules governing Internet communication? How do we reconcile the demands of geographically-based law-making entities on the global network? These are really important questions – in my opinion, truly fundamental to the question of how communication takes place in the twenty-first century. I don’t know what the answers are, and I don’t even know if there are answers, or even who gets to decide what the answers might be. Which brings me, then, to the topic of this conference: reassembling the spatial. What might “reassembling the spatial” mean for these problems, and is that a useful way to organize our search for answers to these difficult questions? Clearly, “reassembling the spatial” could mean different things to different people. To some, I think it reflects only a kind of nostalgia for the simpler days of yore, back when space was space, and men were men, and newspapers and television broadcasters (all three of them) ruled the land . . .

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Ah! If only the world looked like what it used to look like, when we understood things and could make sense of the international legal order. But putting that aside, I do think that to many people in my field of Internet law, “reassembling the spatial” means trying to find ways to reinforce, to shore up, the existing international legal system so that these spatial claims can more easily be asserted, to smooth out the enforcement of these nationally-bordered norms on the global network, and to help create what some of my colleagues – notably Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith, in their influential book on Internet governance – have called the “bordered Internet.” This is the Internet where French claims have purchase over those who “enter” France’s portion of the Internet, Brazilian claims over . . . Goldsmith and Wu argue that the Internet will (and indeed should) come to be carved up along traditional geographic lines and that, in fact, this process is already well advanced. Governments, they tell us, will and should carve up the Net into separate domains where their local ordinances will be given effect and applied to anyone over whom they can assert their power – France in France’s portion, China over China’s portion, Brazil over Brazil’s portion, etc.: What we once called a global network is becoming a collection of nation-state networks . . . like the international system itself. . . . [T]he decentralized territorial system itself promotes diversity and self-determination, even with regard to Internet communication. . . . While it is easy to criticize traditional territorial government and bemoan its many failures, there is no reasonable prospect of any better system of governmental organization.2 If that’s what “reassembling the spatial” means – helping to create an Internet that replicates the spatial boundaries between nation-states in Real Space, reassembling the 3-D map of the world that has come to define the international legal system and superimposing it onto the global network – count me out. I don’t think the answers will be found there. It seems self-evident to me (though apparently not to many others) that the new geometry of cyberspace requires new institutions for governance and law-making that accommodate that new geometry, rather than denying it or attempting to make it go away. I am not quite ready – after a mere 20 years or so of experience with this New Space – to concede defeat on that front and to conclude that there is “no reasonable prospect” of coming up with something that makes more sense than it does. Remember the Line of Demarcation? The bordered Internet reminds me, too much, of that, of Spain and Portugal carving up the New World (with Pope Julius’s blessing) in 1494 – the very year that Columbus returned from his voyage! Space was expanding in the fifteenth century and throughout the Age of Exploration, as people in the Old World realized that there was

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a New World – and the first thing they do is to carve it up and attach it to the Old World, mapping Old World claims onto the New World space, to incorporate it into, and make it look like, the Old World. We have been handed a communications platform whose power derives in large part from its freedom from the constraints of space. For the first time in human history, we can talk to one another as part of a single global community. That is, I would assert, a large part of the reason the global network has grown as astonishingly fast as it has – the fastest-growing thing on the planet over the last 20 years or so. What is so special or sacred about the spatial that we would want to reassemble it in a medium that has already shown us – see “Spring, Arab” – how powerful the new geometry can be? It took an act of imagination to create the New World, and we need something like it again. Like it or not, we are building a new global polity, and we need new global institutions that might be up to the task of governing it wisely. I don’t know what those new governance or law-making systems will look like. I wish I did. I don’t think anyone does. My guess is that they are no more imaginable to us than electronic voting – or, for that matter, the governmental system of the United States – would have been to people living in the days of Louis XIV or George III. But I do know that we will never imagine them into existence if we start, at the dawn of the Age of New Geometry, by rejecting the possibility that they might exist, and I am surely not prepared to say that there is no reasonable prospect that they can come into being.

Notes 1 Mark Scott, “Google Is Ordered to Block Images in Privacy Case,” The New York Times, 6 November 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/business/ international/google-is-ordered-to-block-images-in-privacy-case.html?_r=0. 2 Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (New York and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 152.

Index

aerial assault videos 14, 19–22, 25 AFP-Getty 15, 17 Agnew, John 110 Algarotti, Francesco 102n35 Al Qaeda 13 Annan, Kofi 107 Appadurai, Arjun 110–1 Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, The 113, 120n49 Assault on Iran 107–9, 111, 113 Athanasiou, Athena: Dispossession 76 attack photos, drone 15–19, 22, 25 Aziz, Tariq 15 Basiji shops 116 BBC 15 Behram, Noor 18, 23, 25 Bell, Genevieve 40 Bengal Catholic Herald 97 Blondel, François 90 Boler, Megan: Digital Media and Democracy 23 Brøderbund Software 105 Bruni, Signore 97 Bryant, Brandon 21 Bureau of Investigative Journalism 18 Butler, Judith 21; Dispossession 76 Cabrini-Green housing project 5, 67–8 Canon Air Force Base 21 Carpo, Mario 88 Carver, Evan H. 7–8 Catholicism 92, 93, 95–7, 98 CHA see Chicago Housing Authority Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) 78n7; Plan for Transformation 67, 68 Christian Science Monitor, The 16 CIA 13, 15, 18, 24

Civic Center Park 129, 136 Civil Rights Movement 124 CNN 15, 16 Cole, Thomas: The Architect’s Dream 88 context collapse 1–9, 14, 45, 66, 83, 87, 88, 95, 122 Context Collapse: Reassembling the Spatial 5–6, 118 counter-discourses 111, 113 Creech 14 24 Creech Air Force Base 21, 24–5 Cultural Institute Tebyan 111, 113, 120n39 Current News 15 cyberspace 151 Dadgar, Puya 113, 116, 118; Quest of Persia 114 Daley Plaza 136 Darpakhel, Dande 17, 18 Dawn 8 111–2, 113 Dead Mage Studio 114 democracy 6, 23, 77, 122, 139; architecture of 123; public space 123–5 democracy, protest, and public space 122–39; code layer 137; content layer 138; democracy and public space 123–5; findings 132–6; findings: code layer 134; findings: content layer 135–6; findings: physical layer 132–4; hypotheses 131–3; methodology 125–31; methodology: neighborhood- and city-level data collection and analysis 130–1; methodology: site evaluation 127–9; methodology: site-level data

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collection and analysis 129–30; methodology: site selection 125–7; physical layer 137 Dewey Square 136, 137 Diario di Roma 97 dispossession 66–78; Lefebvre and Marx 72–7; public housing collapse 66–8; right to housing and right to the city 68–72 Dodgeball 31, 39, 45 Dome of the Rock 86, 87 Dourish, Paul 40 drone media 4, 13–24; aerial assault videos 14, 19–22, 25; attack photos 15–19, 22, 25; protest 22–5 drones: attacks 14–24, 26n11; pilots 4–5, 25; Predator 16, 19, 24, 25; strikes 4, 14, 15, 16, 18; war-related imagery see drone media Dvids 14, 19 Erlach, Fischer von: Entwurff Einer Historischen Architectur 88 Ethical Governor, The 25 Facebook 33, 35, 38, 125, 150 Fanafzar Sharif 114 Farsi 119n4 FATA see Federally Administered Tribal Areas Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) 13 Foucault, Michel 74, 118 Foursquare 32, 38, 39, 45 Frank Ogawa Plaza 122 Frederick the Great 102n35 French Revolution 93, 96 French Royal Academy of Architecture 90 Frith, Jordan 31 Galen 85 Garshasp 114, 116 Garshasp Naame 114 gays 4, 50, 53; communities 46, 48, 51, 55, 73; hookup places 55–7, 63; hookup practices 52, 57–62; see also homosexuals General Atomics Predator 25 geographic proximity 8 George III 152 Getty Images 15, 16, 26n7 Giddens, Anthony 3 God of War 116

Goffman, Erving 2, 59 Goldsmith, Jack 151 Google 127, 148, 149; Android system 30; Earth 129; image search 14; Maps 34, 38, 39, 130; Streetview 129 Gordon, Eric 29 government and police 37, 39 Great Depression 66 Gregory, Derek 22 Gregory the Great 98 Gregory XVI 97 Grindr 5, 45, 46, 47–64; fieldwork 50; hybrid ecologies 55–7; organizing meetings with strangers close by, from the home, and in the home 50–3; urban mobilities and public places 50–7; using on the move 53–5 Halter, Ed 108 Harvey, David 3, 72 homosexuals 46, 50, 57; see also gays Hong, Sun-ha 29 Hope VI program 66, 67 Housing Choice Voucher Program 69 How We Fight 109 Hugo, Victor: Notre-Dame de Paris 93–4 Huhtamo, Erkki 117; Media Archaeology 116 Humphreys, Lee: Dodgeball 31, 39 Huntemann, Nina 109 hybrid ecologies 45, 55–7 Inada, Yoriko 31 Independence Mall 129, 133, 134, 135, 136 Indian Express 15 information and communication technology for development 31, 110, 117 Ingold, Tim 54 Instagram 33, 35 iPhone 33; 3G 30 Iran Computer and Video Games Foundation 111, 120nn36–7 Iranian Revolution 120n49 Iranian Revolutionary Guards 111 Iranian video games 104–18 Iran-Iraq war 111 Islamic Development Organization 111 Islamic Revolution 7, 115, 118

Index Julius 151 Kekanto 34–5 Khiabany, Gholam 112–13 Khomeini, Ruhollah 107, 111 Kohn, Margaret 5–6, 126 Krautheimer, Richard 86 Labrouste, Henri 102n40; Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève 94–5 L.A. Plaza 136 LBA see location-based advertisements LBS see location-based services Lefebvre, Henri 4, 5, 66, 77, 111; Le manifeste différentialiste 73; On the Jewish Question 72–3, 74; The Urban Revolution 68, 74 Leo XII 95–6 Lessig, Lawrence 123, 127 Licoppe, Christian 5, 31 Live Leak 14, 19 location-based advertisements (LBA) 35–6, 39 location-based services (LBS) in Brazil 5, 29–40, data analysis 33; literature review 30–2; methods 32–3; sharing location 35–8; using location 33–5 location-based social networks 39–40 Locke, John 75 Louis XIV 152 Low, Setha 125 Ludwig I 93 Mahmood, Tariq 16 Marshall, T. H. 68–9 Marvin, Carolyn 29, 118 Marx, Karl 72–4, 76; On the Jewish Question 73, 74 Marzoghi, Muhammad 104 Massey, Doreen 117 Matos-Silva, Mariana S. de 5 Mayer, Jane 13 Mechner, Jordan: Prince of Persia 105– 7, 109, 114, 119n9 Memorable Battles 113 metaphor 1, 2, 57, 66, 101n22, 125 mobile social network (MSN) 31, 45, 47, 54, 55, 63 Mogi 31 Mohseni, Ebrahim 7, 118 Morel, Julien 5 Muhammad 86 mutual proximity 45, 54, 60

155

Napoléon 93 National Air and Space Museum 25 National Foundation of Computer Games 120n37 National Mall 141n33 National Parks Department 135 nation-state 8, 23, 77, 110, 118, 148, 151 Natkin, Stéphane 116 NBC 16 Németh, Jeremy 7–8, 123, 126, 127, 129 net locality 29 New Space 150, 151 New Urbanist 71 New York State Supreme Court 77 Nicolaci-da-Costa, Ana Maria 5, 32 Nielsen, Gretchen 24 Nielsen, Heid 24 Nooshin, Laudan 116, 118 Obama, Barack 22, 24 Occupy Movement 75, 123, 124, 127 Old Space 148, 150 one-night stands 46, 52, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63 Orientalism 7, 105, 107, 114 Pagès, Jean 90–1, 101n29 PakAlert Press 15 Pantheon 86, 88, 98, 100n12 parallax view 77, 78 parks 129, 130, 134, 135, 141, 143 Parks, Lisa 4–5 Pius VI 96 place 122–39 placelessness 110 plan cul 46, 57, 61, 63 Pliny 85 Post, David G. 8 Prince of Persia 105–7, 109, 114, 119n9 privacy 5, 8, 29, 30–1, 33, 39, 40, 50, 55, 148 privatization of causal hookup practices with strangers 50–3, 55 protests 13, 77, 124; drone 14, 22–5; Oakland 122; public 7, 8; social media 1, 3; space 123; Tahrir Square 124–5; Turkish 75–6; US 123, 126– 39; visible 124 proximity 4, 5, 45–64, 77, 137; awareness 47, 60, 61, 63; awareness

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and gay hookup practices 57–62; geographic 8; mutual 45, 54, 60; spatial 46, 47, 48, 60, 61, 62, 63; timeless 88; see also Grindr Pruitt-Igoe 5, 66, 67 public places 46, 50–7, 58, 63, 65n17 public spaces 4, 5, 6, 29, 56, 127, 139; democracy 122, 123–5; material 7; parochialization 46; right 72, 75, 76 Puya Arts Software 113 Raphael 94 Raw Story, The 15 Reichmuth, Philipp 107, 109, 117 Resistance 104, 113, 116, 120n48 Reuters 15, 16, 22 right to the city 4, 5, 6, 68, 72, 74 Rivière, Carole Anne 5 Rose Kennedy Greenway 137 Sacred Defense 111 sacred space 7, 85, 95 Said, Edward 105; Orientalism 107 Samimi, Farshad 114, 118 sandeepsb1: Death by Drone 23, 24 Semati, Mehdi 109, 117 Serlio, Sebastiano 88 Shah, Miram 18 Shah, Syed Wali 18 Shiite Islamic culture 110, 113, 115, 116 Sisler, Vit 7, 118 Smith, Neil 72, 125 SMOs see social movement organizations social movement organizations (SMOs) 8, 131, 135, 136, 138 solidarity 7, 66, 72, 122, 123, 125, 138, 139 Soufflot, Jacques-Germain 91, 94 South Asian News Agency 17 Souza e Silva, Adriana de 5, 29, 31 space of architecture as a complex context 83–99 spatial proximity 46, 47, 48, 60, 61, 62, 63 spatial turn 2–3 state, space, and cyberspace 146–52 Summers, David: The Defect of Distance 84; Real Spaces 84, 100n2

Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution 120n37 Taliban 13, 15, 16, 18, 26n7 Tebyan Institute 104 Terranova, Tiziana 19 Thousand and One Nights, A 106–7 Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 116–17 Tuan, Yi-Fu 113 Twitter 35; Revolution 124 UDUM see Underlying Discourse Unveiling Method Ullah, Naeem 18 Underlying Discourse Unveiling Method (UDUM) 32–3 urban mobilities 50–7, 63 US Capitol Police 141n33 US Census: American Community Survey 130 US Defense Department 19, 21 US Supreme Court 123 Vega, Liliana 116 Viber 33 video games, Iranian 104–18 Waldron, Jeremy 75 Walkscore.com 131, 133 Waze 34 Weilin, Wang 125 Werning, Stefan 107, 109, 117 Wesch, Michael 2 Westlake Park 122, 129, 134, 136 Wharton, Annabel 84; Selling Jerusalem 100n9 Whatsapp 33 Why We Fight 109 Wittman, Richard 6 Woodruff Park 136 World War II 5, 66, 67 Wu, Tim 151 YouTube 2, 14, 19, 23 ZCTA see zip code tabulation area zip code tabulation area (ZCTA) 129, 130–1, 133, 136 Žižek, Slavoj 77 Zuccotti Park 7, 123, 126, 127, 129, 134, 135, 136, 137