Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square: Producing Public Space in the Mediated City (The Urban Book Series) 3030666719, 9783030666712

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The Urban Book Series

Timothy Jachna

Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square Producing Public Space in the Mediated City

The Urban Book Series Editorial Board Fatemeh Farnaz Arefian, University of Newcastle, Singapore, Singapore; Silk Cities & Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL, London, UK Michael Batty, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL, London, UK Simin Davoudi, Planning & Landscape Department GURU, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK Geoffrey DeVerteuil, School of Planning and Geography, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK Andrew Kirby, New College, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA Karl Kropf, Department of Planning, Headington Campus, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK Karen Lucas, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Marco Maretto, DICATeA, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Parma, Parma, Italy Fabian Neuhaus, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada Steffen Nijhuis, Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands Vitor Manuel Aráujo de Oliveira, Porto University, Porto, Portugal Christopher Silver, College of Design, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA Giuseppe Strappa, Facoltà di Architettura, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Roma, Italy Igor Vojnovic, Department of Geography, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA Jeremy W. R. Whitehand, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK Claudia Yamu, Department of Spatial Planning and Environment, University of Groningen, Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

The Urban Book Series is a resource for urban studies and geography research worldwide. It provides a unique and innovative resource for the latest developments in the field, nurturing a comprehensive and encompassing publication venue for urban studies, urban geography, planning and regional development. The series publishes peer-reviewed volumes related to urbanization, sustainability, urban environments, sustainable urbanism, governance, globalization, urban and sustainable development, spatial and area studies, urban management, transport systems, urban infrastructure, urban dynamics, green cities and urban landscapes. It also invites research which documents urbanization processes and urban dynamics on a national, regional and local level, welcoming case studies, as well as comparative and applied research. The series will appeal to urbanists, geographers, planners, engineers, architects, policy makers, and to all of those interested in a wide-ranging overview of contemporary urban studies and innovations in the field. It accepts monographs, edited volumes and textbooks. Now Indexed by Scopus!

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14773

Timothy Jachna

Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square Producing Public Space in the Mediated City

Timothy Jachna University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

ISSN 2365-757X     ISSN 2365-7588 (electronic) The Urban Book Series ISBN 978-3-030-66671-2    ISBN 978-3-030-66672-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my father, Joseph David Jachna, 1935–2016.

Acknowledgements

The arc of research and inquiry that finds it latest and most coherent and comprehensive expression in this volume was nourished by dialogues with innumerable colleagues and collaborators in the many institutions and associations with which I have had the privilege of being involved in various capacities over the past decades. Thanks to Miodrag Mitrašinović, for our many conversations on public space and urbanism, especially during my residency as a visiting scholar at Parsons School of Design in 2016, during which the concept and proposal for this volume came to fruition. I am grateful to Brian McGrath and David Grahame Shane, for our conversations and their visions on the role of digital technologies in the “metacity”, and to Merve Bedir for our discussions on automation and the twenty-first-century city. I also thank Laurent Gutierrez, with whom I co-founded and co-led the Master of Design in Urban Environments Design program at the School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, for the rich pedagogical platform for exploration of urban issues that this program provided, and for our many exchanges on urban issues. I am also indebted to Tony Fry, with whom I had the privilege of co-teaching in this Master’s program, for constantly inspiring me, through example, to envision the future of cities and urban life as pivotal issues in the future of humans on this planet. I also value the insights that have flowed into this text as a result of my supervisory exchanges with my PhD students during the period of preparing this manuscript: Markus Wernli, Hélène Liu and Suxin (Jasmine) Zhang. Also, the broad review of literature that forms the foundation of this book would have been immeasurably more onerous without the able and enthusiastic support of my research assistant April Liu. Thank you also to John Frazer and Mark Burry, thesis supervisors for my AA Diploma and PhD studies, at the Architectural Association (London) and RMIT University (Melbourne), respectively, for nurturing the seeds of the perspectives on digital technologies in the built environment that inform this book. For the grounding in second-order cybernetic principles that informs the argument of this book, I am deeply indebted to Ranulph Glanville, to whose memory I hope to do justice.

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Finally, I want to thank my wife Wantanee, who first encouraged me to take on this project and then endured through the long process of my bringing it to completion, for her unrelenting support, forbearance, and inspiration.

Contents

Introduction 1 Public Space in the Digital Era ������������������������������������������������������������     3 Urban Public Space and Digital Technologies����������������������������������������     3 The Perspective of this Book ������������������������������������������������������������������     5 Public Space��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������     6 Performing Public Agency����������������������������������������������������������������������     7 Social Construction of Technologies ������������������������������������������������������     9 Public Space: What’s It For?��������������������������������������������������������������������    11 The Digital Mediation of Public Spatial Practice������������������������������������    13 Overview of the Text��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    14 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    16 Conceptualizing Public Space in the Mediated City 2 Public Space, the Public Realm and Digital Technologies������������������    23 Digitally Mediated Urban Public Space��������������������������������������������������    23 Public Space, Public Media and the Public Sphere ��������������������������������    25 Digital Technologies and the “Literature of Loss”����������������������������������    26 A Space of Encounters����������������������������������������������������������������������������    27 Diversity and Irreconcilability ����������������������������������������������������������������    29 A New Chapter in the “Tragedy”? ����������������������������������������������������������    32 Re-commoning����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    33 Public Spaces as Spaces of Rehearsal for Urban Futures������������������������    35 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    36 3 From the Individual to the Public��������������������������������������������������������    39 Communities and Publics������������������������������������������������������������������������    39 A “Society of Individuals” and the Retreat of/from Public Space…������    42 … And into Digital Forums ��������������������������������������������������������������������    44 Hyperindividuation and the Echo Chamber��������������������������������������������    45 Blurring the Distinction Between Public and Private������������������������������    47 ix

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Digitally Mediated Publics����������������������������������������������������������������������    49 Together Apart�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    51 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    53 4 Us and Others����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    57 Producing Digital Public Space ��������������������������������������������������������������    57 Technologies of Control and Technologies of Freedom��������������������������    59 The Digital Mediation of Public Space����������������������������������������������������    62 Public Space as Interface ������������������������������������������������������������������������    63 Stretching the Spatial Metaphor��������������������������������������������������������������    65 Universal Media��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    69 The Particularity of Public Space (Space Matters)����������������������������������    70 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    71 5 Constructing Public Space: Embodiment and Emplacement������������    73 The Body in/as the World������������������������������������������������������������������������    73 Body + Place: Bodily Coming-Together��������������������������������������������������    75 Embodiment and Worldedness����������������������������������������������������������������    77 Mediating Urban Space����������������������������������������������������������������������������    78 Technologies, Embodied and Emplaced��������������������������������������������������    79 The Body and Its Others: Cyborg Publics ����������������������������������������������    81 The Cyborg City��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    83 Non-Human Socialities����������������������������������������������������������������������������    84 Cyborg Citizenship����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    86 Compositing of Intelligence��������������������������������������������������������������������    87 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    89 6 Networked����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    93 Networked Society����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    93 Individuals and Networked Publics ��������������������������������������������������������    94 Conscripting��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    95 Network Against Space����������������������������������������������������������������������������    96 Network(ed) Publics��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    98 Public Delinked from Local, the Spatial, the “Immediate” ��������������������    99 Real and Virtual����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   100 A Planetary Public ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   102 The Spatiality of Digital Networks����������������������������������������������������������   104 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   106 Producing Public Space in the Mediated City 7 The Affordances of Digital Technologies in Public Space������������������   111 Digital Technologies and the Making of Public Space����������������������������   111 Environment, Technologies and Affordances������������������������������������������   112 The Social Affordances of Digital Technologies ������������������������������������   114 The Interface Revisited����������������������������������������������������������������������������   117 Social Technologies and a Shift in Cognitive Styles ������������������������������   119 Affording Governance ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   121

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Affording Extra-Governmental Governance��������������������������������������������   122 Affording Commodification��������������������������������������������������������������������   123 Affording Urban Citizenship ������������������������������������������������������������������   123 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   125 8 Seeing-and-Being-Seen: Affordances of Sensors and Screens ����������   129 Being Seen ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   129 Sensing as Control ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   130 A New Economy of Public Space������������������������������������������������������������   131 Innumerable Perspectives: The Cyborg Sensorial Array ������������������������   132 Witnessing������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   134 Recording and Urban Imaginaries ����������������������������������������������������������   135 Telepresence��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   135 Manifesting����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   137 Private Screens in Public Space ��������������������������������������������������������������   138 Public Screens������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   139 The “Deepening” of Place: Interactive Installations��������������������������������   141 New Visibilities����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   142 Screens as Public Spaces ������������������������������������������������������������������������   145 Public Displays as Incubators for Future Publics������������������������������������   146 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   147 9 Who and Where: Affordances of Personalization and Locativity ����   151 The Individual in the World ��������������������������������������������������������������������   151 Tuning������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   153 Manifesting the Individual ����������������������������������������������������������������������   153 The Personalized Web������������������������������������������������������������������������������   155 Gadgetopolis��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   156 Managing Public Presence����������������������������������������������������������������������   157 The Individual as Reporter/as Public Sensor ������������������������������������������   158 Information Is Not a Commons ��������������������������������������������������������������   158 Locative Technologies and Grounded Computing����������������������������������   159 Detaching from Place or Deepening Interaction with Place?������������������   160 Location and Empowerment��������������������������������������������������������������������   161 The Commodification of Location����������������������������������������������������������   162 Layering of Significances������������������������������������������������������������������������   163 Dissonances����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   164 Digital Counterpublics ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   165 Exclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   165 Augmented Flânerie��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   166 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   167 10 Cyborg Modes of Agency: Affordances of Automation and Modelling����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   171 Automatization of Public Action ������������������������������������������������������������   171 Automatic, Autonomic and Autonomous������������������������������������������������   172 Abdication������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   173 Division of Labor in Cyborg Public Space����������������������������������������������   174

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Contents

Cyborg Partnerships��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   175 Persuasive Locative Games and the Automatization of Public Behavior������������������������������������������������������������������������   176 Disruptions in Accustomed Behavior������������������������������������������������������   177 Rehearsing Roles ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   178 Learning to be Public ������������������������������������������������������������������������������   179 Public Space as an Automated Service����������������������������������������������������   180 Cartography����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   181 Projective vs. Extractive Models��������������������������������������������������������������   181 The Influence of Models��������������������������������������������������������������������������   182 Trust in Data Models��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   183 Maps as Public Commons������������������������������������������������������������������������   184 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   186 11 The Digital Urban Fabric: Affordances of Connectivity and Datafication ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   189 The Digital Urban Fabric ������������������������������������������������������������������������   189 Filtering����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   191 Unequal Connectivity������������������������������������������������������������������������������   192 Networked Activism in Public Space������������������������������������������������������   193 Reciprocal Relationships Between Digital and Physical Sites of Public Action and Interaction ��������������������������������������������������   194 Connective, Collective Action, the Crowd and the Cloud ����������������������   194 Data, Data, Everywhere ��������������������������������������������������������������������������   196 The World as Data������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   197 Data, Space and Place������������������������������������������������������������������������������   198 The Data-Citizen��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   199 Data and Power����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   201 The Economics of Data����������������������������������������������������������������������������   202 Data Publics and Public Data������������������������������������������������������������������   203 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   205 Conclusion 12 Digital Technologies and the Future of Public Space��������������������������   211 The Impact of Digital Technologies on Public Space������������������������������   211 An Evolving Public Realm����������������������������������������������������������������������   213 Multiple Publics ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   214 Whither Public Space in the Digital Era?������������������������������������������������   215 Public and Anti-Public Uses of Digital Technologies������������������������������   217 Public Space as Project����������������������������������������������������������������������������   219 Between Mass Consumption and Social Production ������������������������������   220 Achieving Democratic Mediated Public Space ��������������������������������������   223 Aspirations ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   223 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   225 Index����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   227

Introduction

Chapter 1

Public Space in the Digital Era

Abstract  This book investigates the ways in which the production of public space in contemporary urban contexts is affected by the suffusion of urban life with digital technologies. A “social production of technology” approach is taken to frame the digitally-mediated city as a communal social and cultural project. Drawing on concepts from Arendt and Habermas, and acknowledging the multivalent and shifting nature of public space and the heterogeneity of the urban actors who form it, the “agency” of these different actors in appropriating digital technologies takes center stage. The chapter concludes with an outline of the content and exposition of the book. Keywords  Digital technologies · Public space · Social production of technology · Agency

Urban Public Space and Digital Technologies The well-worn discourse on the “smart” or “wired” city purports that digital technologies present a new stratum of possibilities and relations in cities—not merely a new set of technological artifacts or applications—that has a pervasive and penetrating transformative effect on many facets of the city. In his seminal works on this perspective, The Informational City and The Rise of Network Society, Castells (1989, 2011) proposed that the advent of digital networks in the late twentieth century heralded nothing less than a radical redefinition of global economic, social and political realities. He proclaimed a new urban era, characterized by the reconfiguration of time, space, economy and society introduced by information technology, global telecommunications and the restructuring of Capitalism. Borja and Castells (1997) articulate this phenomenon in more detail, looking at the physical and social implications of these trends on “information age” cities. One corollary of the rise of © The Author(s) 2021 T. Jachna, Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square, The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_1

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digital technologies propounded by Castells is the threat of the effective demise of public space, as relationships built upon coming together in physical space give way to digitally constituted publics, freed from the frictions and restrictions of time and place. Digital technologies are understood here as designating both a collection of applications that enable particular ways of thinking and behaving, and as the broad ascendant technological paradigm of this time that has sweeping, holistic effects on culture and society. This view unifies technological applications serving purposes as diverse as communication at a distance, the recording and dissemination of sound and images, the storage and processing of data, the provision of tools for supporting various tasks, the mediation of a wide range of human (and other-than-human) interactions, the managing of social networks, the automation of mechanical processes and the facilitation of access to information, among others. Public space is an intensely contested theme, and the suffusion of cities with digital technologies is one of the agitations that inspire recent and current rounds of debate and discussion in this contestation. Public space is where “urban culture” becomes most apparent (Simmel 1975 [1903]), in which different ideas, identities and cultures collide and intermix in ways that engender inventiveness and evolution, while acting counter to forces that seek to control, constrain or homogenize (Kuyper and van Bussell 2014: 1). However, some have called into question the necessity or viability of the perpetuation of traditional understandings of the function of the urban public realm in the constitution of societies. Already in the mid-twentieth century, Robert Venturi intimated his belief that neither the city nor urban public space were necessarily essential, or desired, in contemporary (American) life (Venturi 1966). With the mobile smartphone and the Internet, access to social interaction, information, recreation and culture becomes less a matter of the location or type of place in which one is located and more a question of one’s technology-­ supported connectivity. This brings new aspects to the understanding of public space from a functional perspective. The fact that urban citizens use digital technologies to mediate a wide range of their day-to-day practices in cities introduces additional functional parameters to the design of urban public spaces, such as the provision of power outlets and charging stations, and street furniture that accommodates the use of laptops and tablets (Project for Public Spaces 2014). Such measures can certainly contribute to making people feel accommodated and welcome in public spaces, encouraging them to spend time there, but this book will seek quickly to transcend this prosaic level of discussion. The incursion of these technologies into the physical urban spatial realm has more profound and diverse implications than is represented by these functional additions to the fitting-out of public spaces, going to the root of the ways in which publics are constituted. The suffusing of cities with networks of digital technologies is a primary facilitating factor in the emergence of the so-called “metapolis” (Ascher 1995; Gausa et al. 2001: 430) or “metacity” (McGrath and Pickett 2011), which represent new ways of cognitively “framing” urban contexts that become necessary as the historical “polis” and modern “metropolis” are augmented and transformed by new eco-

Public Space

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nomic, geographical, political, social, technical and communicational realities that evade the accustomed ways of understanding cities.

The Perspective of this Book This book takes a network-centered perspective on the city, and in particular urban public spaces, understood in terms of webs of human actions and interactions, delineating the “smart” city as an ecology of different types of urban actors who appropriate various affordances of digital technologies. This perspective is grounded in the notion that urban space in general, and public space specifically, should not be understood only as a substrate or container of urban public life, but rather as the outcome of the spatial practices (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]) of urbanites—that is, the idea that space is constituted by how people, individually and collectively, act and perceive. Framing urban public space in this way, the book seeks to contribute to the smart city discourse an investigation into what is brought to public spatial practice by the technological stratum of digital technologies. The humanist philosopher Hannah Arendt argued for an understanding of the public dimension as being instantiated in the enactment of plurality through the practice of “agency” (Arendt 1998 [1958]). To act as an agent, one must act vis-à-­ vis others, and it is in the performance of these interpersonal interactions that the public realm is made manifest. The public realm is not (only) a space. It is spatial, material, social and above all temporal—a common project continuously produced through the sustained engagement and interaction of multiple publics. According to the pragmatist philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1989 [1962]), a “public consciousness” first arose in gatherings of bourgeois individuals to discuss matters of common concern, that formed a mediating zone for negotiation between private individuals and the state, in which group of individuals became collectives. For Habermas, the public realm is a space of deliberation, equally accessible to all, the dynamics and hierarchies of which rest on the strength of ideas and rationality of one’s argument, and not one’s economic or social standing. More recent scholars have purported that the universal public realm lauded by Habermas, and to some extent by Arendt as well, was never truly universal in that it was never really equally accessible to all citizens, but always dominated by privileged bourgeois segments of society, around whose values, practices and world views public spaces were designed, naturalizing their life world as the given reality of society. This book adopts an aspirational view of the role of public space and the public realm. As such, it takes a normative, inclusive perspective on the smart city, first and foremost as a technologically mediated social ecology, assembling an understanding from the point of view of the various “urban actors,” whose actions and motivations in using digital technologies make up the “smart” or “wired” city. In distinction to much of the literature on this topic, which tends to concentrate on technologies, systems or strategies, this volume presents a theorization of the social dimension of public space in the city in the era of digital technologies, proposing implications of

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the theory and actual practice of the “smart” city on ways of understanding urban public space and public spatial practice.

Public Space Arendt saw two essential criteria as inhering in the public sphere. Firstly, the public is the realm of common appearances, in which everything that appears is nominally visible to all, in which each individual also has the power to bring things and statements into this realm for all to see. Secondly, she saw the public realm as congruent with the human-made world of Culture, as distinct from Nature. According to Mulgan (1991: 13), “Information technologies continue to be most revolutionary not in creating the new out of nothing but rather in restructuring the way old things are done.” In a broad sense, public life is one of these “old things.” In this period of late modernity or “reflexive modernity” (Beck et al. 2003), the idea and framework of modernity is turned back upon the processes of modernization. Public space—like the traditional family, organized religion and other inherited ways of organizing, finding meaning, and structuring human interrelationships— could be seen as a casualty of late modernity, a collateral loss in the context of the raging success of the modernist program of rationality, equality and techno-­centrism. Forms of solidarity, being together, finding common purpose, meaning and efficacy, are said to be disappearing in favor of “hyperindividualization.” Indeed, digital technologies can be seen to enable, if not cause, this drift towards the individual. The trajectory of development of the artifacts and systems of these technologies has been towards the personal, the miniaturized, the distributed, the mobile, the body-intimate, the stylish object of desire. Simultaneously, the networks in which human beings and technological artifacts are embedded become characterized less by hierarchical structures than by “flat” organizations in which every node is equally a center to the egos that occupy them. As in the case of all of these other aspects of society, the question is raised of what value, if any, is lost in the dissolution of these forms. This is not to argue, a priori, that accustomed forms of public life and public space should, or could, be preserved in the face of such pervasive change. Recognizing and accepting the fluid nature of technology, culture and society, it is futile to essentialize the ways of understanding the world that had been enforced by modern paradigms, mourning their loss or seeking to prevent their demise. Rather, this should be seen as a provocation to refresh our understanding of the essential societal values served by the public realm, to critically assess the ways in which these values are served or challenged by the specificities of the present socio-­ technological moment and, for the purposes of this book, to delineate measures and principles for the ongoing project of applying the affordances of digital technology to move closer to the normative vision of an inclusive public realm. Since the infancy of digital communication technologies (Meyrowitz 1985: 93–125), there has been continuing speculation as to whether, to what extent, and in

Performing Public Agency

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which ways the use of these technologies in social interaction is catalyzing transformations in day-to-day urban life, and the implications of these changes for the ways in which concepts of community, society and urbanity are conceived. To convey this shift in perspective, some scholars have used the terms “wired” or “digital” city rather than “smart” city, to imply a more inclusive vision of urban dynamics as being driven by people’s inventive use of digital technologies rather than the technologies themselves (Glasmeier and Christopherson 2015). In recognition of publics that are becoming increasingly accustomed to adopting these technologies to take action, many commercial providers of such systems have shifted their focus from the creation of top-down control systems to the provision of inclusive technologies that invite public participation (Kitchin 2015: 133). The wide-eyed and expansive optimism of the more utopian visions for the Internet in its early days evokes the tone of the boosterist rhetoric extolling the promise of the American West in the opening years of the nineteenth century as a land of promise, in which it was imagined the absence of the fetters of civilization would enable the emergence of societies and ways of life embodying the best qualities of human beings (Snodgrass 2015: 4). The close of that century saw a reciprocal movement in the more settled and urbanized areas back East, as municipal governments acquired land to create large urban parks, thereby securing zones of exception from the otherwise complete privatization (and “utilitization”) of urban space (Banerjee 2001: 10) in these particular cities. These spaces were intended to serve the purpose of instilling “civilizing virtues” among the public, such as good citizenship, civic responsibility and “the social compact that constitutes the core of civil society” (Rosenfield 1989). In comparison, digital venues cultivate network citizenship by inspiring a world view centered on one’s individual identity and unique personal network of connections (as opposed to membership in a society). While much of the mainstream literature and discussion of the “smart city” is driven by governmental concerns with processes of urban development and the exercise of control over cities, or from the point of view of commercial enterprises, the seeking of new markets for ever more complex and pervasive technological systems, in practice, many of the more transformative applications of digital technologies in driving the development of cities, from a sociological perspective, have been in the form of the appropriation of these technologies by individuals, groups and non-governmental organizations.

Performing Public Agency This volume is inspired by Arendt’s understanding of the public dimension as being instantiated in the enactment of plurality through the practice of agency. That is to say, to act as an agent, one must act vis-à-vis others, and it is in the performance of these interpersonal interactions that the public realm is made. Central to Arendt’s definition of the human condition is the ability to act, understood as “agency.” Thuma (2011) extracts four dimensions of Arendt’s understanding of agency, which

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prove useful in expanding upon how these aspects are actualized in public space and especially digitally mediated public spatial practice. The first of these aspects is visibility, which refers to the ways in which, through acting or appearing in public space, a person becomes manifest to others, a part of their world, and constructs a “public self.” The second aspect is the capacity to interact and communicate, by which one is able to engage and act together with others. Third is the capacity to initiate—to “make a beginning,” by which one asserts one’s efficacy and right as an agent, able to conceive and perpetrate actions of one’s own volition. Worldly attachment is the fourth of Arendt’s aspects of agency, referring to the desire to apply one’s capacity to initiate to achieve change in the shared world. For decades now, scholars have written of a purported “emptying-out” of public space, as consumerism overtakes citizenship as the dominant mode of human being-­ together in developed societies, in which public assent, for its part, is no longer arrived at by interaction but rather manufactured by media (Greene 1982). With the diminishment of the purpose of public space as the venue of rational-critical debate in bourgeois society (to the extent to which this purpose ever existed in actuality), public space has come to take on the function of “providing a field for socializing private persons into their systemic roles as employees and consumers.” The public sphere is increasingly an arena for the “engineering of mass loyalty” (Barney 2003: 105–106). According to Habermas, “Citizens entitled to services relate to the state not primarily through political participation but by adopting a general attitude of demand—expecting to be provided for without actually wanting to fight for the necessary decisions.” Arendt argues that it is in public life that the human race becomes human, remarking that many species of animals engage in social interaction, but humans are unique in coming together to engage in deliberation and action. She thus sees the reversion from public to mere social interaction as a decline of the public sphere. Public space is an ongoing project, requiring commitment to engagement with a society and a place over time; a space into which one should not need to be “invited,” but one that is always already the common good of all. Cities are places in which political action and interaction become concrete, much more so than at the state level (in which politics is handled through abstraction, representation and formal systems and processes), and in which members of different publics come into physical interaction (Sassen 2006: 4). Nobody can be made invisible—denied a body—in the city as they can at the national level. Cities are frontier zones in this sense, both centers and peripheries, where differences meet, where power relations are complex as none are in complete hegemony. At least three levels are equally essential to the construction of a public realm: 1. the ability of individuals to appear and manifest themselves as members of society, to be accepted for appearing as they are, having the right to expect safety and to avail themselves of the shared amenities of society 2. the right of publics to make use of the functional, social and symbolic affordances of public space in the performance of their communal identities and the

Social Construction of Technologies

9

conducting of the actions that sustain them, providing a “stage” for the tactical airing of private concerns and issues “out in the open” 3. provision of an arena in which different facets of society come together to address issues or tasks that require the involvement, expertise, consent, collaboration and investment of all This book will explore the implications of digital technologies in all three of these levels.

Social Construction of Technologies This book is informed by the social construction of technology (SCOT) approach to understanding the relationship between telecommunications and the city (Bijker and Law 1992). This perspective purports that technological innovations emerge from “micro-level social processes of human agency” (Graham and Marvin 1996: 105). Their use and developmental trajectories are formed by social processes, and human choices inform every facet of the adoption of technologies. Digital technology systems thus should be understood as social technologies, within a milieu of social and political practices (Roche et  al. 2012; Goodspeed 2014). This raises issues of what organizations and stakeholders use these technologies, and the rights, responsibilities and rules surrounding their use (Bakici et al. 2012). As social technologies, technological systems need to be understood as being situated within cultural discourses of power structures, gender relations and other themes in the political economies of socio-technological systems (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999). Societies are technologically mediated, just as technologies are socially conditioned. As societies become increasingly complex, systems are put in place and energy is expended to enable people to inhabit and function within them (Tainter 1988). As social technologies, digital artifacts, networks and processes play mediating roles in such interactions. Huber (1990) pointed out that, the more increasingly sophisticated technologies are adopted by organizations and societies, the more profound the influence of these technologies on the social and organizational structures of these societies. The reciprocal relationship between the evolution of technologies and the evolution of societies is one facet of the concept of the social construction of technology. Bijker et al. (1987) were pioneering scholars in this area. They proposed and illustrated the thesis that technologies are not neutral or universal but that they must rather be understood as artifacts that exist within social systems, and that it is from their immersion in specific social systems, within which they are actualized, that they attain efficacy and meaning. Intricate and dynamic relationships of co-dependence and co-formation exist between societies and the technologies they use. The term “social computing” (Schuler 1994) addresses the digitally-mediated formation and sustaining of social groups through so-called “social software,” which is seen as one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of Web 2.0, the

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state in the evolution of the World Wide Web from a network of information distribution to a network of social relations. Communal content creation and the Open Source Movement are further developments of social technologies, in which content and coding are created through use by the people who make up the social group. In many of their applications, digital technologies exhibit the traits of “phatic” technologies, whose primary use is for establishing and maintaining human relationships (Wang et al. 2011; Wang and Tucker 2016). While the role of digital technologies—in particular digital communications technologies—in supporting human relationships is relatively obvious, pre-digital technologies such as the television and photography also influenced social interaction (Bourdieu 1996a [1965]; Bourdieu 1996b). Just as the clock as a piece of technology can be seen as a herald, and facilitator, of the regimentation and rationalization of time, space and society in the Industrial Revolution (Mumford 1934), the emblematic technological artifact of recent decades has certainly been the computer. Or to be more precise, since the computer predates the contemporary era of the mediated city by half a century and the clock predated the industrialization of society by centuries, it is the appropriation, placing and using of these technologies in particular ways in the mediation of human interrelations and practices, that these technologies become social technologies. Technologies are neither neutral nor mute. McLuhan (1964) wrote of the bias of media, and Gillespie (2010) remarks how digital social platforms impose a “politics of the platform” on human relationships. By nature, media cannot be understood only by analyzing the interplay of representation and perception at the point of display or interaction between content and observer. Above all, one must take-into-­ account the hegemony of particular commercial concerns in the ownership of networks and the control of content (Van Dijck 2013). Many smart city initiatives are spearheaded by corporations or planning firms, in the name of efficiency and optimization, and concentrate on the sensors with which data is collected and the actuators through which changes in the city are affected. Goodspeed (2014) argues that such real-time control systems approaches are ill-suited to address the “wicked problems” (Rittel and Webber 1973) of the contemporary city, when the focus should be on “IT-enabled collaborative planning” that supports the communal and interactive engagement of these issues over time and across stakeholder groups. This requires that the city be seen as a “sociotechnical theory of action” rather than first and foremost as a technological artifact. Just as the Internet has not in itself had the socially transformative effect that was prophesied by techno-utopian proclamations in its early days (Benkler 2006), simply applying digital technologies in public life does not guarantee a more open, transparent, integrative, creative or responsive public realm. Indeed, researchers have pointed out that these technologies are more often than not applied to maximize regimes of control (Townsend 2013), based on a paternalistic-technocratic view that lauds the automation of the monitoring and decision-making processes that make cities “safe, secure, environmentally green, and efficient” (Hall et  al. 2000). In an analysis of three actually existing “smart city” projects, Greenfield (2013) finds that “smart” city initiatives are often characterized by authoritarian

Public Space: What’s It For?

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political aims. Indeed, some see the smart city initiative as threatening to undo progress in citizen involvement in urban governance that has been made since the 1960s (Townsend 2015: 203). The rhetoric of the transformative potential of digital technologies in the city often rings hollow in that these technologies often serve more as marketing and publicity tools for the city in the global economy that may provide convenience or diversion to urban dwellers (Wiig 2015), but do little to promote the engagement and enfranchisement of citizens regarding the substantive issues of the city. In actuality, the technological applications that make up smart cities in many cases increase social polarization (Hollands 2008), as well as putting increasing power in the hands of private interests that control huge amounts of data or capacity (Leamer 2007), or who position themselves as “obligatory passage points” for the acquisition of “smart” infrastructures (Söderström et al. 2014). Because of this, a growing number of scholars argue that the definition of a “smart” city should lie not in its technological infrastructure per se, but in the ways in which these technologies are used to draw on the collective intelligence of its stakeholders (Jucevičius et al. 2014). The efficacy of any such initiatives can only be judged by the criteria of good governance (accountability, legitimacy, respect, equity and competence) (McCall and Dunn 2012). That is not to claim that achieving “smartness” in the technological sense is inimical to smartness in collaboration. Technological infrastructures hold great potential in enabling collaboration, and collaborative processes can be used to identify and intelligently apply the right technologies in the right ways to the right ends, to meet needs and realize latent possibilities (Stratigea et al. 2015).

Public Space: What’s It For? The concept of public space is multifaceted and layered. It is a term that has acquired different meanings and uses throughout history, and the public space of contemporary cities is in one sense a result of the historical accretion of these different meanings. In Western societies, for example, the medieval space of contact, the classical space of performance, the industrial space of circulation and the contemporary space of connections are overlaid, none quite cancelling its predecessor paradigms but rather interleaving with them to create new interference patterns (Choay 2003). Thus, the addition of what might be termed the digital dimension or layer to urban public space also instigates processes of negotiation and reconfiguration of the accretive continuum that is urban public space. Public space is the space of a certain set of human activities and ways of being together in the world that are at the foundation of how societies have historically been formed and sustained. Activity-based definitions of public space run the gamut from the idealistic and aspirational to the prosaic and utilitarian. At the former end of this spectrum would be Arendt’s and Habermas’ insistence that the public sphere is that realm in which the deliberative processes of democracy can unfold, requiring a populace that is actively engaged in processes of constructing and maintaining

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public space through such discourse. At the prosaic end would be, for instance, definitions seeing public space as providing functional facilities for relaxation, recreation and socializing, implying more of a passive, consumer-like attitude among the public for which these spaces are provided. Cognately, Danish urbanist Jan Gehl (1987) defined the success of public spaces in terms of their ability to accommodate three categories of activities: day-to-day needs and obligations, recreation and idleness, and social activities, while Carr et  al. (1992: 19) assessed public spaces in terms of their accommodating “basic human needs,” defined as providing spaces that are “responsive, democratic, and meaningful.” If the role of public space is to “make space for democratic life” (Miller 2007), this needs to be understood as providing space for the performance of the ways of life guaranteed by democratic ideals1 (Lefebvre 2014 [1970]). The corollary of this benevolent, aspirational description, of course, is the view that public space can also be the realm in which alignment of personal behavior with the norms and conventions of the mainstream of a society are monitored, enforced, and reinforced by example, and in which the state and dominant public have the influence to shape the design of these spaces to perpetuate conformity and suppress diversity. Despite cyber-utopian visions of the potential of the Internet to create a free realm of public exchange (Kurzweil 1999; Rushkoff 1994), Barney (2003: 95) finds that the ways in which digital technologies are actually being appropriated are feeding, rather than counteracting, the supplanting of the public realm with economic activity and consumption. In the infancy of the public Internet, the media theorist and critic Howard Rheingold (1993) perceived a positive and a negative variant of the future evolution of the urban citizen: one in which urbanites use digitally mediated systems to create and exchange user-generated geographically-oriented content, and another in which they passively consume systems and content offered by service providers. For him, the distinction is that between these networks becoming an augmentation of public space and their becoming just another channel of broadcast commerce. However, it is likely overly simplistic to reduce the relationship between the public realm and the commercial realm (in contemporary cities or in the use of digital technologies) to a mutually exclusive and antagonistic dichotomy. LeCourt (2017), for instance, remarks that much of the literature on the Internet as public space revolves around the “prosumer” view of consumption as an act of production (in this case, production of a public sphere), further claiming that the use of the Internet for economic and recreational purposes does not disqualify it as contributing to the public realm, noting that in the past the evolution of the public sphere has been facilitated by changes in economic systems. This is not to claim that the relationship between public life and consumer life is simple or unproblematic. Arendt saw the money economy as bringing a “false objectivity” to public life, which masks the heterogeneity, competition and agonism that characterize the public realm. The use of digital technologies in urban public

1  There is what might be considered a “democratic bias” in most scholarly work on public space, in which public space is seen as an essential lynchpin for the sustaining of democratic societies.

The Digital Mediation of Public Spatial Practice

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spatial practice brings added dimensions to the interference patterns between the public realm and the commercial realm. Many of the applications that support the navigation of urban space, the accessing of data that informs the use of the city, communication and coordination among social groups and location-based gaming and other software that bring added dimensions to the experience of the physical public realm are of a “pay-to-play” nature, for which access requires the purchase of devices, data plans, software applications and memberships. This overt dimension of the monetization of digital connectivity and functionality is increasingly overlaid with an economic dimension in which digital technology applications are designed to harvest data from and about citizens/users, which is then used to target them with commercial messages, monetized directly as a commodity to be sold to third parties, or composited to inform models of crowd behavior, as will be expanded upon in the second section of this book. Public space has tended to be understood as at the same time being provided through the auspices of the state, while by nature also providing for modes of action and existence that form a counterpoint to state power, albeit in different ways throughout history and across cultures. Thus, the decline of the hegemony of the state in late modernity is of relevance to the issue of public space. Currently, public space and spatial practice is defined and facilitated by commercial, communal and other non-state interests as much as it is by formal structures and institutions of governance. For Jan Gehl (1987), social interaction was not the reason for people’s venturing out into public space, but rather the outcome of people moving through public space to conduct the “optional” and “necessary” activities of one’s life and encountering others in the process. This perspective seems to acknowledge the apprehension associated with coming into contact with those outside of one’s social and familial sphere, but also the necessity of providing mechanisms for guaranteeing that such contacts take place, for the sake of societal cohesion. Public space can be seen as embodying such a mechanism.

The Digital Mediation of Public Spatial Practice Nowadays, though, many of both the “optional” and “necessary” tasks of life are handled through digital networks and no longer require us to venture out into physical public space. Additionally, even when we are in physical public space and desiring contact with others, we tend to reach out through our digital devices to our established networks of connections. We are not required to take the uneasy step of interacting with strangers. Nonetheless, for Gehl, physical public spaces remain essential as places of face-to-face contact, even with the exodus of many of the functions that drew people into public space, into “digital agoras.” In the treatise on post-modern architecture and urbanism Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Robert Venturi (1966) claimed that “Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square: they should be working at the office or home with

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the family looking at television.” This depiction of a society in which identities are formed by membership in communities of work and familial relations rather than by participation in public life, in which individuals are plugged-in to public media as opposed to public space, prefigures many urban (or post-urban) imaginaries of the digital era, which enthusiastically projected a future in which a positive feedback loop between withdrawal from the public into the private and communal on the one hand, and the mediation of connections through technological networks on the other, would enable a dissolution of cities—from Toffler’s (1980) “electronic cottage” to the “New Geography” heralded by Kotkin (2000)—as digital networks, the rise of the “knowledge industries” and increasing individuation lead to a situation in which the activities for which people were drawn to live together in cities—working, socializing, consumption and entertainment—become more dispersed and individual, negating the centripetal “central place” imperative (Christaller 1933) as individuals elect to live away from the costs, crime, pollution and crowding of cities. While increasing rates of urbanization throughout the world would seem to refute prophesies that digital technologies would lead to a dissolution of cities, the ways in which people come together in cities has certainly been affected. In The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics, Pask (1969) described an envisioned future in which the built environment would take the form of a distributed spatial electronic interface—a vision that is increasingly approximated as urban areas become suffused with digital networks, systems and devices. Human experience and action in cities are thus “mediated” in many ways by digital technologies. In contemporary “always on” society (Boyd 2012), urbanites are continuously plugged in to digital communications and data retrieval networks, through smartphones, tablets and other such devices, such that these networks are to a large extent a constant component of perception and behavior in public space. Existing “community rituals” of public life, such as acknowledging others with a nod or handshake, are clashing with new rituals of digitally mediated behavior (Gumpert and Drucker 2004: 3). This heralds a different set of roles for the constructed environment, in which buildings and other designed constructed artifacts maintain the dual roles they have always had in the formation of public space, performing on the one hand as enclosures and delineators of the space and field of potentials of public space(s) (in the physical as well as the symbolic sense) and on the other hand as bodies and presences occupying and performing in public space. The first of these dimensions is that of urban design, the second is that of architecture. The computer and its derivative technological artifacts provide new vantages on the city, on public space and on public life, and designers are coming to terms with how to compose for these new vantages (Picon 2010).

Overview of the Text The main body of this book is divided into two sections, each consisting of an introduction and four additional chapters. The first of these two sections establishes a foundation of concepts and perspectives on public space and digital technologies;

Overview of the Text

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the second section presents an understanding of the affordances offered by digital technologies and their relevance to urban public spatial practice, and studies how different types of urban actors activate these affordances in their mobilization, use and subversion of digital technologies in urban spatial practice. Spatial practices are understood here in an inclusive sense, encompassing not just the acts of inhabiting and using the urban public realm, but also the control and surveillance of others in this realm, the many ways in which designers intervene in the public sphere, activist and polemic tactics in the appropriation of public space, and the practices ­surrounding the commodification of many aspects of public life. These two sections constitute the body of the book, bracketed by this introductory chapter (Chap. 1) and a concluding chapter (Chap. 12). Part I establishes a conceptual foundation upon which public space discourse may be brought to bear on an interrogation of the “wired” or “mediated” city. Chapter 2 is the introduction to this section, which begins with a review of relevant topics and concepts of public space, and the ways in which digital technologies are bringing new perspectives and opening up new lines of inquiry in public space discourse. The remaining four chapters of this section expand on these topics in more detail. Chapter 3 takes up the relationship between the urban citizen and the urban collective, through an investigation of the effects of digital technologies upon the interrelations between the individual, the community and the public/society, and upon the interplay between public and private space and practices. Building on these distinctions and interrelations, Chap. 4 elaborates on the mechanisms by which public space is performatively constructed, with particular attention to the effects of digital technologies on the eminently material and located relationship between body and space that is at the core of urban spatial practice, as well as the appropriation of digital technologies in both the so-called “bottom-up” and the “top-down” forces in the formation and use of urban public space. Chapter 5 deals with the ways in which both the entities and the interrelationships that constitute urban publics are affected by digital technologies. It engages the issue of the effects of the mediation of public spatial interaction through digital technologies, and the ascendancy of “cyborg publics,” characterized by interactions between human and technological agents. Chapter 6, the final chapter of Part I, describes the ways in which the mediation of social interaction through distributed digital communications networks affects the constitution of urban publics and public space, through the topics of networked public spaces and planetary publics. Part II addresses the affordances of digital technologies for urban public spatial practice. The introduction to this section (Chap. 7) discusses the broad palette of actions that constitute public spatial practices, and sketches, in broad terms, the ways in which digital technologies are affecting these practices. The concept of affordances—the qualities of artifacts and technologies that offer possibilities for use or action—is reviewed, with a particular concentration on the affordances of digital technologies and their implications for urban spatial practices. The remaining four chapters of this section are themed with reference to Thuma’s (2011) definition of Arendt’s four dimensions of agency that underlie public life, each chapter

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taking one of these dimensions as a point of departure for considering a subset of the affordances offered by digital technologies relevant to urban public spatial practice, spanning historical-developmental, technological and socio-psychological perspectives. Each aspect is expanded-upon, with reference to two different particular affordances of digital technologies, exemplified through examples of existing practice, as well as the issues and debates that arise in urban theory around the respective practices. Proceeding from the potentials for action presented by digital technologies to the practices through which these potentials are actualized in urban public spatial practice, each of the chapters of Part II demonstrates how the various public affordances of digital technologies discussed in the previous section are appropriated by various “urban actors” in their different roles. Every of these roles is a persona, embodying a different set of values, intentions and approaches to public space, and concomitantly, different strategies and tactics of using digital technologies in urban spatial practice. It brings together concepts of social technologies and spatial practices to establish a basis for a discussion of the intermingling of technological and human factors in different modes of agency in the mediated city. Chapter 8, based on the dimension of visibility, investigates the ways in which digital technologies are implicated in the acts of seeing and being seen, by which individuals and groups manifest themselves in public and take notice of the others with whom they share the public realm, as well as the elements that make up the physical environment of public spaces. The affordances provided by digital sensors and displays are central to this latter facet. Worldly attachment, the theme of Chap. 9, is explored through the two aspects of attachment to the body and attachment to place, drawing on the personalization and locative affordances of digital technologies, respectively. In Chap. 10, the dimension of interaction/communication is addressed, for which digital technologies’ affordances of connectivity and modelling are pivotal. Chapter 11 relates to the dimension of initiating, the capacity to conceive and enact one’s intentions within and upon the world. Datafication and automation are identified as affordances of digital technologies that bring novel considerations to the discussion of how intentions are conceived and enacted. Chapter 12, the book’s conclusion, draws together the themes of the various preceding chapters to suggest possible implications for the future development of cities, and the prospects for the appropriation of digital technologies in the endeavor of keeping the shared project of the communal creation of a common world alive.

References Arendt H (1998 [1958]). The human condition, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Ascher F (1995) Métapolis, ou l’avenir des villes. Jacob, Paris Bakici T, Almirali E, Wareham J (2012) A smart city initiative: the case of Barcelona. J Knowl Econ 4:135–148 Banerjee T (2001) The future of public space: beyond invented streets and reinvented places. J Am Plan Assoc 67(1):9–24

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Barney D (2003) Invasions of publicity. In: Law Commission of Canada. New perspectives on the public-private divide. UBC Press, Vancouver Beck U, Bonss W, Lau C (2003) The theory of reflexive modernization: problematic, hypotheses and research programme. Theory Culture Society 20(2):1–33 Benkler Y (2006) The wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press, New Haven Bijker W, Law J (eds) (1992) Shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change. MIT Press, London Bijker WE, Hughes TP, Pinch T (eds) (1987) The social construction of technical systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology. MIT Press, Cambridge Borja J, Castells M (1997) Local and global: the management of cities in the information age. Earthscan, London Bourdieu P (1996a [1965]) Photography: a middle-brow art. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto Bourdieu P (1996b) On television. The New Press, New York Boyd D (2012) Participating in the always-on lifestyle. In: Mandiberg M (ed) The social media reader. University Press, New York Carr S, Francis M, Rivlin LG, Stone AM (1992) Public space (environment and behavior series). Cambridge University Press, New York Castells M (1989) The informational city: information technology, economic restructuring, and the urban regional process. Blackwell, Oxford Castells M (2011) The rise of the network society. Wiley, New York Choay F (2003) Espacements. Milan, Skira Christaller W (1933) Die zentralen orte in süddeutschland. Gustav Fischer, Jena Gausa FSM, Guallart V, Müller W, Soriano F, Porras F, Morales J (2001) The metapolis dictionary of advanced architecture: city, technology and society in the information age. Actar, Barcelona Gehl J (1987) Life between buildings: using public space. Long Island Press, Washington Gillespie T (2010) The politics of ‘platforms’. New Media Soc 12(3):347–367 Glasmeier A, Christopherson S (2015) Thinking about smart cities. Camb J Reg Econ Soc 8:3–12 Goodspeed R (2014) Smart cities: moving beyond urban cybernetics to tackle wicked problems. Camb J Reg Econ Soc 8:79–92 Graham S, Marvin S (1996) Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. Routledge, New York Greene M (1982) Public education and public space. Educ Res 11(6):4–9 Greenfield A (2013) Against the smart city (the city is here for you to use. 1st and 3rd edn. Amazon Digital services, Inc: Do Projects Gumpert G, Drucker S (2004) Plato’s cave: public space transformed. Paper presented at the open space conference, Edinburgh, 27–29 October Habermas J (1989 [1962]) The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Polity, Cambridge Hall RE, Bowerman B, Braverman J, Taylor J, Todosow H (2000) The vision of a smart city. Proceedings of the 2nd international life extension technology workshop, Paris, France, 28 September 2000 Hollands RG (2008) Will the real smart city please stand up? City 12:303–320 Huber GP (1990) A theory of the effects of advanced information technologies on organizational design, intelligence, and decision making. Acad Manag Rev 15(1):47–71 Jucevičius R, Patašiene I, Patašius M (2014) Digital dimension of smart city: critical analysis. Proceedings of the 19th international scientific conference: economics and management 2014, ICEM, Riga, Latvia, 23–25 April 2014 Kitchin R (2015) Making sense of smart cities: addressing present shortcomings. Camb J Reg Econ Soc 8:131–136 Kotkin J (2000) The new geography. Random House, New York Kurzweil R (1999) The age of spiritual machines. Viking Press, New York

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Kuyper A, van Bussell GJ (2014) Dismantling urban history: cultural heritage in public spaces using new media technologies. Proceedings of library (r)evolution: promoting sustainable information practices the 22nd international BOBCATSSS symposium, Barcelona, Spain, 29–31 January 2014, pp 30–35 Leamer M (2007) A flat world, a level playing field, a small world after all, or none of the above? J Econ Literat 45:83–126 LeCourt D (2017) Habermasochism: the promise of cyberpublics in an information economy. In: Horner B, Nordquist B, Ryan SM (eds) Economies of writing: Revaluations in rhetoric and composition. University Press of Colorado, Boulder Lefebvre H (1991 [1974]) The production of space (trans. Smith DN). Blackwell, Oxford Lefebvre H (2014 [1970]) The urban revolution (trans. Bononno R). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MacKenzie D, Wajcman J (eds) (1999) The social shaping of technology. Open University Press, Milton Keynes McCall MK, Dunn CE (2012) Geo-information tools for participatory spatial planning: fulfilling the criteria for ‘good’ governance? Geoforum 43:81–94 McGrath B, Pickett STA (2011) The metacity: a conceptual framework for integrating ecology and urban design, ref metacity. Challenges 2(4):55–72 McLuhan M (1964) Understanding media: the extensions of man. Mentor, New York Meyrowitz J (1985) No sense of place: the impact of electronic media on social behavior. Oxford University Press, New York Miller KF (2007) Designs on the public: the private lives of New York’s public spaces. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Mulgan G (1991) A tale of new cities. Marxism Today 1989:18–25 Mumford L (1934) Technics and civilization. Routledge, London Pask G (1969) The architectural relevance of cybernetics. Archit Des 7(6):494–496 Picon A (2010) Digital culture in architecture: an introduction for the design professions. Birkhäuser Architecture, Basel Project for Public Spaces (2014) Technology brings people together in public spaces after all. Project for public spaces website. https://www.pps.org/article/technology-­brings-­people-­ together-­in-­public-­spaces-­after-­all. Accessed 10 Aug 2017 Rheingold H (1993) The virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. Addison-­ Wesley, Boston Rittel H, Webber M (1973) Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sci 4:155–169 Roche SP, Nabian N, Kloekl K, Ratti C (2012) Are smart cities smart enough? Global geospatial conference 2012: spatially enabling government, industry and citizens, Quebec City Rosenfield LW (1989) Central Park and the celebration of civic virtue. In: Benson T (ed) American rhetoric: context and criticism. Southern Illinois Press, Carbondale Rushkoff D (1994) Cyberia. HarperOne, San Francisco Sassen S (2006) Making public interventions in today’s massive cities. Static 04, London Schuler D (1994) Social computing. Commun ACM 37(1):28–29 Simmel G (1975 [1903]) The metropolis and mental life. In: Wolff KH (ed) The sociology of Georg Simmel. Free Press, New York Snodgrass ME (2015) Settlers of the American west: the lives of 231 notable pioneers. McFarland & Co, Jefferson Söderström O, Paasche T, Klauser F (2014) Smart cities as corporate storytelling. City 18(3): 307–320 Stratigea A, Papadopoulou CA, Panagiotopoulou M (2015) Tools and technologies for planning the development of smart cities. J Urban Technol 22(2):43–62 Tainter JA (1988) The collapse of complex societies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Thuma A (2011) Hannah Arendt, agency and public space. In: Behrensen M, Lee L, Tekelioglu AS (eds) Modernities revisited. IWM junior visiting fellows’ conferences, vol 29, Vienna Toffler A (1980) The third wave. Bantam Books, New York

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Townsend AM (2013) Smart cities: big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia. Norton & Company, New York Townsend AM (2015) Cities of data: examining the new urban science. Publ Cult 272:201–212 Van Dijck J (2013) Social media platforms as producers. In: Olsson T (ed) Producing the internet: critical perspectives on social media. Nordicom, Goteborg, pp 45–62 Venturi R (1966) Complexity and contradiction in architecture. Museum of Modern Art, New York Wang V, Tucker JV (2016) Phatic systems in digital society. Technol Soc 46:140–148 Wang V, Tucker JV, Rihll TE (2011) Phatic technologies—technologies for creating and maintaining social relationships. Technol Soc 33(1–2):44–51 Wiig A (2015) The empty rhetoric of the smart city: from digital inclusion to economic promotion in Philadelphia. Urban Geogr 37(4):535–553

Conceptualizing Public Space in the Mediated City

Chapter 2

Public Space, the Public Realm and Digital Technologies

Abstract  This chapter delineates the scope of digital technologies and of public space, and the discourses on these two constructs. Digital technologies, as appropriated in public spatial practice, span the distinction between public space and public media. These technologies play complex roles in both exacerbating and ameliorating many of the purported contemporary crises of public space, just as they have the potential mediate between the many different publics in urban society. In all of these aspects, they have the potential of providing platforms and tools for the rehearsal of possible future publics. Keywords  Public space · Public realm · Digital technologies · Tragedy of the commons · Subaltern publics · Urban futures

Digitally Mediated Urban Public Space “Digital technologies”—those technological applications based on the creation, processing and storage of data using binary code—have infiltrated every aspect of human endeavor in the contemporary world, to the extent that the present age is referred to as the “post-digital” era (Andrews 2013; Cascone 2000), not because society has left these technologies behind, but on the contrary because they have become so second-nature to contemporary society that they are taken for granted as always already an intrinsic element of our world. There are two complementary faces to this infiltration: one tracking a trajectory of increasing diversification of the applications of these technologies, and the other describing a trend of increasing unification of all these individual systems and artifacts into an all-encompassing environment. On the one hand, a nearly uncountable panoply of different digital devices, systems, services and applications—offering new functionalities or remediating the functions of predecessor technologies like photography, telephony, © The Author(s) 2021 T. Jachna, Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square, The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_2

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etc.—have taken root in every aspect of life and society. On the other hand, this multitude of artifacts and applications is becoming ever more enmeshed in a unifying digital infrastructure of increasingly globe-spanning dimensions. One convention for chronicling the evolution of this overarching infrastructure is as a succession of development from the military ARPANET to the commercial Internet to the “Smart Net” to the “Internet of Things” (IoT) to the “Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT).” Digital applications and devices are less and less seen as individual technological artifacts based on shared technological principles, and more and more as nodes within a rhizomatic digital mesh that spans the globe. Both of these characteristics underlie the designation of digital technologies as a “universal medium”1 (see Chap. 4 of this book). Urban public space can be defined as the sum of physical spaces of the city that are nominally accessible to all people. Historically, the role of public space in cities has been as the set of venues within which public life is practiced, as a foundational facet of any (democratic) society. That is to say, these are the spaces where encounters and sharing of common amenities and experiences with other members of society takes place, outside of the realms of private life and commercial exchange. As prosaic and uncomplicated as these definitions of public space and public life may seem, their application to concrete spaces and activities in cities is not straightforward, in particular because of the lack of congruence between the activities that take place in public spaces and the venues within which public life unfolds (that is, not all aspects of public life take place in public spaces and not everything that takes place in public spaces is part of public life). Spaces can be public de jure or de facto, meaning that there are spaces that are public by virtue of being declared and maintained as such by official decree, policy and design (traditionally, spaces such as streets, parks and squares), versus those that are public by virtue of “falling through the cracks” of systems of control and ownership and which are “made public” (derelict or indeterminate spaces that are appropriated for public activities). Also complicating the definition of public space is the fact that both de jure and de facto public spaces as defined above are often pervaded by commercial and private influences and activities, the dynamics of capital and the vying for rights and power among private interests and communities. Reciprocally, the practice of public life also penetrates nominally private and commercial spaces in the city, facilitated to no small extent by the application of digital technologies of communication and connectivity, in just one example of the ways in which the use of these technologies plays a role in reconfiguring public spatial practice. As will be discussed in the following chapters of this section, in bringing together public space discourse and practice with digital technology discourse and practice, the use of digital technologies in public life and public space adds further dimen1  Like communications technologies in general, digital technologies can be seen as both a technology and a medium. The former represents a view on these technologies as particular applications of scientific knowledge to achieve certain practical functionality, whereas the latter refers to their capacity to encode and transmit messages (a synonym for these technologies is Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)).

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sions of complication to the definitions and distinctions introduced above. Rather than being seen as problematic, this new facet of the complex relationship between public activities and public spaces shows that there is still much at stake in sustaining the discourse on the public dimension of cities, and of digital technologies in the urban environment. This book aspires to contribute to this (still very crucial and relevant) discourse by giving further articulation to these concepts through the lens of digital technologies as used in the urban public spatial realm, and providing contemporary examples to illustrate the contested, ambiguous and fluid nature of these terms and their interrelation.

Public Space, Public Media and the Public Sphere The term “public sphere” was defined by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas in his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, as the realm of institutionalized interaction in societies, in which citizens commune to deliberate together on issues of common concern (Habermas 1989 [1962]). While this may seem to be an exceptionally rarefied, limiting and idealized perspective on the public dimension that denigrates and excludes many of the activities of everyday life that transpire in public spaces and public life as understood colloquially, it does make an essential distinction between the concept of “the public” as a sphere of action and other spheres of influence, activity and interaction in society, in which lies the seed of the many more mundane functions of this realm of human life. The public sphere, in Habermas’ sense, is distinct from the spheres of the state and of the “official economy,” and the purpose of the public sphere is to mediate between the state and society, in holding the former accountable to the latter. The venues within which the public sphere is sited, as a “network for communicating information and points of view” (Habermas 1996), often coincides with what is conventionally understood as public space but could never be completely subsumed or contained by it. Increasingly, these networks are established and maintained via digital technologies. For Habermas, the formation of the public sphere relies on a variety of venues and channels, including the open public spaces of cities but also commercial establishments such as coffee houses as well as, importantly for the thesis of this book, communications media such as newspapers and magazines, as well as the fine arts, drama and literature (Randall 2008). This acknowledgement of the “multi-medial” constitution of the infrastructure that supports the formation of the public sphere is helpful in discussing the interrelationships and interdependencies between the spatial, social and technological / media aspects of publicness, that will be crucial in exploring the interplay between digital technologies, physical public spaces and the activities of people. This understanding of the public sphere as being developed upon such a multifarious scaffolding of public and private, free and commercial, spatial and textual, physical and virtual, formal and informal components and constructs, gives historical context and precedent to these interrelations. Both urban public space and the media of communication and

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cultural production have undergone dramatic transformations, both before and since the time of Habermas’ writing, as has their role in the conduct of public life, and it is at the nexus of these two realms—the spaces of public life and the technological channels of public interaction—in the early twenty-first century, that this book takes its aim. With the advent of the “social web,” in which technological advances and evolving practices have shifted the use of the Internet from distribution of data to social interaction, the World Wide Web has arguably evolved into a form that takes on characteristics of both a public medium and a public space, and indeed the idea of the Internet as an emerging public space has been gaining increasing attention (Leighton and Clark 2005; North 2010; Hampton et  al. 2010). There have been speculations as to whether this globe-spanning venue of technologically mediated social interaction might be seen as the successor to atrophying physical public space—a proposition that would have dire implications for the future viability, necessity, or even desirability, of urban public spaces. This raises the questions, which will be examined throughout this book, as to what, if anything, is the unique and indispensable purpose of the material aspect of the public realm in cities, whether this purpose is still relevant in twenty-first century urban society, and whether emerging digitally mediated public venues might not be able to fulfil these function as well as, or even better than, venues of materially collocated public life.

Digital Technologies and the “Literature of Loss” Public space has been termed “not a concrete reality but a tenuous condition” (Miller 2007), and this tenuous condition has been seen as existing in a state of existential crisis. In many cases, the purported qualities of nominally “public” spaces—openness, freedom, equality and plurality, public ownership and supportive of democratic life—are at times not at all fulfilled by the urban spaces to which the moniker “public” is attached. The rhetorical creation of public space as a conceptual category in both scholarly and popular literature is closely linked, historically, to declarations of its demise. That is, much of the writing on the public realm in the past century has been characterized as a “literature of loss” (Brill 1989), yearning for an imagined ideal public space that had supposedly existed at some point in the past but has been eradicated in (and purportedly by) modern society, but that probably never actually existed in the idealized form in which it is often presented. At least since Jane Jacobs’ declaration of the Death… of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961), there has been an ongoing lament regarding the perceived atrophy of public space, associated in part with causal factors including the shrinking role of governments and the welfare state in market liberalism, paralleled by an increase in private (commercial) and in some cases non-profit entities, taking over increasingly large sectors of human activity (Banerjee 2001: 9). Amenities formerly considered public goods, the provision of which was considered the duty of the state, have been to an increasing extent commercialized and

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privatized. Local governments become increasingly entrepreneurial, and “public” experiences are offered as extra benefits at a price rather than as birthrights. These are manifestations of what Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958]) referred to as the “depoliticization” of public space, in which the political function of public space drains away, to be replaced by the commercial. Exacerbated power distances and the rise of corporate power, as well as the introduction of digital technologies into cities, have all played roles in this purported de-politicization. A more recent sub-narrative has taken its place alongside this “literature of loss” of public space by commercialization and depoliticization. This stream of thought imputes digital technologies in the perceived draining-away of public life from public spaces by virtue of their providing alternative venues and channels of interaction, as well as in contributing to the commercialization and concomitant de-­politicization of public space in various ways. This phenomenon can be observed as public or semi-public “third spaces” (Oldenburg 1989) in which people have traditionally come together outside of the realms of work and home are to a certain degree sapped of their public nature by the insertion of digital technologies through which people who are bodily in these spaces withdraw their attention into virtual or remote places, as seen for instance in cafes full of people whose attentions are absorbed by their smartphones and laptop computers instead of interacting with each other (De Waal 2007).

A Space of Encounters The history of cities has always been one of territorial division between classes, clans, socio-economic and ethnic groups (Paulouro Neves 2012). While it could be claimed that public spaces are the spaces in which these different segments would be expected to come into contact with one another, Malcolm Miles has written that the history of public spaces is the history of a lack of such places (Miles 1997), as the open spaces of cities in past societies tended to exclude most of the population from visibility or access to “public” amenities. Both Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, foundational thinkers in the public space discourse, remark that the classic understanding of public space presumes participation first and foremost by white, male, educated and privileged subsets of society, be it in the ancient Greek polis (Arendt 1998 [1958]) or the exclusive “reading public” that emerged in the cafes and libraries of Europe in the eighteenth century as the supposed cradle of the public realm (Habermas 1989 [1962]). More recent understandings tend to strive for a more inclusive concept of the public realm. As American critical theorist Nancy Fraser (1990: 114) tells it, the idealized bourgeois public sphere lauded by Habermas, if it can ever be said to have existed at all, is being eroded as other societal groups have (rightly) gained increasing access to the public sphere. Fraser postulates that the role of the public realm as an intermediary between the state and society has been superseded by the competition and class struggle between the erstwhile dominant bourgeois public and the

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myriad other societal groups staking claims in the public realm. Each of these so-­ called “subaltern” publics embodies its own ambitions, designs and discourses on and in the public sphere. Thus, rather than speaking of “a” or “the” public, Fraser claims that we must conceive of many concurrent “publics,” and that inquiry into the public sphere must be concerned with “inter-public relations.” With the evolution of thought on public space, it is now generally accepted that heterogeneity is a necessary and definitive characteristic of the public realm. Already a century ago, the philosopher John Dewey (1916) pointed out that society is both singular, in that it is by definition that which draws us all together, and pluralistic, in that it must be equally accessible to all segments of society while allowing them to maintain the differences that distinguish them from one another, and suggested that democratic societies should not strive for homogeneity but rather for a state of “social endosmosis,” in which different distinct components rely on one another. Dewey claimed that “full interaction” between the different subgroups that constitute a society is essential for the maintenance of a healthy democracy, pointing out that “isolation makes for rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and selfish ideals within the group” (Dewey 1916: 99). However, the granting of equal access and rights to public space to all publics is a potentially frightening prospect for many, and one that, it could be argued, has never really been achieved. As a consequence, “subaltern counterpublics” (Fraser 1990) have tended to operate in alternative discursive spaces in society. While such metaphorical discursive spaces must not be conflated with literal physical spaces, the quest for venues within which these alternative discourses can be nurtured can lead to the appropriation of areas that are not the official and designed / designated public spaces of the city, or the exploitation of loopholes in the material and control structures to find footholds in the official public spaces of the city. The Internet has also provided a new dimension of potential venues for sustaining alternative communities and discourses that largely evades the controls and conventions of physical spaces. The uses of the Internet and other artifacts and applications of digital technologies have evolved from data storage and processing to connectivity and social interaction. Digital communications networks, web-based social platforms, massively multi-player online and mobile games and other applications have brought new dimensions and modes to the ways in which people can meet and interact in physical public space, transcending separations in space, time and social class that have delineated the landscape of human geography and delimited the possibilities of public life, and enticing people to into places and interactions in public space into which they may not otherwise have ventured, as when location-based games overlay other geographies of meaning and functionality onto public spaces. At the same time, however, the ways in which these technologies are actually used by individuals, and the directions in which actual applications have been developed, can tend to reinforce one’s proclivity for social interaction with a narrow range of people, ideas and experiences, and to efficiently and imperceptibly filter out others. This is a manifestation of the familiar purported “echo chamber” effect of digital social platforms (Edwards 2013; Grömping 2014; Quattrociocchi et al. 2016), which plays counter to (and in part may be seen as a reaction to) the unprecedented potential for contact

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with heterogeneous other ideas and people brought by the selfsame technologies, even as recent writers question the supposed connection between social media and echo chambers, pointing out that these are the same media platforms through which people are likely to seek and gain access to alternative perspectives. Recalling Habermas’ insight that both public space and public media contribute to the sustaining of the public sphere, a simplified way of distinguishing between the two would be to see public space in terms of physical venues of human interface and interaction and public media as technological channels for dissemination of ideas. While this facile distinction becomes muddied as soon as it is subjected to critical interrogation, at the level of the technical specifications, a certain distinction does hold between public space and public media. There are a number of ways to parse this distinction: physical space accommodates the collocated and co-temporal interaction of bodies, while public media facilitates the remote and diffuse interaction of minds; public space works centripetally to attract people to a common locus whereas public media works centrifugally to disseminate messages from a source to dispersed recipients. However, the public affordances of digital technologies reveal that such distinctions are neither fundamental nor eternal, but rather are symptomatic of the particular social and technological conditions of twentieth century society. The platforms of digital media are, in one sense, both gatherers of people and diffusers of messages. But in another sense, they perform neither the traditional role of public space in bringing people together bodily, nor the accustomed role of public media in spreading a shared feed of news and ideas. They are a new element in the mix that are in many ways supplanting public space and public media.

Diversity and Irreconcilability Views of the public realm as arising when and where people come together purposefully, in the processes that constitute and sustain a democratic society, are supplemented by perspectives that see public space as a realm for interactions that are fleeting, noncommittal and not necessarily goal-oriented, but that form a fabric of interconnectedness among diverse members of a society. This is the perspective that underlies the approach of the influential sociologist Erving Goffman (1963, 1971) and his followers in their studies of public behavior, which they saw in terms of encounters between strangers in particular types of places. For Jane Jacobs (1961), as well, public space was characterized by contacts that are neither intimate nor anonymous, but which form countless small connections without intention. The “jolts” of coming into contact with unfamiliar people are essential aspects of modern urban existence. These jolts, which do not constitute real engagement or communication, which can be demeaning or even endangering as often as they are enriching, are moments in which people are kept aware of their existence in a shared, plural, contested world. For Simmel (1975 [1903]), the essence of urbanity is to live among strangers who never become acquaintances: to live, essentially, in

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a crowd. The crowd, for Walter Benjamin (2002), was a new type of actor that was manifest of modern metropolitan society (specifically, for him, in early twentiethcentury Paris). It is from the crowd that publics emerge, or alternatively, it is into the crowd that publics disappear. As urban existence moves from the metropolitan to the meta-politan, this dynamic takes on new dimensions that merit a re-evaluation. On the one hand, the retreat into digitally mediated communities and echo chambers can be seen in terms of a flight from these jarring contacts with others in favor of environments in which one has a high degree of control over the contacts one allows. On the other hand, it could be argued that the sheer geographical scale of the networks of communication and interaction to which one is exposed through digital communications and platforms, and the sheer quantity of those with whom one could potentially come into contact at any given time forces a re-­conception of the term “public.” There is certainly a tradition of equating the public dimension with a quest for commonality. For Habermas, the goal of communication is to reach a consensus upon which a common society can be based, presuming a grounding in a common understanding of value and rationality. This modernist dream of a global society based on the triumph of rationality is also reflected in Dewey’s (1916) lament that there were too many publics with too many perspectives, and his call for the “search for a great community” to unify all under one public, desiring a common perspective on a common good. Eley (1994) saw the public sphere as the structured setting in which interactions and negotiations take place, in pursuit of such common ground. However, while public spaces are the realm within which control is exercised over a public in the interest of normalization, and within which common ground may be sought, they are also the places in which people experiment with alternatives to sanctioned and inherited ways of behaving and submitting to control (Mela 2014). Increasing credence is being given to arguments that, far from being a place of settlement, or being marginalized and emptied of significance as some have claimed, public space in contemporary cities is precisely where the conflicts and contradictions of the time come to a head and are most apparent—an agonistic perspective on the public realm (Mouffe 2000). In alignment with this development and in distinction to Habermas, thinkers such as Fraser (1990) and Lyotard (1985) saw the communication and interaction through which the public realm is constituted as being characterized by conflict and competition as much as consensus-building. Fraser takes issue with the Habermasian characterization of public communication as striving towards commonality, arguing that the power to structure and influence the public sphere is not evenly distributed among various publics and that, therefore, public space as a realm of interaction is already pre-structured in ways that reify an uneven distribution of rights and agency and discursively “brackets out” differences so that they are perceived as irrelevant. For Fraser, though, subaltern counterpublics are incommensurable, “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate “counterdiscourses” to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs.” Fraser’s counterproposal to the goal of a unified public is that the multiple publics of society must be conceived as constituting multiple public

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realms, not required to conform to a predetermined structure. These multiple publics are prone to contradiction and conflict with one another, embodying differing languages and value systems. In Fraser’s (1990: 122) words, “public life in egalitarian, multicultural societies cannot consist exclusively in a single, comprehensive public sphere. That would be tantamount to filtering diverse rhetorical and stylistic norms through a single, overarching lens.” Negt and Kluge (1993), make a similar distinction, suggesting that the public sphere is multiple and decentralized, and that different public spheres always exist in a state of conflict and struggle with one another. The insertion of digital devices and applications into urban spatial practices lends a jarringly literal dimension to the different relationships to public space among multiple publics, in ways that test the definition of what constitutes a counterpublic. The group of people independently using the same wayfinding application to navigate the city may not constitute a counterpublic in the strict sense, but one could argue that devotees of multiplayer locative games such as Ingress—who subscribe to a shared alternative geography, value system, set of goals and rules for interaction with one another, all made present through augmented reality interfaces to which non-members of this group do not have access—raise the question of how the particular economies of shared virtualities enabled by digital technologies affects the way counterpublics are defined (in particular because examples such as this one seem to go against much of what has typically been understood as the qualities of counterpublics). In terms of functional provisions, aesthetics, semantics and mechanisms of social control, the design of public places has typically served the purpose of substantiating and legitimizing the dominant public’s claim to pride (and control) of place. Counterpublics, on the contrary, are explicitly not defined primarily by territorial boundaries and physical monuments and venues catering to their needs and reifying their values and vaunting their identities, but rather by the links that sustain them. Nor are they typically empowered to appropriate the spatial and material resources required to express and reify a territory through construction. They rely on mediated communications more than geographical circumscription for their coherence (Brighenti 2010: 18), and are therefore linked to networks more so than to places. Dominant publics have historically been able to see themselves reflected and accommodated in public space. Counterpublics have had far less public “legibility.” In this sense, to the extent that the constellations of human interrelations enabled by digital networks can be considered public, in terms of their relationship to physical territories and legible boundaries, these have more in common with counterpublics than the dominant publics in the image of which physical urban spaces are designed. Without by any means suggesting that the broader point made by Fraser and others can be reduced to or subsumed within digital technological systems, this perspective does certainly have implications in terms of understanding the application of digital technologies in the practice of public space. Firstly, each digital platform has the potential of constituting the connective tissue of a particular counterpublic. This is not to equate such platforms with counterpublics, but rather to point out that they

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can be demonstrated to fulfil certain supporting functions in the formation and public practice of countercultures in cities. The various chapters of this section will detail examples of the digital dimension of this dynamic, which takes many manifestations, including the use of online venues as alternative spaces of “gathering” and community formation that do not require a common physical space, as well as hybrid practices of using digital technologies to form networks of cohesion that enable counterpublics to turn public space to their own uses, despite a lack of provision for their needs and desires in physical public space design. Also included among these manifestations is the application of mobile apps to enable the superimposition of alternative “information environments” onto physical space, that enable different ways of perceiving, using and performing public spaces.

A New Chapter in the “Tragedy”? In elaborating upon this point of view, Hardt and Negri (2009) refer to the concept of the “commons,” drawing parallels to the Open Source Movement and its associated ethos, which is grounded in digital technologies through the open source software and hacker movements. The idea of the public realm as a pool of both tangible and intangible shared goods resonates with the concept of the commons, which has been given much attention in recent years (Harvey 2012). The commons is a general term that refers to the sum of all resources to which members of a society have (ostensibly) free and equal access. For Arendt, the “world as such” was the most fundamental common good and the most general case of public space. Hardt and Negri (2009) further specified that the commons consists of both the natural environment and its resources, and the knowledge, languages and networks that support social interaction. The built environment (of which urban public space is a subset) must be considered as part of the second of these categories, as must the totality of technological infrastructures (to which digital technologies belong). Thus, the two dimensions of the commons on whose intersection this book concentrates are both facets of the human-made commons, the artifacts of culture that are at the same time the resources that are drawn upon for the continual evolution of culture. The “tragedy of the commons” (Lloyd 1833; Hardin 1968) expresses the dilemma faced when individuals tend to prioritize their own perceived self-interest above the common good in the exploitation of shared resources, leading to depletion or degradation of those resources, to the long-term detriment of the society collectively and of each individual. The human-made constructs of public space and the Internet can be considered as aspects of the commons, each with tragic narratives of its own. An alternative version of a tragedy of public space emerges, as the very openness and inclusiveness of public space, in which its primary value lies, becomes perceived as a dimension of discomfort, inconvenience and even danger, rather than freedom and opportunity, leading to a retreat to the defensible spaces of the home or community,

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and an appropriation of technologies to embed the locus of interpersonal interaction into the private realm. Mirroring such tragedies of the commons, various, often contrapuntal versions of a “tragedy of the digital commons” have been proposed, identifying the detrimental consequences of self-interested human behavior in peer-to-peer networks on the one hand, and of the ascendancy of rampant artificial agents supplanting human engagement and agency on the other (Greco and Floridi 2004; Adar and Huberman 2000). While both of these are derivations of the original allegory, transposed to the digital realm, a more fundamental tragedy may be identified, specific to the digital commons. Unlike the physical commons of Lloyd’s allegory (in the story’s original version, a common pasture that dies out due to overgrazing), the resources on which digital networks rely are not depletable, and indeed in some sense they could be said to grow in value the more they are exploited. While the digital commons of the Internet is also degraded by selfish exploitation (causing congestion by profligate accessing of web content) and careless pollution (such as the slew of “junk” or redundant content that crowds both server space and screen space), the so-called “infosphere” is not a “bounded environment” from which resources are taken but, quite the inverse, an environment that, by its nature, expands with every new resource created on it. It is, in part, in this very unboundedness that this version of the tragedy of the digital commons lies, for this is a commons without intrinsic experience of commonality. The physical commons of public space are of course embedded within the greater commons of the material world, and although we may have no way to directly grasp the shared nature of the planet as a whole, our experience of sharing public space with others gives us phenomenological access to an experience of collective ownership (and, potentially, stewardship) of a shared, bounded resource. The use of digital networks bears no equivalent experience of commonality or boundedness. The medium of the network is never experienced: only our interactions within platforms built upon the medium. As will be discussed in more detail in Chap. 4, this is linked closely with the lack of intrinsic spatiality in the experience of using such networks, and the very fundamental differences between physical space and digital networks as media for human interface and interaction. The moment of intersection of these two tragic narratives is of particular interest for the thesis of this book.

Re-commoning Notwithstanding the likely incommensurability of the multiple publics that constitute the public realm, public life is not just grudging co-existence. It is a sharing (and indeed, a co-construction) of something common. This “shared something” is what Arendt (1998 [1958]) referred to as the “world as such.” This shared world can be conceived as having material/spatial aspects (territories, artifacts, infrastructures) as well as virtual/informational aspects (knowledge, values, rights), and practices of

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“sharing” take different forms relative to these two aspects. The tangible/geographical world is a limited and delimited pool of resources,2 and the dominant streams of social and political thought that have formed the modern world can be distinguished in terms of their different propositions as to how these resources should be shared and apportioned. In distinction to the physical components of the “world as such,” the virtual aspects of the shared world would appear to have no such intrinsic exhaustibility. Indeed, since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and, with it, the revolutionizing of mass media (McLuhan 1962), the hallmark of information and communication technologies (the physical media that serve as repositories and distribution networks for the virtual common goods of ideas, s­ tories and data) has been the increasing ease of multiplication and diffusion of new content with decreasing use of physical resources and labor to produce and disseminate this content. As the “content” of media becomes more and more on the order of social interactions and co-produced artifacts, such that the distinction between public space and public media becomes blurred, the possibility for seemingly unlimited creation of new social venues becomes increasingly commonplace. The Internet, as the most pervasive digital artifact, which has inserted itself in a seemingly inextricable fashion into the communications, culture and economies that underlie contemporary society, has entered into the discourse of the commons in recent years, under the guise of the “digital commons” (Morell 2014). The digital commons compares and relates to the physical and virtual components of the “world as such” in complex ways. Like the physical commons broadly, and public space more specifically, the Internet and digital communications networks are material constructs, composed of vast and constantly proliferating numbers of servers, conduits, relays, terminals and other devices. Unlike physical public space, much more of this material infrastructure is privately owned,3 such that access to the amenities and functionality of the digital commons tends to be purchased rather than guaranteed as a societal right. In one sense, this can be seen to contrast with the supposed free and equal access ideally afforded to physical public space in principle, but in practice, bodily access of actual people to physical public spaces is also dependent on their access to resources such as transportation and leisure time, as well as being influenced by the legal and design parameters of public spaces that exclude particular activities and modes of use of public space that would be meaningful and useful for particular segments of society. So, while distinctions between the physical and the digital commons are meaningful, they are far from simple and one should resist the temptation to reduce them to simplistic dualisms. Just as the human-made world of urban public space and the infrastructure of the Internet are both created upon the substrate of, and using materials extracted from, the commons of Nature (just as they re-enter the physical commons as components 2  The acknowledgement of the limited nature of the material and geographical resources of the world is a hallmark of the modern era, with the near totality of the urbanization and political subdivision of the planet, conflicts over essential resources and the looming specter of depletion of the materials on which contemporary economies and technologies rely. 3  Notwithstanding the existence of privately-owned public spaces of various types.

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of the man-made/natural hybrid of the Anthropocene), the commons of ideas and knowledge, and the content of the Web is constructed upon, and using materials extracted from, the commons of Culture (and becomes enmeshed as constitutive elements of the cultural commons). It is in urbanized areas that the dominance of the cultural aspect over the natural becomes most prevalent. This is a state that began as a localized condition within the physical boundaries of cities, but has now become globalized such that the planetary-scale Nature of the world ecosystem and the planetary-­scale Culture of global society now exist in a state of mutual embeddedness.

Public Spaces as Spaces of Rehearsal for Urban Futures An important point in distinguishing public space as a spatial category is the particular ways in which the actions that “take place” in public space have implications beyond that particular public space, and beyond public space as a spatial realm. These actions and interactions are rehearsals, instantiations and demonstrations of ways of living together in society, and are enacted in a realm in which all have a stake and a presence. Public space is, in a sense, the staging ground for practices that address issues that matter at a much more profound level and larger scale, that forces visceral involvement with bodily others and with place, and not abstracted interaction. Digital venues have also been found to serve as rehearsal spaces of sorts for ways of behaving and interacting in society, which have eventually had effects on public behavior. In some cases, the activities in these venues serve to reaffirm and enforce established norms of (dominant) public behavior. In other cases, they offer safe haven for identity formation of counterpublics, and in other cases they have served as refuges in which the norms and rules of the official public realm are questioned and alternative ways of being together are rehearsed, articulated and fortified, eventually spilling-out in revolutionary action in the physical realm. Examples of this include the use of online forums in China to circumvent the disdain for public displays of affection and public discourse around sexuality in Chinese society, which fueled China’s sexual revolution (People’s Daily 2003), and the spread of information and social organization via twitter that was instrumental in fomenting and enabling the public demonstrations, occupations and other acts of civil disobedience of the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Equally, though, digital platforms played a large role is sustaining the fringe communities and false narratives that fomented the storming of the US Capitol building by radicals seeking to block certification of the Presidential election results in January, 2021. Of course, digital technologies can be, and are being, appropriated for purposes of establishing structures and exercising control, just as they are used as open playgrounds of experimentation and social negotiation. In this sense, Mela (2014) sees two dynamics at play in contemporary public space. On the one hand, a “strategy of domestication” seeks to commodify and privatize public space while on the other hand a set of practices counter to this strategy seek to define an “alternative project

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of use.” Because of this fundamental role in the continuing evolution of ways of co-­ existing in urban environments, public space needs to be understood as much more than an amenity. The public dimension, in its spatial and societal manifestations, has played an essential role in the formation and sustainment of urban society, as a valued facet of urban life. If public life has come to be perceived as a duty, an option, a choice or a diversion, and public space merely as an interstice between private and commercial enclaves, the public dimension has already been lost. As will be detailed in the four chapters that follow, the dynamics of negotiations between regimes of control and impulses towards freedom and experimentation, the entanglement of the spatial commons and the digital commons, changes in the notions of what constitutes membership in a public or counterpublic, and evolving relationships between the various “others” with whom public space is shared and constituted, are all revealed in numerous ways in different actors’ appropriation of digital technologies in the formation of public spaces and the conducting of public life in cities.

References Adar A, Huberman BA (2000) Free riding on Gnutella. In: First Monday 5(10). http://rstmonday. org/issues/issue5_10/adar/index.html. Accessed 17 Apr 2018 Andrews I (2013) Post-digital aesthetics and the return to modernism. In: Cleland K, Fisher L, Harley R (eds) Proceedings of the 19th international symposium on electronic art, ISEA2013, Sydney Arendt H (1998 [1958]). The human condition (2nd ed). University of Chicago Press, Chicago Banerjee T (2001) The future of public space: beyond invented streets and reinvented places. J Am Plan Assoc 67(1):9–24 Benjamin W (2002) The arcades project (trans: Eiland H, McLaughlin K). Belknap Press, New York Brighenti AM (2010) Visibility in social theory and social research. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Brill M (1989) Transformation, nostalgia, and illusion in public life and public place. In: Altman I, Zube EH (eds) Public places and new spaces. Plenum, New York Cascone K (2000) The aesthetics of failure: ‘post-digital’ tendencies in contemporary computer music. Comput Music J 24(4):12–18 De Waal M (2007) No more bowling alone? Locative media and urban culture. Paper presented at locative media summer conference, Museum of Contemporary Art, Siegen, 3–5 September, 2007. http://www.martindewaal.nl. Accessed 18 May 2019 Dewey J (1916) Democracy and education: an introduction to the philosophy of education. Macmillan, New York Edwards A (2013) (How) do participants in online discussion forums create ‘echo chambers’?: the inclusion and exclusion of dissenting voices in an online forum about climate change. J Argumen Context 2(1):127–150 Eley G (1994) Nations, publics, and political cultures: placing Habermas in the nineteenth century. In: Dirks NB, Eley G, Ortner SB (eds) Culture/power/history: a reader in contemporary social theory. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 297–335 Fraser N (1990) Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text 25(26):56–80

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Goffman E (1963) Behavior in public places: notes on the social organization of gatherings. Free Press, New York Goffman E (1971) Relations in public: microstudies of the public order. Basic Books, New York Greco GM, Floridi L (2004) The tragedy of the digital commons. Ethics Inf Technol 6(2):73–81 Grömping M (2014) ‘Echo chambers’ partisan Facebook groups during the 2014 Thai election. Asia Pacific Media Educator 24(1):39–59 Habermas J (1989 [1962]) The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Polity, Cambridge Habermas J (1996) Between fact and norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. MIT Press, Cambridge Hampton KN, Livio O, Goulet LS (2010) The social life of wireless urban spaces: internet use, social networks, and the public realm. J Commun 60:701–722 Hardin G (1968) The tragedy of the commons. Science 162(3859):1243–1248 Hardt M, Negri A (2009) Commonwealth. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Harvey D (2012) Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution. VERSO, London Jacobs J (1961) The death and life of great American cities. Random House, New York Leighton T, Clark D (2005) Securing the internet as public space. Bull Am Acad Arts Sci 58(2): 18–19 Lloyd WF (1833) Two lectures on the checks to population. Oxford University Press, Oxford Lyotard JF (1985) The postmodern condition. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis McLuhan M (1962) The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man. University of Toronto Press, Toronto Mela A (2014) Urban public space between fragmentation control and conflict. City Territory Architect 1: 15 Miles M (1997) Art, space and the city: public art and urban futures. Routledge, New York Miller KF (2007) Designs on the public: the private lives of New York’s public spaces. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Morell MF (2014) Governance of online creation communities for the building of digital commons: viewed through the framework of the institutional analysis and development. In: Frischmann B, Madison MJ, Strandburg KJ (eds) Governing knowledge commons. Oxford University Press, Oxford Mouffe C (2000) The democratic paradox. Verso, New York Negt O, Kluge A (1993) The public sphere and experience: toward an analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public spheres. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis North M (2010) A decade later: the internet as public space. ACM Sigcas Comp Soc 40:22–27 Oldenburg R (1989) The great good place: cafes, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day. Paragon House, New York Paulouro Neves JPL (2012) The eradication of public space: dissolving liminal states. In: Pinto da Silva M (ed) EURAU12 Porto—Espaço Público e Cidade Contemporânea: Actas do 6° European symposium on research in architecture and urban design. FAUP, Porto People’s Daily (2003) China undergoing sexual revolution. http://english.people.com.cn/200306/ 20/eng20030620_118623.shtml. Accessed 8 June 2018 Quattrociocchi W, Scala A, Sunstein CR (2016) Echo chambers on facebook. https://doi.org/10. 2139/ssrn.2795110. Accessed 5 Oct 2019 Randall D (2008) Ethos, poetics, and the literary public sphere. Mod Lang Q 69(2):221–243 Simmel G (1975 [1903]) The metropolis and mental life. In: Wolff KH (ed) The sociology of Georg Simmel. Free Press, New York

Chapter 3

From the Individual to the Public

Abstract  Digital technologies facilitate the formation of communities, which are distinct from the broader, more inclusive concept of the public. They are enmeshed in pronounced ways in the emergence of a “society of individuals” and a retreat from public space (and into virtual pseudo-spaces) that problematizes traditional notions of the constitution of publics and the pursuit of public life. These technologies are also implicated in the problematization of the supposed binary distinction between public and private spaces and practices. However, they also are being used in forging new modes of public interactions and relationships with different impacts on the public space of the city. Keywords  Community · Society of individuals · Echo chamber · Public and private · Digital forums

Communities and Publics The idea that digital technologies can play a role in the constitution of a public realm is grounded to a substantial degree in the fact that one of the most prominent uses to which these technologies are put is to enable communication and interaction between people. Digital technologies, among their many applications, connect. The Internet and mobile networks are media through which many modalities of human interaction can be conducted. Web platforms draw together “digital communities” of people defined by a common interest or goal, and provide functionality that supports the pursuit of these interests and goals. In some cases, interactions via web platforms are carried out as a prelude to meetings in physical space, such as apps for finding partners for workouts, hikes, games or romantic encounters, while in other cases people who interact on these platforms may never physically meet, as in platforms supporting peer-to-peer buying and selling of goods or services, exchange of © The Author(s) 2021 T. Jachna, Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square, The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_3

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information or communal authorship of artifacts like citizen maps or open-source software. An essential point is defining the relationship between such communities and the broader concept of the public. Communities have played an essential role in the history of human societies, as mediators between the individual and society at large. An essential distinction between communities and the public is that communities are defined by rules for inclusion and exclusion and a definition of boundaries, whereas the public realm is constituted by the pursuit of principles and behaviors that enable heterogenous individuals and groups to co-exist. The public realm, in the contemporary understanding to which this book subscribes, is characterized by the necessity of accepting and sustaining the co-presence of incommensurable differences. The purported “emptying” of the public realm has been blamed on the retreat of individuals into communities, with their safety and low potential for conflict, contradiction or confrontation (Sennett 1976), and in the present age many of these communities are formed and sustained to varying degrees by networks and platforms enabled by digital technologies. Digital platforms or networks allow people to form communities based on shared appetites, interests or opinions, although clearly the existence of communities of affinity as distinct from publics of heterogeneity and even incommensurability certainly predates digital social platforms. Communities, according to the Polish philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000), are actually on the rise in the contemporary world, as people seek stability in ways that allow them to articulate and announce their own identity, as well as providing an “anchor” in disjointed, “liquid” society. Communities can be comforting and identity-affirming, whereas publics can be frightening and identity-­ challenging, all the more so in the contemporary “risk society” (Beck 1992; Giddens 2014), in which one feels increasingly exposed to uncertainties, and structures one’s behavior accordingly. One is all the more exposed if one takes-into-account the globe-spanning connectivity of digital networks (see Chap. 6 of this volume). If one’s public is defined as the group of people with whom one shares spaces and resources, who are within the range of one’s communication reach, then, with the “death of time and distance” (Cairncross 1997; Mishra and Hall 2007) supposedly heralded by digital networks, where does one draw the social and geographical boundaries of the public within which one is embedded, short of encompassing the whole planet and its population? Communities are “projects rather than realities,” that come “after, rather than before the individual choice” (Bauman 2000: 169). That is, communities are intentionally maintained by their members, and membership is restrictive and in many cases elective. Even communities whose membership is to a certain degree not a matter of personal choice, such as those formed in the neighborhood into which one is born, are characterized by affinity (defined by location, and typically also socio-­ economic stratum), having boundaries and a clear “inside” and “outside,” distinguishing between members and non-members. Membership in communities can engender the phenomenon of “cultural cognition,” defined as the tendency to define one’s opinions on complex or contentious issues to align with the values and beliefs of a community with which one identifies (Kahan et al. 2010), rather than by appeal-

A “Society of Individuals” and the Retreat of/from Public Space…

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ing to rational logic or shared societal values. This fuels the phenomenon of so-­ called “cultural tribalism” (Chua 2018). We also see a plethora of instances of people coming together in ways that are rather more on the order of loose common interest groups rather than communities as such: “cloakroom communities,” as Bauman (2000) calls them, the members of which share an experience of a spectacle and nothing else, not just differing from real communities but working counter to their formation. The loosening of relations implicit in the slackening of community ties can be perceived as liberating, but it also tends to absolve the individual from long-term or substantive connection and responsibility to others. There is interaction but no commitment (Wilson 2000). The so-called “communities,” “friends” and “followers” that one gathers in online social platforms provide an apt example of this phenomenon, in which the affordances of digital technologies enable a distancing and abstraction of these relationships, and an ease of “connecting” that trivializes connectivity, even as it enables it. What Heidegger (2008 [1927]) refers to as the sense of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) into the world is encountered more keenly in the public realm—in which one is confronted with otherness and uncertainty—than in communities, which seek to hold otherness and uncertainty in check. Communities tend to be formed through the exercise of varying degrees of choice, unlike heterogeneous publics defined by a shared world of physical places and things that impels us to recognize the need to interact and negotiate terms of living together (Barney 2003). In social philosopher and systems scientist Niklas Luhman’s (Luhmann 1995) terms, a community is a system, defined by a boundary that separates its inside from its outside, the inside being simpler and more comprehensible and the outside more complex and chaotic (as seen from the vantage of those inside the community, of course). A system maintains its coherence through “reduction of complexity,” only admitting a limited amount of information from its context to the inside (see the discussion of the “echo chamber” effect of digital media platforms, later in this chapter). This is not to claim that the public dimension is somehow natural while communities are artificial. While the artificiality of the communities that form through the use of digital networks and social platforms may be patently clear, based as they are in human-made technological constructs, also in the pre-digital era, Hannah Arendt already saw all public life as a fundamentally artificial, human-made cultural achievement that creates a common ground for the enactment of political, as distinct from communal, relationships—relationships based not on intimacy and affinity but on a commitment to sustaining a higher order of commonality based on the need to share the world despite the diversity and even incommensurability of the subcultures, values and world views of individuals or communities, and to cooperate to sustain this shared world (Arendt 1998 [1958]; d’Entreves 2016). This necessitates civility, “the activity which protects people from each other and yet allows them to enjoy each other’s company” (Bauman 2000: 95): a trait that notoriously dissolves in many web-based forums of interaction, due to the anonymity, distance and abstraction that they bring to interpersonal communication.

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 “Society of Individuals” and the Retreat of/from Public A Space… For many, shared public space (or, more precisely, the sharing of space with (other) publics) has lost much of its attraction. In many instances, the (physical) world, in and of itself, has a substantially diminished power to draw people together. A primary barrier to maintaining public spaces is a supposedly diminishing interest in public life, due to many factors including security fears, the seduction of the “echo chambers” enabled by digital technologies, unwillingness to deal with messy plurality, and the shift towards an “experience”-centered, consumerist stance towards urban citizenship (Arendt 1998 [1958]). Participation in the common world of things and places, that at the same time separates people and brings them together, comes to be seen as discretionary rather than necessary or even desirable, and more often associated with danger, inconvenience and compromise compared with the home environment and digital channels of de-spatialized, de-materialized contact. It is therefore neither fair nor helpful to present the demise of public space solely in terms of a dereliction of responsibility by governmental bodies or commodification by economic interests. This raises the question of what, if anything, public space is for in contemporary society, both from the point of view of the individual (why would I need it?) and the point of view of society. When Jane Jacobs (1961) wrote of the death of public space in (American) cities in the mid twentieth century, large segments of urban populations were moving to suburbs and people were increasingly seeking entertainment in the privacy of the home through television, rather than outside of their own private sphere, among and with other people beyond their immediate family. In some ways, digital technologies have contributed to the exacerbation of this inertia, in facilitating the delivery of an ever-accruing number of channels of entertainment and interpersonal communication to the home. This “pull” factor tempting people away from public space is augmented by the “push” factor of increasing apprehension of the “outside world.” The resulting phenomenon of “capsularization” (de Cauter 2004) has shown a marked increase, apocryphally since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But fear of the complexity, uncontrollability and unpredictability of public spaces has been a factor contributing to this phenomenon since at least the time of Jacobs’ writing (Zukin 1995). Bauman (2000: 94) saw a shift, since the “watershed in the institutionalization of urban fear” (Zukin 1995) in the 1960s and 1970s, towards urban communities defined more by their tightly-guarded borders than by any internal coherence. These neighborhoods are often at the same time physical enclaves and “digital enclaves,” in that infrastructures of digital technology contribute to spatial enclaving by enabling the creation of zones in cities with radically higher connectivity and bandwidth than their surroundings, that may thus have stronger and more developed digital connections with other such enclaves elsewhere in the world than they do

… And into Digital Forums

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with their physically surrounding areas (Graham and Marvin 1996). The “club-like municipalities” (Banerjee 2001) of gated urban communities that are the urban morphological expression of cultural tribalism are another face of the same phenomenon as Graham and Marvin’s digital enclaves. The formation of such enclaves is motivated in part by individuals’ disinterest in, and even fear of, the greater urban public context (a context that is transformed from a fabric within which the enclave neighborhood is enmeshed to an “outside world” of an increasingly complex, unpredictable, heterogenous public realm, the frightening complexity and unpredictability of which enclaving seeks to mitigate). With their privileged digital connectivity, surveilled streets and fortified perimeters, these urban zones typically do not constitute communities brought together by affinity of purpose or identity, but rather by shared fears. They have more in common with well-wired shelters that hold the outside public realm at bay than they do with “neighborhoods” in the traditional sense. In physical urban space this manifests itself in gated communities and ­militarized suburban police forces. Enclaving is a driver and symptom of the antipublic impulse. Thus, in allowing differing degrees of access and the creation of enclaves, digital technologies contribute to the fragmentation of cities, and of publics (Graham and Marvin 1996: 336). For the pioneering urban thinker, Georg Simmel (1975 [1903]), the individual and the city existed in an adversarial relationship, and urban life was characterized by the need of the individual to set up defensive mechanisms against being absorbed into the anonymous collectivity of the city. In Simmel’s view, existing in a hyperdense, anonymous and heterogeneous urban environment requires a guarded stance, in order to sustain one’s own identity. Communities could be seen as intermediaries, as mediators, that serve as buffers in this struggle. Digital technologies throw a new light on Simmel’s point. As Paulouro Neves (2012) has argued, the ease and pervasiveness of communication brought by digital technologies, coupled with modernism’s valorization of connectedness, contact and transparency that seems to be served by these technologies, can result in an overload of perceived possibilities and a feeling of exposure that can be met with a retreat into defensible, clearly delineated enclaves that give one something tangible and bounded with which to identify, of which to be a part, identifying an intellectual tradition in urbanism declaring the need to establish boundaries to enable social integration. Such “enclaving” has both geographical and sociological facets, and is one way of consolidating a degree of control over a community and its territory that cannot be exercised over society or the city as a whole. This implies both the withdrawal in space, into spatially delineated and socially monocultural clusters, and the withdrawal from space, into modes of interacting with others that do not require spatial gathering, and in which one’s attention may tend to be distracted from the space within which one is physically located. Both of these modes of withdrawal can be facilitated by digital technologies, through enabling enclaving and through the provision of alternative, typically web-based, venues of non-collocated social interaction.

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… And into Digital Forums Bearing in mind that the public realm is not reducible to public space nor vice versa, withdrawal from public space into the home has never meant a complete withdrawal from social interaction, but rather a retreat into a physical realm where one has a high degree of control over social contact by regulating who, and what, is let in or kept out. And, throughout the twentieth century, beginning with the telephone1 and culminating with the Internet-connected personal computer, the home increasingly became a locus from which one could access channels of communication that transgressed the limitations of physical meeting-up. However, with the rise of personal portable devices, mobile telephony and 3G technology in the closing decade of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, these private technologies became detached from locational fixity such that their context of use now spans private and public spatial realms, introducing new patterns of interference between these two realms. Some of the ways in which the affordances of digital technologies (see Chap. 7) are actually being applied tend to entice people towards more isolation and fragmentation, distracting them from a physical public realm that in contrast may seem inconvenient, unresponsive to their needs, not representative of their identity, and even dangerous and intimidating. Ironically, as a part of one’s attention retreats from physical public space, the body becomes more vulnerable. Oblivious mobile phone users are prone to wander into traffic. Players of location-based games, which have been lauded by some as drawing people back out into public space and interaction with co-present others, have fallen victim to crimes as their attention is attuned to virtual inhabitants and objects in the spaces of the city, while physical dangers and opportunities retreat to the periphery of their awareness (Keogh 2016). Digital venues are doubly enticing as venues of interpersonal interaction, in that they remove the friction of distance as well as alleviating the nuisance of the “noise” of unwanted encounters and experiences that do not appeal to one’s established preferences. We are convinced to “turn away from our own world” (Dewey 1997: 271), willingly abandoning it to regimes of surveillance and governance that reduce the frictions and dangers posed by the physical world to our bodies, and to commercial enterprises vying for our attention. As our intellects and interactions are more and more abstracted into digital realms, physical space becomes the space of bodily logistics, crowd control, the economy of attention and a spectacle for the uncritical absorption of the senses. Our desire for agency is to a growing degree turned away from the physical space that we bodily occupy and into virtual or remote places. If the public sphere is seen as the arena in which private individuals emerge into a common space to engage one another on issues of “public interest,” then the trend of retreating from a common space to assemble an echo chamber of issues of “personal interest,” through which one engages the world, could be seen as retrograde, in terms of the formation of a public sphere.  And, it could be argued, the radio and television.

1

Hyperindividuation and the Echo Chamber

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For the types of “communities through personalization and simulation” that form in digitally mediated networks (Holmes 1997), the Internet becomes “yet another place to hide while still enjoying social contact” (Barney 2003: 112). The digital sphere is experienced and used by many people in a way that is more private than public, because activities conducted through digital networks tend to be primarily economic, rather than political, in nature, characterized by work and consumption rather than “reasoned speech and practical action in pursuit of justice” (Barney 2003: 110). Communities that do not manifest themselves vis-à-vis other communities in a shared space do not become publics. A multitude of communities, in and of itself, does not “add up” to a public sphere, in the absence of a common realm within which these communities emerge as “publics,” interact with one another, and upon which they all rely. This can be seen as contributing to “cultural tribalism,” and it could be said that communities in contemporary societies function more as ­metaphorical tribes than as publics, emphasizing and exacerbating differences from other tribes and encountering them in an adversarial fashion (although this metaphor appeals to a narrow, stereotyped misrepresentation of the nature of tribes in their original sense (Cooper 2018)). The homophily principle, that “similarity breeds connection” (McPherson et al. 2001), can lead to homogenization of one’s social networks. Thus, one socially detrimental characteristic with which communities, and in particular online communities, have been imputed is their function as “echo chambers” (Boyd and Ellison 2007; Sunstein 2002) that perpetuate and reinforce a set of beliefs and world views and the exclusion or suppression of any influences or perspectives that might challenge or contradict these coherences.

Hyperindividuation and the Echo Chamber In a sense, public space has been a space for the revealing of oneself to society, the antithesis of a place of secrets. On its face, to “make public” can be associated with removing secrecy. Digitally enabled hacker movements, as exemplified by the Wikileaks phenomenon, use technological means to infiltrate the digital fortresses of centers of power, chipping away at the asymmetrical power relationship in which secrecy (and access to the secrets of its subjects) is the prerogative of the State (and also corporations), as the technologies of secretive observation become equally accessible to the public as to the government (Innerarity 2016: 85). People also liberate themselves from the control of the state with the formation of global links and their own networks of association, information gathering and dissemination. However, this liberation from the state is bound up with increasing reliance upon transnational non-state entities, in the form of communications concerns and social platforms, to provide the infrastructure of connectivity. As noted above, some central aspects of civic life and engagement have migrated from public space to domestic space (McQuire 2006). More than two decades ago, as of this writing, Graham and Marvin wrote of digital technologies as being used

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in ways that were making the consumption of culture “increasingly home-based” (Graham and Marvin 1996: 37), because people were tending to choose the convenience of online alternatives for shopping and entertainment over their traditional “brick-and-mortar” versions. The “media event” becomes a private thing (Dayan and Katz 1992), rather than a shared experience that brings people together. With the embedding of these technologies into the home, some of the vulnerabilities of the public realm also enter into the private sphere, as when private routers can be accessed via the Internet to spy on home-based Internet use, intercept transmissions and pilfer data. However, with the miniaturization and personalization of digital devices and the ubiquity of web access through 3G technology and wi-fi hotspots, these privatized devices and practices wandered back out into public space, doubly enfolding the ostensibly public into the private, which is then enfolded back into the public realm. Progressive miniaturization, commodification and personalization of digital devices has facilitated the spatial compression of the public realm to the neighborhood, then the home, then the bodies of individuals, who then venture out into public space with these devices in their bags and pockets, and with changed perceptions of the public realm as something delivered on-demand and personalized. Many aspects of the mediasphere are being developed or appropriated in ways that use these erstwhile channels of public dissemination as exhibitionist platforms opening up public realms for private consumption, as exemplified by phenomena such as “reality”based videos and other web content, and diffusing the details of one’s private life on social platforms. The “echo chambers” facilitated by online social networking sites (Boyd and Ellison 2007; Hosanagar 2016) not only allow one to compose and filter the connections with which one wants to be confronted, but also more insidiously with the application of algorithms that “learn” from a user’s past choices and to present them with options and suggestions based on these preferences and habits, essentially incite a positive feedback loop that affirms and amplifies these habits and social predilections, at the expense of awareness of the nuances of other perspectives or opinions than one’s own. This can exacerbate a polarization of opinions and world views to the extent that the likelihood of engaging with others in day-to-day life outside of digital social platforms becomes less likely: a “spiral of silence” (Hampton et al. 2014; Noelle-Neumann 1993) and disengagement. With the era of digitally-­ supported hyper-individualization, though, the echo chamber is compressed to a population of one, with the algorithms that drive social platforms being based on enticing users to reveal increasing amounts of their (monetizable) personal data and perspectives, in exchange for which their digital environment is tailored ever more precisely to provide positive feedback pandering to, and thereby reinforcing, these preferences and opinions. And, because people’s behavior, decisions and interactions in the physical world are increasingly mediated (see Chap. 4) by their use of digital applications such as wayfinding apps, location-based games, and the locative functions of social platforms, the hyper-individuation of one’s information environment begins to have an effect on physical public spatial practice. In this vein, flash mobs—groups of

Blurring the Distinction Between Public and Private

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strangers mobilized to perform disruptive mass acts in public space and then disperse—can be seen as parodies of publics in a number of ways. They make use of the affordances of digital technologies to assemble a mass of people in public space, but this mass often has no common identity beyond the performance of an act that is most often frivolous, sometimes destructive—an exhibition of the banality of the ability to communicate and coordinate communal action and a demonstration of the lack of sense of purpose as to why such communality might be desired: a thumbing of the nose at physical public space. Flash mobs amplify the exhibitionism of the individual to the scale of the group. Digital forums also serve as rehearsal spaces (such as when using Google Street View to scout out a place to prepare for an actual visit or decide whether to visit (Parisi 2015: 8)), proxies or mirrors for interactions in physical public space.

Blurring the Distinction Between Public and Private Definitions of “public” often rely on a distinction from the concept of “private,” which is often assumed to be its opposite or complement. The private realm, in contradistinction to the public, is defined in terms of the home and family, or in terms of the realm of economic activity. One of the difficulties of defining the concept of public lies in the increasing difficulty in defining the concept of the private, in terms of activities as well as in terms of spaces. The question of the importance, or even the viability, of enforcing a public/private distinction, in thought and in action, is a matter of no small amount of contention.2 Both Arendt and Habermas lamented what they perceived as a blurring of the distinction between public and private space. Jane Jacobs (1961), as well, saw maintaining a clear distinction between public and private as a necessary quality of successful public spaces. Digital technologies have been perceived, by different people and for different reasons, as facilitating a blurring of distinctions and divisions between public and private spaces, presenting a threat to privacy (for instance because of the increasing amount of personal information demanded and stored by digital applications, our dependence on vulnerable networks for our relationships and sophisticated and pervasive monitoring and surveillance of our interactions) (Barney 2003: 94), as well as a threat to publicness (for example in allowing the jarring insertion of private mobile phone conversations into public spaces) (Cooper 2001; Goldberger 2003: 66). However, it may be more informative to see digital technologies not as threatening one or the other, or both, of these categories of spaces and activities, but rather as inviting ongoing re-assessment of the ways in which the concepts of public and

2  The category of private space should not be confused with the privacy of the individual, which is a right that applies in any type of space, public or private. Privacy has many facets—the right to personal secrecy, commercial activity, the defensible space of the family or community among them.

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private are understood, applied and performed. Rather than seeing public and private as a priori and opposing modes of human existence in the world, the insertion of digital technologies into urban spatial and social practice demonstrates that the categories of public and private, like many other dichotomies, are socially constructed and performatively produced and constantly under negotiation and flux. As Ted Kilian (1997: 127) noted, “We do not move from public to private, rather we are constantly within both, simultaneously protecting ourselves from absorption into the public through the power of privacy (exclusion) and asserting ourselves into the public sphere (the realm of political power).” Nissenbaum & Varnelis (2012: 12) query whether the progressive dissolution or blurring of the private/public distinction is “cause for resistance, or merely inexorable stages in a progression to which we have already assented.” Fraser (1990: 125–126) even argues that some instances of the maintaining of divisions between public and private are nefarious, and that this distinction does not describe a clearly defined dichotomy of types of spaces and practices, but rather operates as a “rhetorical device” that is used to exclude certain topics and groups from the acceptable scope of public discourse. She gives examples of the framing of domestic violence as a “private matter,” thus denying victims a public voice and withholding the perpetrator from accountability to societal moral codes. In digital venues, the barrier between private and public matters is becoming increasingly porous, and the flow of “private matters” into public forums more fluid. On the one hand, particularly among the present younger generation, there is a much higher willingness to share personal information and experiences in public digital platforms for all to see. On the other hand, the views and narratives of their private lives that people post online are typically very intentionally edited and designed to convey a particular impression. Following Kilian’s (1997) line of thinking, while public and private are useful categories in making distinctions in spatial practice and psychology, they do not describe types of spaces so much as they denote the consequences of different power relations. All spaces have aspects of “publicity” and aspects of “privacy,” and these characteristics exist not as inherent qualities of the physical space but rather as emergent outcomes of the social interaction that takes place in that space, and the dialogue of these patterns of interaction with the physical attributes of the space (Kilian 1997: 124) (see also Bateson 1935).3 In this dialogue, the ability of the space to afford different types of interactions and power relations is revealed. Privacy and publicness should thus not be seen as mutually exclusive but rather as feeding and supporting one another, as Jurgenson and Rey (2013) exemplified in the calculated revealing and concealing of private information on public websites and social platforms. 3  Bateson has pointed out the pervasiveness of the habit of binary thinking, such that we seek to apply it even to things that are not binary in nature. The public/private distinction could be seen as one of these relations. This raises the question of whether there is a cogent Batesonian ternary relationship to replace the public/private distinction, establishing a relationship that is, to borrow another of Bateson’s distinctions, not symmetrical, with each vying for the same dominant position, but complementary, with each defining itself in relation to the others.

Digitally Mediated Publics

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Further complicating the public/private distinction is the superimposition of alternative geographies onto urban space by digital applications. Some of these occurrences are the result of unintentional mistranslations between spatial categories in the world-at-large and the data models of the world used in games and apps, as in the designation of private homes as “gyms” in the Pokémon Go location-based game (Robertson 2016). Others are the unintended side-effects of algorithms, as when normally quiet residential streets become overrun with traffic when path-­ optimization algorithms like Waze “discover” them as shortcuts to avoid construction or traffic jams (Hendrix 2016). In other cases, these incongruences reflect intentional provocations or exploitations of loopholes. Simply because the public/private distinction is far from unambiguous does not mean that it is a meaningless distinction, when used to refer to categories of urban space. This is a distinction that is performed daily. There is a constant reconfiguration of the spatiality of public and private through human actions in space.

Digitally Mediated Publics By the criteria established above, the constellations of people that make contact via Facebook and other analogous web-based platforms would not be seen as a public, nor as a collection of publics, perhaps not first and foremost for the reason that they are commercial platforms, but rather because, though such platforms support the formation and maintaining of diverse different communities without prejudice for membership, their structures incentivize (through) a bias towards isolation and introversion of these communities rather than facilitating, rewarding or encouraging interaction among these communities such that they could be seen as publics vis-àvis each other. Virtual venues of coming-together do not support the formation of “worldly attachment” (Arendt 1998 [1958]) and the importance of perceiving the effects of our actions on the world. van Dijck et al. (2018) write that we are in the midst of an established but still emerging “platform society,” in which digital social platforms have been inserted into all manner of commercial, political, professional and civil facets of life and society, to the extent that they are influencing the structure of economies, cultures and societies at a global scale. While it would be dubious to see social platforms, and the types of interactions that take place on them, as community-building by default, it would seem viable to see at least some of the interactions that they afford and that actually take place upon them as exhibiting many of the characteristics associated with communities. Manzini and Coad (2015) demonstrate examples in which digital platforms support the carrying-out of life projects that form communities of those involved in the co-creation of things in the “real world.” But can web platforms, or other modes of digital connectivity like mobile phone networks, sustain publics, not just communities? Platform applications such as Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Snapchat are referred to as “public social networks,” in that they are

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in principle accessible to all and are not for the exclusive use of a specifically delimited range of people or organizations. In this sense, the term “public” is perhaps warranted, in the same way that a shopping mall may be termed a public space despite its private ownership and subjugation of the public aspect of the space to the commercial purpose for which the mall exists. These sites monetize their membership in different ways: by the selling of premium services and ancillary functionality to their membership base, the selling of advertising individually targeted at each member based on data either voluntarily submitted by members or generated through analysis of the member’s behavior and choices on the platform, and of course the selling of such data to third parties for diverse uses. Digital forums and networks can support public interaction, and there are certainly examples of online forums, as well as digital technology-facilitated collocated events and interactions between people in physical space, which are designed for the express purpose of encouraging discussion and negotiation between members of diverse communities (see for instance Chap. 5 of this book), but these are also venues of choice or invitation rather than of necessity, comparable, perhaps, to specific public forums such as town hall meetings rather than public space at large. The question remains whether such a confluence is in principle possible in digital forums. On the one hand, certain digital networks are so ingrained into the infrastructural support of contemporary life that they may be considered as integral components of the fabric of lived reality into which one is born. On the other hand, we are not “thrown in” to digital communities that are in effect software environments established on these technological infrastructures. We buy in, we log in, we opt in. In affording the sharing of a platform without the necessity of taking notice of the others with whom we share the platform, by removing the bodily co-presence in public interaction, the web can sustain multiple perspectives that never have to share a space, and it could be claimed that it has been used to evade the formation of publics (even as is supports the formation of communities). Just bringing people together is not enough to constitute a public. One (likely not entirely fair) way of reading writers such as Jacobs, Habermas and Lofland, is that the mere creation of opportunities for contact between different publics is seen as sufficient to engender a public realm. This “just contact” understanding of public space has come under criticism for not acknowledging the asymmetrical nature of power relations between dominant and non-dominant publics, meaning that a public space that affords only mere contact affords control and exclusion of counter publics by the dominant public (Kilian 1997). In Habermas’ view, it was the introduction, in the nineteenth century, of “identity politics,” through the emergence of counterpublics desiring access to the public life of the city, that heralded the dissolution of some imagined idealized “universal” public space (although, historically, this so-called universality had only ever been achieved through a narrowly circumscribed and exclusive understanding of the rightful membership of the “public,” limited typically to the male, bourgeois segment of society). The notion of multiple “publics,” rather than a single public, can be seen as related to the concept of a community—a public can be more or less a community, when seen relative to other communities in a shared space.

Together Apart

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Together Apart Arendt blamed the blurring of distinctions between the public and private realms, discussed above, on the rise of “mass society,” the reduction of society to an undifferentiated mass of unrelated individuals linked only through economic exchange (Arendt 1998 [1948]; Martin 2016: 44). Physical space tends to become a neutral container for a mass, not a public, conducting private matters or non-collocated socialization. Hardt and Negri (2004) reject categorizations of public and private, preferring to write of the heterogeneous “Multitude” that comes together to resist increasingly totalizing regimes of control, and propose alternative ways of being, based on the communal production of common knowledge, goods and services. This opens up a view to the ethos of the open-source and maker movements in the context of digital technologies. In proposing a concept for how such diverse and irreconcilable publics might be conceived as effective actors in the globalized society of the present era, in their concept of the Multitude, Hardt and Negri (2004), proffer a vision for modes of coming together of heterogenous, distinct elements of society in a way that does not entail a reduction of difference or a subordination to an overarching ordering regime. The Multitude refers to the global, distributed and heterogeneous totality of humanity, which stands in distinction to societies circumscribed by nation states and late industrial capitalism. For Hardt and Negri, the Multitude is the “living alternative” to the increasingly pervasive, violent, globalized regimes of control that they collectively refer to as “Empire.” The Multitude does not seek unity or class mobilization, but rather endeavors to maintain the heterogeneity and individualism of its components while finding channels for communal action (Hardt and Negri 2004: xiii; Mertes 2004). The formation of the Multitude is clearly enabled by digital networks (see Chap. 6), which support “new circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents and allow an unlimited number of encounters” (Hardt and Negri 2004: xiii), enabling a common realm that is global and distributed, to form a viable counterforce to the Empire. Shades of this can be discerned in the use of digital networking in crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, in which Benjamin’s (2002) crowd attains a new potency as an active agent, even as it retains its character as a mass of mutually anonymous individuals. If not exactly threatening the global political order, these technologically mediated agents have introduced modes of communal action that circumvent the official channels of modern society. Notwithstanding the unitary nature of the concept of the Multitude, and indeed also of retrograde ideas of a singular public, the public is never singular or unified in nature. Paulouro Neves (2012) appeals to anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s (1935) concept of schismogenesis to articulate how disparate communities, when they come into contact and interact with one another, seek to increase their differentiation from one another. This process of differentiation takes different paths and forms depending on the nature of the power differential between the groups in question. To sustain a public sphere, in a normative sense, involves, as a minimum,

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admitting the co-existing expression of a diversity of individual opinions, identities and ways of life. Beyond simple co-existence, there is a persistent holding-on to aspirations for the public realm as a forum in which each member of society engages with others to co-construct shared points of view, despite diversity and difference. As stated by Habermas, “Publicity was, according to its very idea, a principle of democracy not because anyone could in principle announce, with equal opportunity, his personal inclinations, wishes and convictions—opinions; it could only be realized in the measure that these personal opinions could evolve through the rational-­ critical debate of a public into public opinion” (Habermas 1989 [1962]). The public realm is not a simple continuum, but is spatially and socially variegated and fractured. Privatization and fragmentation of the city are often linked, just as the public spatial realm is not continuous in terms of jurisdiction or control. The fragmentation of urban space reflects the fragmentation of society: “From a more general viewpoint, the segmentation and specialization of urban space is, at the same time, the spatial reflection of processes that regard the social and cultural sphere—and which lead to the multiplication of groups and lifestyles—and the effects of capitalist and neoliberal policies, which lead to the reduction of the common goods sphere and the appropriation of them by the market” (Mela 2014). For Arendt (1998 [1958]: 57), the public realm was manifested through “the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised.” This statement posits, at the same time, the indisputability of an objective world that must be shared by all publics, and the incommensurability of the myriad views and designs on this world espoused by this multitude of publics (see also Mouffe 2000; Pellizzoni 2003). To accept the inevitability, and indeed the desirability, of such an irreducible plurality of publics, would seem to be a fundamental criterion for any perspective on public space that could come to terms with the contemporary urban condition, in a descriptive as well as a normative sense. The public realm, as the common space in which different communities come into contact, is thus less a space for negotiation and rational discourse grounded in the shared values of a society envisioned by Habermas and Arendt in their idealized notions of the public realm, and more of an arena in which contact with the other inspires an instinct to differentiate the views, positions and practices of one’s own community from perceived “others.” This dynamic is played-out daily in tangible ways in physical public space, for example in the demarcation of a territorial dividing line where a Catholic Church and a synagogue face off on opposite sides of a street (Ropeik 2012) or the escalation of words and even violence between groups of protesters and counter protesters. Digital platforms could be said to support the sustaining of a multiplicity of “incommensurable discourses” (Lyotard 1985) of multiple counterpublics that characterize the public realm (Fraser 1990), even moving toward “communities of one” but at the same time provide a framework in which this incommensurability need not be confronted, and can even be exacerbated. The echo chamber phenomenon is anti-public, in that it seeks to minimize contact with otherness. The Web creates a pseudo-public realm in which these multiple publics need not vie for the right to

References

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co-habit, as in Fraser’s view, or parcel-off segments of physical space within which they hold sway. In essence, if the Web is a public space then it clearly is subject to the same fragmentation as physical public space, but to an even greater degree. In this regard, a fundamental difference between web-space and physical space is the lack of phenomenological spatiality in the former, such that it is never perceived as a continuum that is shared with others, beyond the communities of the platforms that one seeks out. This is an important distinction between material spatiality and the pseudo-spatiality of the Web or other virtual substrata, which are endlessly multipliable and not a limited resource that must be shared or divided. To conceive of the public realm as simply “community, writ large” would be to ignore the heterogeneity and even incommensurability of interests, goals and means that characterize the different publics that make up the public-at-large. Thus, unlike a community, it is difficult to conceive of the public realm as a project, if a project is understood in terms of cooperation between individuals in working towards a common goal. The untenableness (and also undesirability) of Dewey’s “great community” has become apparent, as has the likelihood that Habermas and Arendt’s ideal of a universally accessible public realm in which all members of society have a nominally equal voice is a yet-to-be-achieved aspiration rather than a situation that has ever existed historically. This is all the more evident in view of contemporary societal shifts in the geographical reach of social networks and the relationship between the individual, the community and the public realm.

References Arendt H (1998 [1958]). The human condition (2nd edn). University of Chicago Press, Chicago Banerjee T (2001) The future of public space: beyond invented streets and reinvented places. J Am Plan Assoc 67(1):9–24 Barney D (2003) Invasions of publicity. In: Law Commission of Canada. New perspectives on the public-private divide. UBC Press, Vancouver Bateson G (1935) Culture contact and schismogenesis. Man 35:178–183 Bauman Z (2000) Liquid modernity. Polity Press, Cambridge Beck U (1992) Risk society: towards a new modernity. Sage, New Delhi. Translated from Beck U (1986) Risikogesellschaft: auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. Benjamin W (2002) The arcades project (trans: Eiland H, McLaughlin K). Belknap Press, New York Boyd DM, Ellison NB (2007) Social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. J Comp Mediat Commun 13(1):210–230 Cairncross F (1997) The death of distance: how the communications revolution will change our lives. Harvard Business Review Press, Cambridge Chua A (2018) Political tribes: group instinct and the fate of nations. Penguin, London Cooper G (2001) The mutable mobile: social theory in the wireless world. In: Brown B, Green N, Harper R (eds) Wireless world: social and interactional aspects of the mobile age. Springer, London, pp 19–31 Cooper R (2018) Tribalism is not the problem. The Week. https://theweek.com/articles/802580/ tribalism-not-problem. Accessed 13 Nov 2019

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d’Entreves MP (2016) Hannah Arendt. In: Zalta EN (ed) The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/arendt/. Accessed 17 Apr 2018 Dayan D, Katz E (1992) Media events: the live broadcasting of history. Harvard University Press, Cambridge de Cauter L (2004) The capsular civilisation: on the city in the age of fear. NAi Publishers, Rotterdam Dewey F (1997) Cyburbanism as a way of life. In: Ellin N (ed) Architecture of fear. Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton, pp 260–280 Fraser N (1990) Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text 25(26):56–80 Giddens A (2014) Turbulent and mighty continent: what future for Europe? Polity, Cambridge Goldberger P (2003) Disconnected urbanism. Metropolis Magazine, p 66 Graham S, Marvin S (1996) Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. Routledge, New York Habermas J (1989 [1962]) The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Polity, Cambridge Hampton KN, Rainie L, Lu W, Dwyer M, Shin I, Purcell K (2014) Social media and the “spiral of silence”. Pew Research Center, Washington Hardt M, Negri A (2004) Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire. Penguin, New York Heidegger M (2008 [1927]) Being and time. Harper Perennial, New York Hendrix S (2016) Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war, again. Guess who’s winning? The Washington Post online. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/traffic-weary-homeowners-and-waze-are-at-war-again-guess-whos-winning/2016/06/05/c466df46-299d-11e6-b9894e5479715b54_story.html?utm_source=SFFB&utm_term=.de3b703b5d2e. Accessed 27 Apr 2018 Holmes D (ed) (1997) Virtual politics: identity and community in cyberspace. Sage, London Hosanagar K (2016) Blame the echo chamber on Facebook but blame yourself too. Wired Magazine online edition. https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-echo-chamber. Accessed 25 Aug 2018 Innerarity D (2016) Governance in the new global disorder: politics for a post-sovereign society (trans: Kingery S). Columbia University Press, New York Jacobs J (1961) The death and life of great American cities. Random House, New York Jurgenson N, Rey PJ (2013) The fan dance: how privacy thrives in an age of hyper-publicity. In: Lovink G, Rasch M (eds) Unlike us reader: social media monopolies and their alternatives. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, pp 61–75 Kahan DM, Braman D, Cohen GL, Gastil J, Slovic P (2010) Who fears the HPV vaccine, who doesn’t, and why? An experimental study of the mechanisms of cultural cognition. Law Hum Behav 34:501–516 Keogh B (2016) Pokémon go and the politics of digital gaming in public. Overland online journal. https://overland.org.au/2016/07/pokemon-go-and-the-politics-of-digital-gaming-in-public. Accessed 14 July 2016 Kilian T (1997) Public and private: power and space. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham Luhmann N (1995) Social systems. Stanford University Press, Stanford Lyotard JF (1985) The postmodern condition. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Manzini E, Coad R (2015) Design, when everybody designs: an introduction to design for social innovation. MIT Press, Cambridge Martin R (2016) The urban apparatus: mediapolitics and the city. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis McPherson M, Smith-Lovin L, Cook JM (2001) Birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. Annu Rev Sociol 27:415–444 McQuire S (2006) The politics of public space in the media city. First Monday, peer reviewed journal on the internet. Special issue #4: Urban screens: discovering the potential of outdoor

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screens for urban society. https://www.firstmonday.org/article/view/1544/1459. Accessed 10 Apr 2019 Mela A (2014) Urban public space between fragmentation control and conflict. City Territory Architect 1:15 Mertes T (ed) (2004) A movement of movements: is another world really possible? Verso, London Mishra D, Hall OP (2007) The death of time and distance. Graziadio Business Rev 10(1). https:// gbr.pepperdine.edu/2010/08/the-death-of-time-and-distance. Accessed 3 Sept 2017 Mouffe C (2000) The democratic paradox. Verso, New York Nissenbaum H, Varnelis K (2012) Situated technologies pamphlets 9: modulated cities: networked spaces, reconstituted subjects. Architectural League of New York Noelle-Neumann E (1993) The spiral of silence: public opinion, our social skin. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Parisi L (2015) Where 2.0: exploring the place experience of “hyperconnected” digital media. Users Sociologica 3 Paulouro Neves JPL (2012) The eradication of public space: dissolving liminal states. In: Pinto da Silva M (ed) EURAU12 Porto—Espaço Público e Cidade Contemporânea: Actas do 6° European symposium on research in architecture and urban design. Porto: FAUP Pellizzoni L (2003) Knowledge, uncertainty and the transformation of the public sphere. Eur J Soc Theory 6(3):327–355 Robertson A (2016) What can you do when Pokémon Go decides your house is a gym? Augmented reality and private spaces don’t mix. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/12/12159422/ pokemon-go-turned-house-into-gym-augmented-reality-privacy. Accessed 7 Aug 2018 Ropeik D (2012) How tribalism overrules reason and makes risky times more dangerous. https:// bigthink.com/risk-reason-and-reality/how-tribalism-overrules-reason-and-makes-risky-timesmore-dangerous Sennett R (1976) The fall of public man. Alfred A. Knopf, New York Simmel G (1975 [1903]) The metropolis and mental life. In: Wolff KH (ed) The sociology of Georg Simmel. Free Press, New York Sunstein C (2002) The law of group polarization. J Polit Philos 10(2):175–195 van Dijck J, Poell T, de Waal M (2018) The platform society: public values in a connective world. Oxford University Press, Oxford Wilson M (2000) Community in the abstract: a political and ethical dilemma. In: Bell D, Kennedy B (eds) The cybercultures reader. Routledge, London, pp 644–658 Zukin S (1995) The culture of cities. Blackwell, Cambridge

Chapter 4

Us and Others

Abstract  Based on the principle of the social production of space, this chapter examines the dual role of digital technologies as technologies of control and technologies of freedom. The structures and biases that are imposed on public space and public life by the mediating role of digital technologies, both on regimes of control and on the exercise of free will in day-to-day life, is articulated. The metaphor of the interface is introduced to encompass commonalities between the affordances of digital technologies and the nature of public space. The role of spatiality in physical public space and the spatial metaphor applied to digital “spaces” is expanded upon. Keywords  Digital mediation · Production of space · Control and freedom · Space · Interface · Universal medium

Producing Digital Public Space Public space is a human-made construct, produced through the actions and thoughts of human beings in the world. The idea of the articulation of space as the consequence of processes of human agency and meaning-making, most commonly associated with the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1991 [1974]), is among the most pivotal credos of social philosophy in the last half-century. Identifying public space as a spatial category thus evokes the question of how such space is produced and, for the purposes of this book, how digital technologies are involved in the constitution of public space. One way of conceiving of the production of public space is in terms of the withholding of rules that apply by default in non-public territory. For Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958]), the world as given is common by default, but she saw this common world as being overlaid by human-made societal distinctions, put in place and enforced through the application of political, social, cultural and economic mechanisms of control and © The Author(s) 2021 T. Jachna, Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square, The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_4

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organization. In particular, the lived world of people in capitalist societies is always already spatially and socially structured in terms of property relations: that is, the logic of private property. Arendt saw publicness in terms of the suspension of these relations. Officially, the withholding of public spaces from property relations (and, consequently, from the economic logic of space that prevails in developed societies) has been one of the roles of governments, but spaces can also be extracted “performatively” from property relations by citizens through their actions and appropriations. So, in either of these two cases, rather than being perceived as preserves of some apocryphal original state of human co-existence, public spaces are seen as states of exception to the logic of ownership, privacy and monetization that inhere in the human-structured world by default. It is easy to see parallels to this perspective in utopian views of the potential of the Internet as supporting the formation of a purported new public realm, in which territorial divisions, social and cultural schisms and hierarchies, and the hegemony of governmental and ­commercial interests could be suspended, even if in the intervening years the Web has been characterized by increasing commercialization of its content, venues and activity, and the implementation of growing mechanisms of control and surveillance. In one of the seminal works on urbanism, The Culture of Cities, Louis Mumford (1981 (1938)) discerned a difference between “producing cities” and “consuming cities.” By the early twenty-first century, the post-industrial turn has shifted most urban regions in developed countries into the latter of these two modes. Miles (1997) questions, though, whether cities, and urban life, should therefore be defined by the ways in which they address and cater for consumers and consumption. Simone (2004), for instance, provides a counterpoint by describing African cities in terms of interactions within, and between, heterogeneous groups and activities, which he sees as the generator, not the content, of public space. This is in effect a description of the type of social dynamic that Nancy Fraser (1990) proposes should be seen as constitutive of the public realm as a multiplicity of interacting publics, stripped of the expectation of some overarching structuring principle for these groups and interactions. Naomi Klein (2001), as well, sees public space not as an a priori container provided to obedient publics by magnanimous governments but rather as something that is created or seized by activism: “people are reclaiming bits of nature and culture and saying ‘this is going to be public space’.” All of these perspectives evince views that it is relevant and even crucial to understand public spaces in terms of physically co-present human interactions in spatial and material contexts in the physical fabric of the city. Furthermore, the relationship between the spatial and the social in public space is dynamic and contested, with no simple isomorphism or one-directional determinism in the relationship between public (inter) actions and public space. Recalling the distinction between public and private explored in the previous chapter, the private realm can be understood as the place of labor, and the public realm as the place of work (Arendt 1998 [1958]). The distinction between labor and work in this case is that between the effort expended (individually) to satisfy the necessities of life on the one hand, and the fabrication of new, artificial things in the world (communally) on the other. The shared world of the public realm, then, is the

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product of human work. It is not only the site of our shared action, but also the fruit of our shared action. The world between us is also made by us. In this regard, the public realm is public not by virtue of being provided, but rather by virtue of its being produced, continuously and communally, by the coming-together of a wide range of diverse urban actors. This reaffirms the position that spatial and social relations cannot be treated as if they are separate things. Social relations are formed by spatial relations, and the perception and meaning associated with spaces is inseparable from social relations (Simmel 1975 [1903]; Lefebvre 1991 [1974]). Public space becomes public through its production, not its consumption. Thus, public space, properly understood, is not consumed or used, but worked on. Lessig (2004) proposes that digital technologies counteract the consumption-­ oriented understanding of life and the commercialization of existence by opening up the potential for “free culture,” through their enabling of exchanges and interactions in which production dominates over consumption and in which there is no economic exchange. This evokes the ethos of the Open Source Movement, in which the common artifact—the software—is common by virtue of being constantly coproduced by the community that uses it and constantly used by the community that produces it. At the interface between digital technologies and public space, this ethos is apparent in many applications, such as “community mapping,” using Public Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS) that enable citizens to collaborate on collecting and submitting data to produce maps that often constitute representations of alternative geographies that reveal particular patterns or issues in the urban environment. Imaginaries of how this might translate to an approach to the built environment have a long history, such as the cybernetic environments envisioned by pioneering cybernetician Gordon Pask, which were not conceived as background services invisibly supporting human activities, but were also to enable, and indeed expect, inhabitants of these spaces to play an active role, in dialogue with the embedded intelligence of the environment, in rethinking and reconfiguring the spaces of their daily lives (Pask 1969). Some trace the origin of this new DIY approach to urbanism back to Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog of the 1960s and 70s (Sadler 2008; Obrist and Brand 2013). Simone’s (2004: 409) designation of African cities as “incomplete” also resonates with the open source ethos and practices.

Technologies of Control and Technologies of Freedom The production of space can be understood in terms of two simultaneous and complementary mechanisms that can be seen as a reframing of the distinction made by Mumford in terms of types of actions rather than types of spaces. In his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas (1984 [1981], 1987 [1981]) establishes a dual conceptualization of society, composed of the “lifeworld” as perceived and lived by members of society and the “system” as perceived by those seeking to understand (and potentially control) society as if from outside of it. Consequently, he sees

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society as being integrated by two types of forces: the actions and interactions of individuals and the controlling measures of governing bodies. He perceives “media” as being appropriated in the exercise of both of these mechanisms. In one, media are used in the service of “language,” playing a role in “consensus-oriented communication” (as in the use of mobile phones by people to coordinate their itineraries in real time). In the other, “steering media” are used to control and coerce the public through a “symbolic generalization of rewards and punishments” (a digital technology example of this would be the composite computerized systems that regulate traffic by controlling of traffic lights and record snapshots of those declining to conform to the actions demanded of them by the signals). The first of these perspectives (which he associates with Jane Jacobs) sees public space as first and foremost a physical construct that supports social processes, whereas the second (which he associates with Henri LeFebvre) sees public space in terms of social processes that form psycho-sociological patterns and relationships with physical space. An understanding of the genesis of public space requires both of these perspectives. Public space is thus both a space of freedom and a space of control. These two facets of human action in the world are complementary and necessary elements of public life, and there are many parallels to this way of thinking—from sociologist Anthony Giddens’ (1986) concept of the complementary forces of structuration and agency, through which societies are constituted, to science and technology scholar Lucy Suchman’s (1987) distinction between plans (intentions that are conceived and articulated in detail before they are enacted on the world) and situated actions (behavior driven by tactical decisions made and acted-upon by actors immersed in a situation) in her seminal work on digital technology interface design. Plans rely on explicit knowledge mobilized to mold a found situation to conform to a preformed vision. Situated actions rely on implicit knowledge applied to navigate within a found situation. In the specific case of physical public space, the system/structuration/plans/control aspect is evident in tangible forces of control in public space, among which the constructed environment is the most obvious and direct, as well as intangible forces linked to social control, rules and policy, and surveillance. The dimension of lifeworld/agency/situated actions/freedom is linked to the practices of individuals and groups in dialogue with these constraints—obeying, transgressing, subverting, re-­ appropriating and negotiating with the explicit and implicit matrices of constraint, facilitation and coercion. Both of these dimensions, and the interrelation between them, are important in the constitution of public spaces. Jeffrey Hou (2012: 91–92) thus makes a distinction between two purported kinds of public space differentiated by the prevalence of one or the other of these forces in their formation: “institutional” public spaces of parks, plazas and streets, provided as amenities by governmental and non-governmental entities; and “insurgent public spaces” of protests, street vendors and flash mobs, appropriated by publics for activities that do not fit into these official institutional spaces and policies. Miraftab (2004) makes a similar distinction between “invited” and “invented” spaces. Similarly, Acconci distinguishes between two types of public space: one created primarily by the exercise of

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control and systems, and the other by the exercise of freedom and the production of a lifeworld. This distinction is between spaces that are provided as public and spaces that are “made public” by people, to create place for activities for which there is no adequate provision (Acconci 1990: 901). The “system” vantage on urban space could be equated with a conventional planner’s perspective, in which the project of public space is defined in terms of the creation of specific, bounded physical spaces, defined programmatically in terms of the “sites of public use and citizen interaction… vital to a sense of community identity and urban well-being” (Goodsell 2003: 363), “the stage upon which the drama of communal life unfolds” (Carr et al. 1992). The “lifeworld” perspective, on the other hand, is that of the citizen not just using these spaces, but appropriating, intervening in and producing space through their actions. Public space is continually made and re-made through the dialogue between these two types of factors. Drawing on the example of the Occupy movement’s appropriation of New  York’s Zucotti Park, Hou (2012: 97) demonstrates that it is neither the physical space alone nor the human interactions alone that constitute the experimental publicness of this action, but rather argues for an understanding of the ways in which spaces are “activated” by human activities in processes of “occupation,” requiring both the existence of requisite spaces in the city for public action and the ability of people to “mobilize, network and take actions.” The idea of two faces of technology that parallel the two faces of public space discussed above—a system-centered technology of control and a human-centered technology of freedom—goes back at least to Mumford (2010 [1934]), as mentioned also by Langdon Winner (1980). This is often linked to the distinction between dispersed and concentrated technologies (such as solar vs. nuclear power), and in current practice digital technologies play a role in the exercise of both of these approaches. On the one hand, technological systems are used in the exercise of control and organization. Networks of surveillance cameras and other sensors maintain constant apprehension of activities and conditions in real-time public space (as expanded upon in Chap. 8 of this book), expert systems inform the compositing and analysis of this steady stream of data, and are also used in urban planning, in regulation of flows of human and vehicular traffic and in facilitating the governance of the exceedingly complex and mercurial social entities that are contemporary urban populations. Langdon Winner cites examples of twentieth-century New York planner Robert Moses’ strategic placement of low bridges to exclude bus traffic, and thereby members of disadvantaged populations, from certain Long Island neighborhoods, and nineteenth-century industrialist Cyrus McCormick’s introduction of pneumatic molding machines to his factory in Chicago to allow him to replace unionized skilled laborers with unskilled workers. He goes on to critique the application of technologies in ways that systematically, if unintentionally, excluded physically disabled people from public life, to illustrate the thesis that technologies can be seen to have certain political biases–not that they impose political types upon society, but that different technologies lend themselves to use in supporting particular political conditions and relationships (Winner 1980: 123–125).

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On the contrary, freedom-supporting face of technologies, Saskia Sassen (2006) sees leftover spaces or terrains vagues, away from the hyper-architectural public spaces where expressions of power and the images of commercialism hold sway, as the spaces in which a particular type of architectural practice may be able to insert itself to facilitate the appropriation and construction of public space. In particular, she sees digital technologies as providing the means by which such practices can operate. There is an implication here that physical architecture can be abandoned to the state and the money economy and that critical practice takes the digital dimension as its own, not eschewing physical space but mobilizing these freer, less tangible or fixed means and dimensions as their point of leverage. Sassen does not see monumentalized architectural public spaces as public at all, but rather characterizes them as “public access” to denote that they are not formed or constituted by public action but can play host to it. Perhaps what has been called public space throughout history has been a misnomer, and a cynical one at that, in that it referred to precisely the spaces where one was most prone to being relegated to the role of subject rather than agent. Monumentalized public spaces also tend to be privatized, weaponized (through the appearance of surveillance, controls and barriers) and politicized (through the contestation, displacement and performance of asymmetrical power relations in urban public space by gentrification). In all of these examples, technologies can be said to serve as mediators of human public action and interaction.

The Digital Mediation of Public Space As a term in the legal fields, mediation refers to a process by which an agreement is reached, and in the broader, philosophical sense, it refers to the acknowledgement that any interface imposes structures and biases on the interactions that it enables. This sense of the word underlies the theory of technological mediation: the idea that the technologies used by a society influence the relations and practices of that society (see the discussion of social technologies in Chap. 7 of this book). Thompson (1995) pointed out that many of the functions attributed to the public sphere were becoming increasingly “mediated” by broadcast and communications technologies, and he questioned the tenability of Habermasian views of the public sphere centered on interactions between physically collocated individuals, in view of the increasing prevalence of “mediated publicness.” Some facets of Thompson’s thesis have been made moot by subsequent technological developments, particularly in the shift from one-to-many broadcast technologies to many-to-many Web and network technologies. For example, the purported uni-directionality of communication in mediated publics due to the biases and limitations of broadcast technology has been supplanted by the peer-to-peer omni-directionality of the Internet. Other aspects, such as the de-spatialization of much public interaction and the diversification of audiences (also an unaccustomed way of referring to the public), have become if anything even more prevalent and ingrained. Digital media complicate the distinction

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between public media and public spaces, because in a way digital media are at the same time both and neither of these. Leszczynski (2015) proposes that the concept of mediation is a way of understanding different modalities of coming-together of people, place and digital technologies in the performance of everyday life. Mediation, whether by digital technologies or by human agents, is never transparent or unbiased. The role of the mediator is not a neutral one. If it were, then there would be no need to speak of mediation. As discussed in the previous chapter, interaction with others is central to the conception of public space, but the space itself, as a medium, is also both embodied and active, not merely a container for the interactions of the agents who constitute the public, but an agent in its own right, with which urban citizens interface. Mediation of spatial experience is not something that has been first brought about by digital technologies. Rather, experience is mediated in many ways and through many different media(tors). With the absorption of many elements of the public sphere into digital channels, one could speak of a type of “remediation” of public life—the transference of ­elements of public interaction from the spatial-material medium to the digital-virtual medium—in which digital forums become new media for forms of action and interaction that have developed in the medium of physical space. However, to do this would be to make a severely false equivalency. Space is not a medium in the same sense as the mass media of broadcast technologies or even digital technologies. Indeed, Berry (2013) claims that remediation, the shifting of content from one medium to another (Bolter and Grusin 2000), is an inadequate term for understanding the absorption of social interaction into digital media and argues that this is rather a case of “enmediation,” in which something that previously existed in an unmediated form is translated into a form that can be carried by a particular medium. In the case of social interaction, only some aspects of sociality are incorporated into the unmediated form, and these aspects are also transfigured from their original form due to the needs to adapt to medium. With mediation (remediation, enmediation) comes also mediatization: the effect that media are not simply mute and neutral, but that they always impose certain biases and constraints—a “media logic”—on that which they transmit and those who make use of them (Altheide 2013; Nim 2016: 92). MacLuhan’s (1964) “the medium is the message” could be taken as a mantra of mediatization. Public life is thus mediatized, in that its organization and comportment are affected by the technologies upon which it is built.

Public Space as Interface In a general sense, the word “interface” refers to the point at which two entities meet and influence each other. The term is typically used to refer to the components or features of a digital technology artifact (a device or an application) that facilitate a “user’s” interaction with the artifact, so as to avail themselves of its functionality.

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The essential concept of the interface is that of between-ness, of mediation, of intervening and translating between two actors, be they biological, technological or hybrid. In any interaction between two people, neither individual has access to the inner workings of the other’s consciousness. From the perspective of each of us, the other is a “black box,” and therefore we must construct a mental model of the person with whom we are interacting, based on which we continually configure and reconfigure our interactions with this person. Our mental model of the other also continues to evolve as our interaction with that person continues. The interface is thus built between partners in conversation, through conversation. In this way, an interface “allows us to remain ignorant yet still to interact” (Glanville 1997). Glanville’s concept of the interface, not as a technological artifact but as an emergent effect of the engaging of agents, is akin to the process of mediation discussed above. In essence, as in our interaction with people, Glanville argues that we interact with digital technologies “symbolically,” as most of us have little understanding of the actual internal processes that we are putting in motion in the course of our ­interactions: “We enter the realm of faith” (Glanville 1997). The logic of the workings of the technological artifact itself remains a “black box” to which we attach explanatory principles, but into which we have no phenomenological access. The “black box” is a characteristic of the user, not of the technological artifact. It is a cognitive short-cut that enables one to make use of something while remaining largely oblivious to its internal workings. The communication between us and the “black box” is what is referred to as the interface. The interface is thus not a technological artifact that precedes and facilitates interaction, but rather it is the conversation itself, through which interaction is instantiated. The concept of the interface allows for discussion of both the interaction between people or groups, and between people and digital systems. Both of these perspectives—human-to-technology and human-to-human interaction—are relevant in the “cyborgian” view on public space discussed in the following chapter of this book, and Glanville’s concept of the interface allows for a generalization of the mechanisms at the point of meeting between human and human, as well as between human and technological system. An action-and-reaction view of the interface is insufficient. The interface is not a conduit for messages but rather is the result of a process of construction through conversation. “The true cyberspace,” according to Glanville, is not a technologically-manifested (pseudo-) space within or via which such conversations take place: it is the outcome of such conversations. This provides a reminder that public space is not just “there,” but is rather a condition that needs to be actively produced through repeated performances (Valentine 2013). Public space can thus be seen as an interface or, more precisely, as a realm of different types of interfaces constructed for and through certain types of interactions. Citing Glanville (1997), “we must build the interface with our partner, and, through it, we master that of which we remain ignorant.” The interface (that is public space) is therefore not (only) a provision, an amenity, a container that we inhabit and utilize as consumers or users; it is both the outcome of our endeavors to engage others and the fabric through which this engagement becomes possible. In the social

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construction sense of the term, public space thus only emerges to the extent that we actively work on co-constructing it. The consequence of this is that the interface needs to be understood as a construct that manifests itself in a certain technological configuration as it is being used as a facilitator of conversation between different entities. The interface is always a socio-technological construct–both an assemblage in space and a process in time. Le Febvre proposed the concept of “social space” not as an alternative to the “absolute space” of Nature, but as a necessary supplement, acknowledging that space as lived and experienced by human beings is always both the physical, material fact of geographical expanse and interrelations and the spatially inscribed relationships, meanings and patterns produced by human societies. The concept of the interface as articulated above can be taken as one perspective on a mechanism of the social production of space, both in the literal spatial sense and in the sense of digital venues. The design of these interfaces takes cues from a number of factors, including piggybacking on the habitus (Bourdieu 1994) established by precedent media, the human sensory apparatus, social norms and community forms. Understanding the interface of the public realm in terms of links that are continuously co-constructed through interaction, using the affordances provided by places or things within, through or upon which interaction occurs, the public realm must be seen in terms of a “bridging” rather than a “bonding.” That is, the concept of the public is an idea of what connects each of us, individually, to all others, rather than what contains us, collectively. This “between-ness” is not owned, individually or collectively, by the state or by society. It is co-created by all members of the public continuously. This recalls Kilian’s more categorical claim that it is power relations that determine the privacy or publicity of a space, and that such power relations must be understood not in terms of qualities of actors, but as something that exists between different actors. Doreen Massey, as well, comments on the “between-ness” of space, as that which is generated in an ongoing fashion in the interactions between people (Massey 2005: 9). These perspectives all have their roots in LeFebvre’s (1991 [1974]) conceptualization of the social production of space. Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958]) captures this “between” nature of public space cogently with the statement, “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.” For Arendt, it is in this gathering around a common, mediating object that the possibility of a public realm lies. Although the public realm is shared in this sense, each individual has a different perspective on it.

Stretching the Spatial Metaphor Digital platforms and networks have in common with physical spaces that both presume and require a pre-existing medium (a physical expanse on the one hand and computer memory and connections on the other) that provides the preconditions,

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the “foundation” and the “material” for their construction, and also in that, collectively, each of these media takes on the character of elements of a global commons. The term “space” is used colloquially to refer to aspects of both of these media (public space/physical space, memory space/cyberspace), and the creation of a public realm in each of these media involves the creation of constructs (streets, squares and parks, web platforms, telephony systems) upon this substrate that afford use, interaction, communication and exchange among people, and also impose biases upon this use and interaction. These similarities underpin much of the discourse that draws equivalencies between the two. Many of the same struggles and inequalities that characterize physical public space are also mirrored in digital public venues. For example, as with physical public spaces, access to the digital technologies that mediate public interaction is constrained by physical access infrastructure. Current struggles have to do with “bottleneck engineering” to mobilize sufficient bandwidth to deal with the rapid increase in online traffic, particularly over mobile devices (estimated at 53% per  annum increase in data traffic from mobile devices), using measures such as introducing more high-capacity cables, constructing more cloud data centers, and producing devices with more antennas to accommodate Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) signals (Hecht 2016). Those without access to such functional upgrades—such as the 75% of mobile network subscribers in Africa and the Middle East who still only have access to second-generation networks, as the more advanced markets begin the transition to 5G—are similarly disenfranchised and excluded from the provisions of infrastructure in the digital realm as those without viable access to public spaces are in the physical realm. In the physical, material sense, the term “space” is used to refer both to the three-­ dimensional continuum of the given world and to the discreet localized places within this continuum delineated by human intervention in the world—the global commons of the spatial expanse of the world and the spaces and places that we build within this commons, by our constructions and our (inter)actions.1 The second of the two senses of the word—as denoting discrete localities in space—could be seen as related to some definitions of the term “place” as distinct from space, as articulated variously by Leibniz (Leibniz et  al. 2000), Tuan (1977), de Certeau (1984: 118), Relph (1976) and others. These works are in general agreement that space refers to the extensive and continuous medium within which relationships between physical entities exist, while place has to do with specific localized situations and assemblages in the spatial milieu that can be experienced directly by people and to which meaningful associations and concrete actions and relations are attached.

1  The distinction between these two senses of this word is made for the sake of the discussion of a specific point relevant to the issue of public space and not to propose that these two senses of the word constitute an exhaustive or fundamental dichotomy. These are just two of the several ways in which the term is used. Newtonian absolute space, for instance, is a more fundamental and abstract concept than either of these, just as space in the sense of a constructed room or enclosure is a more concrete and prosaic one.

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The application of the spatial metaphor to digital technologies operates at two similar levels: the (literal) spatiality of the networks of computers and their interconnections that is the technological infrastructure through which digitally-­mediated interactions are conducted and the (pseudo) spatiality of the specific interfaces through which we access the functionality of this infrastructure. The application of spatial metaphors to digital venues (the second of these two levels) is encouraged and lent credence by at least three factors: (1) the production of illusions of spatiality through processing and display technologies, from the abstracted space of the social media page to virtual reality environments that aim for ever increasing degrees of spatial verisimilitude, (2) the ways in which these venues can seem to afford the gathering of, and interaction between, people, and (3) the understanding of both of these kinds of spaces as both technologically constructed and socially produced,2 allowing parallels to be drawn between the ways in which psychological processes, interpersonal dynamics and control mechanisms operate in both physical and digital venues. However, at least some aspects of the supposed equivalency between digital venues and spatial ones is a false one, for a number of reasons, that require a number of distinctions. The first distinction has to do with the nature of the common medium upon which physical and digitally-mediated publics are based (the first of the two levels discussed above). In both physical and digital venues of interpersonal interaction, there are societal factors that serve to marginalize certain segments of society from participation. However, there are also significant differences in some of the other hurdles to be overcome for participation in these two types of forum. For digital venues, participation can be limited in an absolute sense by lack of access to the technology necessary to use the Internet or communications channels, which can be affected by factors such as one’s economic situation, geopolitical location or education. The basic technology essential for participation in physical public space, on the other hand, is that of our first prosthesis, the body, underscoring the nature of participation in these spaces as a birthright, as it is linked to the embodiment by which we become human (Arendt 1998 [1958]). However, even granted free and universal access and accessibility (which can by no means be taken for granted), public space can only function as such to the extent that it is reachable within the practical constraints imposed by our bodies and our technologies of bodily transportation. The second distinction is in terms of the different forms taken by construction or formation of the individual sites in the digital and the physical cases. Physical public space is forged from the spatial reserve of the material world by technologies of extraction or exemption of zones, taken from the supply of urban space and the economies of private ownership; digital platforms and networks by technologies are created through the production of new “space” based on the manufacture of new

2  Many have applied LeFebvre’s concept of the production of space to virtual worlds (McIntosh, 2008) and other digital social platforms.

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computer memory and software. Digital “space” is for all practical purposes endlessly extensible, producible and reproducible. Urban public space can be understood as constituting a portion of total urbanized territory that has been designated or appropriated as such by strategies and tactics. The creation of physical urban public space is a doubly extractive process. Urban land is created by extraction from a limited pool of resources (the land surface of the planet),3 and in turn public space is created by extraction or exemption of urbanized land from the default of private ownership (or, in cases where property is state-­ owned, sanctioned durable private tenure).4 Both of these extractive practices ­operate both through official means of policy and public works, and via the informal means of occupation and appropriation.5 The creation of digital (metaphorical) space, on the contrary, is a doubly additive process, actualized through the production of new data storage and processing equipment and the establishment of new applications, new sites on the platform of existing applications, or extensions of existing platforms. The apparent unlimited potential for such expansion is belied by the fact that such technological infrastructure itself requires extraction of materials. Many of the essential materials, such as silicon, are abundant, and the limits imposed by their availability are more theoretical than practical. Others, such as the rare earth metals, over 90% of the supply of which is controlled by China, are in some cases so scarce or so unevenly-distributed that their supply can be seen as constantly under threat of disruption or shortfall.

3  And, of course, preceding this extraction is the paring-down of the limitless expanse of space to the vanishingly miniscule portion thereof that is subject to human habitation, as determined by the exigencies imposed by the requirements and limitations of our biological bodies. 4  As of 2010, around 3.6 million square kilometers of the earth’s 149 million square kilometers of land area was urbanized (World Bank), or about 2.4 percent of the planet’s dry surface. The InterAmerican Development Bank proposed a normative allotment of 7–10 hectares of public space for every 100,000 urban dwellers (IDB, 2013). At the current world population of 7.6 billion and urbanization rate of 54 percent of the population, this yields a norm of 2870 to 4100 square kilometers of urban public space (a total size between the sizes of the urban areas of, say, Nagoya and Los Angeles), from .08 percent and .11 per cent of urbanized areas, or around 1/40,000 of earth’s land area. 5  It is acknowledged that these are time-bound (and in many cases place-bound) limitations. The era of colonization and westward expansion in North America sustained, for a time, imaginaries of unbounded potential for settlement. Similar imaginaries linked to the promise of maritime and extraterrestrial expansion of human settlement have perennially gained and lost currency in the modern era. The parameters of the limits of potential future expansion of geographical space for settlement are quantifiable (the water surface of the earth 361 million square kilometers, the surface of the moon 38 million, the surface of Mars 145 million, augmentable by above-ground and below ground multiplication of area, as well as artificial space colonies, dependent on available technologies and resources). Trans-human developments of the future that enable the decoupling of human consciousness from human bodies would require the development of an understanding of publics decoupled from material space, which would entail a fundamental reconfiguration of concepts of being-together as humans.

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Universal Media Though not explicitly spatial in nature, perhaps the most resilient impetus for perceiving an equivalency between the worldwide mesh of digital networks and the physical commons of the world, addressed earlier in this chapter, is the ability of these technologies to not just reproduce the functions of many earlier technologies (photography, videography, telephony, printing, television, radio…) but to transcend the limitations imposed on them by the physical processes and principles on which they were based, as if this medium provided an endlessly malleable material for the extension of human technological capabilities, leading to the suggestion that digital technologies constitute a “universal medium.” While the digital media may be plural in terms of the way this group of technologies is experienced and appropriated, in effect it is a singular, digital medium to which a variety of interfaces are fashioned. Putting aside, momentarily, the hyperbolic use of the term “universal,” the fact that we see digital technologies as a medium—a universal one, at that— speaks to the current conceived ontological status of these technologies. It is tempting to draw parallels to space and materials as media but there is a difference. In this apparent shared “universality” it is easy to discern, on the surface, the qualities that may seem to support claims to an equivalency between digital venues and physical ones. Space could be seen as the original universal medium, upon which all other physical media rest: a “medium of media” within which the material of these media exist and the processes of working these media and interacting with the resulting media artifacts take place. However, the relationship between the universal medium and the individual media artifacts and venues is different in the two cases. The increasing use of Internet Protocol (IP) by nearly all communications media—telephone, radio, television—masks the fact that what might seem, if we only look at the interface, as different technologies, are in effect all appendages of a single, increasingly universal medium of digital technology. ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), which allowed transmission of multiple media over a phone line, was an important step towards the universalization of the medium. This has been extended through intelligent networks, broadband networks, satellite networks and microwave networks (Graham and Marvin 1996: 20–23), and subsequent network types in the years since then. There have also been innovations in filling in the gaps in the “digital divide” between those who have access to these technologies and networks and those who do not, exemplified by the recent declaration of Internet access as a basic human right. The currently trendy concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) is founded on the universal nature of digital media, allowing for networks of interrelation and communication between a vast range of different physical artifacts embedded with an equally diverse range of digital technology applications. This has at least two implications relevant to this inquiry into spatial practice. The pervasiveness of points of access to the World Wide Web means that our movement through and behavior in physical space and virtual space are increasingly intertwined, such that all spatial practice is also digital practice and vice versa (compare to van’t Hof and van Est’s

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(2011: 13) claim that “we are living in the net”). Secondly, it means that digital entities are increasingly being equipped with physical bodies or prostheses (see Chap. 5).

The Particularity of Public Space (Space Matters) To understand the particular role of public space, among the many other elements of the commons, in the constitution of societies, requires an appreciation of both its publicness—that it is accessible to all—and its spatiality—that it is a portion of the limited physical space of the world. The interface—that which is co-constructed between us such that we can interact with each other and—through this interaction, forge links—empathy and understanding and work together on something shared, exemplifies publicness. However, it does not address the particular place of public space among the many classes of public goods (public media, public knowledge, etc.). For this, it is necessary to appreciate the necessity of physical, material spatiality. Physical public spaces can be seen as instances or fragments of the totality of space, and our experiences and actions in these spaces are bound by the innate rules of space as a continuum—the force of gravity, the laws of physics, the rules of optics and perspective. Digital venues have no such relationship to the universal medium in which they are rooted. Digital networks also operate within the laws of physics and have a spatiality—they are embodied in material and distributed in space—but this spatiality is not experienced by humans for the most part, and the spatiality of the network has no relation to the experience of an individual website, mobile phone conversation or use of an app. William Gibson’s (1984) vision of cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation… a graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system,” in which the global datasphere lay spread out like a vast and complex virtual landscape that can be navigated and cohabited by the all who “jack in,” comes closer to a virtual public realm than the form that the Web has actually taken. There are no such vistas in the layperson’s experience of actually existing cyberspace. Also, there is no primordial interface between humans and digital networks, equivalent to what the body is to physical space, that precedes and unifies the ways in which these networks are experienced. The interface to each digital technology system is always designed—as much a human prosthesis reaching out to the Web as a technological peripheral reaching out from digital systems to humans. Therein is grounded the emergence of experience design as a design sub-discipline that has become a central tenet of interaction design (Shedroff 2001). Returning to Lefebvre’s conceptualization, the space of human societies must always be understood in terms of a layering of human actions, interactions, conceptions and constructions, of which the actions conducted, and the structures and artifacts created, via digital technologies, constitute a subset. At the same time, the

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coalescence of the multiple instances of these technologies into a “universal” digital “technosphere,” with pseudo-spatial qualities, evokes particular considerations, which have been explored throughout this chapter. What is necessitated is not the assumption of a facile equivalence between physical and digital spatial realms, but a detailed investigation of the hybrid practices and constructions that are produced in the performance of urban life that is always embedded in both of these realms.

References Acconci V (1990) Public space in a private time. Crit Inq 16(4):900–918 Altheide DL (2013) Media logic, social control, and fear. In: Couldry N, Hepp A (guest eds) Communication theory 23(3). Special issue: conceptualizing mediatization, pp 223–238 Arendt H (1998) [1958] The human condition, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Berry DM (2013) Against remediation. In: Lovink G, Rasch M (eds) Unlike us reader: social media monopolies and their alternatives. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam Bolter JD, Grusin R (2000) Remediation: understanding new media. MIT Press, Cambridge Bourdieu P (1994) Structures, habitus, power: basis for a theory for symbolic power. In: Dirks NB, Eley G, Ortner SB (eds) Culture/power/history: a reader in contemporary social theory. Princeton University Press, Princeton Carr S, Francis M, Rivlin LG, Stone AM (1992) Public space (environment and behavior series). Cambridge University Press, New York de Certeau (1984) The practice of everyday life (trans: Rendall S). University of California Press, Berkeley Fraser N (1990) Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text 25(26):56–80 Gibson W (1984) Neuromancer. Ace, New York Giddens A (1986) The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration. University of California Press, Berkeley Glanville R (1997) Behind the curtain. In: Ascott R (ed) Consciousness reframed I. UWC, Newport Goodsell CT (2003) The concept of public space and its democratic manifestations. Am Rev Public Admin 33(4):361–383 Graham S, Marvin S (1996) Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. Routledge, New York Habermas J (1984 [1981]) Theory of communicative action, volume one: reason and the rationalization of society (trans. McCarthy TA). Beacon, Boston Habermas J (1987 [1981]) Theory of communicative action, volume two: lifeworld and system: a critique of functionalist reason (trans. McCarthy TA). Beacon, Boston Hecht J (2016) The bandwidth bottleneck that is throttling the Internet. Nature magazine online. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-­bandwidth-­bottleneck-­that-­is-­throttling-­the-­ internet/. Accessed 20 Nov 2018 Hou J (2012) Making public, beyond public space. In: Shiffman R, Bell R, Brown LJ, Elizabeth L (eds) Beyond Zuccotti park: freedom of assembly and the occupation of public space. New Village Press, Oakland, pp 89–98 Klein N (2001) Reclaiming the commons. New Left Rev 9(9) Lefebvre H (1991 [1974]) The production of space (trans. Smith DN). Blackwell, Oxford Leibniz GW, Clarke S, Ariew R (2000 [1716]) Leibniz and Clarke: correspondence. Hackett, Indianapolis Lessig L (2004) Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. Penguin, New York

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Leszczynski A (2015) Spatial mediation. Prog Hum Geogr 39(6):729–751 Massey D (2005) For space. SAGE, London McLuhan M (1964) Understanding media: the extensions of man. Mentor, New York Miles M (1997) Art, space and the city: public art and urban futures. Routledge, New York Miraftab F (2004) Invented and invited spaces of participation: neoliberal citizenship and feminists’ expanded notion of politics. J Trans Womens Gender Stud 1(1). http://web.cortland.edu/ wagadu/vol1–1toc.html. Accessed 22 Nov 2019 Mumford L (1981) The culture of cities. Praeger, Westport Mumford L (2010 [1934]) Technics and civilization. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Nim E (2016) Nanodemonstrations as media events: networked forms of the Russian protest movement. In: Baker M, Blaagaard BB (eds) Citizen media and public spaces: diverse expressions of citizenship and dissent. Routledge, New York Obrist HU, Brand S (2013) “We haven’t noticed that we are as gods”: Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Stewart brand. Electronic Beats Magazine Pask G (1969) The architectural relevance of cybernetics. Archit Des 7(6):494–496 Relph E (1976) Place and placelessness. Pion Limited, London Sadler S (2008) An architecture of the whole. J Archit Educ 61(4):108–129 Sassen S (2006) Making public interventions in today’s massive cities. Static 04, London Shedroff N (2001) Experience design. Waite Group Press, San Francisco Simmel G (1975 [1903]) The metropolis and mental life. In: Wolff KH (ed) The sociology of Georg Simmel. Free Press, New York Simone AM (2004) For the city yet to come: changing African life in four cities. Duke University Press, Durham Suchman L (1987) Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication (learning in doing: social, cognitive and computational perspectives). Cambridge University Press, New York Thompson JB (1995) The media and modernity: a social theory of the media. Polity, Cambridge Tuan YF (1977) Space and place: the perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Valentine G (2013) Children should be seen and not heard: the production and transgression of adults’ public space. Urban Geogr 17(3):205–220 Van’t Hof C, van Est R (2011) Introduction: living in the net. In: Van’t Hof C, van Est R, Daemens F (eds) Check in/check out: the public space as an internet of things. NAI010, Rotterdam, pp 11–31 Winner L (1980) Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus 109(1):121–136

Chapter 5

Constructing Public Space: Embodiment and Emplacement

Abstract  Classic notions of public life and public space, grounded in the importance of tangible bodies in physical spaces (and their interrelationships), have been complicated by new adjacencies and connectivities afforded by digital technologies. Public space, and public bodies, increasingly take the form of cyborg entities, with the intermeshing and interaction of biological and technological components and actors, introducing new notions of citizenship and of agency in the performance of public life and the co-construction of public space, as well expanded apparatuses of control over the public realm and of empowerment of individuals and publics. Keywords  Embodiment · Emplacement · Cyborg publics · Worldedness · Grounded interaction

The Body in/as the World An obvious difference between physical and digital/virtual venues of interaction is the presence of the body in the former and the absence thereof in the latter. The body is at the same time the most fundamental piece of private property but also that which appears in public to manifest an individual as a member of a public. The body is projected into the digital domain, both as a generator of data (biometric, locational, etc.) and as the prosthesis with which we manipulate input devices and interfaces. We are given (or in many cases, we construct) cyphers and avatars that are our representations in digital forums in which we meet with others. But these are not equivalent to the flesh and blood body by which we appear and stake our claim in physical public space. In a sense, the lack of bodily presence may be the primary argument for declining to acknowledge online and tele-mediated forums of interaction as public spaces, in the sense developed by Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958]) and the intellectual tradition that she founded. Bodily co-presence—appearing and © The Author(s) 2021 T. Jachna, Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square, The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_5

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acting physically vis-à-vis others—entails risks and commitments that cannot credibly be achieved in mediated interaction, with arbitrary and expendable avatars in infinitely extensible spaces. To speak of the body as an input-output device through which the self (understood as the mind) interacts with the world is quickly revealed as a lazy expedience that perpetuates the idea of mind-body dualism. The embodiment perspective sees the body as more than an interface: it is part of the “computational loop” (Clark 1997) through which the self is embedded in the world. That is, computation is not contained in the mind but happens in the world, of which the body is a part. Rejecting Cartesian/Kantian mind-body dualism, the body is the tool by which humans intervene in the biophysical world (Mauss 1973). It is the probe through which we gather sensory impressions of the world that serve as the basis for our knowledge of the world, just as it is the instrument through which we undertake changes in the world to form it to our needs and visions. Human consciousness and perception only exist insofar as they are anchored in a body, and are developed and put into practice in the body’s actions vis-à-vis other embodied entities, including but not limited to other humans (Gibson 1979; Bateson 1972). Our bodies are always at the same time physical bodies in space and virtual bodies in virtual environments (Stone 1995). In both senses, there are games of revealing and hiding the body, appearance and disguise, surveillance and control (see also Chap. 8 of this book). Our body is the world, in the sense that we perceive the world via our senses and not otherwise. The separation of information and matter is a conceptual one. There is no information without material embodiment, and all matter has the potential to embody information (c.f. Luke’s (2004) assertion that the division between the physical and the virtual is illusory). Digital phenomena are also physical, in that at their root they are grounded in material switches set to “on” or “off” (Hoy 2005) and in networks and ethers of conductive matter through which signals are transmitted. The illusion of the mind-body dualism is related to this. N. Katherine Hayles derides the idea that a human mind could be downloaded or transmitted independently of the body, lamenting on how “information lost its body” (Hayles 1999: 2), allowing the type of faulty thinking that equates of humans and computers. By extension, this is the same fundamental fallacy that allows the equating of so-called “cyberspace” with physical space. The posthuman perspective concentrates on patterns of information rather than of materiality. Information technology is that which allows the carbon-based and the silicon-based to function as a hybrid integrated system. Coherences in these systems are understood in terms of information “flows,” in Hayles’ terms, that link biotic and digital components of a system together. While they are physically and materially separate and distinct types of entities, from the perspective of information they form a coherent system. To say that information flows or is transmitted is, on the face of it, a misrepresentation. Matter flows, energy flows, but information as such does not flow, although we can agree to conventions of encoding patterns into, and directing the flow of, matter and energy, such that these patterns can be decoded by others intercepting these flows, provided they are privy to the same conventions.

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In the posthuman perspective, the body can be seen as the first of our many prostheses that we learn to steer, and through which we encounter, explore and manipulate the world, including interaction with other agents in the world. Two of Glanville’s distinctions are pertinent here: firstly, his assertion that cybernetics sees things in terms of information processes, as distinct from the systems theory perspective that sees them in terms of energy processes, and secondly that information is not something that can be transmitted between entities but rather must be constructed by each entity for itself through processes of conversation (Glanville 2004). There is never a direct link between our brains and our environment (Hayles 1999: 10; Maturana 1970). Our consciousness of our environment is always mediated (first of all through our bodies and its senses). The observer can only see what is allowed by its own sensory and cognitive organization. Information needs a body, a medium, and indeed is inseparable from being part of the state of a particular body at a particular time (Hayles 1999: 13). Cybernetics has been accused of making information seem more important than materiality (Hayles 1999: 50), but information is only ever embodied. When Mitchell (2003) declared “the trial separation of bits and atoms” to be over, he was drawing on a distinction that was phenomenological, not ontological. In one sense, this separation never existed, in that there is no data storage or processing without a (physical) medium, and the parameters of what can be done with data are set by the physical properties—conductivity, etc.—of material. The leaps in speed and functionality sought by quantum computing, at the vanguard of digital technology research, are being achieved by understanding and exploiting ever more fundamental physical properties of matter.

Body + Place: Bodily Coming-Together The more cities sprawl, and the more individualistic, commercial and fragmented urban life becomes, the more crucial the role of public space (Castells 2004). With digital technologies, the bodily bringing-together of people in itself no longer “goes without saying” as a requisite for real-time interaction. Rather, it has become a feature that can be designed-in (or designed-out) or sought-out (or avoided), as desired. The difference in the metaphorical “bandwidth” for public interaction available in collocated and non-collocated interaction is narrowing, even as the nature of these two channels of interaction diverge. In online and other digitally-mediated interaction, it has become necessary to explicitly specify if an action or interaction, a quality or characteristic, is IRL (“in real life”), rather than in or through one of a number of digital platforms or networks of connectivity. “Where we are physically no longer determines where and who we are socially” (Meyrowitz 1985: 115). This evokes “cyberpunk” fiction author William Gibson’s (1984) “meatspace,” to which cyberdenizens occasionally, often grudgingly, must turn their attention for the sake of maintaining the material support necessary for their online lives, the most essential aspect of which is the body itself. IRL is also used to make distinc-

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tions, or to draw parallels, between an actor’s on-screen persona and his or her offscreen character and actions (as when actors who play a couple on television are also dating IRL). Such drawing-together of online activity and play acting, while distinguishing both from the world of material things, actual locations, sincerely felt emotions and non-simulated qualities, is telling. It is not that the qualities displayed by people in face-to-face interactions are without artifice—every encounter with an other in the public realm is an act of theater, in which one tries to affect the other’s impression of oneself by dramaturgical means (Goffman 1959). Rather, it is the case that, despite whatever personas or avatars one may project in the various fora in which one is active, there is still an assumption that there is for each mentally stable individual, a core of personhood that serves as a datum for all of the roles that a person may play. It comes down to the contingencies of the body. This is in one sense the crux of what physical public space still is: the arena in which the necessity of the body, and of sharing space with other bodies, is practiced. So, we define physical public space in the digital era as those places in which our embodiment together with others in a shared space is played-out. This is a performed metaphor for our need to share the earth together. The designation of public space as an exception from the rule of private ownership establishes it as something that is not endlessly multipliable, reproducible or extensible (as virtual platforms are), that must be shared among all (which virtual platforms need not be, and never are). Places in which resources are expended and the legacy of the expenditure of these resources lingers on in the built forms, the heritage, that is manifested in the architecture of the place. A reminder that the place has existed through the past and that our interventions will form and contain part of the life world of future generations. The overlaying of digital infrastructure and digitally mediated spatial practices onto the physical spaces of the world creates a phenomenon that has variably been referred to as “hybrid spaces” (De Souza e Silva 2006) or “virtual co-emplacement” (Moores 2006). A typical initial way of thinking about the relationship between digital networks and space is in terms is hybridization (Leszczynski 2017). “Hybrid spaces” are seen as emerging from the confluence of the supposedly erstwhile separate worlds of virtuality and materiality by new affordances offered by digital technologies. The idea that virtuality first emerged with digital technologies has been roundly refuted, and human experience has always combined physical and virtual components. Similarly, space, conceived as “real estate,” exists at the same time as a physical continuum and as a database of units to which values are assigned (Sassen 2006: 5). In all such distinctions, though, the digital dimension is produced, whereas the physicality is given (or always already produced), meaning that the digital dimension is an “inflection” of a physical entity. This distinguishes these digital objects from those without physical anchor. In any case, digital networks are always based on physical infrastructures (Blum 2012). These networks are virtual only in the same way that any network of human relations is virtual, a set of intangible connections that cannot exist without a physical medium.

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Embodiment and Worldedness That the prophesied demise of the need for physical coming-together of people that was meant to have been caused by the proliferation of digital alternatives to daily life activities like shopping, socializing and studying has not come to pass has been attributed, alternatively, to the power of place and an innate human need for face-to-­ face contact (Townsend 2004). Indeed, digital communications have in some cases been applied to enable physical gatherings of people and the invention of new forms of tangible communality. What emerges is a geography of islands—both physical and perceptual—linked by flows, of which the phenomenological flow of perception and experience is one aspect, within which each individual builds a personalized and unique “micro-­ universe” in which the self can fragment and multiply, playing different roles in different contexts (Wachter 2012: 5)—the “space of flows” overtaking the “space of places” (Castells 2004). This raises another possible interpretation of the term “multiple publics,” which must be understood not just in the sense of multiple segments of society occupying a shared public realm in a given urban locality, but also in terms of each individual being embedded in different public spheres simultaneously (possibly presenting a different face and playing a different role in each of them). We show up in public space as multiple subjectivities and multiple personas, and the public spaces in which we appear are also multiple. It is precisely the supposed placelessness and timelessness of experience afforded by digital networks that are seen by some as anathema to the city and urban public space (i.e. Goldberger 2003). Referring to Arendt’s terms, it has been purported that they release one from the bodily ties to physical space which are at the foundation of the phenomenological apprehension of the common world. In severing people from the perception of embeddedness in, and dependency on time, from the experience of duration, delay and distance, there is also a dismantling of the acknowledgement of a common history in which present publics exist in relation to past and future publics, while the personalized, body-specific, mobile, miniaturized artifacts of interface with these systems re-embed the physicality of urban amenities with the embodied individual, rather than with the enclosed and shared space. Worldlessness (Arendt 1998 [1958]) arises when there is nothing between people. The world is the most fundamental interface. “We might wonder about what will become of the concrete world, in which our bodies are unavoidably grounded, as it becomes progressively disconnected from social relationships that are increasingly abstract and technologically distanced from a common world of things” (Barney 2003: 111). The coffee house, one of the apocryphal cradles of Habermas’ public realm, has to a large extent changed from a hotbed of face-to-face public interaction to a wi-fi hotspot at which individuals station themselves as they conduct non-collocated interaction with remote others and with data (Varnelis and Friedberg 2008: 15; Habermas 1989 [1962]). Ostensibly, we are presented with a constantly increasing range of “worlds,” accessed via the Internet or gaming and simulation software, within which we can

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immerse our attentions. The genealogy of these worlds can be traced back to sports fields within which specific rules, roles and value systems inhere, the many architectural heterotopias (Foucault 1997) of institutional complexes and intentional communities, and the narrative-driven environments of theme parks. “Worlds” can be endlessly multiplied: “the world” cannot. Given the definitions of the public realm and public life discussed in the previous section, it would be difficult to defend a claim that the global reach of digital communications networks and social media platforms unequivocally and always detracts from public life. Access to digital networks gives individuals the possibility of participating in several dimensions of what would be considered some of the core aspects of publicity: pursuing topics of interest to them, coming into contact with diverse opinions and reaching (and being a member of) broad and vast audiences for one’s online performances of the self (Flichy 2010). From the point of view of the individual plugged into the affordances of digital technologies, there is no discontinuity between the global and the local. They are phenomenologically linked in each individual’s stream of experience. It is not that individuals who are collocated in space no longer share a common experiential world; it is that each of these individuals is increasingly likely to also be plugged in to other channels that mediate and distract from the immanence and importance of that which is in the embodied space that one occupies, each vying for a portion of one’s hyper attention. Virtual venues are the focus of much of our attention and the tableau on which we project our public representations, but by definition can never become the locus of our bodies. While there have always been virtual experiences inserted into public space—from reading a newspaper to being distracted by advertising billboards to daydreaming—until hand-held electronics these abstracted experiences were rarely social in nature. Whereas public space is made by the human application of technologies to pre-­ existing land, the Internet is at is base a technological construct. Both of these commons are embodied physically, but typically our only direct experience of the spatiality of the material construct of the Internet or communications network is the device in our pocket or on our desk. The spatialities of the different “venues” that we “visit” through these devices are not those of the artifact itself.

Mediating Urban Space The trope of “space” has found ready and widespread acceptance as a metaphor in digital environments, most famously in the term “cyberspace,” which supposes that a (distinct) virtual world or worlds can be conceived and experienced as a three-(or more)-dimensional extension separate from, but in many ways homologous to, physical space. But this is a false equivalency. Our bodies are also spatial entities. We become and remain urban entities by integrating the spatial/material body into the infrastructures of the city. Urban food

Technologies, Embodied and Emplaced

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systems span from widely distributed farms and factories through logistical networks of transport vehicles and interstitial nodes to spaces of food retail, production and consumption, via the gateways of our mouths to the chambers, antechambers and conduits of our digestive systems. Bodies take their places in the micro-­spatiality of transport systems as cargo and control units, just as the macro-spatiality of these systems both defines, and is defined by, an urban society’s logistical logic of what bodies are to be placed where, when and for how long. Similarly, bodies are essential spatial components of public space. The presence of bodies is a prerequisite for the formation of public spaces. The outer surface of the body—at the threshold between our biological interior and the shared spatial, material world—is the nexus between the public and private spheres. One’s body is at the same time one’s most private possession and the means—the interface—by which we become present and active in public space. Atmospheric perturbations, chemical changes, photons, airborne particles and the molecules of the atmosphere itself collide with the body, where sensory organs pick them up as the raw data from which all of our phenomenological impressions of the world, and the human and non-human agents with whom we share it, are constructed. Cultural conventions of apparel and architecture mediate and modulate the ways in which bodies are revealed or concealed and provide semantic cues as to roles and hierarchies. Because of its threshold nature, the body is the flashpoint for much contestation in public life, as expressed in the anti-street-harassment slogan, “my body is not public space.”

Technologies, Embodied and Emplaced The primacy of the architectural formation of public spaces as a primary frame of public life has been downplayed in recent discourse. Indeed, numerous critics have imputed the grand, formal architectural formations of classical and modernist public spaces with representing and enforcing unilateral and restrictive regimes of control, legitimizing and accommodating power structures that vaunt the value systems and world views of some segments of society, while delegitimizing, erasing or marginalizing others (Ockman 1996). A certain strain of techno-utopianism saw digital technologies as offering escape from this tyranny. The right to influence the design, formation and control of public space has typically been primarily the privilege of governments and dominant publics, and a history of maneuvers and negotiations between the state and the dominant public can be read in the history of the design and development of such places. Counterpublics, contradistinctively, have been distinguished by their tactical appropriation of the affordances of these spaces for their own ends, that are not formed by or for them, but which they occupy and engage. Physical space and material constructions have been used to express and reify structures of power and influence in societies since ancient times, through allocating possession of land and control over material resources. Ownership and tenure of land, the control of

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supplies and flows of material and labor, access to financial resources and ability to influence social and political processes are generally concentrated in the hands of the state and dominant publics. However, this most ancient, material-spatial, datum has always been overlaid by networks of relations and interactions that have expressed themselves spatially and materially in more subtle ways. If the genius of molding material and space to express and accommodate certain of these networks is the realm of the state and dominant publics, the genius of sustaining and performing such networks in ways that subvert, appropriate and transcend physical space and materiality has been demonstrated by counterpublics. But of course, our use of digital technologies also always takes place within the physical world. McCullough (2007) describes what he refers to as a “paradigm shift” in digital technologies from web-based, virtual “cyberspace” to “pervasive computing,” in which computation and our interaction with it becomes distribute in the physical world, where it “pours out beyond the screen, into our messy places, under our laws of physics” (McCullough 2004: 9). So, in effect we have come full-­ circle. Imaginaries of the potential of digital technologies in the late twentieth century tended towards a fascination with their ability to create completely synthetic experiences that played on the senses (and even emotions) in a way that mimicked physical reality but stood separate from it. In the early twenty-first century, these technologies have been brought back into contact with our experience of the physical world, deepening and supplementing our experiences as embodied beings in the world through applications such as augmented reality, mixed reality and geo-tagging. With the statement, “the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it,” Weiser (1991: 1) is credited with first proposing the idea of ubiquitous computing, the state in which computers become invisible and embedded in the environment rather than existing as discreet objects, and interactivity becomes a pervasive quality of the environment rather than an intentional interaction with a computer-as-object. McCullough (2004) argues that ubiquitous computing technology can make for a deepening of sense of place. In any case, with ubiquitous computing came a shift from computers as objects with which one interacts to computing as a quality of the environment. One is always within the computational apparatus. Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer of the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab coined the term “tangible bits” (Ishii and Ullmer 1997) to refer to the conjoining of physical objects with digital systems, and perceptible events with invisible computational processes, in ways that support the instinctive manipulation and perception of the digital world through one’s senses and bodily movements, seamlessly linking “bits and atoms.” Their concept of “tangible user interfaces” (Ullmer and Ishii 2001) describes physical objects or environments that function as “handles” by which people can grasp—in both the cognitive and physical sense of the word—and manipulate digital data and systems. Dourish (2001) appeals to a phenomenological model of action in the world to argue for an understanding of interaction as tangible and social, located in social and physical reality rather than abstracted in virtual spaces or localized at interfaces. The past two decades have seen hundreds of projects and proposals

The Body and its Others: Cyborg Publics

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applying digital technologies in the city to extend, duplicate, contradict, obviate, tweak or otherwise enter into a co-defining relation with social and spatial practice in cities (McGrath and Shane 2005; Fusedspace 2004). Bodies are sited in, and move through, spaces; personal digital devices are sited on bodies. Digital network individualism relies on the detachment of devices from places and their attachment to bodies, the virtual disappearance of time and bandwidth limitations—the overall disappearance, backgrounding and ubiquity of digital technologies and their receding into the fringes of the consciousness by virtue of their embedding in our habits. “Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something ­sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. […] in this way are we freed to use them without thinking ...” (Weiser 1991). On the one hand, there is physical or tangible interaction, that involves tactile, often manual, grasping and manipulation of objects, surfaces and people, within one’s cone of physical and tactile focus, that are linked to “bits.” On the other hand, spatial or ambient interaction involves awareness of “bits” existing in the environment around us, of which we may have only a peripheral perception. Historically, the consciousness of sharing a common world was engendered by a sustained retinue of performances of human bodies in shared physical public spaces, bringing issues of embodiment and emplacement the forefront. The increasingly distributed, technologically mediated and remote nature of interaction facilitated by digital technologies raises the critical question of how, if at all, such a consciousness can be maintained among groups of individuals who never confront each other bodily, and who will never have a direct experience of collocation in a shared physical space. That being said, digital technologies do not intrinsically drive people apart, as discovered for example by at an early “wired suburb” of Toronto in the 1990s, in which those residents provided with Internet and other digital amenities actually had more contact with neighbors, more community involvement and used digital connections to organize offline get-togethers (Hampton and Wellman 2000; Oppenheimer 2014). Hampton et al.’s (2015) research in recreating the short films documenting people in public spaces in New York shot by organizational analyst William Whyte in the 1969 (Whyte 1988), found that very few (a maximum of 10%) of people in the filmed spaces were using mobile phones, and that these were using them in situations of transition, going or waiting to meet people, and not ignoring the one they were with. He also found that those on phones tended to loiter longer in public spaces and not just pass through (Oppenheimer 2014).

The Body and Its Others: Cyborg Publics A cyborg is defined as “a self-regulating organism that combines the natural and artificial together in one system” (Gray 2001: 2). The cyborg, rather than the machine or the animal, becomes the apt metaphor for human society in the

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twenty-­first century (Gray et  al. 1995). The posthuman perspective must be assumed, that there is no “natural self” independent of our prostheses (of which the body is the first and which we have been accruing by adding layers of technology) (Hayles 1999). The application of the cyborg metaphor to cities in the era of digital technologies is an obvious and well-worn trope (Mitchell 1998, 2003). The boundary between human and technology is fuzzy, and defining it is neither simple nor perhaps really important, compared to more pressing distinctions of an ethical nature (Gray 2001: 12). The body itself is the first technology, to which we accrue the technologies of writing, the machines of societies and communities, the apparatus of cities, and the prostheses of communication tools. It is difficult to imagine being a contemporary human without most if not all of these. The extension of the body through technologies is necessary for the very constitution of contemporary societies. As demonstrated by Sennett (1996), there has been a reciprocal relationship between the image of the body and the image of the city throughout urban history. The equivalent image of the body in the networked, mediated city is that of the cyborg. Just as the ideas of the cyborg body and the cyborg mind refer to a hybridization of biological and mechanical components to repair or augment the human organism, cyborg publics can refer to an analogous stage of evolution in how we understand the public (or publics), as being constituted by humans, non-human agents, humans augmented by technologies, and other configurations in which the actions and interactions of humans or groups of humans that construct the public realm are meditated by digital technologies, and in which digital artifacts enter as public agents in their own right. The cyborg perspective reconfigures distinctions, not only between the biological and the technological, but also between public and private, between Nature and Culture (in realizing the lack of clear boundaries between the human and the animal), and between the physical and the non-physical (in the ubiquity of invisible micro-electronic technological elements that permeate and affect the material world) (Haraway 1991 [1985]: 293–294). As machines continue to make strides in not just mimicking the outward appearance of human activities, but become capable of exhibiting volition, autonomy and the ability to design, humans become increasingly mechanized (Haraway 1991 [1985]: 294). And within the Internet of Things, machines begin to communicate and interact. With artificial intelligence they begin to mimic learning and reasoning. With cyborg publics, they begin to engage in public interactions, both with each other and with humans. Rejecting what he sees as Haraway’s “biocentric” and individualistic understanding of the cyborg as an augmented and modified human, Luke (2004: 107) argues for including more “machinic” and collectivized imaginings of cyborgs, in terms of the “fusion of machine/human, animal/human, non-physical/physical regions”—of which cities would seem to be clear examples. The cyborgian has been used as a way to describe and analyze the current stage of the development of cities (Swyngedouw 1996; Gandy 2005). The built environment in all of its scales is our prosthesis and we are not independent of it. Dawkins (1982) referred to this idea as

The Cyborg City

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the “extended phenotype,” leading to a condition in which it is difficult to discern definitively where the augmented human ends and where the environment begins.

The Cyborg City The cyborg state is a constitutive fact—a definition even—of the city, and perhaps of human life on earth. It is difficult to think of human societies, cultures or individuals in a relationship with the world that is not always already constituted by the fact that we interface with our environments and each other as human-machine composites (Luke 2004). It is the human body or community stripped of its technological extensions that is an abstraction and a concept that exists in concept only. In actual practice and lived experience, every human body, be it individual or societal, is a cyborg, in which the biotic body and brain seldom interface with the world except with and through their non-biotic extensions, augmentations and alterations. It is taken for granted, whether we make it explicit or not, that when we speak of a human self or collective, we are always talking about a cyborg self or collective. We learn from Maturana and Varela (1980) that the organism and its environment, as a couple, need to be seen as the minimum element of analysis, inseparable from one another. The organism/environment pairing—or structural coupling—in the case of constructed human environments, is in itself a cyborg principle, in which the environment with which we couple is itself in many components a technological artifact produced by us. The cyborg consciousness is one that takes as a matter of course our relatedness with animals and equally with machines (Haraway 1991 [1985]). At the level of information, there is also no boundary between the human and the animal, rooted as they both are in the same language and chemistry of the genetic code. The increasingly “cyborg” character of culture is characterized by the interleaving and mutually causal feedback loop between society and technology, in which each forms the other and relies on the other for its formation and sustainment (Graham and Marvin 1996: 106–107; Bender and Druckrey 1994). When Haraway (1991 [1985]: 295) wrote of a “cyborg world,” ushered in by the “final imposition of a grid of control on the planet,” she referred to the “Star Wars” orbital defense system that has by the present day faded into the background of our consciousness as just one of numerous such technological matrices imposed by us on the planet, up to and including the Internet. In the Anthropocene perspective, the entire planet is now congruent with the man-made environment, as human actions affect weather patterns, chemistry and ecosystems; watersheds are reconciled and engineered as hydrological systems; land ownership, mapping and datafication bring every bit of land under human rule and control, and more and more land is terraformed and urbanized through “anthropogenic” means (Luke 2004: 108; McKibben 1989). Nature should not be mistakenly thought of as a set of scenes or elements, but rather as a set of forces, systems, patterns and processes, all of which

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are being interceded in, both intentionally and unintentionally—by accident or by design—by human action. We live in a society of cyborgs and also a cyborg society (Gray et al. 1995: 3). Just as our individual bodies become cyborgs through the extension of technologies, communal social, commercial and governmental bodies also become increasingly cyborgian in nature, and with this they become increasingly global, cut loose from place (Gray et al. 1995: 7). While there are certainly numerous ways in which the individual cyborg body affects public spatial practice and perception, for the purposes of this volume we will restrict our inquiry to the cyborgization of the collective public sphere, it being understood that the participants in this sphere are also in themselves cyborg in nature. “Cyborgs remind us that we are always embodied, but that the ways in which we are embodied aren’t simple” (Gray et al. 1995: 7). Bodies are components in technological infrastructures, and bodies are linked to other bodies through these infrastructures, just as technological artifacts are components in bodies and are linked to other technological artifacts through bodies. Each mechanistic and organic component brings with it different needs, capabilities, modes of agency and ways of perceiving. One of the things that the human component brings to the cyborg construct is the need for publics. One can make a distinction between technologies as extensions of the individual body and mind (through digital agents, prostheses and “footprints”), technologies as augmentations of space, and an increasing range of technologies at what might be seen as the interface of the two. This meeting and intermixing can be experienced as taking the form of a reaching-out of each to the other (as in the case of augmented reality) or as the formation of hybrids that muddy the distinction between the individual (body and mind) and place (physical and virtual infrastructure). This is what Crang (2000) has termed “prosthetic sociality: the practice of acting socially at a distance through technological mediation.” It is not possible to completely extricate the cyborg body from this understanding, as “cyborgs offer a new map, a new way to conceive of power and identity” (Gray et al. 1995). The cyborg perspective brings both the specter of a totalizing planetary matrix of control, and also of an evolved way of individuals, “not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints,” being in the world—a world with an expanded population of proximal others, be they human, animal or digital/mechanical. Haraway argues for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.” Strategies of control are not concerned with maintaining the “integrity of natural objects” but with the regulation of “boundary conditions and interfaces” (Haraway 1991 [1985]: 292–302).

Non-Human Socialities Digital technological artifacts can be seen as exhibiting a sociality among themselves, able to influence or “perturb” each other’s behavior independent of any human agency, and via media of communication, such as radio or microwaves, that

Non-human Socialities

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are not detectable by human senses (Ash 2013). The Internet of Things concept makes this stratum of “non-human socialities” and “things talking to things” all the more explicit and pervasive. In their interactions with one another, these digital agents also maintain their own space-times, which Ash refers to as “atmospheres,” not as a modification or intervention into the spatio-temporal world of human life, but as dimensionalities in their own right, to which humans have no access. The expansion of the mind into the mechanized realm, and indeed the creation of a new realm of mechanized mind, raises the responsibility of devising a new ethics (Dupuy 2009). This is what is referred to as “cyborg anthropology,” defined as “the production of humanness through machines” (Downey et  al. 1995: 342). The ­discourse of the cyborg is one of transcending one’s own boundaries as well as transcending the given boundaries of infrastructure. These are “assemblages where agency is distributed between human and nonhuman agents, reenacting embodiment rather than privileging information over matter” (Dias 2011). With the perspective opened up by the cyborg public proposition, any technological infrastructure can be seen as a technologically-constituted “other,” with which we have been sharing the city and in which we are embedded (just as it is embedded in, a citizen of, our societies, we are an element in its guts). The hegemony of the universal medium of digital technologies has an inclusive as well as an exclusive face. They obviate the friction of distance, afford the transmission, processing and inter-pollination of the vast array of media and messages that can be encoded digitally, and link an immense and distributed swathe of human and non-human agents with access to the requisite technologies, affording the formation of a cyborg public realm that is the de facto venue and channel of much of the interaction that constitutes the public sphere of the twenty-first century. By the same token though, anything that cannot be encoded digitally, and any agent without the necessary technologies of access, have no place in this realm. The requirement of converting everything to a common universal medium is the greatest and least visible tyranny. All that does not find its reflection in this register, all that cannot be encoded, is categorically denied entry to this realm. It becomes an enterprise (a game?) of splicing, of tinkering, of the inventing of codes that allow different ways of interfacing human and technological entities and systems. Digital technologies augment individuals’ capacity for sensing and processing, enabling more multidimensional interactions with the urban environment and those others with whom we share it (Wachter 2012). The notion of the ability to disassemble and reassemble practices and identity is central to Haraway’s (1991) take on the cyborg concept. This disassembly and reassembly applies to the way we constitute our identities and connections, the spaces and activities of our lives, the biotic and the technical aspects of our being. Haraway (1991 [1985]: 295) refers specifically to local affinity groups (she mentions the Livermore Action Group and Fission Impossible by name) that bring together individuals with diverse and even seemingly irreconcilable points of view for social action on areas of shared concern, as “cyborg” in nature, for their splicing together without need of reconciliation. The cyborg perspective rejects “naturalizing” concepts in which are coded an implication that they represent the unquestionable and “natural” order of the world,

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and instead adopts concepts that cannot be coded as “natural” but are rather explicitly constructed, tentative and elective (Haraway 1991 [1985]: 301). Replication supplants reproduction, simulation replaces representation, biology as inscription overtakes biology as clinical practice, genetic engineering takes the place of sex, all involving microelectronics in some way. The cyborg perspective is appropriate in seeing public also as not given but constantly reconstituted.

Cyborg Citizenship Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline (Clynes and Kline 1960) coined the term cyborg to refer to the extension of humans through technology to augment the efficacy of human beings, and it is in this spirit that this book applies this concept to the question of publics, asking not simply how technological extensions of the human can be used to patch-up a wounded and deteriorating, or even lost, public life, but rather, what new dimensions and indeed definitions of public are evoked. What new avenues of imagination and ambition are opened up? Following on calls for the acknowledgement of other “human” publics, this raises the challenge of broadening the notion of the public realm to include non-human actors (and perhaps even seeing machinic publics, in which humans play no part, as among the subaltern publics that need to be admitted into the public realm). Just as different cultures have different norms for the inclusion or exclusion of different segments of society in mainstream public life, different cultures also have different attitudes to the cyborg, and to the inclusion of the machinic in our bodies and our societies, with East Asian cultures and particularly Japan being notably welcoming (Gray et al. 1995: 12). This is a type of prejudice that has consequences for the types of publics that can be formed. Based on the assertion that political participation necessitates communication, Gray (2001: 24–26) suggests a “cyborg citizen Turing test” to establish the right of an entity to cyborg citizenship, involving convincing a jury of 12 peers that it can participate in their conversation. The idea of cyborg publics raises the question: what would be the equivalent test for inclusion in a public, and how, in this case, would one define the term “entity?” The machinic networks within which we are embedded, and the prostheses through which we become cognate to our machinic others, are now multiple and disparate. Every citizen inhabits multiple bodies simultaneously (Gray et al. 1995). The cyborg perspective may be the apotheosis of social technologies. Böhlen and Frei (2010) evoke Latour’s (1993 [1991]) concept of the “thing” to articulate the nature of things in gathering, a “parliament of things” that replaces ideas as a point of gathering, as the basis of what is common among all people. This parliament, or any parliament, is brought together not by agreement or similarity, but rather by a need to mediate over disagreements and conflicts, often about restricted resources or clashing rights and expectations. “Gathering together differences” requires the constitution of a (single) public of heterogeneous members rather than a collection

Compositing of Intelligence

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of different publics. Based on this, Böhlen and Frei (2010) propose the need for the design of a new alternative public based on a network of things. In Actor Network Theory, the principle of “generalized symmetry” proposes that all elements in a network, be they human or non-human, biotic or abiotic, should be seen as exercising agency, in that every element has the potential to exert an influence on the behavior of other elements (Latour 2007 [2005]). Thus, technological artifacts should be seen as political actors in that they embody and perpetuate power relations, rights of access, and other mechanisms of control (Winner 1980).

Compositing of Intelligence In assemblages of digital technologies, it is not in the individual sensor or actuator that “intelligence” lies, but in the in-between of the network that joins them. As computers, as discreet elements, disappear and computation increasingly takes the form of conversations and exchanges between heterogeneous devices distributed in space, from one viable perspective, we exist within the computer as working components of it. The very concept of “ambient intelligence” originated as a slogan of the commercial electronics firm Philips, as the moniker for its research and development program to conceive of a system of linked devices as an environment rather than individual devices in an environment (Zelkha and Epstein 1998). Computer intelligence is achieved not by the mimicking of human intelligence, thinking and problem-solving, but by appropriation of humans into the distributed network in a way that parcels-off tasks to human or non-human nodes depending on their capabilities. “Mixing people with information processes requires designers to seek new solutions for the obvious. Just as government comprises more than downloading application forms, public deliberation is more than just blogging” (Böhlen and Frei 2010: 27). Deliberation relies on an aggregate “intelligence” beyond the sum of individual intelligences. Just as the cyborg is the result of a dismantling and re-assembly of the human in reaction to the realities and possibilities of the time, cyborg publics are ongoing projects of seeing the public realm not as a given, but rather as an ongoing experiment. Just as we have inherited physical bodies, we have inherited social bodies that correspond to certain ways of occupying public spaces and performing public life. We have also co-evolved with our web of prostheses, our extended phenotype of technologies. The cyborg perspective offers a way of understanding the “material interface between the body and the city” (Gandy 2005: 28). Understood in this way, publics have always had a cyborg nature, in that they always involved the interfacing of individual bodies and the world at large through technologies such as clothing, the spoken word and the automobile. “Hybrid teams,” in which robots and humans are co-workers, have become commonplace, and the emerging field of “social robotics” explores the design of robots from the point of view of social psychology (Breazeal et al. 2016). The advent of

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cyborg publics raises the issue of how humans and robots interact as agents in the public realm, implying the need for a new field of “public robotics,” as it becomes apparent that human-robot interaction will become an increasingly important facet of future public life. This situation was foreseen by Pask, in his vision of a cybernetic built environment in which human-human, human-machine and machine-­ machine interactions intertwined (Pask 1969). In the manifestation of this vision in which we are currently living, it is less relevant to see the environment as a machine with which we interact, and more relevant to understand it as a public in which heterogeneous human and non-human actors interact in ways that show characteristics more emblematic of public space than of architecture, in that it is not a ­consciously controlled and designed environment with a locus of control, but rather an emergent environment coming from the confrontation of these disparate actors, actions and interactions. “Environment” is not an entity with which we can converse, but a milieu of numerous others from which our interactions construct an environment. That is perhaps a shortfall of the typical, somewhat self-contained and paternalistic/maternalistic, architectural perspective on the interactive environment—seeing the environment as a coherent and singular entity, with which we the inhabitant engage in a conversation. The Futurists declared that “we too are machines, we too are mechanized by the atmosphere that we breathe” (Pannagi and Paladini 2003 [1922]). In seeking to find a common ground for conceiving and designing for the interaction between human and non-human entities, are we furthering the “mechanisation of the mind” or the “humanisation of the machine” (Dupuy 2000, 2009)? Or, in the spirit of Haraway, are we moving towards a new conception of what constitutes a public that emerges from the interaction of these two (Haraway 1991 [1985])? The human-machine distinction is one of the “agonistic dualisms” that Harraway sees as being dismantled through new technologies, in her Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 1991 [1985]). This is achieved by the plethora of hybrid forms between human and machine, enabled by digital technologies, such that there is no purely human or purely machinic entity, but rather a panoply of forms in-between. Cyborg politics is non-essentialized, admitting not just different types of actors, but multiple “languages” of communication, where language must be understood not in the literal sense but in the sense of multiple foundations of meaning-making, “against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly” (Haraway 1991 [1985]). The cyborg perspective implies more than just human-plus-machine. It also includes the notions of feedback loops between the biotic and technological components such that they influence each other and can be seen to come together to form a greater whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Heterogeneous cyborg publics bring into question the appropriateness of seeing public space as a site of symbols of controlling power, monuments of a dominant culture or functions, serving reductivist needs or desires of a specific societal segment (Wiley 2008).

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References Arendt H (1998 [1958]). The human condition, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Ash J (2013) Rethinking affective atmospheres: technology, perturbation and space times of the non-human. Geoforum 49:20–28 Barney D (2003) Invasions of publicity. In: Law Commission of Canada. New perspectives on the public-private divide. UBC Press, Vancouver Bateson G (1972) Steps to an ecology of mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Bender G, Druckrey T (eds) (1994) Culture on the brink: ideologies of technology (discussions in contemporary culture #9). Dia Art Foundation and Bay Press, Seattle Blum A (2012) Tubes: a journey to the center of the internet. Harper Collins, New York Böhlen M, Frei H (2010) MicroPublicPlaces. The Architectural League, New York Breazeal C, Dautenhahn K, Kanda T (2016) Social robotics. In: Siciliano B, Khatib O (eds) Springer handbook of robotics. Springer, Berlin Castells M (2004) Space of flows, space of places: materials for a theory of urbanism in the information age. In: Graham S (ed) The cybercities reader. Routledge, New York Clark A (1997) Being there: putting brain, body and world together again. MIT Press, Cambridge Clynes M, Kline N (1960) Cyborgs in space. Astronautics 26–27:74–76 Crang M (2000) Urban morphology and the shaping of the transmissible city. City 4(3):303–315 Dawkins R (1982) The extended phenotype. Oxford University Press, Oxford De Souza e Silva A (2006) Re-conceptualizing the mobile phone—from telephone to collective interfaces. Aust J Emerg Technol Soc 4(2):108–127 Dias MP (2011) Digital performance in networked public spaces: situating the posthuman subject. Proceedings of ISEA 2011 Istanbul, Sabanci Universitesi, pp 653–659 Dourish P (2001) Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. MIT Press, Cambridge Downey GL, Dumit J, Williams S (1995) Cyborg anthropology. Cult Anthropol 10(2):265 Dupuy JP (2000) The mechanization of the mind: on the origin of cognitive science. Princeton University Press, Princeton Dupuy JP (2009) Cybernetics is an antihumanism: advanced technologies and the rebellion against the human condition. AntiMatters 3(2):47–64 Flichy P (2010) Le sacre de l’amateur, sociologie des passions ordinaires à l’ère numérique. Seuil, Paris Foucault M (1997) Of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias. In: Leach N (ed) Rethinking architecture: a reader in cultural theory. Routledge, New York, pp 330–336 Fusedspace competition website (2004). www.fusedspace.org. Accessed 18 Apr 2005 Gandy M (2005) Cyborg urbanization: monstrosity in the contemporary city. Int J Urban Reg Res 29(1):26–49 Gibson JJ (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton Mifflin, Boston Gibson W (1984) Neuromancer. Ace, New York Glanville R (2004) The purpose of second order cybernetics. Kybernetes 33(9/10):1379–1386 Goffman E (1959) The presentation of the self in everyday life. Anchor Books, New York Goldberger P (2003) Disconnected urbanism. Metropolis Magazine, p 66 Graham S, Marvin S (1996) Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. Routledge, New York Gray CH (2001) Cyborg citizen: politics in the posthuman age. Routledge, New York Gray CH, Mentor S, Figueroa-Sarriera H (1995) The cyborg handbook. Routledge, New York Habermas J (1989) [1962] The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Polity, Cambridge Hampton KN, Wellman B (2000) Examining community in the digital neighborhood: early results from Canada’s wired suburb. In: Ishida T, Isbister K (eds) Digital cities. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 475–492

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Hampton KN, Sessions Goulet L, Albanesius G (2015) Change in the social life of urban public spaces: the rise of mobile phones and women, and the decline of aloneness over thirty years. Urban Stud 52(8):1489–1504 Haraway D (1991 [1985]) Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. Free Association Books, London Hayles NK (1999) How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Hoy M (2005) Digital homelessness and L’Espace internet. Leonardo 38(1):6–7 Ishii H, Ullmer B (1997) Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms. In Proceedings of CHI’97, Atlanta Latour B (1993 [1991]) We have never been modern (trans: Porter C). Harvard University Press, Cambridge Latour B (2007 [2005]) Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory (Clarendon lectures in management studies). Oxford University Press, Oxford Leszczynski A (2017) Geoprivacy. In: Kitchin R, Wilson M, Lauriault T (eds) Understanding spatial media. SAGE, New York, pp 235–244 Luke T (2004) The co-existence of cyborgs, humachines and environments in postmodernity: getting over the end of nature. In: Graham S (ed) The cybercities reader. Routledge, New York, pp 106–110 Maturana H (1970) Biology of cognition. Biological computer laboratory research report BCL 9.0. University of Illinois, Urbana Maturana H, Varela FJ (1980) Autopoeisis and cognition: the realization of the living. Reidel, Boston Mauss M (1973 [1934]) Techniques of the body. Econ Soc 2: 70–88 McCullough M (2004) Digital ground: architecture, pervasive computing and environmental knowing. MIT Press, Cambridge McCullough M (2007) New media urbanism: grounding ambient information technology. Environ Plan B Plan Design 34:383–395 McGrath B, Shane DG (eds) (2005) Sensing the 21st-century city: close-up and remote. AD Architectural Design 75(6) Wiley-Academy, London McKibben B (1989) The end of nature. Anchor Books, New York Meyrowitz J (1985) No sense of place: the impact of electronic media on social behavior. Oxford University Press, New York Mitchell WJ (1998) Cyborg civics. Harvard Architect Rev 10:164–175 Mitchell WJ (2003) Me++: the cyborg self and the networked city. MIT Press, Cambridge Moores S (2006) Media uses and everyday environmental experiences: a positive critique of phenomenological geography. Participations 3(2):233–256 Ockman J (1996) Mirror images: technology, consumption and the representation of gender in American architecture since WWII. In: Agrest D, Weisman L (eds) The sex of architecture. Harry N. Abrams, New York, pp 191–210 Oppenheimer M (2014) Technology is not driving us apart after all. New York Times Magazine. https://nyti.ms/L0tRoB. Accessed 14 June 2017 Pannagi I, Paladini V (2003 [1922]) Manifesto for futurist mechanical art Pask G (1969) The architectural relevance of cybernetics. Archit Des 7(6):494–496 Sassen S (2006) Making public interventions in today’s massive cities. Static 04, London Sennett R (1996) Flesh and stone: the body and the city in Western civilization. WW Norton & Company, New York Stone AR (1995) The war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age. MIT Press, Cambridge Swyngedouw E (1996) The city as a hybrid: on nature, society and cyborg urbanization. Capital Nat Social 7:65–80 Townsend A (2004) New digital geographies: information, communication, and place. In: Zook M, Dodge M, Aoyama Y, Townsend A (eds) Geography and technology. Springer, Basel

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Ullmer B, Ishii H (2001) Emerging frameworks for tangible user interfaces. In: Carroll J (ed) Human-computer interaction in the new millennium. Addison-Wesley, Boston Varnelis K, Friedberg A (2008) Place: the networking of public space. In: Varnelis K (ed) Networked publics. Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Wachter S (2012) The digital city: challenges for the future (trans: Waine O), Metropolitics. http:// www.metropolitiques.eu/The-­digital-­city-­challengesfor.html. Accessed 21 Oct 2017 Weiser M (1991) The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American special issue on communication, computers, and networks, pp 94–104 Whyte W (1988) City: rediscovering the center. Doubleday, New York Wiley D (2008) The urban square: remediating public space. Stream: Culture, Politics, Technology. Toronto: Open Journal System 1(1) Winner L (1980) Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus 109(1):121–136 Zelkha E, Epstein B (1998) From devices to ‘ambient intelligence’: the transformation of consumer electronics. Presentation at the digital living room conference, Philips. https://fenix. tecnico.ulisboa.pt/downloadFile/1970943312273456/AI_02b_AmI_Philips.pdf. Accessed 2 Apr 2018

Chapter 6

Networked

Abstract  With the “Network Society” facilitated by digital technological networks, the physical public realm must be understood as always overlaid with de-spatialized patterns of interaction and connection between people, affecting the constitution of public life in spatial and temporal dimensions. At the same time, digital networks offer alternatives to accustomed physical venues and practices of public life. Differentials in access to these networks introduce a new dimension of inequalities in access to public life, and the public with which one is able to interface in real-­time takes on a planetary scale, bringing with it new possibilities as well as new vulnerabilities. Keywords  Networked society · Planetary public · Spatiality of networks

Networked Society Mahlouly (2013) has made a distinction between the “normative” (elitist, restrictive and non-inclusive) public sphere of Habermas and Arendt, and contemporary “connective culture,” in which a much wider range of members of society are empowered to contribute to public discourse in contemporary society, suggesting that this requires a reconfiguration of our understanding of public life. This understanding of society in terms of individuals and their interconnections is based in the logic of networks, and indeed Varnelis (2008: 145) argues that—like modernism and postmodernism during specific recent historic periods—“network culture” is the defining paradigm of contemporary society. The concept of networks (as, perhaps, in distinction to publics) is the organizing paradigm of contemporary society (Rainie and Wellman 2014). Public space and the public realm are by nature networked, and always have been (Dias 2011). Though societal networks certainly predate the digital era (Wellman 1999), this aspect of society has been brought more explicitly to the forefront with the mediation of societies through digital communications networks, with the creation of dispersed “networked publics” (Varnelis 2008), connected by digital communications networks and platforms. With networked society, the role of connections becomes more prevalent as the role of locations recedes. According to Graham and Marvin (1996: 184), “A city is now less a physical site for social interaction in pub-

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lic space—as in the modernist vision—and more of a fixed place for the intersection of global networks that carry the instant flows of signs and information which currently shape urban social and cultural life.”

Individuals and Networked Publics One of the primary mechanisms in the production of digital culture is digitalization, a process of abstraction in which complex ensembles are reduced to simple units (Gere 2008)—the process of translation from analog to digital, from continuity and contiguity to discreetness and disjointedness (see also the discussion of datafication in Chap. 11 of this book). In social terms, the digitalization of the public realm involves the disaggregation of societies into individuals. Network culture can be seen in terms of the use of technological infrastructures to re-assemble or re-­ combine these fragments/individuals through the weaving a net of technologically-­ mediated interconnections. The scale of contemporary societies necessitates the use of mass media for the communication and interaction that constructs the public sphere. For Habermas, half a century ago, these mass media consisted of magazines, radio and television (Habermas 1989 [1962]), to which we can now append the Internet (Barney 2003: 106).1 However, it must be acknowledged that the networks of society are experienced differently by different groups and individuals, at different locations and in different cultures, with different societal and demographic profiles, and varying levels of access to technology and resources. And, with the growing mobility and personalization of digital devices and the hyper-individuation of the ways in which applications and platforms are used and experienced, each member of society becomes more and more a unique locus of intersection of these global networks in their own right, so that even the specificity of a space as a unique node within layered global networks is diluted, meaning that there are ever-fewer common elements of experience that may be assumed to inhere among people sharing a particular location in space. Bauman (2000: 200) had critiqued that social relations in the “liquid modern” world increasingly take the form of “cloakroom communities,” whose members have nothing in common but the consumption of a common spectacle, but it seems that even this type of shared reference is disappearing as even the spectacles with which we distract ourselves, that overlay and filter our interactions in and with public space, become more and more personalized2 and delinked from the characteristics of the space itself.

1  Or in one sense the Internet has swallowed-up many of these precedent media and taken their place as the primary channel of entertainment, communication and information-gathering of most members of society. 2  However, this line of critique may be reductive and categorical to an unmerited degree, as personalized devices and apps are also instrumental in facilitating active modes of engagement between people in the co-creation of experiences (as in gaming, geo-hacking and related practices), that can even be critical and productive, as will be discussed in the next section of this book.

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Through our use of digital technologies, we come to perceive spaces more and more not in terms of boundaries and enclosure and fixity, but rather in terms of fluid and open “moments” within networks of relations to the world at large (Massey 1993). Similarly, each individual is a distinct and unique node of active global connections, moving through and participating in physical public space, plugged-in as each of us is to our various networks of social interaction (and social withdrawal), information harvesting and dissemination. The accustomedness—the banality even—of the ability to project our attentions and representations into virtual “worlds,” or to engage with others in remote locations, is a different type of cyborg existence than the mechanical/fleshy hybrids discussed by Haraway. It poses the illusory promise of the possibility of shedding the public body, while at the same time raising questions about the relationship between the body and the city, as “problems arise when the city begins to appear boundless, and it becomes more difficult to attribute to it a reliable scale relative to the individual human body…” (Martin 2016: 3). Barney (2003) remarks on several aspects of web-based socialization that have an effect on the public sphere. The first is the possibility of personalization of the contacts and news with which one wants to be confronted, by which one can create and curate an edited and customized version of the world that is much more comfortable and customized than the contradictory and complex common world of the public realm at large. Another aspect is the so-called “loosening” of the connections that one has with others, defined by anonymity, choice and convenience more than by a shared stake in something enduring and common. No risks or commitments are demanded or taken. In digital network culture, physical entities are separated from their representations, which are encoded into digital signals that may circulate freely through networks of communication. We exist in the world as our located bodies, as well as in our many disembodied representations through which we appear: as profiles in digital platforms, as avatars in online games, as voices and images in mobile telephony, as series of messages on discussion websites. The act of appearing in digitalized public space is connected to the need for Identity Management (IdM), involving both support for individual and group action and concern for personal privacy, reconstituting ourselves in a cyborg fashion (Wilson and Gomez Flores 2016; Van’t Hof and van Est 2011: 13).

Conscripting In subsuming diverse and multifarious types of individuals and groups, any society corresponds to the concept of a “heterogeneous network,” as defined by Actor Network Theory (Latour 2007 [2005]), and if public space is the space of society and the current society is a network society, then it is essential to understand the role of such heterogeneous networks in producing public space. Networks grow and sustain themselves through recruitment. Graham and Marvin (1996: 106), referring to Westrum (1991: 72), describe the work of technological entrepreneurs as seeking to enroll other people and technological artifacts into their

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network by “heterogeneous engineering” (Law 1987), the recruitment of diverse different kinds of actors into one’s networks. This can be seen in the enticement of diverse individuals into social networking platforms and other digital technology applications. One could question whether this type of recruitment, through convenience and functionality in exchange for one’s money, one’s knowledge or one’s personal information, is supplanting public belonging. Are these now the primary contexts of codependency through which we are linked to heterogeneous others, devoid of the spatiality of physical public space because we never have to share an embodied space with them? Is this “public-minus-space” rather than “public-­plus-­ space” indicative of the developmental trajectory of contemporary societies? Is society settling on a new way of organizing its heterogeneous multitudes? Because of the anti-spatial nature of the Web and the anti-embodied nature of the contacts that take place in digitally mediated venues, the interactions that take place in such network publics are not just interactions minus the body but, to a large extent, interactions that happen in the way they do because of the absence of the body. Anti-publics are not just the absence of public, they are the negation of publicness using its own means. As social technologies, digital networks support the formation and maintaining of societies as a type of infrastructure, as have other technological infrastructures throughout history. In some sense, digital networks can be added to the list of support infrastructures on which we rely, blending from the biological support of the natural environment to the artificial (not to say superfluous) infrastructures that humans construct to deal with their supplemental needs, or a hyper-level intensification and amplification of the essential needs à la Maslow (1943): “I am inextricably entangled in the networks of my air, water, waste disposal, energy, transportation, and Internet service providers” (Mitchell 2003).

Network Against Space In network society, human-made networks are reified, made to seem a part of the “natural” order—a type of “second nature.” The modulations of networks are not congruent to or constrained by physical architectural delimitations, and the disjunction between physical space and the ways in which human relationships of power, affinity and influence are manifested leads to an emptying-out of physical space, such that it becomes a gloss, a spectacle and not a reflection or determinant of deeper (or higher) structures. “It’s the invisible city that we are shaping through ubiquitous computing and mobile telecommunications devices that matters” (Nissenbaum and Varnelis 2012: 11). There is seldom congruence between physical political boundaries and the networks of digital connectivity; the former cannot contain the latter (Gray et al. 1995). Paul Virilio saw the space-time structures of the city as constituting the very fabric of urban life, and perceived their disruption by digital networks as heralding the dissolution of the traditional cultural significance of the city (Virilio 1997). Others have also seen the types of relations and interac-

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tions enabled and prioritized by digital technologies as anathema to the city. Network society also disrupts political geography at the international and global scale, as the organizing logic of computer networks overtakes the organizing logic of geographical space (Mulgan 1991). This speeding-up and diffusion of interaction and communication, in one sense, is a continuation of the trajectory defined by an accumulation of infrastructures of communication and transportation, concomitant with the process of industrialization. Anthony Giddens sees a “dislocation of space from place” as the connection between physical localities and social connections become disengaged from one another. Electronic spaces lack the “civic legibility” of physical spaces (Mitchell 1995), another dimension of the invisibility of the exercises of power through these networks. But I would add the point that the extraction of interaction into digital networks removes the civic from the spatial, and from the possibility of spatial legibility, altogether, such that we need a different kind of legibility. Digital technologies become “disembodying mechanisms” (Giddens 1990) that extract interaction from place, physical locatedness and embodiment, and indeed geography itself. The design of the interfaces to networks becomes essential to the design of the public realm. In the twentieth century, the network technologies of the telephone and the television disrupted accustomed relationships between society and spatial configuration (Murdock 1993), and the enticements, and the ease of communicating and forming social bonds with those with whom we share affinities rather than proximity, has been further increasing since the early days of the web (Storgaard and Jensen 1991)—a fact that by now is deeply ingrained in the business models of all anti-­ public network providers. Anti-publics usurp the means (or at least usurp the human attention, cognitive, emotional and sensory faculties) of the public to drain and replace the spatial public realm. The global reach of communications media and practices does not negate space or locality. Experience, as well as political and social control, are embedded in the local (Castells 2004). Writing at the outset of the information age, Castells saw the space of flows as instantiated in the Internet as an instrumental space, that was inimical to the construction or expression of identity. Digital technologies can in some cases replace physical flows, but can also serve to regulate physical flows. The influences they have on physical practices are far from simple (Graham and Marvin 1996: 275–6). Graham and Marvin (1996: 334) determined that certain central functions that are not possible to be converted to flows will retain and even augment the importance of their centralization and concentration. The network, rather than the physically bounded space, is the dominant medium of interaction contemporary human societies (Mitchell 2003: 10; Wellman 1999). Physical spaces are nodes in networks. Cities (and public spaces within cities, and individuals in these public spaces, and so on) are seen as nodes in the layered networks in which different flows are bundled and interact, and it is the patterns that emerge from the dynamic juxtaposition of these fixed bodies and physical constructs (places) with the cut-loose flow of networks that give texture to the medium within which contemporary urban life is conducted (Healey et al. 1995; Graham and Marvin

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1996: 71). As nodes in networks, both physical places and web places seem to conform to Thrift’s (1993) description of “almost places” that are nodes in networks, defined in terms of “stages of intensity,” as sorts of attractors meant to capture activities, or as “third-order simulacra.”

Network(ed) Publics The shift in the nature of publics and the public realm needs to be understood in the context of the turn to network culture (Wellman et al. 2006; Varnelis 2008), as well as other social, cultural and economic shifts that obviate any possible return to some real or imagine past ideal of public space. The “network culture” perspective gives importance to the ways in which digital networks are overlaid on social, technological and spatial/material networks (and the networks of these networks) in such a way that nodes in these networks can be brought into focus with their relationships with people, places, things and processes (Varnelis and Friedberg 2008: 27). The four phenomena of networked publics—“amateur and non-market production, networked collectivities for producing and sharing culture, niche and special interest groups, and aesthetics of parody, remix and appropriation” (Russell et al. 2008: 43) all manifest themselves in the production and performance of public space as mediated through digital technologies. In Habermas’ view, the public space of rational exchange between bourgeois equals was already in decline at the time of his writing (Habermas 1989 [1962]), being supplanted by capitalism’s exacerbation of unequal wealth distribution and the growth of mass media, which allowed a small number of hegemonic voices to override the multitude of individual voices. The illusion of equality was sustained by excluding from the public realm—both functionally and discursively—those who were not part of bourgeois society. The Internet, in its early days, was seen as an ideal venue for a renewed democratic discourse and a return to more responsive democratic processes (Lim and Kann 2008: 77–78). It would also seem that digital technologies are playing some role in affording the reversal of the nominal effects identified by Habermas, in that media now amplify, rather than muffle, the voices of individuals, and the current form of capitalism is one of individual gratification, that relegates public space to a trivial position as a technical support infrastructure, on which low demands are put. Existing networks are being invisibly retrofitted to Internet protocol (IP) while retaining their different physical infrastructures, creating an ever-enlarging composite network of networks, carrying the abstract entity that we call the Web. Online venues are not just replacements or alternatives for face-to-face venues, but can be seen as augmenting the publicness of these venues, by overcoming limitations such as the limited number of people who could be involved in collocated deliberation. People can come together who would not normally meet, and the ability to hide behind the anonymity afforded by these venues obviated certain dimensions of prejudice (while making room for other dimensions of prejudice).

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Public Delinked from Local, the Spatial, the “Immediate” It is increasingly impossible to conceive of the public spaces of the city independently of an understanding of their existing at the same time within a system of global linkages and connections. Every “microenvironment” we experience or inhabit is at the same time a localized physical construction and a node in a global network of related environments. “The city becomes a strategic amalgamation of multiple global circuits that loop through it” (Sassen 2006: 5). Every individual in public space is potentially at the same time interacting with others and accessing data that is globally distributed, giving little attention to the physical space that they are bodily occupying—physically in one public realm and mentally in another. Physical public space is a medium through which our bodies move, even as our attention is embedded in virtual venues of global publics, whether we are bodily at home or out in the city having little relevance for the purposes of these interactions. While there are proponents of the primacy of the social over the spatial in the public realm, who argue that it is in the forms of interrelations, and not the physical space, that defines the nature of public, communitarian (social?), or public (Lofland 1998), there are also strong arguments that it is in the co-articulating relationships between the social and the spatial that public space is instantiated. The purported disappearance of space and time instigated by digital networks is lauded for easing the friction of communication, making remote people and places as accessible as nearby ones, but it also has the converse effect of making those places and people that are nearby, local and familiar as equally distant, and our interactions and relations with them equally mediated (and with the same technological interfaces), as those that are a world away. In practice, this disappearance is not serving to bring the world to us in a real and substantive way, so much as it is distracting from the fact that there is a difference between the local and the far away. In certain cases, we value the distance, control, non-committal nature and ability to wear “masks” and assume superficial and fleeting identities, of interaction at a distance. We can also use these technologies to create virtual distance and separation where there is no physical distance of separation. Having such a tenuous and shallow base of interaction makes the greater public space all the more daunting, so we avoid it. The physical morphology of cities can support this, as in the notably diffuse morphology of Los Angeles (Dewey 2004: 293). Parts of the physical world are abandoned to neglect, as they are considered uncontrollable, even as digital venues offer the paragon of controllability and personalizability. We exist simultaneously in these two publics: the virtual and egocentric personalized “pocket public” and the frightening and disparate world at large, of which we expect not much more than a guarantee of personal security, a removal of obstacles and the provision of undemanding “experiences” as scenery and backdrop, as we traverse it. Everything can be perceived as having both an informational aspect and a physical aspect (and both of these are in themselves also constructs of the observer), such that the transfer of physical things always has a messaging potential, and the transfer of messages always has a physical manifestation. The differential between the

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speed and distance at which messages travel and the speed and distance of material movement is now enormous. To the extent that the physical environment becomes spectacle and servomechanism, the mesh of meaning is not slowed by the local, has no gravitation towards the walkable or the neighborly, and spreads in a frictionless way that impels us to invent or discover our own fill-in for proximity, which is affinity. There is a shift from a culture that is physically mediated to one that is digitally mediated, in terms of work, relations, etc.: “A society based more and more on the rapid circulation of messages, signs and information via global electronic networks” (Graham and Marvin 1996: 4). There emerges an “integrated circuit” of places, each of which implies all of the others in a “holographic” analogy (Haraway 1991 [1985]: 307), as each element in a network is largely defined by its relationship to other elements. A relational sense of identity is reinforced, in which individuals are identified by their connections, more so than by their membership in a group. Digital technologies, in their foregrounding of the Network Society, call attention to the nature of cities as sets of relations rather their composition as sets of objects. Objects are seen as entities that are anchors for relations, for flows, exchanges and interactions. We begin to speak of economies, in terms of systems of exchange, and of ecologies, and in terms of entities linked in a web of continually performed co-dependency and co-definition. The avant-garde British collective Archigram of the 1960s and 1970s has been aptly cited numerous terms for giving expression and visualization to the principle of architecture and the city as a space of flows (Wachter 2012).

Real and Virtual A critique of the so-called real-virtual divide is fundamental to Manuel Castells’ (2011 [1996]) proclamation of the Network Society, in which virtuality is an inextricable component of the mediated cityscape. Mediated public space must be treated as a “both-and” situation, in which the simultaneous presence of individuals in physical space and digital forums should not be seen as a schism or a paradox, but a constitutive fact of contemporary human existence (Gibson, 1988). Brighenti (2010: 8) has written that “the public domain exists at the point of convergence and in the zone of indistinction between material and immaterial processes, whereby an immaterial meaning is created through acts of material inscription and projection.” Many have proposed the idea that space in contemporary society must always be understood as a hybrid construct, with physical and digital facets (Kluitenberg 2006; Manovich 2006). The desire to maintain a distinction and separation of the physical and virtual is a convenient convention for those who would seek to cordon-off the digital realm and appropriate it as a datum of control, providing enticements for people to perceive and practice the virtual realm in a way that actualizes its division and abstraction from physicality, rather than performing practices that link digital technologies and physical space.

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In digitally mediated practice in urban public space we see the blurring of distinctions between public space and public media. The superimposition of digital networks onto physical public space can be seen in terms of the intensification of the interrelation and interference patterns between public space and public media that has been accruing at least over the past century. Digitalized information comes to be perceived by some as a stratum superimposed upon the physical world. The nature of the interrelationship between these two layers can be manifested and designed in different ways. Giving some license for simplification for the sake of clarity, this is a workable perspective from which to gain a conceptual foothold, but it has little bearing on the way that public practice is perceived or performed, and is in this case best relegated to a marginal reminder of the facilitating and automated operations “behind the curtain,” as it were (Glanville 1997). In urban morphological terms, public space can be seen as the connective tissue of the city, that constitutes the medium within which private spaces are set, that mediates between private spaces, both joining them together and separating them from one another. If one takes a “space syntax” (Hillier and Hanson 1984) perspective on urban space as a continuum of interconnected spaces, public spaces are the spaces that must be passed through in order to move through urban space and urban life. This gives an objective, pragmatic vantage on one facet of the nature of public space, in that it is the space that one must traverse in conducting one’s day-to-day life. This (oversimplified) description of urban space, in terms of private spaces between which public spaces connect, might immediately evoke comparisons to network morphologies of the type that characterize networks of digital connectivity. And indeed, network-based analyses of have been applied to analyze street patterns in cities to considerable insight (Crucitti et al. 2006; Porta et al. 2006). However, reversing the metaphor—applying the metaphor of urban space to digital networks—quickly meets resistance, due to an important distinction between the experience of the continuum of physical space and that of digital networks such as the Web and telephony systems. While the network is a mental construct through which relations in physical space can be analyzed, in the case of digital networks, the network is a description of their constitutive structure. At the most fundamental level, a network is defined by a set of nodes and connections between those nodes. In urban public space, both the nodes (private spaces in this analogy) and the connections (public space) are spaces that can be occupied and experienced by people. Phenomenologically and ontologically they are of the same order. Distinctions such as public/private or node/connection are secondary categories imposed by convention, use or theorization. In the case of digital networks, nodes and connections are phenomenologically and ontologically distinct. Communication through digital networks is only experienced at its nodes. There is no experience of the medium that is between us, via which we communicate: only of the device (typically with a screen) via which we interface with the digital network and avail ourselves of its affordances. And indeed, the content presented to each of us becomes increasingly personalized such that there is less and less commonality even of interface (Mitchell 2003: 15). We experience these networks from the nodes, and indeed we could conceptually frame these networks to say that

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we are the nodes in these networks. We experience connections between nodes in terms of their effects, mainly in terms of achieving connectivity to other nodes or access to data and functionality, but we cannot occupy a connection in the same way that we can occupy a public space. The collective processing power of a distributed network of computers, as opposed to a mainframe, serves as a metaphor for this type of distributed production (Benkler 2006). It is impossible to overlook the obvious parallels between the distributed nature of production, consumption and knowledge, and the sharing of information throughout this network, and the Internet of Things, in which the same type of economy seems to be established among inanimate things. Societal and technological networks and the webs of interactions and information that sustain these networks, are superimposed, to form a cyborg super public.

A Planetary Public Through the affordances of digital technologies, webs of communication and networks of command are de-centered and globally distributed (Hardt and Negri 2000), and the dynamics of physical public space, overlaid with digital technologies, cannot be understood independently of this phenomenon, to the extent that “[t]here is no doubt that something very similar to a global public space is slowly taking shape because of the confluence between communicative possibilities and the spread of democratic values” (Innerarity 2016: 85). In the early years of the Internet and the spread of the use of mobile phones among the consumer class, Graham and Marvin (1996: 38) wrote of the emergence of a “global sense of place.” In allowing us to loosen the gravity of physical location, the digital affordances at our disposal can give the “ubiquitous” feeling of “being in all places, without really being anywhere” (Olaquiaga 1992: 2), such that “[o]ne result of the new global culture is that the old symbols of the locational rootedness of urban life increasingly seem to be lost or remade, to be replaced by an intangible and accelerating set of global flows of images, data, services, products, people and commodities” (Graham and Marvin 1996: 180). The symbolic aspect of public space has been shaken-up by the seemingly frictionless postmodern flows of images and messages. This has the effect of confusing our sense of reality as our experiential landscape becomes a mélange of different levels of reality—facts and artful fictions, records of reality and simulations of possibilities, from across the world and across the street—presented to us with equal levels of (im)mediacy. Regardless of their provenance or ontological status, they are all accessible and present to our senses and sensibilities, as the affordances of digital technologies are mobilized to make the speculative tangible and the remote immediate (even as they mediate the tangible and the local to make them seem remote and staged) (Bender and Druckrey 1994). The same trends of commodification, control, theming and consumption noted in physical public space also apply to electronic venues and networks (Dewey 2004). We, the “users,” are sold commodities, and are ourselves transformed into com-

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modities in both physical and digital venues. In the neoliberal, urban management(rather than urban governance)-driven cities of the developed world, there is an economic calculus by which these spaces must sustain themselves as spatial products. Time-space compression is experienced differently by different groups: the haves and have-nots, the cans and can-nots. For those riding the global flows of data, plugged-in with high bandwidth and money to spend, this compression brings convenience and connectivity. For those without these privileges, the compression brings constraints, exclusion and limitations (Massey 1993). In this new public space, marginalized groups are distinguished not only by their lack of resources or knowledge, but also going against the grain in terms of what one expects of public space, not accepting the commodification and trying to make it a space of contact and democracy. Cities are doubly entrenched in the public realm: firstly by virtue of their housing of dense settlements of heterogeneous societies and the public spaces to serve them, and secondly in their privileged positions as nodes in the global space of flows that constitutes the urban geography of contemporary networked global society (Castells 2011 [1996]). The distinction between the “public” and the “mass” is important here. The mass is an aggregate body to be controlled, broadcast to, marketed to. The public is an active body of agents with a role in the political constitution of society (although this role has changed over time and continues to change). In networked society, there are not only cities but also ‘city’ a distributed urban condition that is at its most concentrated and apparent in the urbanized areas of the world, but which in effect pervades most of the planet to a large degree. Networks of digital communication, interaction and diffusion are among the primary facilitators of the pervasiveness of this condition and the interlinking of cities and the spaces between them into a continuous mesh of urbanity. Already more than 30 years ago, Dematteis (1988) wrote of a “planetary metropolitan system,” unified by communications and logistics networks which have since intensified exponentially. The city is seen as an interface and point-of-access to higher-level systems such as energy systems, food systems, etc. Similarly, it is the point of access to planetary-scale social systems, as expressed in the relationship between Bratton’s (2016: 153) “city” and “earth” layers, the energy and resources of the former being mobilized to sustain the former. The grids of infrastructure that sustain the city level are also the interfaces to the other layers of Bratton’s “stack,” and certain elements at the city level can be seen as “footprints” of entities at higher levels, such as corporate headquarters (Bratton 2016: 153). As the city becomes suffused with more communications, it becomes less legible itself, due to the retreat of interaction into digital venues, and the “fortressing” of both physical and digital space (Dear 1995; Graham and Marvin 1996: 188). The international scale of communications technology infrastructures was tied to the rise of “extrastatecraft” of industrial operators and infrastructure companies spanning and linking, rather than contained by, nations (Easterling 2015: 100–101). Jameson’s (1991) technologically facilitated “post-modern hyperspace” of global networks of capital, communication and influence, which span and transcend

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nation states, has outstripped the potential of humans to perceive or act relative to it. The “urbanisation of real time” and “urbanisation of real space” have been achieved by successive application of physical and then digital infrastructures (Virilio 1997). For these reasons, there are strong arguments for adopting a focus on interactions and relations in terms of decentered, de-materialized, de-localized networks rather than centered, physical, located spatial enclosures, as the datum for understanding social interaction through digital technologies (Hampton and Wellman 2000). However, while telecommunications have played a role in the decentralization of cities, the scattering of activities away from centers to a more dispersed arrangement and the splitting-up of erstwhile architectural ensembles or at least proximities, these technologies have also facilitated new concentrations and logics of adjacency and contiguity (Graham and Marvin 1996: 41–42). Online interactions intensify involvement in local activities, by linking the local to the global (Parisi 2015: 2). This brings a “non-cosmopolitan globality” that does not disengage from the local, alternative globalities that are not implicated in corporate or governmental globalization.

The Spatiality of Digital Networks Digital networks do have a spatiality, in that they are embodied in physical infrastructures of nodes and connections, but it is an abstract spatiality that is not experiential. It is different from the spatiality of physical places in that it is a spatiality that evades detection or perception, and has no congruence with the way that we experience these networks. It is also a different kind of spatiality than that of other purveyance infrastructures, in that it can deliver a simulation of spatiality that has nothing to do with the spatiality of the digital network itself but in the form of doubly-encoded messages that are unpacked first by the digital device and then by the human senses to convey a pseudo-spatial experience. Again, it is the body that is the measure of all things in the physical world for humans, that determines a vantage, a scale, a scope of perception, a commitment and a locatedness. But there is no universal equivalent to the body in cyberspace. Because they are abstracted from the body, interactions in digital realms retreat from view by default. They are only visible if made visible. They are only tangible if made tangible. This is the basis of interface design. Because our access to these networks is de-spatialized and even anti-spatial, pseudo-spaces and pseudo-bodies need to be designed and constructed to allow us to get a grasp on them or to act relative to them (to say “act within them” would be to perpetuate an untenable spatial metaphor). The “invisibility” of the relationships (if not the artifacts and interfaces) of digital infrastructure is a barrier to our comprehension of them (Graham and Marvin 1996: 50). The possibility of interaction that is disjointed, in both time and space, has long since become the norm rather than the exception in advanced urban societies (Mitchell 1995; Olaquiaga 1992). The application of spatial metaphors to digital

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venues (navigating the web to go to the website of a social platform…) perpetuates the illusion that they are somehow alternative spaces with the same potential and dimensionality as the physical world at large, creating a false equivalency (Dewey 2004: 292). The Internet may have a spatial basis but it is fundamentally “anti-spatial” in that “you can find things without knowing where they are.” The Net is “nowhere in particular and everywhere at once” (Mitchell 1995). Things are tagged rather than located. Communication networks thus have the effect of “stretching” and “folding” space, putting widely dispersed neighborhoods and individuals in closer contact, communications, and relationships of mutual influence with one another than those people or places with whom they are immediately adjacent (Crang 2000; Graham and Marvin 1996). Space and time do not contain such networks (nor vice-versa). Time and space are constructed through actions and interactions, in the sense of the Production of Space (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]). Space and time are continually made and remade through the ways in which societies develop and constitute themselves (Thrift 1993). Public life does not unfold within space and time so much as it constructs space and time in its unfolding. In the spotty geography of digital enclaves discussed in Chap. 3, the topology of digital networks recapitulates the network of safe capsules of space linked by networks of paths bypassing marginalized areas of the city (de Cauter 2004). Or, as Graham and Marvin (1996: 70) put it, “Only the physical spaces where the right infrastructure is built can be accessed.” Due in part to migrancy and the parallel international networks and flows that it establishes, new transnational spaces of exchange and communication emerge (Basch et al. 1994; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). In developing communication technologies that can circumvent local controls and surveillance and strengthening transnational connections as local connections are weakened or neglected, “counter-geographies” emerge that invite the possibility of re-configuring relations in public space (Sassen 2006: 6). “The key task seems to be supporting these parallel processes of social innovation in urban places and electronic spaces so that new ‘homes’ for convivial and democratic urban social life can be constructed amidst what Squires calls the ‘flux and flow of the globalization of social relations’” (Graham and Marvin 1996: 237). To be engaged with communications media is not to be absent from physical space, but it is a different kind of presence in space: one that could be argued as enriching rather than impoverishing one’s experience, as Scannell (1996) remarked on the “doubling of place” brought by television and radio. Similarly, we can conceive of a multiplying of public interaction, by virtue of the superimposition of the connectivity of digital communications and information technology onto the opportunities for collocated and tangible interaction in physical space. The embedding of networked digital technologies in urban socio-spatial practice means that there is constant contact between place-based and place-independent publics, such that spatially-­defined publics are always already rubbing shoulders with publics otherwise constituted. The distinction between local and global actions is less clear-cut than ever, as many things done locally draw on digital flows and connections, and things done globally are often undertaken while situated in a specific physical location and supported by the affordances and infrastructure of that physical place.

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From the global network perspective, the public is planetary, echoing ideas of the earth as an organic whole unified by both natural (e.g. Lovelock’s (2000) Gaia Hypothesis) and man-made (e.g. McLuhan’s (1962) Global Village) systems of organization. We still live with the legacy of the idea of spaces as “spatial products.” Cities compete on the marketplace and public space is among the amenities that play a role in this “global image bank.” Through time-space compression, the world becomes “one place” (Harvey 1989; Featherstone 2006), not through the modernist dream of bringing all of the world under a rational modernist paradigm, but rather by linking the disparate parts creating a diverse and dispersed public rather than a homogenized global community.

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Producing Public Space in the Mediated City

Chapter 7

The Affordances of Digital Technologies in Public Space

Abstract  This chapter discusses the broad palette of actions that constitute digitally mediated public spatial practices, and introduces the concept of affordances, and in particular the “social affordances” of digital technologies to delineate the ways in which these technologies are appropriated by different agents in the mediated city to co-construct the public realm. Affordances are not characteristics of technologies alone nor of people alone, but rather are measures of the interfaces where technological potential meets human intention and desire. The implications of digital technologies’ affordances for the governance and commodification of public space are discussed, as well as for the practice of urban citizenship. Keywords  Social affordances · Citizenship · Commodification · Governance

Digital Technologies and the Making of Public Space As the preceding chapters of this book have demonstrated, the incursion of digital networks and digitally mediated urban spatial practice into urban contexts affects the frames of reference by which public space and public life are understood and practiced. To proclaim digital technologies as either anathema or panacea to public space would be to miss the point, but the use of these technologies in public spatial practice does encourage a revisiting of the question of how public space is constituted in the post-digital urban era. The Internet, in its basic structure, presents the possibility, and even bias, of appropriation as a democratizing medium, because every participant is potentially simultaneously a receiver and a producer of ideas, the initiator and the target of advances toward interaction; its structure avoids central control and its reach facilitates connections between people despite distance or other barriers to their meeting. However, in actuality, this venue, as well, is not used primarily for rational critical debate but for economic purposes of production and consumption (Barney 2003: 109–110), and for titillation and recreation. Thus, while the Internet is a realm of work, much of this work is not aimed at the creation of the “enduring, common world” that would be the scaffolding on which a public sphere could grow, in Arendt’s terms, but rather is aimed at facilitating the creation and exchange of economic value.

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Digital venues have also been found to simplify and streamline public discourse, interaction and discussion, working against rationality and deliberation. While online-only social spaces are fully dependent on one technological infrastructure, physical space predates and prefigures any specific technologies, and can play host to any number of layered and interacting technological infrastructures—as technological regimes are introduced to mold the space of nature into Arendt’s public space as common human project—none of which, however, can contain, subsume or subjugate it.1 Digital technologies both pull us towards the abstract through their disembodied signals and algorithms, while at the same time enabling increasingly intensive engagement with the tangible and spatial, by heightening and amplifying our perceptual apparatus. But when digital technologies are applied in ways that complement and augment, rather than replace, interaction with and within physical spaces, they can broaden the metaphorical “bandwidth” of public life. In order to move from broad generalizations about the effects of the superimposition of networks and artifacts of digital technologies onto physical space and the material world, and in particular the world of human action and interaction that is at the base of public space, it is necessary to address the question of what it is, exactly, about these digital networks and artifacts that lend them to appropriation by people in the performance of the actions and interactions of urban public practice. In the most pragmatic and prosaic terms, what are the possibilities and proclivities of these technologies, distinct from other technologies, that invite us to appropriate them into the ways that we interact with others, represent ourselves, form affinities, exercise control and test the bounds of freedom? What are the specific ways in which we perceive and act upon the possibilities that these technologies present to us to imagine and actualize new ways of constructing and perceiving the publics that we construct?

Environment, Technologies and Affordances To address this question, we can appeal to the concept of affordances. Anyone familiar with the fields of design, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), or interaction design may be familiar with this concept (Norman 1990; Gaver 1991; Vicente and Rasmussen 1992). The term “affordances” was used by the American psycholo-

1  In this distinction, though, the concept of space should not be essentialized nor indeed reified as if it were something given and neutral. The human-made material-spatial constructs that are the precondition and platform for public space are of course in themselves also manifestations of the application of technologies by agents—the traces of past and present applications of power, money and technology, and the ongoing site and object of modifications (through augmentation, editing and destruction) to this material-spatiality by the interplay of agents in the present. This pertains as much to the old technologies of architecture and physical infrastructure as the new digital technologies of surveillance and communication.

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gist James Jerome Gibson (1977) to refer to the qualities of a thing (which can also be an environment or an intangible or digital artifact) that signal and support particular uses to which that thing might be put: the possibilities for action “afforded” by that thing. Gibson further claimed that it is essential to the nature of human psychology and the conducting of human life to perceive environments in terms of the possibilities for action that they afford. Affordances are “the perceived or actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine how the thing could possibly be used” (Norman 1988). Through the proffering of affordances, environments can excise “ambient power” over their inhabitants, encouraging some ways of acting and discouraging others, without explicitly making them impossible (Allen 2006). Affordances are not characteristics of technologies alone nor of people alone, but rather are measures of the interfaces where technological potential meets human intention, potency and desire. Affordances should be understood as not merely physical or semiotic properties of the thing in question, but rather as relational properties, emerging from the field of possibilities that arise at the confluence of the thing itself and the human body and mind. Furthermore, although in his original conception Gibson saw affordances as independent of the needs of any particular user or observer2 (“the object offers what it does because it is what it is” (Gibson 1979), subsequent scholars on this concept acknowledge the relevance of also considering the intentions and imagination of the particular individual(s) who are engaging with the artifact, bodily and cognitively. Since affordances emerge from an individual’s perception of, and engagement with, an artifact or environment (which perception and engagement is in turn influenced by that person’s psychology, experience and expectations), the opportunities perceived to be presented by one’s encounter with an artifact will differ from person to person, and from context to context (Dohn 2009; McGrenere and Ho 2000; Rizzo 2006; Torenvliet 2003). This leads to notions of “motivational affordances” (Zhang 2008) and “complex affordances” (Turner 2005), that take-into-account individual histories and intentions (Baerentsen and Trettvik 2002). Taking such concerns into consideration, Kaptelinin & Nardi, writing within the HCI vein of affordances studies, propose that Gibson’s concept be “re-grounded” through a “meditated action” perspective that acknowledges and reflects the “mediation” of human thought and action by the cultural and technological milieu in which humans exist (Kaptelinin and Nardi 2012). Gibson’s account has been termed “ecological” (Brady and Phemister 2012: 8; Northcott 2012: 101), to the extent that it has to do with understanding the human as an organism in interaction with its environment (see also Bateson 1972). Affordances provide an apt approach for research seeking to identify the qualities of environments that resonate with people’s desires or needs (Hadavi et al. 2015) and for shedding new light on the relationship between form and function in architecture (Maier et al. 2009). The affordances perspective has also been mobilized to analyze

2  This is related to Gibson’s lack of distinction between humans and other animals as regards affordances.

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the relationships between particular types of people and particular types of environments (Kyttä 2004; Mäkinen and Tyrväinen 2008). This perspective has been applied, for instance, to understand the ways in which the four different environments of the home, the neighborhood, the school and the town center afford d­ ifferent developmental needs of adolescents in Britain—the desire for places of social interaction and for places of retreat (Clark and Uzzell 2002). The “social affordances” perspective is particularly relevant for the purposes of the present work, because it explicitly introduces the social, interpersonal, dimension to the affordance concept, which is a necessary precondition for considering the public dimensions of these technologies. The social, as opposed to merely individual, dimension of affordances was acknowledged by Gibson (1979), and has been expanded and elaborated-upon extensively by others in the four decades since his seminal work on the concept. The first verbatim and explicit use of the term “social affordances” that I have been able to identify is by Goldring (1991). The literature on social affordances has come to encompass at least two distinct facets of the role of affordances in the formation of societies. The first of these facets addresses the ways in which people provide affordances for each other and teach others in society about affordances (as in the case of the parent-child or teacher-­ student relationship) (Van Leeuwen et al. 1994), whereas the second seeks to articulate the potential of artifacts and environments to support the formation of social connections and pursuit of social interaction (Bradner et al. 1999; Wellman 2001).

The Social Affordances of Digital Technologies This latter aspect of social affordances (which Gaver (1996: 114) sees as distinct from social affordances and calls “affordances for sociality”) has been the focus of much research in human-computer interaction (HCI) (Bradner 2001; Kreijns et al. 2002). The Canadian sociologist Barry Wellman (2001) uses the term in this sense when he enumerates the social affordances of digital networks—bandwidth, portability, connectivity and personalization—by virtue of which these technologies afford the establishment and maintenance of social networks. The “networked individualism” of Wellman et  al. (2003) is enabled by appropriation of these affordances. Further nuance has been contributed to the understanding of digital technologies in specific social settings by scholars investigating topics such as the social affordances of online social platforms for supporting deliberation (Halpern and Gibbs 2013) and the construction of relationships and communities, as well as the “communicative affordances” of mobile media accessed through devices such as smart phones and tablets that affect the ways that they are integrated into the daily routines of people, and how they affect these daily practices (Schrock 2015). Processes of building social networks have always been fundamental factors in the formation and sustaining of societies, and the importance of social networks is becoming all the more foregrounded in the age of the Internet and easily accessible global communications (Wellman 1999). Wellman has proposed that people activate the

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social affordances of digital communications networks in the forming of communities that sustain themselves through the interplay of digital and physical venues and channels (Wellman 2001). He has investigated the consequences of the digital mediation of communities at the neighborhood scale (Hampton and Wellman 2000) as well as the implications of different levels of connectivity as a dimension of urban inequality between people and between localities (Fong et al. 2001). The context-dependent nature of affordances, and in particular of social affordances, is reflected in research identifying the affordances of digital technologies within specific socially-defined contexts of interaction (Conole and Dyke 2004). Scholars have proposed, for instance, four affordances of digital technologies for visual design (digital technologies are potentially procedural, participatory, encyclopedic and spatial) (Murray 2011) and four affordances specifically for mobile media (portability, availability, locatability and multimediality) (Schrock 2015). The affordance concept has also been effectively applied to shed light on particular specific social practices. For example, in tourism studies, tourists’ appropriation of digital affordances of virtual mooring in the “statusphere,” following, collaborating and (dis)connecting, in the context of the practice of backpacking tourism, are found to underlie the emergence of the “flashpacker,” the backpacker in continuous contact with their distributed social networks during their travels (Molz and Paris 2013).3 Emerging at the nexus of technological possibilities and human psychology and social dynamics, the concept of affordances, in particular of the social variety, invites exploration of the co-defining nature of society and technology. Affordances are not static and universal, but rather are constantly configured and reconfigured through processes of negotiation between technologies and societies, both of which are in a constant state of flux. And these negotiations themselves play an estimable role in driving and steering these processes of societal and technological change, as the various actors driving technological development seek to respond to, anticipate 3  Much of the research into the social affordances of digital technologies within specific contexts of use has been conducted on the area of education, arriving at various insights. By way of example, two such studies yield a list of five (engagement, powerful teaching conversations, complex tasks, in-site and on-site support, and connections and visibility) or alternatively ten (accessibility, speed of change, diversity, communication and collaboration, reflection, multi-modal and nonlinear, risk fragility and uncertainty, immediacy, monopolization and surveillance) affordances of digital technologies for teaching and learning in schools. A more elaborated discussion of the affordances of digital technologies in education draws on the potentials offered by these technologies to increase students’ motivation to learn; to contextualize learning through interactivity; to enable immersion and continual formative feedback, to support students’ demonstration of what they have learned; to enable collaboration and communication in the learning process; and to adapt to different needs and paces of different students (compiled from a number of sources. The breadth and depth of the scope with which the concept of affordances has been brought to bear on the role of digital technologies in the school and the classroom, and the variety of affordances identified because of the different hypotheses and conceptual framings of different researchers, serves to all the more strongly illustrate the relative lack of application of this perspective to the understanding of the equally important and complex socio-cultural and spatial-material context of public space.

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and influence societal development, and the various actors who constitute society use, subvert, experiment with, and become accustomed to technological developments and develop expectations, apprehensions and preferences for future technological development. Both technological determinism and social determinism are constrained views. The concept of affordances is based on an understanding that the social and technological spheres are mutually co-determining in ways that are often unforeseeable, and are always engaged in a conversation with one another. One strand of the story of the evolution of social practices can be told in terms of the continual development of technologies, and the concomitant recognition and appropriation of affordances of these technologies by individuals and groups in satisfying their needs, pursuing their desires, and experimenting with new possibilities. Simultaneously and reciprocally, this narrative can also be recounted in terms of the evolution of needs, desires and ambitions of humans driving the development of technologies to afford the meeting of these needs, desires and ambitions. William W. Gaver, one of the pioneers of affordance research in interaction design, referred to his affordance-centered perspective as an “ecological approach to social interaction,” in that it seeks to articulate the ways in which people recognize and act upon the opportunities for action presented by their environment (Gaver 1996). The ecology at hand can be understood in terms of a dynamic, triadic relationship between people, environment and technologies. It is easy to see how the social affordances of digital technologies, as identified by Wellman (2001) and others can support a greater focus on the individual. With the shift from location-based to person-based networking—enabled first by mobile phones and subsequently by a slew of other personal devices that facilitate not just interpersonal communication but also wayfinding, photography and sound recording, personal data management and monetary transactions—the individual is the locus of the communication infrastructural networks of cities. This is a profound change because, at least at the point of interface, which is the only directly experienced physical manifestation of the system, there is a lack of a need or desire to share, while the sharing of the infrastructure that supports these individual nodes is not the sharing of a common good but the patronizing of a common brand. The control of social action by those controlling social networks is afforded by the technologization of social interaction (in distinction to the usually vaunted “making technology social”) that makes interaction codifiable, recordable, monetizable and subject to reduction to algorithms (Van Dijck 2013). This raises an essential point of difference between these digital forums and physical public spaces. While many strategies for controlling online venues have their analogies in strategies of control in physical space, there is always a greater surplus of unscripted, unplanned, unforeseen potential in public space, precisely because it is analog rather than digital. This is the manifestation of the different degrees of malleability or ability of media to be subjected to totalizing regimes of control. As a layer of technology overlaid on accreted strata of other technologies, not to mention the social norms and learned behaviors of people, the affordances of emerging digital technologies enter into a milieu of pre-existing affordances, interacting with them in various ways. For example, Gaver (1996) demonstrates the ways in which

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digital technologies subvert affordances of predictability, the establishment and recognition of stable patterns on which people rely in their everyday social practice. Hampton et al. (2011), on the other hand, remark that the affordances of digital technologies do not lead to the erosion of place-based networks of social connection and interaction, but rather strengthen them by offering affordances such as pervasive awareness, by which people are enabled to constantly receive information from their various social networks. A social affordance perspective can reveal the roots of “digital inequality,” as people with different socio-economic and demographic backgrounds tend to possess varying degrees of skills in activating the affordances of digital technologies to gain access to digital networking, further exacerbating pre-existing inequalities. The “universality” of digital technologies—their subsuming of the functionality of numerous predecessor media into a universal medium—could be seen as an overarching affordance that prefigures all other affordances of these technologies. It allows data of different types to “talk” with one another, and enables data of different types to be stored and processed by the same equipment. The discussion of social affordances has been a necessary step in understanding the ways in which digital technologies are appropriated in the construction, both literal and figurative, of public space, but further development will be necessary to move from the social to the public. As discussed in Chap. 3, the notions of social and public are not equivalent: the former referring generally to interpersonal relationships whereas the latter requires such higher-level criteria such as the facilitation of democracy and plurality. Thus, while the concept of “social affordances” provides a welcome bridge into the interpersonal and intersubjective dimensions of affordances, more work will be necessary to gain an understanding of the ways in which digital technologies can afford the actions and interactions that underpin the construction of publics and public space. Building upon the foundation of concepts established here, each of the remaining chapters of this second section of the book will explore a different facet of the public affordances of digital technologies.

The Interface Revisited This section revisits and expands upon the concept of the interface as introduced in Chap. 4 of this volume, as a foundation upon which to construct an affordancecentered understanding of the uses of digital technologies in the production of public space. The concept of the “interface” can be understood as denoting the locus at which affordances are actualized, where technology meets human intentionality. Prosaically, this term is used to refer to the elements of a digital technology artifact through which individuals interact with that artifact, and through the artifact with digital networks, databases and functionality. An interface is a bridge between the experiential world of humans and the abstract world of data and computational processes, and, via this data and these processes, between human and human. The concept of the interface is thus of central concern in exploring the ways in which

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technologies facilitate the types of interpersonal interaction that are the fabric of public life. As pointed out earlier, even for people interacting in a collocated way without the mediation of communications technology, no individual has access to the inner workings of another person’s psyche, emotions, perceptions and thought processes. Each individual is thus a “black box” unto others. We can observe others’ behavior and reactions but can never observe the mental workings that underlie this behavior. We build mental models of others with whom we interact, and constantly amend these mental models, and recalibrate our interactions with these others based on the evolution of our mental models. We do this through linguistic and non-linguistic communication, by observation of behavior and “reading” cues such as body language, our history of interaction with a given individual (if any) and stereotypes and conventions that we bring to the interaction. It is through such reciprocal processes of constructing and adapting mental models of one another that interacting humans—in and through conversation—construct an “interface” that allows them to interact (Glanville 1997). Glanville has argued that we interact with digital technologies (among other complex systems) in a similar way, as most people have insufficient understanding of the processes that underlie the functionality and behavior of these systems. “We enter the realm of faith” and interact “symbolically” with these technologies (Glanville 1997). We adopt explanatory principles to guide this interaction, based on our accruing history of involvement with these technologies. In both the humanto-human and human-to-technology variants of the “black box” principle, the “black box” is a characteristic of the observer and not of the sentient or technological other with whom/which they are interacting. In a (for now) comparatively trivial and rudimentary sense, many of the technological systems with which we interact are also programmed to build “black box” mental models of us, reading and analyzing our behavior to “remember” habits and preferences in order to optimize searches, target advertisements and streamline functionality. If, as Glanville argues, the interface is that which is constructed between two interacting entities through an iterative process of each acting on and refining their “black box” model of the other, then the interface is the never-completed outcome of a process of conversation, that is never simply “given” or designed by someone outside of the conversation, but always only existing by virtue of its continuous performative construction by the interacting entities (Valentine 2013). These interfaces are among the sites where the patterns and meanings are generated by human interaction, understood by Lefebvre as constituting the “social space” that is inscribed by human societies onto the “absolute space” of Nature in the social production of space (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]). Within this broader narrative, public space can be seen as an arena of the social production of certain types of interfaces. These interfaces are not amenities provided for the sustainment of public life, but are both the results of our interactions with others and the ether through which such interactions are enabled and sustained. Have digital technologies obsolesced public space? In his tetrad of media effects, Marshall McLuhan proposed that every medium or technology can be understood in terms of four types of effects that it has on society: what it enhances, what it retrieves (that had been previously made obsolete), what it obsolesces, and how it reverses its

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original characteristics when pushed to the extreme (McLuhan and McLuhan 1988; McLuhan 1992). For instance, the mobile phone enhances interpersonal communication, retrieves tribal culture, obsolesces phone booths,4 and reverses into letters (McLuhan and McLuhan 1988: 168–171). The Internet enhances decentralization, retrieves writing and correspondence, obsolesces travel and distance and reverses into isolation and information overload (Soules 2007). While these examples could be criticized as oversimplifications (the Internet does not obviate the need or desire for travel but it does radically reconfigure erstwhile reasons and motivations for travelling), the tetrad does provide a useful lens for discerning the factors on which a discussion of the effects of media and technologies on society can be founded. Avoiding the impulse to categorically declare public space as a casualty of digital technologies, more nuanced insights into the interrelations between these technologies and this realm of the city and of human life can be gained by the cross-mapping of the tetrad model onto the dimensions of the public sphere proposed by Thuma (2011): visibility, interaction, initiating and worldly attachment.

Social Technologies and a Shift in Cognitive Styles To paraphrase Latour (2007 [2005]), Nothing simply is: Everything is doing something. This is a reminder that technologies are never mute but rather they exert agency in their relationships with people, in the spirit of the “social technologies” perspective. The notion of affordances has not only to do with what we are able to do with the technologies, but what our use of these technologies does to us: how the act of engaging these technologies in the context of use affects our habits, our imaginations, our ambitions, our relationships with other human beings, the city and society, and indeed the broad political forms of society at the most overarching scale. Turner (2013), for instance, recounts how, during the Second World War and the post-war era, artists and intellectuals identified in mass media the potential for furthering fascist and totalitarian societies and espoused multimedia environments as a democratic alternative. As demonstrated, a wide range of lists of affordances of digital technologies has been proposed, arising from the immersion of these technologies within a particular context. As the concern of this book is public space, it will be relevant to query what affordances become apparent when the potentials of digital technologies are considered in the context of the actions through which public life is conducted and a public realm constructed. Technologies are not invented to fulfil a clearly delineated and pre-existing need or desire, but rather the roles fulfilled by a particular technology are actualized through its immersion in a given socio-cultural context. The way in which we use digital technologies in public space is tied-in with this, in a reciprocally-defining relationship between habits in use of technologies and psychological predilections. According to N. Katherine Hayles (2012), digital technologies are implicated in a shift in cognitive styles, the ways in which people  And the 2G mobile phone is in turn obsolesced by the smart phone.

4

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p­ rocess information. She claims that the ability to be plugged-in to various channels of communication, stimulus and information simultaneously prioritizes “hyper attention”—cursory awareness and engagement with multiple streams of information between which one switches constantly—over “deep attention,” or concerted and sustained concentration on a single task or object. Because of this, it could be argued that the interpenetration of public and private roles and modes in digitally mediated urban life not be seen in terms of the decaying of a fundamental human faculty, but rather as a consequential way of being in the contemporary city. We are not extracted from physical space by virtue of our being connected to remote others and distributed communities through digital channels, but we are operating in a parallel-processing mode of cursory hyper attention to different social or public contexts, devoting shifting degrees of attention to each of the various channels. There is an attention economy of public life, which is not completely distinct or separated from the monetized attention economy, which will be discussed in a later chapter. Mobile phone users present a type of “absent presence” (Gergen 2002) in public space, at the same time in that place and in another space of social interaction, while those on the other end of the line become “third persons” who are brought vicariously into the public space (Ling 2005). Hyper attention was not created by digital technologies, and indeed Hayles (2012) proposes that a general alertness to the multiple stimuli and potential dangers of a complex environment was likely a necessity for inhabitants of the pre-­modern world. Processes of modernization are characterized by mitigation of risk and unpredictability and the rationalization of spatial, temporal and social organization that saw the designation of times of work, play and home life; the separation and concentration of spatial zones for these different activities; and the codification and institutionalization of societal roles. These processes put in place the scaffolding of a lived world that enabled and encouraged deep attention. That a resurgence of hyper attention is being brought, not by a regression to pre-modern practices, but rather by the acceleration of technical progress and the suffusion of social and spatial practices with advanced generations of the selfsame technologies that facilitated the march of modernization, is a manifestation of what Bauman (2000) terms “liquid modernity,” in which the modernist impulse for constant and radical transformation is turned back upon modernity itself. Using technologies, we “go to work” on the world, transforming relationships in the world-as-found, of which the interrelationship between public and private spaces and practices is one facet. And our use of technologies also goes to work on transforming the public/private relationship in ways that are not necessarily intended or foreseen. Chen (2007: 15–16) cites a roster of scholars writing on the ways in which technologies have brought private spaces into the public realm (automobiles, MP3 players, mobile phones) or public practices into private space (print media, television, the telephone, the Internet). Three threads of discourse on public space, touched-upon throughout the previous section of this book, can help to give specificity to a discussion of the public affordances of digital technologies. These broad threads are: (1) the governance and control of public spaces, (2) the practices of urban citizens in their uses of public spaces and (3) the incursion of private-sector commercial interests into public spaces.

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Affording Governance Digital technologies can afford governance. Infrastructure space, including digital infrastructure, has been termed a “secret weapon” of those in power, for its affordance of activities that are invisible but consequential (Easterling 2015: 15). Broadband and mobile phone networks are counted among these infrastructure spaces. Graham (2004: 285) sees the role of digital technologies in policy and planning for public space as “to help support the emergence of urban places which support a creative, positive and democratic intermingling of public cultures and domains.” “Computationalism” (Golumbia 2009) refers to the belief in computation as a superior way of governing and organizing, which belief can be exploited by existing governing and economic powers, not least because they have control of networks and the wherewithal to regulate, finance and control them, playing into the logic of “instrumental reason.” Governance, in the cybernetic sense, means steering. There is (restrictive) steering that is achieved by forcibly reducing the complexity of that which is governed in order to better control it, and there is (regulatory) steering by reacting to complexity in-the-moment, maintaining a stance of sensitized readiness. The governance of public space can involve both of these. Restriction of variety can be achieved by excluding certain segments of society, enforcing conformity of behavior, etc. Regulation can be achieved through constant monitoring and reaction, but the truly non-variety-reducing kind of regulation cannot be centralized in the case of independently acting agents, so this type of control needs to be distributed. Trust is required, and this is typically not feasible in public space, as nice and lofty an ideal as it might be. So, there are constant, ongoing processes of negotiation. Bratton (2016: 148) sees the city as being policed by the modulation of “reversible partitions” that regulate access to urban spaces to different users, effectively creating different urban morphologies for different citizens (and, I would add, to different publics). Haraway (1991 [1985]: 309) refers to an “informatics of domination” constituting a broad program of coordinated moves designed to subjugate citizenry. The smart city endeavor is seen as promising quick fixes for a broken urbanism, for “urban managers who don’t actually control what they think they control” (Bratton 2016: 160). The Internet is not under the jurisdiction of any single government, but the “last mile” of infrastructure that links the point of access to the connection through phone and cable networks, is within the physical territorial jurisdiction of municipal and state powers, where the Internet becomes material, spatial and local. Boundaries around cities, such as they might be, are made porous and dissolute by the instantaneous and global nature of the digital networks in which the city is embedded (Virilio 1986). Traditional structures of governance are vulnerable to subversion, because cities are enmeshed within technological networks, and the multiple and largely private interests that control these networks whittle away at any pretense of integrity of urban or national territoriality. Addressing by systems higher up need not follow a geographical logic. Interfaces are created to reify a matrix of understanding and therefore of control. It is the logic of the interface that is the logic of control.

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Affording Extra-Governmental Governance Governance has taken on a much more entrepreneurial stance in many cities in the world, both in economically developed and developing contexts, and this is reflected in many manifestations in public space, and also in the prioritization of public-­ private partnerships over welfare state provision of public goods. Government strategies have seen the development of technological infrastructures as ways of supporting economic development, to attract investment and jobs, including the mechanization and informatization of transport infrastructures, including guidance, routing, passenger information systems, etc. for greater efficiency and speed (Graham and Marvin 1996: 308), seeking to remove friction from flows in the physical world as well as the electronic. Traffic, utilities and other systems of mobility and service as well. Increasingly, the governance of public space is not only the purview of government, which is tied to (physical) territorial understandings of the body politic. Governance is equally carried out by telecommunications companies, transnationals, and other non-governmental actors. With the importance of transport systems, and more generally the integrated suites of comprehensive smart city applications, firms like IBM, Cisco, and others are becoming de facto managers of many aspects of cities. There is a split between place-based governments, which control the (old) sedentary and local aspects of the city and the technologically-driven logic of the private firms that manage the dimension of flows, networks and connections. There is also a split between the social logic of government controlling the spatial logic of the city, and the logic of digital networks controlled through the profit logic of commercial providers. Graham and Marvin (1996: 309) call for a consolidated policy, focused on bringing the management of these technical networks to support social equity, economic sustainability and environmental sustainability. Infrastructure needs to be thought of in terms of its social effects and affordances, not just technical functionality. Both the infrastructures and the data of digital networks tend to be kept firmly under the control of private commercial interests (Graham and Marvin 1996: 52), meaning that they are not extensions of public space; they are subject to intense competition and are driven by the profit motive. “Their very purpose is to ‘lock out’ part of the population from their information” (Batty 1990). There is always a price of admission, if not in one currency then in another. The adage that if you are receiving something without paying for it then you are not the consumer, you are the product, is indicative of the shift in the economic model on which many platforms run. All of this exacerbates existing divides—if you have no money, your information is also a less interesting commodity. Policing takes on an extended meaning. Policing often deals with regulating the relationships between different publics,5 ejecting some while favoring others. 5  including the relationships within other-than-human (technological) actors, and the relations between these actors and human individuals and publics.

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Affording Commodification In much of the discourse, the “smartening” of the city is tied-in with the opening of new markets (Hollands 2008), and driven in fact often more by corporations than people or governments. And for this reason, the projects of smart city initiatives will tend to be concentrated on places expected to provide the greatest revenues, “for example, tourism, commerce, showbusiness, as well as stations, airports, gentrified central areas” (Mela 2014). With the advance of capitalism, the communicative role of public space comes increasingly dominated not by the symbols of power or social groups, but by commercial messages. Building facades become advertising for themselves and for the higher-level transnational or global entities to which they give tangible visualization and spatialization. There is a multiplication of perceived choice and freedom in the modern mediated city, as long as one has the money to afford it, and the fragmentation of the market thus corresponds to the fragmentation or “capsularisation” (de Cauter 2004) of public space as a commodified range of offerings on the market for different “target groups.” In this way public spaces become more domesticated and, in a certain sense, inclusive (Mela 2014). When all things are purchased there is no common good, only what each can individually afford. There is no perceived “topical relevance” to anything that cannot be brought within the fold of the self. Individuals de jure can make empty choices and individuals de facto can make choices that truly matter to their lives. Withdrawal from public life leads to a lack of ability to feel, to empathize (Sennett 1976). In a phenomenon of “networked individualism” (Holmes 2002), as mass marketing gives way to marketing targeted at, and tailored for, the individual, mass publics give way to a multitude of “publics of one”—each of us desiring the amenities of public life, only without other people, both supply and demand being afforded by digital technologies. Citizens perform “digital labor” (Fuchs and Seignani 2013) for these companies, in supplying them with data. Content is sold to an audience, but the audience itself is also sold to advertisers (Smythe 1977). Computer-mediated communication introduced the concept of the “user” just as mass media had introduced the concept of the “audience,” the “mass,” the “crowd” (Wei 2016: 11–13).

Affording Urban Citizenship In their use of personalized digital devices, social platforms and other elements of digital technologies, urban citizens reconfigure the ways in which they use and relate to the public spaces of cities. Ledrut (1986) stated that “the modern city is semanticized by the fact of its social production and use rather than by any communicational intention.” In other words, the meaning of the city is not “given” to urban citizens but produced by them through their practice of the city. The dayto-­day construction of meaning between urban inhabitants and the digitally

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mediated city involves a constant interweaving of mediated and unmediated communications and interactions that constitute digitally mediated urban spatial practice. The ability to communicate and interact in ways that transcend spatial collocation also affects urban citizens’ perceptions and practices in the public realm. Networks of association and interaction independent of spatial proximity have always existed, but are now being brought to the forefront as the digital technologies that offer the affordances for these communities take up a central role as sites (not merely channels) of community interaction. As an example, the categories of public space and the private spaces of “work” and “home” are referents structuring the time and space of urban lives, in urban time and urban space. The twentieth century was characterized by increasingly clear and absolute distinctions between the place (and time) of work and the home place (and time), and in making distinctions between these private spaces and the spaces of the public realm, in terms of location, aesthetics, spatial, temporal and social organization and roles. The era of the mediated city has seen a more fluid definition of these categories as digital devices and networks, along with changing social norms and modes of organization, afford the bringing of activities formerly associated with the home and workplace into public space. These and other practices change the ways in which people construct their understanding and use of public space. For example, the cellular phone has been termed the “compass and beacon” of the users of contemporary cities (Kopomaa 2000), and the landmarks by which one orients and guides oneself through the public space of the city are not (only) fixed structures and spaces, but also fellow urbanites (with their personalized mobile devices) who are themselves mobile. Townsend has hinted that navigation in websites may be a model for how people navigate the city “through intangible information cues” (Townsend 2000). The digital mediation of spatial practice in the modern city is, perhaps ironically, re-introducing an emphasis on the phenomenological and real-time (as opposed to abstract and fixed) dimensions of physical spatial experience. The appropriation of the affordances of digital technologies in practices of governance of the public realm, in the performance of public life and in the commodification of public spaces and spatial practice are interrelated. While capital, power, and political movements are increasingly global and networked, cities are the “strategic sites” in which these distributed phenomena are bundled and interface with one another (Sassen 2006: 5). Cities are also the sites at which these phenomena become phenomena in the literal sense that they can be directly experienced by the human senses. However, activities of daily life have been migrating to virtual venues, manifesting a split between the places of everyday life and the activities of daily life. As public spaces are relieved or stripped of their functional load (and perhaps their symbolic load as well), they present vacuums waiting to be filled. These vacuums are often filled with advertising, as is any other space that has presented itself where attention value is valued more highly than other values for use of that (literal and figurative) real estate.

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Each of the subsequent chapters of this second section of the book will identify a different family of affordances of digital technologies in public spatial practice and discuss how these affordances are implicated in the production of public space and in the interplay between the above-discussed phenomena of urban governance and control, urban life and citizenship, and urban commodification.

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Glanville R (1997) Behind the curtain. In: Ascott R (ed) Consciousness reframed I. UWC, Newport Wales Goldring P (1991) Early steps towards language: how social affordances educate attention. In: Proceedings of the sixth international conference on perception and action. International Society for Ecological Psychology, Amsterdam Golumbia D (2009) The cultural logic of computation. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Graham S (ed) (2004) The cybercities reader. Routledge, London Graham S, Marvin S (1996) Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. Routledge, New York Hadavi S, Kaplan R, Hunter MCR (2015) Environmental affordances: a practical approach for design of nearby outdoor settings in urban residential areas. Landsc Urban Plan 134:19–32 Halpern D, Gibbs J (2013) Social media as a catalyst for online deliberation? Exploring the affordances of Facebook and YouTube for political expression. Comput Human Behav 29:1159–1168 Hampton KN, Wellman B (2000) Examining community in the digital neighborhood: early results from Canada’s wired suburb. In: Ishida T, Isbister K (eds) Digital cities. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 475–492 Hampton KN, Lee CJ, Her EJ (2011) How new media affords network diversity: direct and media access to social capital through participation in local social settings. New Media Soc 13(7):1031–1049 Haraway D (1991 [1985]) Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. Free Association Books, London Hayles NK (2012) How we think: digital media and contemporary technogenesis. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Hollands RG (2008) Will the real smart city please stand up? City 12:303–320 Holmes B (2002) Unleashing the collective phantom (resistance to networked individualism). Mute Magazine. http://www.metamute.org/en/Unleashing-­the-­collective-­Phantom-­Resistance-­ to-­Networked-­Individualism. Accessed 21 Jan 2020 Kaptelinin V, Nardi B (2012) Affordances in HCI: toward a mediated action perspective. Proceeding of CHI 2012, 5–10 May 2012, Austin, TX Kopomaa T (2000) Speaking mobile: the city in your pocket. YTK’s electronic publications. http:// www.hut.fi/Yksikot/YTK/julkaisu/mobile.html. Accessed 4 Nov 2017 Kreijns K, Kirschner PA, Jochems W (2002) The sociability of computer-supported collaborative learning. Educ Technol Soc 5(1):8–22 Kyttä M (2004) The extent of children’s independent mobility and the number of actualized affordances as criteria for child-friendly environments. J Environ Psychol 24(2004):179–198 Latour B (2007 [2005]) Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory (Clarendon lectures in management studies). Oxford University Press, Oxford Ledrut R (1986) The images of the city. In: Gottdiener M, Lagopolous AP (eds) The city and the sign: an introduction to urban semiotics. Columbia University Press, New York Lefebvre H (1991 [1974]) The production of space (trans. Smith DN). Blackwell, Oxford Ling R (2005) The socio-linguistics of SMS: an analysis of SMS use by a random sample of Norwegians. In: Ling R, Pedersen P (eds) Mobile communication: renegotiation of the social sphere. Springer, London, pp 335–349 Maier JRA, Fadel GM, Battisto DG (2009) An affordance-based approach to architectural theory, design, and practice. Des Stud 30:393–414 Mäkinen K, Tyrväinen L (2008) Teenage experiences of public green spaces in suburban Helsinki. Urban For Urban Green 7:277–289 McGrenere J, Ho W (2000) Affordances: clarifying and evolving a concept. In: Proceedings of graphic interfaces 2000. ACM Press, New York, pp 179–186 McLuhan M (1992) The global village: transformations in world life and media in the 21st century, reprint edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford McLuhan M, McLuhan E (1988) The laws of media: the new science. University of Toronto Press, Toronto

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Chapter 8

Seeing-and-Being-Seen: Affordances of Sensors and Screens

Abstract  This chapter addresses the topic of VISIBILITY in digitally mediated urban public space. To see and be seen is a central aspect of public space. The suffusion of public space with digital sensing and surveilling apparatuses adds new dimensions to this economy of visibility. The roles of technologies of sensing and display in regimes of social control, in citizen witnessing and manifesting, and in the formation of urban imaginaries are discussed. The incursion of digital screens, both personal and public, into urban public space, enhances the reconfiguration of relationships between public and private, local and remote, while providing sites for the incubation of future forms of publicness. Keywords  Sensors · Actuators · Screens · Visibility · Telepresence · Manifestation

Being Seen According to Arendt (1998 [1958]), at the base of public life is the right to be seen and heard by others, along with the responsibility to see, hear and accept the copresence of others. The public realm, then, in this sense, is delimited by what is seen and heard, in terms of what is intentionally presented to be seen and heard, what is officially allowed or condoned, what is tolerated or accepted through expediency, and what, through force or subversion, explodes its way into public space and, therefore, into the sensory apparatus of citizens. To be a member of a public is to have the right and duty to occupy the realm in which one’s actions have consequences for others and in which the actions of others have consequences for oneself. As physical entities, we have effects on the physical world. We exert pressure and friction on the surfaces that we contact. The atmospheric perturbations caused by our bodily presence, our movements and our voices emanate outward into the atmosphere and the photons that ricochet off of our bodies penetrate even beyond the atmospheric medium into space. And these effects in turn collide and interact with other physical entities, emmeshing us in the physical world. A miniscule subset of these other material entities are endowed with the potential to translate this pressure and friction, these air perturbations and photons, into modulations of other physical and chemical processes that are interpreted as signals by the processing mechanisms of organic brains and digital computers. © The Author(s) 2021 T. Jachna, Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square, The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_8

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These cochleae, image sensor chips, infrared and ultrasonic sensors, microphones, nerves, olfactory receptor neurons, retinas, thermistors and thermocouples, touch receptors, piezoelectric disks and other such constructs can collectively be referredto as sensors. To appear, to be public, is to be sensed by sensors. Public life relies on being co-present with others and visible to them as they are visible to you.1 Appearance in public space can be seen as a type of theatrical performance, in which individuals present themselves to society at large and instantiate their place and role in democratic society (Valentine 2013). Public space is a stage upon which the performances of human co-existence unfold, lending them a sense of collective significance despite their often seemingly trivial and fleeting nature as individual acts. Exhibitionism and voyeurism are endemic in contemporary digital culture, existing in a symbiotic relationship with one another. Artist and media theorist Jordan Crandall (2005) has written of contemporary voyeuristic culture as requiring a reciprocal economy of a desire to watch and a desire to show. Both of these are evident in digital technology and the role of public space as a stage on which to see and be seen is continued. Publicness is thus intrinsically linked to visibility (Brighenti 2010) and, in a broader sense, to sense-ability. To be public is to sense others and to be sensed by them. To sense that one is being sensed is part of the public experience. In the case of embodied, co-present humans, this is a symmetrical, reciprocal relationship (albeit one that is always tinged by cultural norms and power relations).

Sensing as Control There are different aspects of the inclusive nature of public space that are seen to necessitate control. One is the need to surveil in order to mitigate the risks introduced by the inclusiveness and unpredictability of public life. The bargain that one strikes in submitting oneself, willingly or grudgingly, to scrutiny in exchange for dividends of security and convenience, is a common theme in contracts, both social and commercial. The desire to maintain control over urban public space through maximizing visibility has been a generative strategy for urban design throughout history, as exemplified in Haussmann’s restructuring of the urban fabric of Paris through a crisscrossed pattern of wide and straight boulevards. The exercise of control involves both seeing and concealing, including concealing oneself (Innerarity 2016: 83). The increasingly fortified borders between some public and private spaces are sites of the highest concentration of surveillance and security-related sensors, supplemented by physical barriers (Graham and Marvin 1996; Davis 1992). Surveillance systems can have a polarizing effect on the spatial geography of secu-

1  Before seeing this as a disqualification of non-visual types of interaction from being considered public in nature, it must be allowed that one can also make oneself present to others via other means, such as text and voice exchanges.

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rity by displacing crime to areas that are not scrutinized (Graham and Marvin 1996: 335). Public spaces are “spaces of appearance,” in which individuals and groups are seen and recognized by others as a part of the public (in contrast to places of disappearance such as concentration camps) (Arendt 1998 [1958]). Sensors, however, can allow a sort of “seeing there without being there:” a sensing without bodily presence, apparently cheating the seeing-and-being seen covenant of public space. Turning over surveillance to artificial intelligences places a second degree of abstraction of the surveilling agent from participation in public space, doubly removing the surveiller from visibility and accountability. In urban societies in developed countries, it is all but assumed that every adult citizen is in possession of a smart phone and thus has on-the-fly access to content and functionality that these devices provide. With digital technology, the technology of seeing and concealing is equally available to those nominally controlling and those being nominally controlled, such that there is no clear binary relationship (Innerarity 2016: 83). “The old mechanisms of government don’t work in a society where citizens live in the same information environment as those in power over them” (Giddens 2002: 8).

A New Economy of Public Space Surveillance, as a component of regimes of social control in public space, certainly predates the digital era. Koskela (2002: 293) remarked on at least a decade of predecessors, comparing surveillance in cities to Foucault’s (1995 [1975]) panopticon effect (while also remarking on the insufficiency of this metaphor because of the postmodern superficiality of the surveilling gaze in contrast to that of cutting disciplinary observation), in which control is internalized because urbanites have internalized the possibility of being watched at any time. But, in some ways, individuals seem to have evolved beyond the fear of surveillance, accepting it or even offering themselves up willingly to be observed. In the cyborg public realm of contemporary cities, we may be more likely to choose to reveal details of our identities willingly and habitually to digital devices and agents than to other human beings, for instance to gain access to goods, services or knowledge. One of the affordances that we proffer to such systems by this willingness is the possibility to silently and unnoticeably harvest our data and “remember” things about us as individuals—our search preferences, the places we frequent, our patterns of movement and areas of interest—for future use. In cyborg public space, to be seen is to generate data, to become data. It is this very off-handedness from both sides, each at the fringes of the other’s attention, generating a profligate surplus of data, that characterizes the contemporary urban cyborg scene. Many contemporary urban citizens do not see surveillance as inherently threatening or ominous. In addition to the perceived dividends in terms of safety (which

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is also one of the main arguments used to justify such technological surveillance and data gathering), surrendering data on one’s self and allowing the tracking of one’s movements and behavior can, in and of itself, be seen as a benefit to be sought out, a way of appearing before a cyborg public. Surveillance has come to be perceived as “friendly” (Crandall 2005), and people implicitly contribute to their own surveillance by readily volunteering locative information, photos and masses of other personal images and other data, for returns such as reliability, increased personal reach, etc. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been instrumental in the spread of voluntary acquiescence to, and even pursuit of, being subject to surveillance, relying on chips that are (usually) intentionally and knowingly carried on the body. Surveillance is sought-out as providing effortless access to channels through which one’s presence may be maintained, as volunteering such data can help in securing and increasing one’s membership in online communities. As Nissenbaum and Varnelis (2012: 22) muse, “Is it that we’ve come to trust that just because the eyes that are watching us are (largely) algorithmic, it’s not a matter of concern?” The conscripting of individual human minds into networks of data collection in this way brings a profound leap in the types of data that these systems can capture. They have access to an increasingly rich and variegated array of views, not only onto us (our behavior and habits) but also into us (our values, desires, beliefs and motivations).

Innumerable Perspectives: The Cyborg Sensorial Array Arrays of surveillance cameras and other urban sensors constitute a segment of contemporary cyborg publics, which serve as non-human observers of public space, with which humans co-inhabit the public realm, and with which we interact. The New  York-based theatrical company Surveillance Camera Players, for example, have been staging famous plays for this “audience” of surveillance cameras in urban public spaces around the world since 1996. Highly accurate facial recognition technology is being used to analyze surveillance camera footage of crowds in urban public spaces in many Chinese cities. One known use of this technology is to identify jaywalkers, who are then shamed by posting their images on web portals. In the words of Qi Lu, chief operating officer of the Chinese Internet tech company Baidu, “with far field voice sensors… even at a distance we can hear what we want to hear… We can see your fingers, your eyes… the machine can see what it wants to see” (Lu 2017). These words were not uttered in the context of lauding or decrying the potential of these technologies for surveillance, but rather in pointing out the valuable channels of data collection that such capabilities put at the disposal of providers of services and products. The 2017 feature movie Dragonfly Eyes, by Xu Bing, is a narrative constructed entirely from publicly available footage from surveillance cameras throughout

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China2 (Xu 2017). Xu compares the (at the time) 170 million cameras3 (Chin 2017), recording visual data throughout the nation and feeding it dutifully to the datasphere, to the thousands of facets that make up the optical organs of the insect from which the film draws its title. Though many of the spaces captured by such cameras are private or commercial, the fact that they are all sites of cameras streaming on publicly viewable channels places them all equally under the public gaze. These are public eyes in that what they see is nominally available to anyone with Internet access. A large portion of the images and videos recorded in public space are not gathered by automatized surveillance systems as such, but rather are collected and diffused by individuals through use of their mobile digital devices. This voluntary (even enthusiastic), individual, open and distributed harvesting of visual impressions is a counterpoint to the dispassionate, discrete, automatized collecting conducted by surveillance systems. The massive and meteorically expanding oeuvre of “selfies,” other photos, videos and other image recordings of public spaces, and the activities that happen in them, posted to Instagram and other such platforms, constitute a vast and constantly expanding archive distributed throughout the Net and digital communications networks. This archive can be accessed by mining and searching, or can even intentionally gathered and curated by public and private interests (or even platform providers like Google or Facebook) for their own purposes. Each smart phone-carrying cyborg urbanite becomes a sensory node in a distributed network of sensors in the “augmented city” (Ratti and Claudel 2016). These sensors are subjective, gathering impressions that are intentionally selected by individual humans and often put out there for other humans to perceive and form impressions and act upon. The unspoken corollary to this is that people without these devices are excluded from this network, both as producers and consumers. Thus, not only between government and citizens, companies and consumers, but also between the haves and the have-nots of citizens, there are different levels of inclusion in the sensory and visibility economy of public space. In this sense, in the “data economy” we (or rather the devices that we carry which become our metonymies) exist within a state of generalized symmetry with other devices (that are metonymies for other things or places, the weather data-collecting sensorial array stands in for that place, it is the sensory instrument of the place) as producers and consumers of data. We are of value, and indeed are only present at all in many senses, by virtue of our being attached to many devices that require our input, and many others that do not require our conscious input but which monitor us nonetheless. In crowdsourcing and other modes of data harvesting, the human body and mind are converted into a sensorial array. In order to plug humans into digital networks, incentives are needed, and the offered incentives are myriad, from conve-

2  The 2007 film “Look,” by Adam Rifkin, had used a similar conceit. Rifkin’s film, however, was not actual found surveillance camera footage, but was performed by actors and shot using digital video cameras placed at the locations of actual surveillance cameras to simulate their perspective. 3  This number was expected to increase by 450 million by 2020.

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nience to social inclusion. In this way, we become embedded in the universal medium; we become digitized. The multitude of sensors (human, technological and cyborg) that pervade public space contribute to Arendt’s “innumerable perspectives” that come together to create the public realm. This “surveillant assemblage” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000) does not wait for data to be input by people but rather draws data from us and constructs “data doubles” of us. “Our personal spatial data flows freely and without friction across and between interoperable and synergistic geo-enabled devices, platforms, services, applications, and analytics engines” (Leszczynski 2015), and our thus-constructed “data doubles” can be subjected to analysis, bought and sold on the market as a tool to better target us with commercial messages, propaganda or scams.

Witnessing Digital technologies afford both the recording of evidence of events by citizens and the rapid and broad diffusion of this evidence. “Citizen witnesses” are often the first on the site of an event to record and distribute footage, pre-empting the official media or the government in presenting the first account. These “accidental journalists” (Matheson and Allan 2009) sometimes provide the only accessible accounts and footage, particularly when the government or another entity seeks to suppress spread of the news of the occurrence, or when the event is ignored or under-reported by the traditional news media. Such citizen contributions to journalistic discourse have become an accepted and expected aspect of the reportage on any event (Blaagaard and Allan 2016: 68). Everywhere is a potential vantage and all are potential witnesses. Furthermore, with the explosion in the number of sensors present in public space and the increasingly diverse types of data collected, traces and evidence are multiplying. In investigating or reporting on any crime perpetrated in an urban area, police and reporters are virtually guaranteed to be able to draw on security camera recordings of the criminal before, during and/or after the act. Protesters use tactics of peaceful witnessing, in which they are not just witnessing for themselves as public individuals, but serving as the eyes of the distributed network by live streaming or recording, as in the cases of the dismantling of the tents and placards of the occupy movements, as documented for instance in the 23 November, 2011 eviction of Occupy protestors from Toronto’s St. James Park. The capturing and circulation of images is an act of dissent and protest in itself and is effective in “making public” as well as “organizing publics,” putting these artifacts into circulation, “redistributing” dissent from the physical camp to the digital network (Milan 2015: 1). Digital technologies lend new levels of audibility and visibility to citizen voices and images in the reporting of news and events (Chouliaraki 2016: 169). With the exclusion or persecution of professional journalists in the conflicts following the Arab Spring, citizen testimonials became crucial, even leading

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to NATO’s decision to intervene. Sensors and human sensing link together in witnessing (that becomes a communal witnessing). Convergent journalism (Deuze 2006) refers to collaborative projects between official digital news outlets and citizen witnesses. Reporting not just on what is seen but also what is felt becomes relevant and accepted with citizen journalists. A graphic video of the death of journalist Ramy Ryan during an Israeli missile strike at a market in Palestine was taken up by international news media and was instrumental in influencing public opinion on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, as amateur digital videos and subtitling cause emotions to reverberate through extended “collectivities of translation” (Pérez-González 2016: 110–123). Rather than the c­ oherent narratives broadcast through a public medium that characterize professional or official news reporting, the reportage of citizen witnessing is delivered through a hybrid collection of channels—Twitter and email messages, eyewitness links, with footage and links inviting testimonials and opinions, constituting an immersive environment of heterogeneous perspectives that engage and play off of one another, through which each individual must navigate (Chouliaraki 2016*). The citizen witness serves as a sentient probe.

Recording and Urban Imaginaries Our imaginaries, iconographies and myths of the urban condition have always been mediated through the representations of the urban environment that we create and display to ourselves and one another (Mattern 2015). The progression of urban representations from engravings to geo-tagged mobile phone snapshots and Google Earth data also marks an evolutionary path in terms of the relationship between sensory organs, image processing mechanisms and representational forms, in which the tendency is one of increasing abdication of the component tasks of sensing, processing and composition of representations from humans to technologies. We can refer back to Walter Benjamin (2015) for discussions of the city as a photographic subject, and photography’s role in social change movements. When the city is surveilled, it becomes mediated and, in a way, this constant surveillance is a type of algorithmic authoring, producing a “cinematic city.”

Telepresence Telepresence refers to the use of digital technologies to give a person the sensation of participating in an event or situation where they are not bodily present (Minsky 1980) and, in a corollary that is often underplayed in definitions of this term, to give people participating bodily in this event or situation the impression that this remote person is also a participant. While this term is sometimes applied to static installations such as those used in videoconferencing, in the more complete sense of the

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word, telepresence also involves the remote user being able to exercise control over a remote surrogate body. While early attempts at telepresence involved the hiring of human agents who would venture out with body-mounted cameras and microphones, telepresence agents are currently typically understood to be robots. The initial impetus for the development of telerobotics (robots controlled by a remote human as opposed to, for instance, those whose behavior is algorithm-driven) paired with telepresence was for the exploration of environments that were hostile or inaccessible to human bodies, such as outer space, the ocean depths or the interior of the human body, while also allowing operators to exercise agency at a distance. Consumergrade telepresence robots are marketed primarily as providing ­convenience and overcoming time and distance barriers in the domestic, business, commercial, institutional and industrial spheres (Telepresence Robots 2016; Beam® 2018). There are in principle few technological barriers to bringing the avatar principle into physical public space: the possibility of us having robot proxies of ourselves representing us in public space is a current area of research. Researchers have investigated the implications of individuals being in public space by proxy, as in through robotic agents. Such robotic co-presence can “enhance the public realm as a space where people can interact under the appropriate conditions of privacy and equality; where the social and economic benefits of contact are maximized, and where barriers to participation are reduced. In doing so we will create a ‘model’ public space that will also function as a living laboratory” (Levine et al. 2013). Potential applications of telepresence in public space include enabling those who cannot be, or do not desire to be, bodily present at a particular public space or event (for instance because of physical disability, geographical distance or fear) to “participate” nonetheless. With the current state of technological development, sensory telepresence is for the most part limited to seeing and hearing, but advances in “digital scent technology” (Strickl 2015; Hariri 2016), “haptics” (Awada et al. 2013) and (to a lesser degree) “taste media” (Ranasignhe et al. 2016) indicate that the ability to digitally codify, transmit and evoke sensations of smell, touch and taste is just a matter of time. Within the scope of the service provided by the human telepresence agent or the functionality and terms of the service agreement for telepresence robots, these avatars can also be instructed to act, intervene and interact with others in public space. This is another example of the growing ability of normal citizens to avail themselves of the “seeing there without being there” privileges formerly reserved for the state and other privileged entities in society with the wherewithal and power to place police forces, soldiers and spies, as well as surveillance devices, sensors and actuators, into public spaces to serve as their eyes, ears and hands. Social robotics research is driving development of functionality in telepresence robots that enable the enactment of “body language” at the command of a remote operator or mimicking the operator’s own body language, which has been shown to facilitate social interaction. Telepresence robots bring together sensors, actuators and screens to enable multichannel remote participation in public life through the creation of a special kind of cyborg construct. From the perspective of cyborg publics, the question of whether one is present or absent from public space is a matter of degrees rather than an absolute distinction. Telepresence robots are extensions of the sensory and expressive

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apparatus of people, and one could imagine a scale of gradations of telepresence, and thus of agency in public space, depending on technical specifications such as the depth, resolution and fidelity of the sensory data that can be transferred, the intricacy of the mechanical articulation and ease and freedom of remote controlled movement of the robotic agent, and the refinement and expressiveness of its emotional interface that allows for affective interaction with others. However, none of these distinctions is as important as that between bodily presence and bodily absence.

Manifesting Because the construction of public space relies on a reciprocal economy of seeing (sensing) and being seen (sensed), it is also necessary to consider the ways in which digital technologies affect what is seen or visible in public space and the manner in which urban actors of different types are able to present themselves in these spaces. The feeling that one is participating in a shared objective apprehension of a common external reality is the foundation of the public experience. As stated by Arendt (1998 [1958]), “Appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality.” The architectural framing of physical public spaces has always been an instrument via which the powers-that-be have made themselves manifest in urban space, created monumental testaments to their values and history, and instilled spatial biases that gave literal shape to the practices of public life. This physical structuring of public life also serves as a visible datum of a common shared public world within which all members of an urban society coexist. This is in distinction to the lack of such a common visible datum in digital/virtual venues of public interaction, as the visible architecture of physical public space stands in contrast to the invisible architecture (Hoy 2005) of the Internet. Each individual in physical public space is also part of the visual environment of others in that space. The right of individuals and groups to appear to others by projecting their identities and voices has long been a hallmark of democratic public spaces, as exemplified by the “speaker’s corners” in many public parks and squares in cities around the world, set aside explicitly for the purpose of public speeches. The lineage linking these places to the countless Web-based venues of public airing of opinions is obvious. Indeed, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian cited the original speakers’ corner in London’s Hyde Park, which has existed formally since the Parks Regulation Act of 1855 but which in practice dates back to the seventeenth century and is still used intensively to this day, as his primary inspiration for that successful news aggregation and discussion website. But others have pointed out the one crucial difference between the physical and webbased soapbox is the ease with which anonymity and distance from one’s audience can be maintained in the latter. This factor has been linked to a noted lack of civility in Internet forums in which one does not share a bodily co-presence with one’s audience.

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In the cyborg public space that emerges with the suffusion of urban environments with digital technologies, the content and interactions of digital forums intermingle with physically collocated interactions. Digital screens and other display technologies are an immediately apparent manifestation of digital technologies of showing digital content in physical space. Examples of such technologies are myriad, including projections, screens both large (digital signage) and small (personal digital devices), media facades and kinetic architecture. They have their pre-digital precursors in public film projection (from candles to incandescent projectors and reel-to-­reel), televisions (from cathode ray tubes to plasma screens) and billboards (from painting to photographic printing to large scale ink-jet printing), but bring expanded dimensions of dynamism and interactivity that afford new possibilities of integration into public life and interaction. The public affordances of digital applications has taken hold on the public imagination, and now that these affordances have become commonplace, they have become affixed to individual screens in the home or the workplace, subsumed as another functionality of the increasingly generic and ubiquitous consumer products with which we interface with the world—one more link in a chain of applications (like the home cinema, the home video game) that, having made their debut in public or communal settings, are quickly transmediated by the industry to be absorbed into the private, personal sphere. We devote “continuous partial attention” (Stone n.d.) to these devices and their screens, and prefer SMS and other forms of communication that can be done in an off-hand manner.

Private Screens in Public Space The mediation of views into public realms from private spaces through screens is a well-rehearsed practice. From the vantage from the defensible private spaces of our automobile, home or workplaces, we view the world outside of these spaces through screens in the form of windows that provide a framed view onto the public world outside from the security of our private spatial bubbles (Dewey 2004: 294), an analogous function to way in which the screens of our personal digital devices offer a perspective into the digital public realm. Through the screens of mobile phones, pads and other personal technological artifacts, urbanites augment their visual experience of public space in personalized ways. Using wayfinding apps, location-based games and other such applications, individuals have access to individualized views onto the urban spaces they occupy. Private screens on personal digital devices also add new facets to the norms and codes of spatial practices in public space. The “Code of the Street” (Anderson 1999) of inner-city neighborhoods extents into, and is influenced by, social media, as acts of bravery or cowardice in street skirmishes are recorded and circulated to be viewed on private screens, extending the audience of such acts in space and time. Citizen recordings of criminal activities and acts of police brutality, such as the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis that sparked the social upheaval

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that is still unfolding as of this writing, are likewise diffused through such networks, bringing behaviors often conducted in a split second in the fringes of urban space and society into the view of an international digitally-mediated public, in which “new issues emerge such as “invisible audiences” and the “context collapse” of relational settings separated geographically and socially” (Lane 2016: 50).

Public Screens Besides the private screens of personal digital devices, public spaces in cities around the world are being populated by an increasing number of large-scale fixed public screens. These media screens can be seen as extensions of the architectural element of facades by other means, as Struppek (2006: 109) noted in the case of museums, making their presence known in public space and engaging new audiences. As these screens began to proliferate in cities, Townsend (2004) proposed that a new type of urban place was emerging, characterized by a density of interactive displays and systems, which he illustrated through analyses of case studies of four highly “mediated” existing urban spaces (Times Square and Union Square, New York; Shibuya, Tokyo and Digital Media City, Seoul). These urban environments are formed, in a fashion that is both truly urban and truly public, from the accumulation of works by many actors, rather than the structured and contained design of one author. These spaces are formed as much, or more, by a cacophony of large-scale advertising surfaces than by the architecture of the surrounding buildings, as building facades are appropriated as real estate of attention that can bring in more rental per square foot than the office spaces tucked behind these signs in the buildings’ innards. The painted or printed billboards that initially colonized this valuable vertical real estate were succeeded by electric signage, which was supplanted by digital screens which are being extended with augmented reality content, even as these large fixed public screens are joined by the countless micro-screens of personal devices. Large public screens have typically been used for broadcasting popular events, as information and advertising platforms, as well as for alternative content by artists such as Jenny Holzer (McQuire 2006). The proliferation of digital screens in public spaces—bringing the enticement of passive absorption a moving display of luminous images and engaging narratives designed to distract and titillate—evokes a direct analogy to the re-spatialization of the domestic realm and the reconfiguration of domestic life that came with the insertion of the television into domestic space in the mid-twentieth century. Virilio saw the public image (often viewed from within a private space) as having replaced public spaces (Virilio 1994). The “society of the spectacle” posited by Guy Debord is one in which public life becomes a life of communal consumption of prefabricated experiences (often distributed by public media or disseminated in spaces of public gathering), rather than a place in which individuals create a common world through their interactions with others (Debord 1995 [1967]; Struppek 2006: 107).

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With the technology of projection mapping, it is possible to design and project images onto surfaces and objects with any geometry or texture. The use of this technology to intervene into public space is exemplified by the Bristol-based French projection artists AntiVJ (www.antivj.com). With these technological capabilities, every surface of every public space is a potential digital screen. The digital display screen is no longer only a miniature private window carried by individuals out into public space or a dynamic billboard for mass spectacles, but also a potentiality of any surface of any public space that can be called into being with technologies that are only becoming more accessible, affordable and commonplace. Unlike so-called “media facades,” which are integral parts of buildings used primarily for planned, paid-for, vetted and curated creative work and advertising, in projection (in many literal and figurative senses of the word) the image originates from outside the entity onto which the image is being projected, requiring little or no physical alteration of surfaces (and is often done without express permission from property or building owners). While most of the more elaborate projection mapping projects of the past were undertaken with the consent and even support of authorities and property owners, the same technology also affords “guerrilla projection” initiatives that throw ideologically charged images onto highly visible or symbolically significant surfaces to express political messages and raise awareness of issues that may be felt to have been afforded no space or expression in official public space. McCullough (2013) writes of the “ambient,” the tendency to perceive environments as wholes and not as accumulations of individual messages or signals. In this context, he proclaims the banality of digital public screens, and claims that they are not perceived as windows to another world but rather as disjointed fragments in the swirl of images that public space has become, heralding an age of “unprecedented distractions” and “divided attention.” In the concept of the attention economy (Davenport and Beck 2001), human attention is understood as a limited commodity for which there is fierce competition. This paradigm has been markedly gaining relevance with the explosion in the amount of digital content, providers and channels of access, leading to a situation in which “a wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention” (Simon 1960). The “economy of attention” predates digital technologies as a force in the economy of public space. It is the essential corollary to public space as the space of appearance. Individuals (through their bodies), commercial enterprises (through their advertising presence), and the state (through their symbols and instruments of power and authority) have long vied for attention in public space. Notwithstanding the present purported status of digital screens as just another layer of noise in an increasingly information-overloaded urban environment, there are some who see in them a greater potential. As discussed in the following section, digital screens have also become a medium for artists and designers who seek to appropriate these technologies to interrogate and extend the public experience and draw the attention of public citizens to the curating of public bonds.

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The “Deepening” of Place: Interactive Installations The visual environment of public spaces has always been constituted by different categories of entities: the architectural ensembles that frame and delineate public spaces, the people that occupy the spaces, and the semiotic layer of advertising, commemorative, informational and wayfinding signage (in which physical space becomes a site of messages vying for our attention (McCullough 2013)). Digital technologies have been applied to blur the distinctions between these three layers and create new hybrid forms. For decades, media artists such as Krzysztof Wodiczko have explored the possibilities and implications of the superimposition of architecture and the projected image, and as projection and display technology has become increasingly digitized, contemporary media artists have continued to experiment with the effects that can be brought by the juxtaposition of the ancient and static medium of architecture with the new and dynamic medium of digital media. Some works disrupt the division between the enduring architecture of public space and the individuals who fleetingly occupy these spaces, as in media artist Theo Watson’s 2011 “Faces” project in San Francisco’s Market Street, in which portraits of passers-­by were projected onto the facades of buildings. As demonstrated in a well-known example of such installations, Rafael Lozano-­ Hemmer’s “Vectorial Elevation” in Mexico City in 1999 enabled individuals to control spotlights via the Internet to create monumental light sculptures over the city’s central square, Zócalo Plaza, these installations enable individuals to ape, for a few moments at least, the efficacy and privilege of the architect, the planner, and the monumental artist in forming the aesthetic environment of official public spaces, in a way that is part narcissism, part empowerment and part usurpation and bending of urban roles. Designers of such spaces frame the problem statements implicit in their projects in different ways, which imply different understandings of the role of the designer, the nature of the user and the space, and the nature of public space design. For instance, a project like the Centre for Digital Urban Living’s “Commitment/ Confessions” project in Aarhus, Denmark—which enabled people to record video confessions of their bad climate habits and commitments to improve them, which were then subsequently projected in public space (Leong and Brynskov 2009)— presumes a social structure and social norms that would encourage people to then follow-­up on these promises. Interaction here refers to the interaction of the individual with the digital artifact as a type of megaphone. One observer described another Centre for Digital Urban Living installation titled “Climate on the Wall,” which enabled visitors to write slogans about climate change that were then projected on a facade, as a kind of public manifestation of refrigerator door “magnetic poetry” (De Lange 2009): a public airing of a private practice, in which individuals could interact with each other’s statements, potentially stimulating (or at least simulating) a type of dialogue. Mixed results have been reported on the potential of such installations to spur debate or action, with many being approached as diversionary games or entertain-

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ment, not leading to such interchanges or actions, but often even being subverted for other purposes. There is an inkling that digital installations alone won’t change the fundamental expectations and behavior of people in public space. De Lange (2009) has remarked that perhaps these installations should become “conversation pieces, rather than the conversation itself.” That is, rather than designers seeing their role as creating environments to contain certain types of discussion, they should think more of how their pieces insert into existing patterns and practices, or rather abandon the conditioning ambition altogether. He goes on to make the point that maybe such installations, while not exactly leading to political debate, do help people in gaining trust and sufficient knowledge of one another to be comfortable to share public spaces. Design for interaction is now the mantra, rather than design of interaction. The enticement for individuals to interact with such installations lies in part in the allure of seeing their actions take on dimensions beyond that of their individual body, writ large in public space, or transcending space and time through telepresence. The interaction with others achieved through such installations has remained largely cursory, and one awaits applications that enable and encourage substantive interaction by drawing on the potential of digital technologies to augment the experience of physical reality by making it seem strange and wondrous: a “transfiguration of the commonplace” (Danto 1983). The understanding of places as electronic interfaces raises the possibility that the relationship between human and environment could be seen as a type of conversation and learning process, through which each learns from and about the other (Pask 1975; Haque 2008). The statement in this form could be applied to any type of social technology in the built environment, particularly and especially the technologies of construction and articulation of built form, as notably explained by Stewart Brand (1994) in How Buildings Learn, but with an even deeper genealogy. To give specificity to exactly what digital technologies bring to this conversation requires more precision. Pask’s “us and it” dichotomy has become complicated by the presence of many individual actors—biological, digital and hybrid.

New Visibilities Paul Virilio has referred to large-scale public screens and projections as a new “electronic gothic” for the age of consumption and spectacle, just as the stainedglass windows of medieval cathedrals served the purpose of spiritual enlightenment (Virilio 1998). Struppek (2006) foresaw an incremental program of development of the role of screens in re-imbuing spaces with publicness, beginning with special broadcasts by TV stations of content specifically designed to be viewed in these spaces, to encourage identification with local culture and create collective memories in these places. Architecture in this form is no longer the “crystallization of the city’s memory over time” (Struppek 2006: 107), but the fleeting image of a moment. These screens are new components of the architec-

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tural framing of public space, bringing static (architectural) space into contact with the space of flows in which everything is in flux. In the city of networks, every place is defined by its fluid connections to other places, and indeed to the flows of people and information through them, and public screens give visual representation to these flows and information. The idea of linked screens for communication between remote places has been a perennial vision, as in the “Hole in Space” (1980) and “Hole in the Earth” (2003–2004) projects (both cited in Struppek 2006: 109). With personal access to apps such as Skype and FaceTime, these applications have lost their novelty effect, and the commonplace use of these technological affordances is now primarily in private and business-related uses, not in the opening-up of public portals. Aside from creating new adjacencies in space, some applications also play on the potential of digital technologies to disrupt temporal relationships. Thierry Fournier’s 2008–2012 project “See You,”4 in which digital screens in public spaces display 24-hour-delayed recordings of the scene directly behind the viewer, providing a (one-­way) link in time rather than in space and creating a “temporal depth” (Fournier 2008–2012). LAb[au] (ND) refer to their projects as integrations rather than installations, in that they are integrated into the architectural frame of public spaces, taking the form of memorials or artworks, critiquing the spaces or types of spaces they are in, or even public life itself. Such installations demonstrate the “affective” potential of interactive digital technology displays to become spaces of public interactions, rather than merely points of access to information, functionality or diversion (McQuire 2006). Through public screens and projections, real-time informational aspects of the urban environment can be made visible. A project during the 2012 Architecture Biennale in Aarhus, Denmark, projected a visualization of real-time data about the city onto the tower of the city hall. The “D-Tower” by the Dutch architecture firm NOX was a sculptural edifice in a public square in the city of Doetinchem, Netherlands that was illuminated a different color at night depending on the predominant emotion expressed during that day by respondents to a questionnaire on a website (NOX 1999–2004). Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s “Body Movies” was an interactive digital installation set up in public spaces in Rotterdam (Lozano-Hemmer 2001), in which “Thousands of photographic portraits, previously taken on the streets of the host city, are shown using robotically controlled projectors. However, the portraits only appear inside the projected shadows of the passers-by” (Lozano-Hemmer 2001). This installation demonstrates Arendt’s notion of public space as something that both links and separates people. It entices and enables members of the public to enter into a sort of interaction with one another, while at the same time inserting a buffer and filter between the interacting participants. Like all mediums, all media, it mediates between people in both of these senses. People occupying the same public space

 The French title of this work was “A+.”

4

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interact not as bodies but as two types of avatars—projections and shadows—in a virtual pseudo space projected onto the architectural boundary of the space. United Visual Artists (UVA) created permanent installation for Maple Leaf Square in Toronto, which exemplifies the notion of “show architecture” (Wachter 2012) that flaunts the aesthetic potential of digital technologies to atmospheric effect. The nonrepeating cellular structure of the canopy roof shows off the capabilities of digital technology-supported design and fabrication, while at night an array of lights embedded in the roof present dancing patterns, in reaction to movements of pedestrians and traffic in the space or the lights in the buildings s­ urrounding the square. The artists’ description of their intentions to “create a work that people could connect to, immerse themselves within, and almost escape momentarily from the hard environment of the city” (Saieh 2010) expresses a sentiment that sees the urban environment and social contact as something to be escaped. “Augmented reality” applications superimpose layers of visual representations of virtual data onto our view of the material world (Fatah et al. 2015). While early examples of these applications in areas such as tourism (Schnädelbach et al. 2002) and wayfinding (Haller et  al. 2006) required head-mounted displays, data gloves and other high-end interfaces, this functionality is now commonplace among smart phone-based games and other applications. For instance, a series of augmented reality art collaborations between Re+Public and the artist B.C. “Heavy” Biermann superimpose digital augmentations onto public murals and billboards, allowing people to use their smartphones to interact with and manipulate these artworks on their private screens (Re+Public 2018), blurring the boundaries between private property and public space (Karlin 2013). As cursory and trivial as the interactions facilitated by projects such as those discussed above may seem, it would be unfair to dismiss them off-hand as mere diversions or exercises in narcissism. In discussing his “CoCollage” project—in which cafe patrons post messages to a public digital display—De Lange (2009) cites Jane Jacobs, Lynn Lofland and Claude Fischer in arguing for a more accessible, less vaunted version of public contact that has to do with us gaining the trust and confidence to put ourselves on display to others, to become gradually familiar and eventually trusting, and potentially even to interact with others, which he hypothesized could lead to discovery of shared interest and the establishment of relationships. Even just the passive watching of other individuals through these screens could be seen as a way of “just being” in the presence of others, which is a baseline function of public space (Arnold 2011: 402). Public screens have long been sites for digital versions of many of the elements that populate public spaces: information, commercial messages and artistic works. With their appropriation as venues of interaction and representation of the individuals who occupy these places, they become all the more de facto extensions of urban public space.

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Screens as Public Spaces Public screens can be sites at which virtual flows become visualized and linked to a place and an audience. They create an audience that could potentially become a public, if these screens are applied in ways that catalyze the formation of publics (Struppek 2006: 108). This principle was put into action as early as the 2003 “Public Space Broadcasting” project of cooperation between the BBC and the municipal governments of several northern English cities, in which public screens became participatory planning tools (McQuire et al. 2008). The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) and English Heritage, advisory bodies to the British Government on issues pertaining to urban design and historic environments, respectively, have proposed a set of principles for the integration of large digital screens into public spaces (CABE/English Heritage 2010). The occasion for the study that generated this report was the Live Sites initiative, in which large screens were installed in 30 public spaces in British cities to allow for remote public real-time viewings of the 2012 London Olympic Games.5 During the Games, the content displayed on these screens was provided by the Olympic organizing committee and managed by the BBC, but after the games the screens were turned over to local authorities and became integral parts of these spaces. In some ways, the Live Screens transformed the relationship between the Olympic Games and the hosting city and society. However, McGillivray and Frew (2015) argue that during the events, these Live Sites also served to colonize public spaces in cities with corporate “brandscaping” and the incorporation of these spaces into a global transnational space of spectacle and frivolity. McQuire (2006) analyzes such interventions into urban space in terms of the concept of “relational aesthetics” (Bourriaud 2002 [1998]), in which the work of art is understood as an intervention into social space and relations, that (re)configures social interactions between people. Augmented people come into contact with the built environment, sensing and addressing it in new ways, just as augmented environments come into contact with people, sensing and addressing them in new ways (Wachter 2012). Chen (2009) argues for the necessity of augmented reality as a component of urban life, claiming that data is an essential and fundamental dimension of the environment in which we conduct our lives, to the extent that “if you are not seeing data, you are not seeing.”

5  Remote public screens had previously been erected in cities throughout the host countries of the Olympics in Sydney (summer 2000), Salt Lake City (winter 2002), Torino (summer 2006), Beijing (summer 2008), Vancouver (winter 2010), and, subsequent to the London event, in Sochi, Russia (winter 2014), Rio de Janeiro (summer 2016) and Pyeongchang (winter 2018). They have become a fixture of the Games and an integral component of the planning for the upcoming events in Tokyo (summer 2020).

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Public Displays as Incubators for Future Publics In the realm of art, experiments are being undertaken to explore the potential of digital screens to become public spaces rather than merely commercial advertising media and policing/surveillance. There are calls to make use of screens to transcend the commercial and spectacle-dominated uses to which they are most often put, to enable new types of “spatial agency” in public space. Unlike the many personal screens of consumer electronics, the nature of these artifacts is to address large groups of people, becoming architectural elements (McQuire 2006). Jeanne van Heeswijk’s “Face Your World” project of 2002 was an early example of trying to use public screens at bus stops to engage young people in imagining the redesign of their community (cited in Struppek 2006: 110). The implication is that screens can become extensions of sites of public interaction in cities. The more recent “Screens in the Wild” project by The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London and the Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham was developed to counter the closed-system nature of conventional urban screens to create open systems that could be appropriated by communities.6 Interactive displays were situated at four sites in Nottingham and London, encouraging interactions between collocated people at each of the sites as well as between people at different sites. These installations brought life to the public areas in which they were situated, as well as constituting new public spaces in their own right, establishing a platform for further development and experiments by other artists and designers, who were invited to submit proposals for applications to be run on this platform. The international Connecting Cities Network of media artists and academics (connectingcities.net) was founded with the mission of creating a networked infrastructure of digital displays and installations in cities around the world. With presence in forty-one cities on five continents, this initiative foresees the use of digital screens to make manifest the networked global nature of contemporary cities and publics, entailing, at a global scale, “the construction of publics present to one another” (Arnold 2011: 408). Thus, fixed public digital screens are beginning to emulate their tiny counterparts on smart phones and tablets in facilitating the two-way linkage between places, rather than (or, more precisely, in addition to) presenting entertainment and commercial content. The network of digitally mediated urban public spaces begins to make the transition made by the ersatz public space of the Internet and World Wide Web with the advent of the social web. Just as one of the purposes of public space is to provide places for the rehearsal of ways of relating and interacting with one another, these projects can be seen as establishing sites for the learning of new ways of interfacing with one another in networked cyborg public space.

6  A documentary by Mattia Pagura on this project is available at http://moritzbehrens.com/2014/ screens-in-the-wild-documentary/.

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Pask G (1975) Conversation, cognition and learning. Elsevier, Amsterdam Pérez-González L (2016) The politics of affect in activist amateur subtitling: a biopolitical perspective. In: Baker M, Blaagaard BB (eds) Citizen media and public spaces (critical perspectives on citizen media). Routledge, Abingdon Ranasignhe N, Lee K-Y, Suthokumar G, Do EY-L (2016) Virtual ingredients for food and beverages to create immersive taste experiences. Multimed Tools Appl 75(20):12291–12309 Ratti C, Claudel M (2016) The city of tomorrow: sensors, networks, hackers, and their future of urban life. Yale University Press, New Haven Re+public (2018) Public murals. https://www.republiclab.com/public-­murals/. Accessed 7 Feb 2020 Saieh N (2010) Maple leaf square canopy / United Visual Artists. Arch Daily. https://www.archdaily.com/81576/maple-leaf-square-canopy-united-visual-artists. Accessed August 30, 2018 Schnädelbach H, Koleva B, Flintham M, Fraser M, Izadi S, Chandler P, Foster M, Benford S, Greenhalgh C, Rodden T (2002) The Augurscope: a mixed reality interface for outdoors. In: Proceedings of CHI, pp 9–16 Simon HA (1960) The new science of management decision. Harper and Row, New York Stone L (n.d.). Continuous partial attention. https://lindastone.net/qa/continuous-­partial-­attention. Accessed 30 Aug 2018 Strickl D (2015) FeelReal brings sense of smell to virtual reality. VR World. http://vrworld. com/2015/03/11/feelreal-­brings-­sense-­of-­smell-­to-­virtual-­reality/. Accessed 22 July 2019 Struppek M (2006) The potential of urban screens. Vis Commun 5(2):173–188 Telepresence Robots (2016). telepresencerobots.com. Accessed 3 Dec 2017 Townsend A (2004) New digital geographies: information, communication, and place. In: Zook M, Dodge M, Aoyama Y, Townsend A (eds) Geography and technology. Springer, Basel Valentine G (2013) Children should be seen and not heard: the production and transgression of adults’ public space. Urban Geogr 17(3):205–220 Virilio P (1994) The vision machine (trans: Rose J). Indiana University Press, Bloomington Virilio P (1998) We may be entering an electronic gothic era. Archit Des 68(11/12):61–65 Wachter S (2012) The digital city: challenges for the future (trans: Waine O), Metropolitics. http:// www.metropolitiques.eu/The-­digital-­city-­challengesfor.html. Accessed 20 Sept 2017 Xu B (2017) Dragonfly eyes (Qing ting zhi yang) (film). Xu Bing Studio

Chapter 9

Who and Where: Affordances of Personalization and Locativity

Abstract  In investigating the theme of WORLDEDNESS, this chapter interrogates the ways in which our bodies and their technological extensions embed us in the shared world. Within a trend towards personalization of the devices and services of digital technologies, we use these devices and services in different ways to manifest ourselves in the world (the public sphere) before others and manage our public image and our web of connections to others. We become nodes in a broad distributed sentient cyborg sensorial network that overlays public space. Locative affordances of digital technologies link this virtual network to physical places, supporting both the commodification of location and the formation of “digital counterpublics.” Keywords  Personalization · Locative technologies · Individual · Commons · Tuning of space

The Individual in the World We are immersed in the physical world, and in society, by virtue of our existence as embodied individuals. For Arendt, it is this status as beings in the world that embeds us in the public realm. The nature of the relationship between the individual, the common and the collective has changed throughout history and is always culturally situated. Norbert Elias (2001) proclaimed that contemporary society is a “Society of Individuals,” in which the individual does not stand in distinction to society, but rather society is understood as being formed by individuals and practices of individualization. The society is always present in the individual and the individual in society. He used the metaphor of the dance to describe how, although each individual moves as an autonomous entity, the pattern of any individual’s performance only makes sense in the context of the movements of all of the others. Elias was seeking to dismantle the assumption that the concepts of the individual and of society are distinct or opposing.

© The Author(s) 2021 T. Jachna, Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square, The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_9

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The trend towards individuation has affected the nature of public life, in which the essential characteristic of “civility” is superseded by a desire for individual expression, for which others in public space serve as an audience. Simmel’s urban individual, needing to defend himself from the city lest he lose his individuality (Simmel 1975 [1903]), has evolved into an individual whose relationship to the city is performed through using technological capabilities to appropriate the city as a canvas of personal expression and consumption. The value of public space is that of a stage for the narcissistic pleasure of seeing oneself represented and being taken notice of by others, in the most banal and literal sense. The individuation of technologies supports the individuation of public life. This move towards the individual is reflected in projects that seek ways to apply the affordances of digital technologies to “personalize” public space, catering to the desire of the individual to always see oneself as the center, seeing digital artifacts as tools to transform public space into private (e.g. Itō et al. 2005). Already early in the Internet and mobile phone era, personalization was declared as having overtaken access to information as the primary factor motivating people in their use of digital technologies (Negroponte 1995). The supposition seems to be that public space is a tabula rasa that gives one the space and, importantly, the public audience, which once can establish hospitable, self-centered, bubbles that are at the same time defenses against absorption into the public realm and showcases for performing before an audience of other individuals. The activities of “cocooning” (using technologies to create bubbles that isolate us from the world), “camping” (affording temporary private bases at locations in public space) and “footprinting” (leaving personal traces at particular locations) were identified by Itō et al. (2005) as common practices of urbanites in three global cities (Los Angeles, Tokyo and London) in the use of digital technologies in public space, which they refer to as “genres of presence in public space.” These practices have in common that they are all centered on protecting, manifesting and supporting the individual, not affording interaction with others. Public space becomes the realm of the “small p politics” of personal expression, rather than the “large P Politics,” in which private issues and impulses are given a public face and worked-through in order to achieve “public solutions for private troubles.” Bauman defines a typology of four different “public but not civil” spaces—emic, phagic, non-places and empty spaces (Bauman 2000: 98–104)— which have in common that, although they admit and allow speech and action of people, they obviate the effectiveness of any statements or action in achieving any consequences of significance, the “redundancy of interaction.” Though there may be contact with others, there is no engagement with “otherness.” Communities, in the traditional sense, are thus replaced, more and more, by networks of individuals, and the durable shared values and referents that define such communities supplanted by rhizomatic webs of loose and temporary individual-toindividual affinities. There is an emphasis on “instantaneity,” and the decline of long-term commitments leads to the “precarization” of human bonds—a concentration on the “me, now” rather than the “us, over time” dimension of the public consciousness. “In cyberspace, point of view does not emanate from the character;

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rather the point of view literally is the character” (Hayles 1999: 38). This is now being projected from cyberspace onto physical space, an example of a way in which cybersociality is presaging, conditioning, or at least paralleling, practice in physical space. The Internet and mobile communications networks have been instrumental in enabling the spread of “networked individualism” (Wellman et al. 2003), involving the transition from “densely-knit, tightly bounded” from groups to “sparsely-knit, loosely bounded” networks in the constitution of society.

Tuning Castells’ idea of “microcoordination” of people using mobile phones is an example of distributed coordination and steering in a cybernetic sense. The term “tuning” (Coyne 2010) refers to the idea that technologies are not just used to track time but also as a way to coordinate the actions of individuals. This reflects an ongoing cybernetic loop of adjustment of perceptions, actions and anticipations among a group of independent actors. Tuning also has to do with the way we adjust ourselves to our environment and the environment to ourselves (Maturana and Varela 1980). In built environment terms, tuning refers to the adjustment of the environment by citizens in ways that do not require special expertise or machinery. This resonates with Stuart Brand’s (1994) thesis that buildings and spaces adapt and “learn” as people alter and augment them over time to accommodate changing uses, cultural norms and social structures or Tony Fry’s (2017) idea of “metrofitting” of cities, with the essential difference that digital “tuning” occurs at a much faster pace than physical alterations and allows each individual to a certain extent to tune their own relationship with the place in a way that does not necessarily impact on the ways the space is perceived and used by others.

Manifesting the Individual For the modern individual, identity is an ongoing project and not a “given” (Bauman 2000). “Individualization” or the formation of people as individuals, is the content and purpose of contemporary life. For individuals in contemporary society, selfreference and self-observation are seen as ways of confronting the alienation brought by a complex societal environment, reducing the complexity of the “inside” to its minimum, the “society of one,” in which others are present only in terms of their relationship and connectedness to oneself (Geyer 1996). In some senses, the metaphor of “performing” before an “audience” in public space takes on a higher degree of directness and literalness with digital platforms, as members of today’s younger generation become accustomed to a curated, exhibitionist crafting of one’s public appearance to a degree that was previously reserved for celebrities (Boyd and Ellison 2007). We are able to craft the way we appear

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online and in gamespace (Turkle 2011). By curating our profiles, avatars and personas in the various digital platforms in which we participate, we construct our own “micro-universes,” in which we subdivide and reproduce our identities, and we (and our architecture) become fragmented archipelagos (Wachter 2012; Deleuze 2004). On a social platform, users can select which photographic images and textual descriptions of their activities out and about in public, or in the privacy of their homes or workplaces, are open to public view, and which of them are only accessible to selected individuals. Curating one’s representations is an example of an identity management practice, in which one composes the relationships between one’s appearance in physical and digital venues. On the Web, formerly private genres of media artifacts (snapshots, home movies, diaries, etc.) are increasingly projected into public venues (Russell et  al. 2008: 43). A photograph or a video of something done in private becomes a public performance when posted openly on the Web, and a record of an activity in public space can be reserved for a private audience. Although public profiles on social platforms are arguably indeed public, in that they are findable and accessible to all comers, the public interaction that they engender would seem to be at a very stunted and banal level, while the performance aspect of public life is accentuated to an extreme degree. There is a different logic to the choice of (physical) places in which one chooses to “appear” in these public postings, selected for their “instagrammabilty” (their value as an interesting background against which to appear, or a setting with which one wants to be associated in order to gain prestige or project a certain image of oneself). Just as we use digital technologies to project our personal representations of self into the public realm, we also appropriate these technologies to increasingly personalize the ways in which we represent the city to ourselves. The personalization of maps, as afforded by applications such as Google Maps, such that no two people will be presented the city in the same way (Morozov 2014), is indicative of the trend towards reduction of shared points of reference. This takes place even as the Google Maps framework, in this example, becomes increasingly ubiquitous and ingrained in urban spatial practice. The resulting individualization of experience of the city creates a “personal database city” (Frith 2012). The habit of being entertained, with and by one another, in public space dwindles. As Yi-fu Tuan reported in an interview, lamenting the impoverishment of public life by mobile phones, “Public space is bodylanguage space, and as such provides endless entertainment. People watching, we say. Everyone is part of the show—the baby soundly asleep in her stroller no less than the mother feeding the pigeons, and as supporting extras the pedestrians parading back and forth. If more and more people are locked into the private worlds of their earphones and iPhones, will that not diminish—or kill—public space, which is space that justifies itself by, among other things, its power to entertain?” (Cook 2014). However, alarmist discourses claiming that mobile phone use drains urban places of person-to-person interaction are barriers to a rational and nuanced examination of the relationship between digital technology use and public spatial practice. For instance, a study in public spaces in New York found that several factors, such as the number of group interactions and the prevalence of

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women in public spaces, had actually increased over the preceding 30 years, and that only 3–10% of occupants of the space were found to be using mobile phones, and then mostly in interstitial times or places, such as while waiting for someone (Hampton et al. 2015). The effect of personal digital gadgets on public spatial practice seems to be more subtle and multifarious than either emancipatory or dystopian discourses of digital technologies in the public realm acknowledge.

The Personalized Web There is a convention of describing the development of the World Wide Web in terms of an accretion of technological affordances, from Web 1.0, characterized by information storage and retrieval, to Web 2.0, characterized by the facilitation of social networking, to Web 3.0, characterized by the personalization of the web experience based on application of machine learning algorithms to learn from and respond to individuals’ behavior. With each step in this progression, the Web takes a different role in the formation of publics, from mediating access to a common pool of resources in Web 1.0, to supporting the formation of communities in Web 2.0, to assuming an increasing degree of agency in interacting with individuals in a way that forms each citizen’s experience of the Web in Web 3.0. The latter phase of this development is also heavily implicated in the radical individuation of society. This phase is distinguished by, and indeed even driven by, the tailoring of each individual’s experience and interface to that their personal preferences, prejudices and habits. Web 2.0 could be termed the “web of communities” that stops short, at least in its conventional applications, of supporting the formation of publics. From a technological perspective, Web 3.0 can be seen as a further development of the affordances of Web 2.0, but within the discourse on the public realm, it must be seen as moving the Web away from the possibility of enabling a digitally mediated public realm. Web 3.0 could be termed the “post-social” Web. The E2E1 architecture of the Internet essentially means that nearly all processing power lies in the devices that serve as nodes in the network, whereas the network itself remains a comparatively “dumb” conduit for transmission of signals, in contrast to earlier communications such as the telephone and television in which the receivers were “dumb” and the network processed information (Bar et al. 2007). It is enticing to draw parallels from this to the democratic nature of public space as being mute, but for the interactions between intelligent actors within it. Previously, only industrial concerns and, in planned economies, governments, could command the infrastructures and control structures needed to mobilize people to cooperate to make things. The networked information economy allows networks to draw on widely distributed resources and knowledge to achieve things (Benkler 1  E2E or “end-to-end” refers to the network organizational principle in which application software and processing is embedded at the end-points or nodes connected by the network, with the network infrastructure itself primarily serving the purpose of connecting these end points.

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2006). “A good deal more that human beings value can now be done by individuals, who interact with each other socially, as human beings and as social beings, rather than as market actors through the price system” (Benkler 2006: 6–7). The outputs of such actions “are not treated as exclusive property” and become “a flourishing nonmarket sector of information” (ibid). Normal citizens are the ones who imagine the things, organize and produce them, and these things also become part of the “public domain” to be modified and extended by others.

Gadgetopolis Personal gadgets have always been a component of how people navigate urban space and society. The “phone, wallet and keys” are still among the essential tokens through which we manage our communications, transactions and access in urban life (all converged now into a single device that also subsumes the functionalities of the audio-visual entertainment system, the rolodex, the camera and the sound recorder) (Itō et  al. 2010), becoming more personalized, customized and used to achieve increasing degrees of “self-reliance.” These digital devices become “mechanisms people use to synchronize their relationships and interactions” (Coyne 2010). In this sense, perhaps the most relevant urban design in the digital era, at least in terms of tangible artifacts, is the kind that fits within our pockets, or fully evades our view. The “user friendly,” personalized device is the most effective psychological hook in the transition to cyborg citizenship. Humanizing these technologies so that they are willingly taken on as prostheses, as tokens of identity, is a coup in the service of the cyborg turn. Individuals coordinate their social relationships, public interactions, movements through urban space and their use and perception of these spaces through a battery of functions supported by their personal devices, including instant messages, email, voice calls and more elaborate applications such as wayfinding, ranking, location-based gaming and geo-notation applications (Goodman and Chant 1999). Wachter (2012) has pointed out that, in practice, most of the links between the physical world and cyberspace inhere in individuals, with their multiple gadgets and online personas, rather than in spaces, and has argued that the digital city does not manifest itself in the physical spaces and forms of cities as much as it does in the ways that these spaces are experienced and used by individuals. We cyborg hybrids change urban space in the way that we constitute and perform our cyborg selves, as in the example of the driver-car hybrid’s role in the transformation of urban space in the post-war era. Hand-held devices themselves are composites of many of the affordances of digital technologies—locative, communicative, etc. (Hjorth 2008; Richardson 2005)—the “Swiss army knife of consumer electronics” (Boyd 2005: 28) that has also become so integrated into our being and our interactions that participation in many facets of urban life is unthinkable without them. More than tools or even prostheses, they are part of the fiber of our cyborg beings. A person without a smart phone is an amputated urban being in the mediated city.

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Far from being merely another device used by people within the city, the mobile phone is changing people’s core perceptions of self, community, time and space, profoundly affecting the way cities are used and experienced (Townsend 2000; Kopomaa 2000; Katz and Aakbus 2002), and changing the “choreography” of how people move through the city (Graham 2004: 133). Many of the changes in social interaction and spatial practice that are enabled by cellular phones are associated with the mobility made possible by mobile phones’ nature as portable and personal, rather than fixed and shared, devices (Urry 2007; Itō et al. 2005).

Managing Public Presence It is instructive to think of public spaces in terms of “technosocial situations” (Itō and Okabe 2005), in which people structure the composition of their public and private lives performatively, defining the distinction between public and private in terms of actions rather than places. Many of the functions that traditionally have brought people out into public space are now personalized and privatized, as public space has been to a certain degree emptied of its political function and appropriated as a commercial medium. We are agents who remake space in our own image performatively through the use of our gadgets, establishing a new, fluid zoning of urban space. This is a matter of co-evolution of technology and psychology, a convergence of technological artifacts and the annealing of urban morphology around the socio-technological practices and patterns that thus emerge. In a sense, the affordances of digital technologies to transform our relationships with and within physical space represent the continuation of a path already forged by precedent technologies. The landline phone enabled distributed sociability and “intimacy at a distance,” and the automobile can be understood as a private, interiorized “browsing device,” in which one traverses a world framed through a (wind)screen (Varnelis and Friedberg 2008: 21). Much of the hype and optimism about digital technologies has to do with the finding of individuals with similar interest that one would otherwise never have met. Small-scale retailers can connect with specialized producers and distributed communities of consumers to enable specialized and niche markets to emerge across distances (by spanning both geographical and informational chasms). This is all the more important in enabling marginalized or disadvantaged groups to commune and organize. However, in actual practice, mobile technologies are most often used to maintain connections with existing friends rather than meeting new people, as in the practices of “tele-cocooning” (Habuchi 2005) and “selective sociality” (Matsuda 2005). People have always constructed “media walls” (Gumpert and Drucker 2004: 2) to claim a piece of privacy in public space and project themselves into a virtual environment, and this practice continues into the digital age, as in the case of Japanese teens’ use of their keitai (mobile phones) as “territory machines” that create a private cocoon at will in a public space, even as actual private home space is perceived as too public for interactions with friends (Fujimoto 2005).

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The Individual as Reporter/as Public Sensor As discussed in the previous chapter of this book, phone cameras are another type of distributed sensory network that captures the banal and non-unique, repetitious aspects of urban life (Rubinstein and Sluis 2008: 23), becoming more pervasive even than security cameras and making urban citizens into amateur photojournalists. These devices can also be used to record—to bear witness to—extraordinary and disruptive events in the public realm and circulate these images among local and global publics nearly instantaneously, as in the “insider” images of the July 7, 2005 London Underground terrorist bombings. Such recordings provide a first-person, in-the-moment experience of the event as it unfolds: more visceral, immediate and personal than the post-event reportage of official news outlets. These images are more than just evidence of an event; the citizen reporter stands in as the “everyman” and the “human face” of the event (Cross 2016: 202). As Chouliaraki (2012: 204) stated, “media today constructs a kind of “experiential immediacy” which creates a feeling of solidarity based upon imagining ‘the other in the self’.” In citizen reporting, images take on a public character and express public feeling, bearing a “new seal of authenticity” for journalism and establishing a “celebration of amateur form” that reverses past photojournalistic conventions. Certain communities and publics cohere at the moment of the image’s production, its first uploading and its circulation, but the meaning of the images extends beyond these as it ripples outward, such that “a more informed and empathetic response to history emerges, one that strengthens the value of the process of witnessing and also, perhaps, sheds some light on what it means to be ‘a citizen’ within the context of social media use” (Cross 2016: 204–209; Chouliaraki 2012: 169). The difference between witnessing and sensing gets at the distinction between human and non-human agency.

Information Is Not a Commons In the post-Information Age (Glenn 1993; Negroponte 1995), in line with the shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, the emphasis shifts from access to information to hyperpersonalization, in which case information is not something shared between people, but is the product of algorithms processing a pool of raw materials that is always already tailored by our devices to suit the receiver. Thus, the idea of information as a public realm is a fading metaphor. We are distanced from information by the particular form that information design has taken, just as we are distanced from public space by the particular tack that public space design has taken. Information design can be seen as seeking to protect us from TMI (too much information) in the same way that public space design protects us from TMP (too much public) (recall the positions of Simmel 1975 [1903] and Sennett 1976). This is an old and contentious practice in public space—as in for instance public space design

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measures intended to exclude “undesirables” (read counterpublics)—and one that is made all the more imperative by the slew of public fronts on which we are potentially exposed in our day-to-day lives. This filtering of information on a personalized basis has long been evident in applications like Google Maps, which can learn preferences and interests from each user’s clicks and personalize its responses accordingly, promoting some results and filtering others, leading to diminishing common points of reference in the representations that mediate between the city and its inhabitants. Commonality must be sought elsewhere, if it is to be found at all anymore. The idea of public space as a “common imaginary” and collective activity is weakened by this trend, as people are conditioned “to think of public space as an extension of their own private spaces” (Ampanavos and Markaki 2014: 5). On the one hand, this could be seen as one antidote to the estrangement and displacement confronted by individuals in the face of the extreme complexity and scale of the contemporary megacity context, while on the other hand it could be seen as dissolving links of commonality. This is a different tragedy of the commons, based not on depletion of shared resources but on dissolution of the social bonds that typically form around the sharing of a resource. Access to information technologies also becomes highly personalized, as artificial intelligence software tends more and more to inform the construction of echo chambers tailored to our habits, desires and needs, such that information is no longer that which draws us together but becomes yet another force for extreme individuation (Morozov 2014). And the consequence of not having a phone or Internet access is social exclusion, lack of access to services, information, and opportunities. The closing of phone booths for instance is a sign of this assumption and exacerbating the marginalization of the “have-nots,” by removing this amenity from public space, reflecting a skewed “power geometry” (Massey 1993).

Locative Technologies and Grounded Computing “Locative media” refers to a set of applications of location-based technologies that link information to physical geographical locations, enabled by technologies such as mobile telephony networks, wireless laptop computers and other personal electronic devices, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), GPS (global positioning systems) and GIS (geographical information systems). It is by now commonplace for devices of many sorts to have locative capabilities. Even before locative capabilities became widespread, their potential to reconstitute patterns of connection and interaction was anticipated by many. With its proposed WorldBoard global infrastructure (Spohrer 1999) of pervasive augmented reality, using geographically situated information to impose digital information and virtual objects on our perception of any place in the world, IBM foresaw a totalizing and commercialized future for the application of locative media. The seminal, rambling Headmap Manifesto for locative media (Headmap 2004), which laid out a vision for a society transformed by the possibilities afforded by a world of ubiquitous, location-aware

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artifacts, prefigures the currently trendy “Internet of Things” concept. The wide-eyed optimism of the Headmap Manifesto was countered by contemporaneous cautionary tales of a “locative dystopia” (Hemment 2004), in which participation in society is seen as being increasingly bound to the prerequisite of surrendering oneself to the locative logic of these systems, echoing critiques of surveillance technology in public space (Whitaker 1999; Lyon 2001). In order to play a location-based game like Pokémon Go, a player must grant access to their identity, contacts list, location, photos and other media files, permission to use storage on their mobile phone, to use the camera and adjust other settings and set other functions in motion, making it an all-round surveillance app as much as a gaming app. Such utopian and dystopian proclamations and ethical considerations at the promises of a new technology are of course always accompanied (and often outstripped) by pragmatic market-driven applications. The locative affordances of digital media facilitate wayfinding apps, coordination of one’s movements and schedules with others, and many other commonplace practices of everyday spatial practice in the contemporary city. Flash mobs—large groups of people who, prompted by SMS or e-mail notification and guided by the locative affordances of their personal devices, gather at a specific place at an arranged time to perform an unexpected act and disperse—are a familiar example of a primitive use of locative technology. Location-based games make use of locative media in order to use the physical space of the city as a field for the playing of digitally games. Location-based social networking applications like Foursquare allow users to find businesses and other amenities in their vicinity as they move through the city, to write and read reviews on these places, and to track the activities and movements of people in their personal network (to the extent that these people “check in” to allow the system to sense their location). Technologies used can be complex and specific, but they are often as simple as the SMS, GPS or camera functions of a mobile phone. The Bristol, UK-based artists group Blast Theory, seminal purveyors of this medium, see their location-based games as explorations of social and political implications of the use of these technologies (www.blasttheory.co.uk).

Detaching from Place or Deepening Interaction with Place? McCullough (2006: 29) suggests that the locative media-enabled urbanism of the mediated city is less about physical location, movement or boundaries, and more about “how people obtain, layer and manage their connections.” Geocoded Internet data can be used to create hybrid experiences of physical and virtual spaces that go beyond the simple accessing of information to activate different layers of experience of spaces through superimposition of virtual information-scapes onto physical landscapes (Zook and Graham 2007). Public spaces can be browsed and searched like Web space. They can be filtered our interaction with them can be configured to suit each of us individually (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2015: 177). However, there are some ways in which digital technology use can afford new dimensions of place-specificity and attachment to place. The concept of “net

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l­ ocalities” (Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2011) refers to the way we access the Web is increasingly determined by where we are. Net localities have to do with the people and things physically at a given place and also those connected to that place. In this way, urbanites’ use of mobile phones to create “mobile spaces” has been instrumental in the performative hybridization of urban space (de Souza e Silva 2006; de Souza e Silva and Frith 2015). Location-based Mobile Games (LBMGs) make use of locational affordances to blend physical and digital worlds in gameplay. LBMGs are different than other precedent and contemporaneous digital media applications in that they deepen people’s engagement with physical spaces and the people in them, rather than extracting them from public space (du Gay et al. 1997; Habuchi 2005). For example, Lynch (2016) claimed that Pokémon Go can make people more aware and appreciative of landmarks and public spaces in their cities, by drawing their attentions off-screen momentarily to look for details and places.

Location and Empowerment Context-aware technologies can be seen as empowering individual urban citizens, in giving them control over their safety and security (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2015: 170), while also giving them something that they can leverage to their gain. Individuals “hold the purse strings” to their location information (and other data, and their attention), and that is the new datum of empowerment in public space. In an analysis of media reports on location-based devices and social networks over four months in 2009, it was found that the preponderance of these reports dealt with the control afforded to users over their data and the ability to configure their own environment (workspace), rather than warning of the control and surveillance of one’s public life that comes with use of these networks (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2015). Willingness to surrender one’s locational data is driven by a cost-benefit calculation, and it seems that people will allow this information to be harvested if it supports the functionality of games, or allows coordination with friends and others. They are willing to knowingly surrender this data to advertisers when using location-based social network apps such as Foursquare and the now-defunct Gowalla,2 in order to facilitate these programs in rewarding them with coupons and discounts to places where they frequently “check-in” (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2015: 172). Many applications enable one to personalize and “manage” the information level of public space, as in when one seeks contextual information such as restaurant guides and reviews, location-aware coupons, and information about people in their surroundings. In this way, we construct a “differential space” (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2015: 176), as we can choose and edit which elements and people of our

2  Gowalla was acquired in 2012 by Facebook, which shut it down as a platform and integrated aspects of its locational and content-sharing services into their own platform.

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e­ nvironment to interact with. Likewise, power asymmetry arises when one player in a game agrees to release locational information but others do not reciprocate (Licoppe and Inada 2006). Some games allow one to opt-out of revealing one’s location or even enables them to “check in” from a false location (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2015: 172).

The Commodification of Location The “commodification of location” has long been an aspect of public space, as in the monetization of building surfaces in public spaces for billboards and other advertisements that generated striking public spaces of the twentieth century including Times Square, New York, Piccadilly Circus, London and Shibuya, Tokyo. If, in the twentieth century, the real estate of attention was embodied in the facades of buildings facing public spaces, in the present day this commodification relies on the GPS capabilities of mobile devices. In the digital era, the term “location-based services” (LBS) and “location-based advertising” (LBA) refer to commercial locative-technology-based applications that use geographical positioning information (typically from mobile phones and other personal portable devices) to provide promotional messages and services that are specific to the particular location in which a person finds him- or herself (Bellavista et al. 2008; Barnes 2003). Location-based social networks also monetize locativity, as in the case of Foursquare providing free goods and coupons to reward players for frequently “checking-in” at particular locations. Location is commodified to become a “tradable entity” (Shklovski et al. 2009). In effect, to say that something is commodified in the digital economy means that it is datafied, and that data associated with or generated by it enters into a system of exchange as an entity onto which value is projected. Ads, coupons and other enticements can be thusly attached to specific locations. Because many of these messages are associated with brick-and-mortar shops in the immediate vicinity, these ads engender a much more immediate effect on spatial behavior in public space, seeking to influence immediate action, more so than planting a seed for a potential purchase or patronage decision at a later date. Additionally, this can be seen as creating a new relationship between advertising and space in that the ads are only seen by some of the people in the space. They are also personalized such that they are the effect of the coming-together of a particular individual and a particular location (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2015: 174). Rather than “always on” and generic, these messages are triggered and personalized.

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Layering of Significances Like graffiti and shantytowns, digital annotation and tagging are types of intentional bottom-up inscribing that leave traces in the city, circumventing rules of land tenure and planning regulations that control and constrain the right to leave one’s enduring mark on urban space. David Rokeby’s Neighborhood Markup Language (NML) (Rokeby 2001) and the Swedish GeoNotes project (Persson and Fagerberg 2002) are examples of early proposals for the tagging of physical space with digital annotations that can be read using digital gadgets. Tagging of urban space has since become the medium of projects in many cities, typically using semacode barcodes, which are mounted in public spaces and can be scanned by mobile phone cameras to link to urls. The Active Campus application allowed people to digitally write “e-graffiti” at places on university campuses, which could be read by others using the app (Licoppe and Inada 2006). Such geographically-linked information is referred to as “location-based content” and the process of linking such information to specific locales as “geocaching.” Many social media applications, such as location-based games, also inscribe new layers of significance onto physical public space. Ingress is a location-based game first launched by Niantic in 2013, which uses augmented reality to superimpose a science fiction play scenario onto physical public space. The game play centers around a battle for dominance between two warring factions of players, territorializing urban public space and tribalizing players by dividing them into adversarial groups. Ingress and similar games reconceive the places and monuments of the physical urban public realm as battlefields and prizes in a war between rival teams. Public landmarks in the city are appropriated into the game logic as strategic “portals” that are fought over by rival teams. These locations in the real world are designated as portals by players, and the game progresses through the capturing and linking of these portals into territories. “Portals exist not only as nodes within a digital representation of the material space, but also as physical landmarks that bear sociocultural and material significance prior to their incorporation into the game” (Moore 2015). Games like Ingress play with the narratives already embedded in physical public space by political, commercial and psycho-geographical factors. Location-based games reinterpret the physical-material structures of the city through play, in a way similar to that of the skateboarding subculture, as explained by Borden (2001). The urban environment is re-read and re-written through these acts of play, blurring the boundaries between functional and ludic uses of urban space (Moore 2015). Also similar to the urban subcultures that form around skateboarding or parkour (also called “free running”), the playership of these games constitute a set of communities (which can be seen as counterpublics of sorts), distinguished by a shared set of practices and “readings” of public space. The semiotic landscapes of the game and the physical public realm can clash, as when the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC was designated as a “Pokéstop” in the Pokémon Go game. An image, posted on the image-sharing platform Imagur, showing a screenshot of a poison-gas-emitting

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Pokémon called a Koffing superimposed on the background of the Museum’s Helena Rubinstein Auditorium, was the focus of particular outrage (Peterson 2016). As in the physical public spatial continuum, the landscape of augmented reality location-based gamespace has been formed through an accretion of different historical strata of interventions. Niantic, the company that owns Ingress, was founded within Google in 2010 and spun-off in 2015. Pokémon Go was then developed by the same developer, largely relying on map data that was generated from players of Ingress. Portal locations in Ingress were initially defined by mining tagged photos on Google, including historical markers, public artwork, unique pieces of architecture and other landmarks, supplemented by asking Ingress players to suggest locations for portals, which led to the identification of five million portals worldwide (http://mashable.com/2017/10/26/nissan-zero-emission-car/). This portal’s dataset in turn became the foundation for Pokémon Go, in defining gyms and Pokéstops.

Dissonances By “overwriting” the meanings of places (Ejsing-Duun 2016: 145; Evans and Saker 2017: 24; Moore 2015 others are drawn from here), location-based games and “Locative media events can help de-familiarize common representations of space and disrupt habitual patterns in its use. They invite participants to renegotiate the structures designed by those in power and alert citizens to their influence” (EjsingDuun, in Baker and Blaagaard 2016: 141). This recalls Arthur Danto’s (1983) remarking on the “transfiguration of the commonplace” accomplished by works of contemporary art that recontextualize everyday objects by bringing them into places or discourse in which they are re-interpreted as pieces of art. Ejsing-Duun (in Baker and Blaagaard 2016: 141) traces the “encouraging (of) playful intervention in urban space” back to the Situationist International (Mc Donough 2004), as a performative critique of the alienating effects of modern capitalist society. Just as the superimposition of digital networks onto public space can afford the overlaying of different landscapes of significance onto the physical public realm, physical public spaces are also enfolded into digital venues in various ways. For instance, Matthew Boswell argues that Holocaust memorials are becoming increasingly digitized, both in terms of the media of site interpretation and in terms of being circulated through photos that bring them into a wider and more distributed public space. Media connecting public spaces with “electronic elsewheres” (Berry et al. 2010), have a different relationship to place than signs and other media that deepen the information content of the place, such as wayfinding and other types of signage. The ways in which these places are projected into the “digisphere” are often at odds with their intended character as public memorials. In particular, people posting pictures on social media using the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as a scenic backdrop for themselves in exhibitionist poses have been roundly criticized for making light of the solemnity of the place, treating it as just another “instagrammable moment” by virtue of its striking aesthetic character (Harvey 2017).

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Digital Counterpublics Location-based mobile games have been lauded in some cases for their ability to lure people out of the physical private realm and to interact with others in public spaces. Such games have been linked to an increase in interest in outdoor activities among older children (Grundy and Howland 2014). This implies that we begin to see games in a different light, as occurring at the same time within game spaces that are abstracted from the world-as-such and interleaved with the spaces of everyday life. Such games contradict Huizinga’s (1955) notion that a game is distinct from day-to-day life by embedding it in daily life and indeed requiring non-game space as its site and non-game things as its playing pieces. Location-based games can be seen as a subset of location-based social networks (LBSN), which combine the social and the locative affordances of digital technologies. Video game researcher Brendan Keogh (2016) claims that Pokémon Go creates, if not a global community then some sort of socially-leveling way of meeting and interacting in public (he tells an anecdote of exchanging Pokémon location information with boys he runs into, with whom he would otherwise not have interacted) and a way of pulling “what everyone is doing” from the private, hidden, individual realm into public. The early SMS-based locative game Dodgeball was found by Humphreys (2010) to create a sense of a commonality and a sharing of experience and information. People adjust their paths to coordinate with others and feel familiar in unfamiliar environments. Knowing that other people “like them” (e.g. other players of the same game) are around can encourage people to venture into even unknown parts of a city (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2015: 175).

Exclusions For all of the potential of digital technologies to afford inclusion and belonging within publics, they can also bring new dimensions of exclusion that often tend to recapitulate existing dimensions. Differing degrees of access to locative technologies exacerbate “differential mobility” (Wood and Graham 2005), as those without digital devices become excluded from these information sources and cannot move about with as much informed freedom as those who do. Mary Flanagan distinguishes between the wandering of the leisure class as play and the drifting of the disempowered, the former relates to those playing location-based games as a conspicuous demonstration of their money and privilege (Moore 2015). Thus, in many cases location-based games can be seen as reinforcing the privileges of the moneyed classes in the right to public space. There is a dimension of inequality in the different degrees of connectivity in gaming as well. The LBMG Ingress, for instance, was found to have fewer portals in African-American neighborhoods in major US cities than in white neighborhoods (Iveson 2016; Huffaker 2016).

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Digital technologies have also been mobilized in attempts to transcend or counteract perceived inequalities in urban space. “Local Blogs” was a project launched by the magazine Big City in Moscow in 2012, in the form of a website that allowed participants to define locations in the city and post remarks, information, concerns and news linked to these specific locations, indicated on a map-based interface. The intention was to provide a space to counter what was seen as the hegemony of a reductive mainstream narrative of the city, perpetuated by government and the media, that prioritized certain locations in the city while glossing-over or ignoring places and issues that did not play into the official image of post-Soviet Moscow and thereby fuel organization and discussion (in other digital venues such as Facebook) on the rehabilitation of the city that were not reduced to broad pan-urban programs concentrating on a small set of places, issues and slogans but rather which engaged the particularities of specific locations and communities (Glazkov and Shmeleva 2015).

Augmented Flânerie Comparing location-based games to the practice of flânerie, the aimless, leisurely strolling through the city that Baudelaire (1964 [1863]) saw as emblematic of the modern urban experience,3 Keogh claims, “There is an odd sort of colonialism to flânerie. For the working-class man, the city streets are not a place to be lazily wandered around but a place where work must be done. It’s where they live. It requires some arrogance to presume that this urban space that other people work and live in is yours to be remade into a playful space to be used at your pleasure.” He further muses that the ubiquity of Pokémon Go in urban places raises questions about what sort of digital play is acceptable, and where. “You would not play chess on someone’s tombstone, but would you spin [on] one for some pokéballs?” (Keogh 2016). For even if one’s behavior is driven by reference to the values and motivations of an abstracted realm of significance not available to all of one’s fellow inhabitants of public space (whether that realm be that of the bourgeois leisure class or the networked players of a location-based game), one still always also exists as a body in shared public space, subject to the scrutiny and judgement of the public in terms of the appropriateness of one’s actions and appearance. Evans and Saker (2017: 24) see locative games as blurring or even dissolving the “magic circle” (Huizinga 1955) that delineates game space and separates it from the space of the “real world, just as the laptop computer has contributed to the dissolution of boundaries of the space of work and the mobile phone is implicated in the problematization of the private/public distinction. As such, rules of behavior and accountability in games are blurring into public space behavior. Games can superimpose different standards of appropriate behavior that override established norms

 Baudelaire was writing of the particular case of nineteenth-century Paris.

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in physical public space. The introduction of other geographies of significance onto the physical space of cities can strain the carrying capacity of urban spaces, bring unwelcome crowds to private addresses, encourage inappropriate behavior at sites such as memorials and cemeteries. Commercial operators also pay game developers to introduce enticements to lure customers to their places of business. There have been controversies around the fact that game developers that effectively make use of public space and infrastructure as essential parts of the hardware of their applications contribute nothing to the maintaining of these public goods. They are also not subject to traditional mechanisms, such as property taxes, by which businesses can be made to contribute to the maintenance of the public spaces from which they benefit.

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Chapter 10

Cyborg Modes of Agency: Affordances of Automation and Modelling

Abstract  This chapter investigates the ways in which digital technologies are implicated in the ways in which we conceive of INITIATING directed action in and on public space. Digital technologies afford the automatization of processes and the abdication of initiative and action to algorithmic agents. Locative games superimpose their “game logic” onto the spatial and semiotic geography of physical cities and the motivational patterns that influence public behavior, cultivating modes of automatized public behavior that affects the behavioral norms of public life. Digital technologies are also increasingly involved in the processes by which we generate our cognitive models of the urban environment and, therefore, in the ways in which we conceive of imperatives for action. Keywords  Automation · Digital modelling · Locative gaming · Cyborg · Persuasive gaming · Digital modelling · Collaborative cartography

Automatization of Public Action The ability to initiate is linked to Arendt’s (1998 [1958]) understanding of freedom as an intrinsic human capacity, and an essential factor in her conceptualization of public life. In cyborg publics, though, a myriad of filters come into play that distance the initiation of action from direct, conscious human agency, as the capacity to “decide” and effect change is granted to a growing cadre of artificial intelligences and software algorithms and the automatization that they entail. To automatize a process is to make it second nature, both in the sense that such procedures continue to run without the need for continuous conscious attention or intention, and also in the sense that these processes become a part of the “second nature” of human-made constructs that are so ingrained in the formation of habits and perceptions of the world that they are taken to be as innate as the “first nature” of the natural world and its laws (Barnes 1984; Hegel 1976; Adorno 1973). To automatize something is to distance it from conscious thought—to make it an aspect of “the way things are.” Arendt saw automation as conditioning humans in ways that threatened to disrupt patterns of human life, seeing the origins of automation © The Author(s) 2021 T. Jachna, Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square, The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_10

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in nuclear fission and thus in violence against, and domination and subjugation of both humans and nature (Simbirski 2016). As a collateral effect, where there is computer control over systems, there can also be rationing of privilege, such as preferential road access, greater access to broadband communications for some citizens than others: a “pay-per-public,” or in any case a public realm in which rubrics are applied to allocate privilege. Software must be considered as an actor in this discussion. Software continually modifies space (transduction) (Kitchin and Dodge 2011) through “ontogenetic modulation” (Mackenzie 2003). This means that the software that drives the ­applications, networks and platforms that we use to mediate our use and experience of the city, affect the way that we understand and act in urban contexts, as well as influencing interpersonal and societal relations and processes in a type of “automatic production of space” (Evans and Saker 2017: 19–20).

Automatic, Autonomic and Autonomous Automation is a broad term that can refer to different types of systems, corresponding to differing types of control over processes. In this vein, it is useful to distinguish between automatic, autonomic and autonomous systems. Automatic systems, once put in motion, will continue to behave in a certain way without the need for attention. Autonomic systems, on the other hand, are self-governing. That is, they are able to self-regulate to maintain their operations. Autonomous systems are able to formulate and adapt their own goals. These represent three levels of self-­ sufficiency. Many complex systems contain automatic, autonomic and autonomous elements. The human nervous system provides an example of both the distinction between these concepts and their interdependency. Sensory nerves, for instance, perform in an automatic manner in a healthy body, transmitting impulses to the brain whenever they are stimulated. The autonomic nervous system, controlled by the hypothalamus in the brain, regulates behaviors and reactions that do not require conscious thought, such as the heartbeat, breathing and the “fight or flight” reflex. The frontal lobe of the cerebellum is the nexus of autonomous functions of the nervous system, such as the ability to make conscious decisions. Similar principles characterize the functioning of the machinic others with which we share public space, as in the case of the automobile. The infusing of air and fuel and the igniting of this mixture to drive the car engine is an automatic process, put in motion by starting the car’s ignition and continuing until the engine is switched off. Cruise control is an example of autonomic functionality, responsible for monitoring a car’s speed and making adjustments in order to maintain speed at a constant. Autonomous capabilities are being introduced into vehicles to enable them to make decisions such as selecting between different courses of action to avoid an immanent collision.

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This distinction also can be applied to the systems that regulate behavior of actors in public space, such as the systems that control flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Traditional stoplights at intersections are automatic, changing from green to yellow to red at preset intervals. More recently, so-called “smart” traffic control systems adjust the phasing of stoplights in reaction to data on traffic conditions collected by sensors. Proposals for autonomous intersection control systems foresee a future in which the majority of vehicles are driverless and can communicate with an artificial intelligence that senses vehicles approaching an intersection and makes decisions as to the optimal routing through an intersection to get all vehicles through without collisions, and sends individual guiding instructions to each vehicle to allow for a fluid flow of traffic through the intersection from all sides simultaneously without the need for traffic lights.

Abdication The increasing delegation of tasks to automatic, autonomic and autonomous technological systems represents an abdication of responsibility to our technological others. Golumbia (2009) uses the term “computationalism” to refer to a belief in the potential of computation to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our endeavors to understand and intervene in the world, founded on the (unjustified) assumption that the human brain works on computational principles and that therefore computer technology could in effect play the same role as human minds in processes. The allure of affording digital technologies (specifically algorithms) a place at the centralized control level of the city is apparent. Commuting times can be smoothed by turning traffic coordination over to computer systems (Graham and Marvin 1996: 334–335). Public safety can be secured by the installation of a network of surveillance devices. As elements in the city, digital infrastructures interact with other systems and criteria in a sometimes-conflicting way, but once the whole city becomes the object of coordination, algorithms can calibrate all of the city’s systems to compensate. This is characteristic of the present “fourth industrial revolution” (Kagerman 2017) driven by hyperindividualization rather than standardization or mass-customization, moving beyond automation of tasks to autonomous control of these tasks (not just the programming of systems but turning over control of the programming and reprogramming of these systems to other systems). The shortcomings of the pop-psychology attitude that “the things that you don’t attend to in a sense don’t exist, at least for you” (Barker 2014) are apparent even at the level of our own bodies, in which our very ability to attend to things autonomously depends intrinsically on the ongoing functioning of automatic and autonomous facilities of our nervous systems. The stance advanced in positions such as the one cited above reduce the totality of the world to the spectacles that capture our attention and can encourage a non-critical, consumptive mode of being-in-the-world.

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Division of Labor in Cyborg Public Space In explaining the contemporary “automatic society” (la société automatique), Stiegler (2015) defines the automatic processes that drive society in terms of “the automatisms of the economy of data.” The automatic habits that one has to internalize in order to be counted as a member of this society have to do with producing data. In this economy of data, however, computers process data at a speed millions of times faster than humans, making this a radically asymmetrical coupling. Because computers are much faster than us in analysis (“understanding” in Stiegler’s words), whereas synthesis (“reason”) is still the purview of slow-processing humans, there is a severe lack of congruence between the faculty of understanding and that of reason—a “collapse of reason.” Humans are the component of the cyborg public ensemble that does not follow “Moore’s Law,” which states that the maximum processing power of computer chips tends to double about every two years (Reddy 2017). In contrast to the rapid increase in capabilities of each subsequent generation of digital technologies, the cognitive and processing capacity of individual human brains remains largely constant. A corollary of this fact is that human attention is a precious and limited commodity. Humans have access to a wealth of information but a limited attention span and “bandwidth” to take it in and process it. Thus, we engage automatized “cognition amplifiers” and “guardian angels” to do things we don’t have time to do or don’t have the cognitive capacity to do (ibid). Examples of such tasks include the monitoring of data and news, sensorial networks distributed across urban space, as well as our own vital signs, and alerting us of conditions that may affect our lives and the consequences for action. With the help of such agents, we decide (or it is decided for us) which parts of life are a chore to be delegated and which we want to consciously maintain an awareness of. These are not generic information feeds but rather rely on access to information models of ourselves based on our private data, which serve as digital agents of urban citizens. As put by Terzidis (2017) “I make a copy of myself and let it calculate.” Data is constantly being generated automatically from sensors embedded throughout the environment (of which, if one were to take a hard turn towards the cyborg discourse, humans and their social media are one facet). In the case of the countless ambient sensors in the sensorial array that permeates public space, data is gathered mutely and indiscriminately—automatically—and as a matter of course, like rain in a gutter or photons by photovoltaic cells. Light, sound, movement, temperature, humidity and other elements of the sensory environment of spaces are sensed and, therewith, generate data, becoming present in the datasphere. The presence and actions of humans, as physical, biological entities in physical space, generates data in the same ways. Henri Cartier Bresson, pioneer of “street photography,” referred to the photographic art as “A sort of violation… if sensitivity is lacking, there can be something barbaric about it” (Kimmelman 2009). In questioning the ethics of this medium that inserted an automatic technological process into the artistic process, he and others

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who first brought photography out of the studio into the public space of the city could be seen as the precursors, and apocryphal conscience, of what would become the current culture of surveillance, in which public actions are subject to recording by security cameras and other sensors as a matter of course.

Cyborg Partnerships The 1987 speculative fiction film RoboCop (and its 2014 remake), which presented a scenario of a crime-ridden 2028 Detroit, opens with a scene of a prototype of a lawenforcement robot malfunctioning and wreaking havoc, and closes with a scene in which the programmed directives of the machinic component of a cyborg policeman hinder him from following his human sense of duty and ethics to avert a crime. These two scenes give voice to fears associated with the turning-over of control of vital urban functions to automatized technological agents. As the task of managing and maintaining order in public space in the twenty-first century megacity outstrips the capacity of unaided human minds and bodies, the question of the nature of the partnership between human and technological agents that can meet these challenges becomes crucial. The cited opening scene presents a version of an oft-played-out speculative fiction trope of the dangers of complete automatization, in which efficiency is supposedly optimized by removing the human element, while the closing scene evokes the more nuanced issue of how, if human-machine partnerships are unavoidable, they can be constituted without subjugating the human values that these partnerships should serve. Another way of framing this would be the seeking of a balance between the strategic and the tactical. The French intellectual Michel de Certeau (1984) distinguished between strategies, which are associated with plans and rules through which control is maintained and goals methodically pursued, and tactics, which have to do with spontaneous actions in the moment, navigating the contingencies of one’s present situation in the conduct of daily life. For de Certeau, strategies were associated with the exercise of power and tactics with negotiations of individuals with the power structures under which they exist. In terms of this distinction, algorithms are strategic in nature. They are based on an “if-then” logic. They can be, and in the best cases are, certainly designed with minute attention to all contingencies that might arise and with consideration for the best course of action (or inaction) in each of these contingencies, but it is impossible for algorithms to generate directives outside of the rule system that they embody, although they can certainly generate results unforeseen in the initial program (as played-out in the cited RoboCop scenes) when they are operating in reaction to (unforeseeable and uncontrollable) conditions and events in the context in which they are operating, as will always be the case in urban computing. In this sense, algorithms are at their base eminently automatic, and digital automatization relies on algorithms. In cyborg publics, we are living with digital algorithms in a different way than we live with people. Algorithms optimize, but they are often put in place to optimize in a way that is hostile, or at best indifferent, to humanity.

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 ersuasive Locative Games and the Automatization of Public P Behavior Computer games are algorithmic environments. Players’ navigation of these environments during playtime is highly tactical in nature (though different degrees of strategic thinking are also necessary to succeed in different types of such games). Drawing on B.J. Fogg’s (2003) concept of “persuasive technologies,” which proposes that computers can be used to positively influence perceptions and behavior, American video game designer and theorist Ian Bogost coined the term “persuasive games” to refer to a type of digital games that have the potential to profoundly influence perception and behavior, not first and foremost through their visual aesthetics, but rather by virtue of their power to immerse players within the a particular process logic (Bogost 2007). He refers to this as the “procedural” nature of these games. For Bogost, the persuasive power of digital games lies in their ability, unmatchable by analog games, to simulate the complexity of real-world situations. The relationship between games like chess or Tetris and the real world tends to be tenuous and abstract, such that there is little chance of carry-over of strategies and behavioral patterns learned in these games to one’s day-to-day life. Attempts to emulate real-­ world situations in analog games typically result in cumbersome and unplayable games. But in the case of digital games, players are not required to consciously engage the intricate rule systems on which they are based, but rather encounter them at a purely phenomenological level. Persuasive games lie between the positivist and objective concreteness of simulation games such as SimCity and the abstraction of classic arcade style games like Tetris. Persuasive games are often structured in ways that aim to lead players to reflect on fundamental questions of how experiences of the world work and one’s ability to exercise agency in the world.1 Whereas conventional location-based games like Ingress and Pokémon Go superimpose an alternative geography and reward system onto urban space, which it uses as a playing field, persuasive locative games often seek to encourage perceptions of the urban context and spatial practices that engage issues in that real-world context. Persuasive location-based (or “pervasive locative”) games condition players to behave and perceive in certain ways by inserting automated reward and feedback mechanisms into their activities in public space. Examples of such games include Ukko, which sought to motivate children to walk to school rather than being driven, by creating a virtual “pet” whose health can be influenced by the distance walked by the child-player and their success in avoiding routes that take them through areas of high air pollution, and the treasure hunt-­themed game The Treasures of Captain Torment that obliged teams to make ethical decisions, such as whether to abandon “weaker” team members in exchange for advantages in the game play 1  Notable persuasive games provide environments within which players explore and reflect upon issues such as aging and partnership (“The Marriage”), free will and extinction (Rod Humble’s “Perfect Distance” and “Last Thoughts of the Aurochs”) and the perception of time (Jonathan Blow’s “Braid”).

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(Spallazzo and Mariani 2018: 45–48), and the many so-called “urban exergames” (Knöll et al. 2014) with the straightforward goal of motivating people to make use of urban public space for physical exercise. Digital persuasive games, like any computer games or indeed any IT programs, are based on algorithms and therefore on automatization. To the extent that they seek to condition behavior, though, the examples cited in the previous paragraph also aim at achieving the automatization of human action. In a way, then, these games take their place in a long line of strategies in which the pairing of urban technologies with rule-based systems to channel the behavior of urban citizens, as in the tandem of traffic lights that signal and regulate expected behavior and traffic laws that set penalties for transgressing the directives of these signals (with the difference that membership in the community or sub-public of the game is elective rather than compulsory). While motivated by much different aims and values than the ethos of Fordism and Taylorism, that subjugated the organization of human life and labor to the logic of mechanized mass-production, this approach to persuasive games has in common with these approaches a strategy of behavioral engineering using technological systems to condition norms of human action.

Disruptions in Accustomed Behavior Counterexamples from within the genre of persuasive games can be found in more open-ended forms that, rather than aiming to instill particular behavioral patterns, instead seek to create disruptions in accustomed patterns of behavior and habits of perception, thereby opening up possibilities that require players to consciously reflect on their own situation and relationship with the urban context and requiring them to interpret the opportunities and implications thus provided and consider tactics for their engagement of the situation. An example of such a game is SFZero, which was invented by members of the nonprofit game development collective Playtime Antiboredom and first played in San Francisco in 2005. SFZero is played by groups or individuals who compete for points in pursuing tasks that are posted on the game’s website. Some of the tasks are relatively explicit, such as writing and posting a love letter in a public place, while others are formulated in intentionally vague and evocative language. For instance, a 2013 task titled “Journey to the End of the Night” instructed participants, “For one night, drop your relations, your work and leisure activities, and all your usual motives for movement and action, and let yourself be drawn by the attractions of the chase and the encounters you find there” (http://sf0.org). It is up to players to interpret the meaning of each task for themselves, perform the task, and upload written, photographic or video documentation to chronicle their quest for task fulfilment, which are granted points by the game facilitators. Players report having undertaken activities, reflections and public interactions that they wouldn’t have otherwise, and have taken risks such as riding public transportation blindfolded into unfamiliar neighborhoods (Blitstein 2006; Dansey 2014). This is an example of what is, at its base, a digitally-enabled

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game, but one in which the algorithmic automatized component is at a minimum and exists primarily to spark situations for non-algorithmic experiences.

Rehearsing Roles “Procedurality” entails the ability to construct complex behaviors, driven by many variables that a user can manipulate and explore. In the context of games, players take on roles and make decisions based on the constraints presented by those roles. Of course, human-made rules and constraints exist in physical spaces as well, but whereas these rules about behavior in physical action and interaction are intended to deter people from doing things that are possible but not desirable, or adhere to a small subset of the behaviors of which one is capable, in the case of digital environments, these constraints are constitutive of the fundamental logic of the environment itself and therefore impossible to transgress from within. To act outside of the designed constraints is impossible, not just undesirable. In digital environments, there is only design. There is nothing that exists independent of it having been put in place by a human or technological agent. There is no a priori nature, physics or chemistry in these environments because they are virtual fictions. With increasing degrees of reliance on digital networks, applications and devices comes increasing compulsion to operate within the rules of the software model’s logic or, expressed differently, we are compelled to play the roles assigned to us within the world of the system. In assuming the mantle of different characters within games, we experience life constrained by different roles. This has the effect of building empathy with a particular role. In many cases, the roles assumed by game players are escapist in nature, allowing them to take on personas far from those that they would ever assume in their daily life and evade the strictures of societal controls. Persuasive games, however, explicitly take a different tack, seeking to provide opportunities for experiences that encourage reflection on one’s situation and role in society and feed the imagination for how this role might evolve. They can allow gamers to build empathy with the roles of others in society by enabling them to experience the constraints and concerns that form their life world, such as the games “A Breathtaking Journey” (Kors et al. 2016) and “A Hostile World” (Bertolo and Mariani 2014), in which players take on roles of ethnic minorities and must complete missions simulating the day-to-day struggles of immigrants or refugees, through which they experience the city in which they live through different eyes. Such games can sensitize people to critical issues in urban public space, as in the case of Suyin Looui’s “Transition Algorithm,” that leads players to seek out, document and reflect upon locations being impacted by gentrification (Flanagan 2007), and can also provide arenas for the rehearsal of other roles that the gamer themselves might aspire to take on in urban society, as in the geotagging-based game “Commons,” which rewarded players for identifying issues in their neighborhood, suggesting ways to react on them, as well as identifying positive elements of the neighborhood (Schiller 2012). Beyond supporting the rehearsal of roles, behavior and interpersonal interactions in public space, persuasive games also

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serve as trials of the potential constitution of cyborg publics, in allowing for experimentation with the interaction between human and digital agents.

Learning to be Public For things that “we don’t know how we do,” like speaking, walking and seeing, we “don’t try to capture knowledge and program it. We let the machines learn for themselves. Let the machines program themselves” (Reddy 2017). This becomes possible with Big Data, from which models of complex phenomena are achieved not through the abstraction of rules and theorizations, but through the accretion of millions of pieces of data from the observed situation. This became possible only recently after passing a threshold of processing power and memory. One implication of this is that the realm in which machines learn and in which we learn public interaction are one and the same. We are learning the same things in the same spaces. We and our technological others are members of the same publics. We are part of the contexts within which we learn to interact with others, even other types of sentience. This cannot help but affect the constitution of publics. We learn to “be public,” always already immersed in a cyborg public realm. At the level of the senses—the simple registering of environmental factors such as light, sound and temperature—the technological has long been able to emulate the biological, and in most cases has surpassed it in terms of sensitivity. And work is progressing on technological applications and algorithms for processing the data thus gathered to recognize patterns, for instance through image and speech recognition. Digital technologies are also rapidly “learning” many of the skills needed to synthesize sensory data into coherent patterns. Computer speech recognition relies on the recording and analyzing of millions of hours of speech, plus appreciable processor speed and memory. Not long ago, this seemed decades away but it has already been achieved (Reddy 2017). Facial recognition software has reached a level of sophistication that allows the Chinese government to implement autonomic systems that track millions of individuals’ movements through and between large crowded public spaces in cities across the country as a matter of course. This raises the question of what are the other components of public life that need to be learned in order for automata to behave, vis-à-vis each other as well as humans, in ways that mimic public interaction. And at what point do we call them public actors in their own right, if ever? Can they be co-constructors of public space, if they do not have a will, intentions and rights? At what point, if ever, do they enter into the realm of the sentient components of public space and not the framing elements thereof? If we are faced with the job of remaking public space (or whatever will be constructed on its ruins) from the ground up, might we need to rethink certain aspects and distinctions between machines and humans, as collaborators in this project, as they both progress through the learning experience of how to be members of these emerging cyborg publics?

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Public Space as an Automated Service There have been many speculative proposals prognosticating applications of computer automatized planning paradigms. The 2001–2003 Bauhaus Kolleg project “Serve City” provides an apt example (Sonnabend 2003). This project presents a design for the redevelopment of a disused industrial site in Sydney, Australia as a live/work district for “urban nomad” knowledge workers, whose lifestyle is associated with a high degree of mobility and flexibility in the use of time and space and an intensive and “productive” use of communication networks for social, economic and professional interaction, related to the prevalence of the individual as an autonomous work unit within this subculture. This district is conceived as a service provider linked to a physical site and serving as a medium for the regulation of spatial use as well as social and economic interaction in the district. Each resident of this district is seen as both a provider and a consumer of digitally mediated services, and the provision and consumption of these services provide the social cohesion for this community. The physical space of the city is 100% public in that it is all communally owned, and the spatial use and physical configuration of the city is constantly shifting. The physical structures of this district are standardized units conceived as generic “hardware” for which the digital “software” can be changed at will to re-­ purpose any structure for a new user (since work and life in this society is digitally mediated). Inhabitants use ICTs to locate, book and “configure” appropriate spaces for their transitory needs. At first glance, this proposal may seem very populist. However, the arrangement is the emergent result of the sum of (the relations between) all the actors. It does not respond directly to the explicitly stated wishes of any individual but instead digital technology intermediates by calculating a “common good” that no individual has the overview (or impartiality) to perceive. In this way, it is comparable to any typical planning paradigm, the authority from above weighing the different considerations and, following an implicit prioritization and understanding of what are the valid terms by which a city can be designed, anneals a physical arrangement. The decision as to what best serves the common good would be delegated to a piece of software. Serve City’s authors describe the project as a platform rather than a plan, giving the impression of an open-source type of urbanism. The project speaks of the physical spaces in-between buildings as “emergent,” implying that these spaces are where the public life of the physical city will take place, but this public space is constantly wiped clean by the reconfiguration of units on the site. Indeed, there is no provision for insertion of urban elements independent of the system, as the system relies on the physical site being a tabula rasa that can be constantly rewritten to mirror the computer’s virtual model of the optimal arrangement of the city at a given time. The logic of this particular project also incidentally leads to a marked and explicit commodification of public space. “Public” space is provided in the form of fixed “space providers,” which must be rented through the provider, thus calling into question the legitimacy of calling these spaces public in a real sense.

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Cartography The Serve City example cogently demonstrates the interweaving of the physical space of the city with digital models of the city. A model is an abstracted depiction of something in the world (a territory, a phenomenon, a process…). A map is a type of model. Because they establish boundaries, delineate realms and reify particular ways of “reading” the physical world, maps can be thought of as preceding and producing—rather than following and reproducing—the territories to which they refer (Pickles 2004). By compressing, codifying and transmitting knowledge of a territory and putting it into the hands of selected individuals and institutions, maps have historically allowed rule-at-a-distance and have thus facilitated imperialism and colonization (Leszczynski 2018). Digitally-augmented mapping, which combines human input with automatized processes, can aid in the visualization of the overlay of physical space and digitally-mediated communities, as in those produced by Eric Fischer (Flowing Data 2007–2020), created by harvesting real-time publicly available location-tagged datasets on Twitter “tweets” and superimposing them onto geographical maps. Modelling and its use in simulation are tied in with, and their development spurred-on by, the rise of the Global Risk Society (Beck 1992), in which the anticipation and playing-out of future possibilities, and the rehearsal of actions within each of these eventualities, are seen as of primary importance. Projective digital models do not just simulate possible futures: they are informed by, and feed back into, the ways in which we envision possible futures and act to bring these futures into being. The increasing verisimilitude and comprehensiveness of data and algorithm-­based pictures of potential futures mask the fact that they are not “crystal balls” into the future consequences of present action but are limited by current models of change, which in turn are constrained by the worldviews and biases of the authors of these models. To select which factors will be included, what algorithms will be used to model them and how they will be represented, all affect the possible imaginations and articulations of futures. The digital construct is a model of the physical city on which designs on the city can be developed and rehearsed. The authority of the model implicitly lends authority to the measures developed within it. Projective models are arenas for rehearsing attitudes and ways of acting in order to achieve desired futures. They provide contexts for the formation of communal urban imaginaries but also constrain and channel future-oriented thought.

Projective vs. Extractive Models We use and perceive public spaces not only in relation to enclosure and landmarks, but also in relation to each other, and digital communication technologies afford both of these. They afford the latter by the “compass and beacon” (Kopomaa 2000)

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effect, by which we move around the city in constant conversation and coordination with one another (also Humphreys 2010). The relational networks in the city constituted by the ever-shifting swarms of individuals and the constantly changing conversations and connections amongst them via digital communications has been visualized since 2009 by Chris Speed in his “Comob” project, to give expression and support to “Post-Cartesian Tactics” in the use of cities. The project uses GPS-­ enabled collaborative mapping to show a constantly updating visualization of social and spatial relations between people (Larsson 2012: 32). As abstracted representations of the city-as-it-is (in real time), these maps are an example of “extractive” models of the city. By abstracting and representing certain aspects of the city, such models can aid us in perceiving patterns, processes and rules of the urban context. Kevin Lynch’s (1960) term of the imageability of a city takes on a literal meaning in many of these projects, which create abstracted “representations of space,” in LeFebvre’s (1991 [1974]) sense, to allow the apprehension and comprehension of the city in ways not possible with the unmediated eye. To address another of Lynch’s central terms, navigability of the physical space of the city and navigability of information become intertwined. The “software-sorted geographies” (Graham 2005) that we use to navigate and understand our urban contexts have a profound influence on how we, in turn, use, perceive and inhabit public space. “Projective” models, on the other hand, are not representations of the state of things as they are, but rather are tools for envisioning how things might be. Projective modelling is related to what Hayles (1999: 12) has termed the “Platonic forehand.” If the Platonic backhand (which underlies extractive models of the world) refers to the creation of abstractions (i.e. theories) by which to understand the world, moving from the complicated and variegated to the rarefied and abstract, then the Platonic forehand is the creation of articulated and detailed models or virtualities, using abstract modelling and formulas, requiring powerful processing capability, to stand as worlds on their own.

The Influence of Models Models rely on, and are indeed another output of, another type of construct in the digital world discussed previously in this chapter: algorithms. The surface complexity of the output, mimicking that of human actors or the physical world, masks the fact that what lies behind them is human-made. The behaviors of digital algorithmic agents do not reveal deep hidden rules of the natural world. On the contrary, they reveal the consequences of extrapolating from the assumptions, worldviews, value systems and theoretical understandings of the world upon which the algorithm is constructed. They are second nature, not Nature, but they are equally real as constraints and environments. In both extractive and projective models, the choice of the mode of abstraction that is used to model the city is a fundamental ideological choice, which determines what can and cannot be expressed and discovered through each of these systems.

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Models play the role of metonymies of the city, using selected aspects of the urban ensemble to stand in for the complex totality of the city. Just as the modernists abstracted the aspects of the city that could be best addressed by rational organizational thought and called the representation thus created by the sum of these aspects “the city,” digital models of cities abstract the aspects that are best dealt with by digital media. Cathy O’Neil (2016) has proposed that the models of the world on which many algorithms are based tend to be used in ways that perpetuate, rather than remedy, inequality, prejudice and divisions, because they in effect build-in existing presumptions and biases into the assumptions and rules on which the models are based. The evolution of the commons of public space in the digital era needs to be understood in the context of the evolution of other commons made possible by the affordances of digital media, in particular the Open Source Movement. In some sense, the open-source nature of many of the models that are superimposed upon urban space can serve as an indicator of the potential for physical public space to become more open-source in nature. The urban public realm must be understood in terms of the overlay of these various strata.

Trust in Data Models For Heidegger (1950), technoscience—the application of scientific knowledge to the end of bending the world to the service of humankind—is instrumental in establishing a new metaphysics with man, rather than God, as the ultimate referent for meaning in all thought and action. Contemplative thought, seeking meaning in the universe, gives way to calculating thought, an instrumental mode of thinking aimed at strategies for increasingly turning the universe to serve the needs of our species. Central to Heidegger’s instrumental mode of thought is the representation of the world through mathematical models, in order to better apprehend and establish control over the world, recalling Dupuy’s (2000) definition of cybernetics as “calculating in order to govern.” One of the more provocative claims of Big Data apologists is that sufficient depth, frequency and comprehensiveness of data collection and analysis could do away with the need for theorization: in effect that quantitative descriptions could dispel the need for qualitative understanding. There are numerous familiar (and valid) critiques of this claim, such as that even the most subtle and detailed understanding of correlations does not reveal which correlations are meaningful, and that Big Data is best at modelling and predicting relationships that are common, but is not good at analyzing uncommon occurrences or conditions (Markus and Davis 2014). These critiques notwithstanding, one essential merit of this claim of the Big Data ethos is the recognition that theories and models that allow us to mentally grasp exceedingly complex phenomena constrain the patterns and relations that we are able to recognize in these phenomena.

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Maps as Public Commons Maps are a particular genre of model. In the application of digital technologies to mapmaking, locative technologies can support user-led cartography of cities by individuals, and collaborative cartography (also called collaborative mapping) by communities. Such applications typically rely upon geographic information system (GIS) technologies to collect, process and represent spatial data. While many GIS applications are used in the context of city planning, monitoring and administration by governments and other urban authorities, “citizen participatory GIS” takes the power of mapping out of the exclusive hands of authorities and experts and into the hands of communities (Elwood 2006; Pickles 2004). The opening-up of American GPS data to public access in 2000 enabled the emergence of “volunteer geography,” in the form of OpenStreetMap, Geonames, Editgrid and other such collaborative citizen mapping applications, as well as a slew of mobile apps, giving rise to a ­“cartographical common” (Le Crosnier and Vidal 2010), in which collaboratively-­ authored online maps are composed, maintained, annotated and updated by distributed individuals using the locative capabilities of their digital devices. One of the primary uses of GIS is in supporting decision-making processes, which it often goes without saying means government decision-making, but which by now as a matter of course must involve some type of public participation (Zhang and Liu 2014; Batty and Hudson-Smith 2005). In Ryan et al.’s (2016: 62) concept of “virtual city experimentation,” the “virtual realm” (which they explicitly declare is not synonymous with or reducible to digital virtualities) refers to the creation of situations within which human critical and projective abilities in imagining possible alternative realities for the city and different sets of relationships. Digital models can give representation to long-term, subtle or intangible effects, such as those associated with environmental changes, that can raise awareness and inspire to action. “Massive Multiplayer Online Forecasting Games” like Urgent Evoke, which challenged participants to collaboratively work-through scenarios for addressing urgent issues such as conflict, poverty, hunger and climate change (Brooks et al. 2015), seek to form publics around these issues and engage them in confronting the seemingly intractable problems and instill an attitude of seeing the entire world as a shared commons on which all humans rely, and a perception of a public at a global scale. The Bartlett Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis at the University College London maintains a hyper-detailed dynamic virtual model of London that can serve as a test ground for scenarios and future projections. The simulation is a copy of, and a surrogate for, the city itself. The model allows multiple ways of viewing the virtual city both through “iconic” models expressing actual physical structures and spaces and “symbolic” models allowing the visualization of intangible mathematical factors (Batty and Hudson-Smith 2005). These different ways of viewing support different decision-making processes. One can enter the virtual city as an avatar to experience it in a pseudo-spatial manner, extract oneself to survey it as an organic whole or extract quantitative information about processes in the model. The urban

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simulacrum allows simulation and visualization of the consequences of events, scenarios and urban design decisions, in a multitude of dimensions. The model is intended to be accessible to urban design professionals as well as to laypeople, and it is indeed proposed as a tool to enable the public to understand the urban built environment, and even participate in its design through simulating their suggestions within the virtual city, while at the same time providing a public virtual forum in which proposals can be aired and evaluated. The Brain Box project of the CHORA Conscious City Institute at the Technische Universität (Technical University) in Berlin demonstrates the ways in which models can become rallying-points for the formation of publics and the integration of these publics into processes of thinking through responses to urban issues and formulating visions and priorities for the future development of cities. The project manifests itself as a multimedia environment centered around an interactive table on which different cartographic representations of the city of Berlin are projected. Participants are able to toggle between different representations of the city and superimpose different layers onto the map representing a spatialization of demographic, economic, infrastructural and historical data. The table and the participants are placed in a space, the walls of which are a 360-degree projection surface on which representations of different types of city data can be called-up to inform the discussion, which is also supported by ancillary prompts such as cards that propose role-playing scenarios to spur discussion. In the words of the authors, “the Brain Box is a new type of public space, in which access to information and the planning of intelligent systems in our cities (Smart Cities) becomes democratized2” (Arphenotype 2015). Immersion in models and simulations has played a role in the full range of human activities. Simulation has been connected to war since Napoleonic and Prussian Wars (De Landa 1991), when rehearsal of scenarios for speculative battle situations became instituted in campaign planning. At the other extreme of human activity from violent confrontation lies the solitary withdrawal from interpersonal interaction, which in the contemporary context can involve immersion into virtual online games (although with massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, the bellicose extreme of simulation use becomes embedded into the other extreme of withdrawal into simulated worlds). While some models seek to give a handle on the world and allow us to play out scenarios and ask “what if?”, others are simulacra, worlds unto themselves. It has been suggested that they may be the new public spaces, in that they play host to interactions that are, in some ways, characteristic of those in public space.

2  translated from German by the author: “Die BrainBox ist eine neue Art öffentlicher Raum, in dem der Zugang zu Informationen und das Planen von intelligenten Systemen in unseren Städten (Smart Cities) demokratisiert werden.” The author also witnessed and participated in a demonstration of the project in the context of the Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften (Long Night of the Sciences) in Berlin in 2016.

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References Arendt H (1998 [1958]). The human condition (2nd edn). University of Chicago Press, Chicago Adorno TW (1973) Negative dialectics. Routledge, New York Arphenotype (June 13 2015) TU Berlin/CHORA, Brainbox Programm, Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften 2015. Arphenotype website. http://www.arphenotype.com/?p=1245. Accessed 4 Sept 2018 Barker E (2014) Undivided attention: 6 ways to focus that will make you happier. TIME magazine, June 22, 2014. http://time.com/2912307/undivided-­attention-­6-­ways-­to-­focus-­that-­will-­make-­ you-­happier/. Accessed 3 Dec 2017 Barnes J (ed) (1984) The complete works of Aristotle. Oxford University Press, Oxford Batty M, Hudson-Smith A (2005) Urban simulacra London. Archit Des 75(6):42–47 Beck U (1992) Risk society: towards a new modernity. Sage, New Delhi. Translated from Beck U (1986) Risikogesellschaft: auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. Bertolo M, Mariani I (2014) A hostile world: a pervasive urban game to sensitise and foster a cross-cultural reflection. In: Ruggiero D (ed) Cases on the societal effects of persuasive games. IGI Global, Hershey Blitstein R (2006) More than zero: a trio of twenty-something San Franciscans have invented SFZero, a game that bleeds far into reality. SFWeekly News. https://archives.sfweekly.com/ sanfrancisco/more-­than-­zero/Content?oid=2160010. Accessed 11 Apr 2019 Bogost I (2007) Persuasive games: the expressive power of videogames. MIT Press, Cambridge Brooks LJA, Meneses CV, Keyser B (2015) From territorial to temporal ambitions: the politics of time and imagination in massive multiplayer online forecasting games. Soc Media Soc 2015:1–14 Dansey N (2014) Emergently-persuasive games: how players of SF0 persuade themselves. In: Ruggiero D (ed) Cases on the societal effects of persuasive games. IGI Global, Hershey de Certeau (1984) The practice of everyday life (trans: Rendall S). University of California Press, Berkeley De Landa M (1991) War in the age of intelligent machines. ZONE, New York Dupuy JP (2000) The mechanization of the mind: on the origin of cognitive science. Princeton University Press, Princeton Elwood S (2006) Negotiating knowledge production: the everyday inclusions, exclusions, and contradictions of participatory GIS research. Prof Geogr 58(2):197–208 Evans L, Saker M (2017) Location-based social media: space, time and identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London Flanagan M (2007) Locating play and politics: real world games & activism. Leonardo Electron Almanac 16(2–3):1–13 FlowingData (2007–2020). https://flowingdata.com/tag/eric-­fischer/. Accessed 12 Feb 2020 Fogg BJ (2003) Persuasive technology: using computers to change what we think and do. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco Golumbia D (2009) The cultural logic of computation. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Graham S (2005) Software-sorted geographies. Prog Hum Geogr 29(5):562–580 Graham S, Marvin S (1996) Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. Routledge, New York Hayles NK (1999) How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Hegel GWF (1976) Hegel’s philosophy of mind (trans: Wallace W, Miller AV). Clarendon Press, Oxford Heidegger M (1950) Holzwege. Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main. English edition: Heidegger M (2002) Off the beaten track (trans: Young J, Haynes K). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Humphreys L (2010) Mobile social networks and urban public space. New Media Soc 12(5):763–778

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Kagerman H (2017) Talk at 2017 International forum on innovation and emerging industries development. Hosted by Shanghai municipal government and Chinese academy of engineering, Shanghai, China, 7–9 November Kimmelman M (2009) When a picture is worth a thousand debates, give or take. The New York Times, 3 June. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/arts/design/04abroad.html. Accessed 2 Sept 2019 Kitchin R, Dodge M (2011) Code/space: software and everyday life. MIT Press, Cambridge Knöll M, Dutz T, Hardy S, Göbel S (2014) Urban exergames: how architects and serious gaming researchers collaborate on the design of digital games that make you move. In: Ma MH, Jain LC, Anderson P (eds) Virtual, augmented reality and serious games for healthcare 1. Springer, New York, pp 191–207 Kopomaa T (2000) Speaking mobile: the city in your pocket. YTK’s electronic publications. http:// www.hut.fi/Yksikot/YTK/julkaisu/mobile.html. Accessed 12 Sept 2004 Kors MJL, Ferri G, van der Spek ED, Ketel C, Schouten BAM (2016) A breathtaking journey: on the design of an empathy-arousing mixed-reality game. Paper presented at CHI PLAY '16, 2016, Austin, TX, USA, 16–19 October Larsson T (2012) Infrastructure, space and media. A book from the Media Places Symposium in Umeå, 5-7 December 2012 Le Crosnier HL, Vidal P (2010) Digital equipment and urban commons. Call for papers for Netcom journal Hervé. https://journals.openedition.org/netcom/1612?lang=en. Accessed 14 May 2019 Lefebvre H (1991 [1974]) The production of space (trans. Smith DN). Blackwell, Oxford Leszczynski A (2018) Spatialities. In: Ash J, Kitchin R, Leszczynski A (eds) Digital geographies. SAGE, New York, pp 13–23 Lynch K (1960) The image of the city. MIT Press, Cambridge Mackenzie A (2003) Transduction: invention, innovation and collective life. https://www.lancaster. ac.uk/staff/mackenza/papers/transduction.pdf. Accessed 12 Sept 2018 Markus G, Davis E (2014) Eight (no, nine!) problems with big data. New York Times, 6 April 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/opinion/eight-­no-­nine-­problems-­with-­big-­data. html. Accessed 19 Mar 2018 O’Neil C (2016) Weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Crown, New York Pickles J (2004) A history of spaces: cartographic reason, mapping and the geo-coded world. Routledge, New York Reddy R (2017) Talk at 2017 International forum on innovation and emerging industries development. Hosted by Shanghai municipal government and Chinese academy of engineering. Shanghai, China, 7–9 November Ryan C, Gaziulusoy I, McCormick K, Trudgeon M (2016) Virtual city experimentation: a critical role for design visioning. In: Evans J, Karvonen A, Raven R (eds) The experimental city. Routledge, New York, pp 1–18 Schiller B (2012) Games for civic participation, social causes, and fun. Fast Company. https:// www.fastcompany.com/1680420/games-­f or-­c ivic-­p articipation-­s ocial-­c auses-­a nd-­f un. Accessed 22 Sept 2019 Simbirski B (2016) Cybernetic muse: Hannah Arendt on automation, 1951–1958. J Hist Ideas 77(4):589–613 Sonnabend R (ed) (2003) Serve city: interactive urbanism. Jovis, Berlin Spallazzo D, Mariani I (2018) Location-based mobile games. Springer, Cham Stiegler B (2015) La société automatique 1. L'Avenir du travail. Fayard, Paris Terzidis K (2017) Talk at 2017 international forum on innovation and emerging industries development. Hosted by Shanghai municipal government and Chinese academy of engineering. Shanghai, China, 7–9 November Zhang ZH, Liu H (2014) Research of urban digital planning model based on GIS.  Appl Mech Mater 543-547:4129–4132

Chapter 11

The Digital Urban Fabric: Affordances of Connectivity and Datafication

Abstract This chapter investigates the affordances that support the aspect of INTERACTION/COMMUNICATION, from which public space is performatively constructed. The connectivity, afforded by digital technologies, that supports interaction and communication, is mirrored by practices of filtering of connectivity and information, through which urban citizens curate their public presence. This theme is discussed in the context of the ascendancy of the crowd as a composite urban actor, as exemplified by protests and activism in public spaces. When mediated by digital technologies, interaction and communication generates data, that is the foundation of a new stratum of economic and political life. Keywords  Connectivity · Datafication · Networked activism · Big data · Public data

The Digital Urban Fabric Public space is a space of interaction and communication, where we come into contact with others and co-construct a shared world. For Arendt (1998 [1958]), this performative forging of connections is an essential aspect of the public realm. The interaction and communication afforded by digital networks brings another layer to this fabric of connectivity. From one perspective, the Internet can be linked to the rediscovery (or re-invention) of civil society, and Internet-based connections between people were incubating grounds for new forms and expectations of ways of coming together, which bleeds over into expectations and practice in the use of public spaces. Indeed, digital networks have been said to act as “trojan horses” (Obrist and Brand 2013), performing alternative possibilities of public interaction in urban space. In a Network Society, everyday life can be seen in terms of the navigation of connective networks, which is a broad conceptual base that can be used to describe physical, virtual and social contexts equally and simultaneously (Mitchell 2003). In some senses, the ease of interaction and connectivity afforded by digital networks has been touted as a threat to physical public spatial practice. Digital connections become more reliable and frictionless, as urban space becomes more © The Author(s) 2021 T. Jachna, Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square, The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_11

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fragmented, and navigating the physical urban realm becomes, in contrast to the increasingly frictionless, invisible pervasiveness of access to digital connectivity, often more disjointed, unpredictable and bothersome. Even as city spaces become more fragmentary, we must bodily move through the spaces in-between to pass through the city. Digital connectivity between places, and between the people in them, creates new types of adjacencies and continuums in public space. Public spaces are “stretched” across different localities and geographies by virtue of their ­embeddedness in media networks, such that these places must be understood both as localities defined by their physical, material and geographic characteristics, and as nodes in networks, defined by their connections: “articulated moments” in the words of Doreen Massey (1993). Through the Internet of Things, this distributed instantaneity of transmission applies to communication between non-human agents as well, as sensors and processors in spaces throughout the city are able to exchange information about traffic, movement and gathering of people and even the presence and behavior of specific individuals. Digital connectivity between people is a function of connectivity between the personal devices that have become integral to our cyborg selves. In this sense, the web of connections that enable digital publics relies upon the much wider web of connections between digital devices that is denoted as the “Internet of Things” (IoT). With tens of billions of devices connected to the Internet (Gartner 2013), this population of technological agents in cyborg society far outstrips that of humans. The Internet of Things relies on the connectivity (as well as datafication and locative) affordances of digital technologies. Apologists for the ubiquitous sensors brought by the IoT era laud the potential of these sensorial arrays to “add value” to public space: “IoT allows public space to get the sensors required for data collection much closer to existing and foreseeable target elements than simply having a set of environment sensors” (Arbelaiz 2016). There are promises of the potential of the Internet of Things to import public life into places where it is currently absent or tenuous, and in many developing urban contexts digital networks have enabled connectivity between people even in cities lacking core elements of a (physical) infrastructure of public amenities. Following the idea of “Cities as Service Platforms” (Suominen 2017), mediated public space can be seen not first and foremost as a set of spaces, but as a set of affordances distributed throughout the space and time of the city, that are actualized in many cases in coordination of physical and digital affordances, leading to the blurring, morphing, recombination and decomposition of architectural typologies. A humanist slant on the potential of the Internet of Things, which purports a clear master-servant relationship between human and technological actors, is presented in the idea of “adaptive environments,” in which the array of digital agents is mobilized to “tune” the physical environment to the needs of humans. According to Baker (2015), “Adaptive environments will be able to retrieve and use contextual, relevant, timely and accurate information to interact with us. Spaces will adapt to people, from groups to individuals, contextually and appropriately.” Digital sensorial networks can also play a service role similar to that of sentinel species in the

Filtering

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biological world, which are monitored because changes in their behavior or well-­ being may provide indicators of impending environmental risks to humans (as in the “canary in the coal mine” metaphor), be it seismic activity, meteorological factors, particulate matter or chemical traces in the air. Through our embeddedness in the Internet of Things, we as individuals are always already immersed in computation. We exist in and move through computational environments just as we exist in and move through physical environments. The origin of the concept of “ubiquitous computing” is attributed to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre) Chief Scientist Mark Weiser (1991: 94). Computers become invisible and embedded in the environment rather than existing as discreet objects, and interactivity becomes a pervasive quality of the environment rather than something requiring intentional interaction with a computer-as-object. Weiser’s cited paper begins with the statement, “the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” (p. 1). McCullough (2004) gives a patently architectural point of view on ubiquitous computing and argues for the use of this technology for a deepening of sense of place, in design for interaction of people with places, as well as with each other within places. Dourish and Bell (2007) argue that ubiquitous computing raises the relevance of studies on the relationships between technology and place, referring to technological “infrastructures” by which humans interact with and within space, consisting as much in social negotiations as in technological applications. Recent advances in ubiquitous computing have been afforded by developments in cloud computing, which enables localized, mobile, personalized and distributed devices to seamlessly access computational capacity and data storage of remote servers.

Filtering As explored in Chap. 8 of this book, the experience of public space, and the staging of public life that takes place within it, is grounded in visibility. Our public experience is circumscribed by what and who we can see/sense, and what and who we cannot see/sense. A corollary of connectivity, and an essential part of maintaining a public persona, is the filtering of the connections that one maintains. In LBMGs (location-based mobile games), for instance, one can filter the individuals with whom one wants to interact and “play.” This is another way of selecting one’s public, not by deciding which place to go to, but by selecting those individuals and groups with which one remains connected (and often, also with whom one shares one’s data). One is co-present with others not only by virtue of inhabiting the same spatial enclosure, but also by choosing to including certain people within the network of moving landmarks in space and time with which one coordinates. Filtering is and always has been a part of the construction of public space. Ways of filtering out undesirables at the institutional level are now practiced at the individual level. Such “curatorship” of connecting and filtering is the way that we parse and craft a public for ourselves.

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This curatorship is supported by a wide range of location-based social networks (LBSNs) such as Foursquare, Snapchat’s “Snap Map” function, and many location-­ based mobile games, which facilitate the visualization of the physical location of those with whom one decides to connect. Such applications enable one to “browse” public space, like a search engine browses the Internet, and to identify those people, places and information that one perceives as relevant to oneself (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2015: 169).

Unequal Connectivity Of course, connectivity is restricted not only by choice, but in many cases also by circumstances such as physical location, social status and economic wherewithal. In the case of commercialized communications networks and broadband providers, less lucrative localities will as a matter of course be neglected in the provision of these services (Fountain 2014: 31), and individuals of lesser means or without literacy in digital technologies will be marginalized in this dimension of public space. This becomes all the more apparent when one regards access to digital networks as fundamental in facilitating the use of public space, access to services and information, coordination of physical spatial practice using digital communications links and inclusion in public life in cities. Those with greater command of, and higher incidence of use of, social platforms, tend to be those who in general possess a higher level of “social capital” (Lu and Hampton 2017), likely also increasing their awareness of the affordances, options and possibilities of public space. For instance, the actual number of citizens with access to the Internet or Facebook in Egypt and Tunisia is tiny compared to the quite widespread reach in Western countries, meaning that the proportion of the population potentially involved in, or privy to, the digitally mediated orchestration of the Arab Spring revolutions in those countries represented a privileged elite, young and educated, more reminiscent of Habermas’ normative public sphere than the connective digital publics of contemporary developed contexts (Mahlouly 2013). Like the Internet before it, GIS (geographic information system) functionality was originally intended for governmental and institutional uses but has become accessible to the general public to an increasing extent, playing a role in supporting practices of “citizen media,” the uses of media to perform essential elements of citizenship (Rodríguez 2011; Stephansen 2016: 35). Google Maps “mash-ups,” which afford the augmentation of the Google Maps app with data drawn from other applications and datasets to enable customized spatialized visualizations, are a baseline example. Google Earth, the so-called “people’s GIS,” is now accessible as a matter of course in many parts of the world, while others explicitly exclude it, which in itself is an indication of different parameters of formation of the possibilities of the public realm.

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Networked Activism in Public Space Citizen media present baseline examples of the role of digital technologies in empowering urban citizens, and these technologies have also played a significant role in the enabling citizens to inform, mobilize and manifest in urban public space. Street protests are instances in which the activation of technological affordances has played a role in facilitating massive and effective collective citizen action. Milan (2015) sees the camps, placards, etc., which are the physical manifestations of protests, as the outcomes of processes of meaning-making, and the performance of joint action. However, she claims that with social media we need to see the relationship between the symbolic and the material differently, positing that while these media may afford “spectacular bursts of protest by bypassing the tedious task of organizing,” because they “enabl[e] composite flexible identities and elusive no-­ strings-­attached actions,” they have little political efficacy and are notoriously ineffective in engendering lasting commitment or even agreement on goals. Digitally mediated public engagement can be an engagement of convenience and whim, rather than of necessity or shared long-term interest (Flichy 2010). A collective identity is not really produced because the semiotic world disseminated through media platforms is so malleable and amorphous that anyone may find anything in it, so that it becomes much more a projection of one’s own desires and narratives and increases individuality more so than collectivity. Digital platforms are appropriated to draw-in others from outside the event into it (by tagging, linking, etc.) and to extend the time of the event by posting, forwarding and discussion through “always on” media, in contrast to a one-time dissemination by broadcast media, that then goes away (Milan 2015: 7). These protests become performances, most of whose “participants” are gathered after the events are “finished,” as recorded evidence of the protest becomes circulated via digital media. This creates “emotional spaces” in the digital ether, that engage the empathy of an audience that is distributed in space and time (Gerbaudo 2012: 5). Because such spaces are generated by emotionally charged attraction rather than delineated by brick and mortar, these spaces evade the controls brought by the architectural framing and other regimes of control that circumscribe action in physical public spaces. Accordingly, protests can be conceived as being “attended” by far many people live-streaming the event than physically on the site. This leads to new forms of protest. The “collective plot” of protests becomes a communal construct, to which all can contribute, tactically maneuvering to represent their perception. In this type of protest, it is no longer “organizations” that are protesting but “networked individuals.” There is no leadership, no steering. The “affinity groups” enabled by the Internet did not need to meet in space, were low-­ commitment and short-lived. “These informal networks allowed for multiple and flexible identities, fluctuating and horizontal leadership, and temporary aggregations on the basis of affinity” (Milan 2015).

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 eciprocal Relationships Between Digital and Physical Sites R of Public Action and Interaction Through digital networks, actions, presences and occurrences in concrete physical spaces are projected to much broader publics than those physically present, and are given a longevity beyond their actual temporal duration. For example, Lane (2016) demonstrated how the informal, unwritten “Code of the Street” (Anderson 1999*) of inner city African-American societies is affected by the mediation of social interactions through digital technologies. Street life is conducted both online and offline. Online forums and digital communications networks are used as venues to coordinate and complement activities in physical space by community groups, police forces and street gangs alike, all of whom also monitor the online and offline activities of the others to coordinate their own activities (Lane 2016). Digital technologies played an essential role in spreading the “nanorevolutions:” the ironic and cynical non-revolutions that emerged after strong suspicions of falsification of the results of the Russian parliamentary elections of December 2011 (Nim 2016: 92). The first nano protest took place in the northern Russian town of Apatity on 11 December, in which toys and dolls were used to stage ersatz protests, after planned protests in public space were not granted permission by the authorities, because there is no law against the displaying of toys in public space. Images of these protests were circulated throughout Russia and abroad, first through the Russian social networking platform VKontakte and then through Twitter, LiveJournal and YouTube (Nim, in Baker & Blaagaard, 2016: 93). These stagings were intentionally mediatized in this way to create sites of maximum visibility and to attract media coverage. Social media allowed the physical and virtual replication and serialization of these events (a function of digital technologies leaked and transposed into physical space), and the archiving of “protest artifacts” that were picked up by mainstream media, bloggers and others (Nim 2016: 106).

Connective, Collective Action, the Crowd and the Cloud The instantaneity of the mobile communication afforded by digital communications technologies means that the coordination of actions of different individuals in public space is less and less constrained by a need for collocation. This factor underlies commonplace and banal practices such as the on-the-fly making, breaking and amendment of plans and itineraries of acquaintances as they move through public space, but also more consequential acts, for good and for bad. Such functionality was as instrumental in facilitating the Arab Spring protests in public spaces across the Middle East as it was in enabling the simultaneous explosions of the 2004 Madrid train bombings. This is the principle that underlies the phenomenon of “smart mobs” (Rheingold 2003; Molnár 2014: 45).

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Egyptian computer engineer and activist Wael Ghonim used the Facebook Arabic page “We Are All Khaled Said” to build a discourse and disseminate information about the tyranny of the Mubarak regime and nurture an activist stance that eventually led to public street protests of the 2011 “January 25 Revolution,” when followers were emboldened by the events of the Tunisian revolution (Alaimo 2015: 1). These “information cascades” that arise when a few people dare to express their feelings, which emboldens others to do it, are intrinsically dependent on the connectivity of digital networks, as “mass public action will not happen until ‘everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows’ that a government’s actions are unacceptable” (Shirky 2008). There are both hardware and software aspects of the potential of digital technologies to allow communication and collective action to circumvent centralized control of content and use. On the software side, social media provide the ability to distribute news instantaneously without the need to go through official broadcast media channels (Shirky 2008), essentially bypassing erstwhile controls, reducing costs and problems of organizing and communicating to and within big groups and eliminating need for hierarchical organisation.1 In terms of hardware, the distribution of storage on personal devices, rather than centralized servers of network providers, in “person-­to-­person” (P2P) networks makes them more difficult to shut down, monitor or control. Access to channels of information that could not be controlled by the government was an instrumental factor in participation in the Tahrir Square protests that sparked the “January 25 Revolution” in Egypt (Tufekci and Wilson 2012). These affordances enable particular forms of networked collective action. Benjamin’s (2002) crowd as the new social actor, called into being by the modern metropolis, is being transfigured through the appropriation of digital technologies. Networks are leaderless, centerless, and held together by constant exchange of messages. “Action frames” are personalized as well using the affordances of personal media. Collections of people linked by digital networks are not so much coherent groups as masses of individuals linked by channels of communication. This is what is meant by “networked collective action” (Bennett and Segerberg 2012; Rainie and Wellman 2014). The mediated crowd is facilitated by the computational “cloud” that makes computation and remote social interaction ubiquitously accessible. “Cloud protesting” (Milan 2015: 2) centers on the actions, needs and bodies of individuals, bound together in collective action. Collectivity is thus linked to connectivity, and digitally mediated public action can be understood in terms of “connective action” (Bennett and Segerberg 2012). Movements based on connective action are more fluid than typical activist networks and are able to draw in a wider variety of participants, because they are not driven by a single and simple ideology but evolve with the accruing membership, also allowing each member to gain much more public audience and to experience the 1  Web logs (blogs) and other modes of digital dissemination make available a wider range of perspectives and opinions than had previously been available to those in public space, even as the reliability and rigor with which these messages are controlled is reduced, which can be expected to inform interaction and behavior.

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network as them-centered and to give each one the opportunity to contribute to the movement’s message rather than subscribing to a fixed and communal ideology. This can be compared to the evolution of branding as also facilitated by networks of digital communication. Thus, rather than seeing digital technologies as only exacerbating individualization and retreat from public life, it must also be acknowledged that they can afford the individualization and democratization of participation in collective action, increasing access and motivation for effective action in the public sphere. The use of digital technologies to afford gathering and communal action is grounded in the affordances of these technologies that support the distributed collection and sharing of data. “Crowdsourcing” involves citizens in the gathering and producing of data that can inform decisions, letting people collectively produce information about their cities, and represents a digitally-enabled reconfiguration of urban social practices, supporting functions such as the reporting of issues in public space, participatory budgeting to determine the allocation of funds for public works and the inventorying and monitoring of natural and human-made public and common assets (Le Crosnier and Vidal 2010). As evidence of the ascendancy of the digitally-enabled crowd as a category of urban actor, there are many examples of crowdsourcing of ideas for city improvements (www.spacehive.com, www.betterciti.es), and of using digital forums to mediate between citizens and the corporate providers of digital technology “solutions.” The New York-based non-profit advocacy organization OpenPlans (1999–2015), for instance, developed and applied open-source applications to enable citizens to become involved in transport and public space initiatives in their cities. Map Kibera (2009–present) (mapkibera.org) is a citizen-led initiative to use GPS technology to create a map of a huge slum district of Nairobi in order to allow it to be incorporated into formal urban planning processes. Other examples include multi-platform services for making available, accessing and discussing “hyperlocal” information (www.everyblock.com) and using online “serious gaming” approaches to engage citizens in thinking-through urban issues (betaville.net; Devisch et al. 2016).

Data, Data, Everywhere Crowdsourcing is one manifestation of the importance of economies of data in urban public spatial practice. While in its original sense, data refers generally to observed facts about the world, in the context of digital technologies the word refers more specifically to the encoding of such “facts” into binary code, the processing of which is the fundamental characteristic of these technologies. Data do not simply exist: they are produced (Gitelman 2013), often through processes of “datafication,” in which various affordances of digital technology are used to record or measure things in the world and represent them in a coded form such that these representations may be processed, organized, analyzed and transmitted (Van Dijck 2014).

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Data is political from the outset. Decisions as to what is measured, accepted as truth, codified and stored, as well as how it is measured, are always colored by the intentions and world-view of the measurer, and the biases and limitations of the measuring technology. A primary distinction to be made in the use of data is that between on the one hand top-down regimes by traditional planners and governments in exercises of control and regulation of public space, and on the other hand bottom-up appropriation of data (and generation of citizen data) by urban individuals to open up realms of freedom of use of public space. With the so-called “Internet of Everything,” an increasing number of entities in the world come with embedded digital technology that generates, almost as a by-­ product, data about themselves, their use, and their environment, including the people who use them. As a consequence, data is being produced with intensifying rapidity and regularity, in ever-growing volume and with increasing variety. “Big Data” refers to the harvesting of a targeted subset of the vast amount of data produced about the world by the uncountable array of sensors and algorithms embedded in the world, and analyzing this dataset to reveal relationships, patterns and trends. Big Data is typically data that is not collected for a specific single analytical inquiry, but which is rather the “by-product” of automatized processes, requiring “urban analytics” to wrest sense out of it (Batty 2016: 321). The analysis of Big Data is used in day-to-day management and governance of urban environments, and also in exploratory processes seeking to discern subtle changes that presage long-­ term future trends (Batty 2016: 325). In urban environments, Big Data is generated by collecting data from widely distributed and unrelated urban systems such as transport systems, surveillance cameras, traffic signals and weather data stations. There is no central control for these systems.

The World as Data The cataloguing, datafying and mapping of every part of the earth’s surface brings the whole planet into the realm of the urban, or “denature” (Luke 2004: 108). Thus, the entirety of the earth is brought into the category of the man-made, and thus the realm of the public. The suffusion of the public sphere with algorithmic actors is the co-requisite of processes of datafication. An algorithm is an automatized agent to which responsibility can be abdicated. What happens when agents are not equipped with human judgement or accountability, or more precisely, where they are the second-order effects of human choice, yet they are still carrying out the roles of public agents in making decisions, granting freedom or exercising control? These concerns are evident in current debates around autonomous vehicles, to cite one example. Big Data is often seen as providing the potential to better apprehend and comprehend social processes. Big Data itself is a social phenomenon, with implications for how we define truth (Graham and Shelton 2013). This paradigm affords copious insight into the quantifiable aspects of humans in the city as logistical patterns. The aspects of public space and spatial practice that can be measured are the

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aspects that can be codified, and processed. Meanwhile, subjective and qualitative aspects of urban life, especially from those with less involvement in or access to digital technology systems and devices, and other differentiations that are not converted into data are non-existent as a dataset, and therefore absent in any models that may be constructed on the basis of this data. The measuring of flows of data evades the more profound and constitutive question of the relationships of power and influence that set the agendas for cities and the ways in which the use and generation of data reflect and affect urban social and cultural forms, values and practices (Sassen 2012). In view of this, Murakami Wood (2014) makes a plea for a broadening of the ambitions and scope of the smart city beyond the optimizable, quantifiable views of the city as a technical infrastructure, an economic engine, and a managerial hierarchy to take on a more social perspective. Big Data has even been described as entailing a degree of incisiveness, scope and scale that heralds the “end of theory” (Anderson 2008), in a re-emboldened manifestation of the positivist conceit that “qualitative” is just a place-holder for things we have not yet been able to quantify sufficiently. A street in the present era is at the same time a physical and a digital infrastructure, that is suffused with data generated by the individuals that occupy the space (Wachter 2012). These data, which include locational indices, social connections, behavioral preferences and even emotions, play as large a role in forming the landscape of possibilities and proclivities in public space as does the physical, architectural framing of the space. Emotions are “datafied” and distributed through digital social platforms, affording the formation of collective protests around a multitude of individual feelings of outrage, for instance (Milan 2015). All that is datafied becomes part of this landscape and, reciprocally, all that is not captured and datafied is afforded no presence. Thus, the exercise of the right and desire to manifest oneself publicly is circumscribed by the extent to which one’s actions, opinions and emotions are datafied. Such is the tyranny of the universal medium. Three orders of spatial data collection can be identified, which are distinguished from one another in terms of gathering device, intent, attention, etc.: (1) Data that is intentionally collected, (2) Data generated as a by-product of communication and automation, which can be mined for (locative data of smart phone usage, for instance), and (3) Data on psychological states and opinions surrendered by urban network users. These are also absorbed into different economies and encashed for different types of capital/value.

Data, Space and Place Data is abstraction, and we inhabit virtual worlds as data projections of ourselves, not as bodies. The digital ether stands as a counterpart to physical space as a realm of circulation. Once something has been datafied, it can be carried through this medium and transformed without having to emerge again into physical space in its

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de-datafied form.2 The fabric of this “other” world of digital technologies is ­generally inaccessible to human experience: a foreign dimension that eludes our registers of perception, as we have no perception of, or interaction with those with whom our data is sharing a server. Through the superimposition of digital networks onto physical space, and the association of data and devices with specific places and embodied individuals and groups, the realm of data becomes entangled with spatial practices and constructs such as urban public space. Graham (2013) writes of the “digital shadows” of cities, consisting of data generated from and about a city. Some of this data is consciously collected to monitor the vital signs of the city and geocoded content produced by users (Hecht and Stephens 2014), but much of this data is not generated intentionally but rather is produced as a collateral effect: the “exhaust” from the interactions of humans and devices in the Internet and the IoT. This information comes to form “augmented realities” when there are channels for feedback loops for people to access this data while in the course of performing urban life, such that data informs behavior in real time (Graham and Shelton 2013). Bowker (2014) has pointed out that the realm of data is not separate from the physical world of experience, and that the storing, processing and moving of data does things to the world. For instance, Web-based services such as search engines can impose a hierarchy on geographical locations by the priority with which they return recommendations or search results relative to places (Zook and Graham 2007). This prioritization can be influenced by factors such as user ratings of places or payments by proprietors of businesses. The relationship between data technologies and physical space takes on different modalities. Kitchin and Dodge (2011), for instance, make a distinction between “coded” spaces, in which software functionality has been applied as an ersatz or streamlining of analog functions (such as traffic-control systems), and “code spaces” in which software is an essential dimension and where functionality, character or experience of the space would be fundamentally compromised in the absence of software (as in location-based games).

The Data-Citizen The 2015 completion of the Human Genome project to physically and functionally map the three billion nucleotides of the human genome, by which human genetic information is encoded and passed-on, was an important milestone in the definition of humans as informational beings, and the understanding of our epigenesis as a 2  Granted that data does not circulate: signals circulate, requiring an encoding and decoding at either end, and of course that these signals are also present in the physical world, but it is in this encodedness that they withhold themselves, while existing in a medium in which they can be endlessly manipulated and calculated. Indeed, this also reinforces the Network Society idea, that the in-between is a space of flows, while meaning is only ever made at the sending and receiving nodes.

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process of algorithmic computation. In one sense, this places data and algorithms at the foundation of what it is to be human (or at lease biological), but in another sense it confronts us with the stark insufficiency of data and algorithms, because the phenotype is not determined by the genotype but by the conversation between the genotype and the environment through the evolving body itself as the object and the interface of this evolution. Each individual can viably, but not exhaustibly, be defined in terms of data processing processes and machines. This may place us in a position of better appreciating our kinship with all living matter. However, this aspect of datafication does not capture consciousness or agency. Much of the discourse on the cyborg paradigm has drawn attention to the hardware aspect of the contemporary post-human reality in which the bodies of individuals are hybridized and extended through their increasingly intimate entanglement in physical digital devices and systems. However, a less tangible but equally profound and consequential aspect of the technological extensions of individuals lies in their production and consumption of data that is an essential facet of their being in the world. Individuals’ data projections are central to their manifestation as presences and agents in the public realm (as in the case of crowdsourcing, through which the collective public becomes a distributed sensory network in the form of a “crowd” that provides data for algorithmic agents), but these data projections also enable the quantifying of people for purposes of control or marketing, in order to harvest their attention and monitor their actions. We are doubly datafied, pulling us in two directions. So the dichotomous nature of the urban citizen—as a member of an anonymous crowd and at the same time an individual fighting against this anonymity—is apparent par excellence in the digitally mediated urbanite, willingly offering up their data as one data-point of an “aggregate” data public, while at the same time striving for self-expression and customization of their use and experience of the city and its public spaces through their use of the same technologies. Via their digital devices, people in public space have constant access to a surplus of data and activities that are delinked from the physical space in which they happen to be, weakening the connection between person, activity and place. However, at the same time these technologies also afford access to a higher and more incisive level of knowledge about the spaces one inhabits, as well as the formation of networks to act upon this knowledge. As stated by Evans & Saker (2017: 17), “The overlaying of ‘real’ world environments with data and information is indicative of the movement of the internet itself from the desktop to what we now understand as the ‘mobile web’, the use of internet-based services and applications through continually connected smartphones and devices.” Different people in the same physical environment can exist in different information environments, due to differentials in their access to information that can facilitate their understanding or use of the environment. And the ways in which digital technologies are being appropriated into urban spatial practice is driving this to the extreme, allowing different people to co-inhabit the same physical space with fewer and fewer shared referents, to the extent that it is relevant to query whether physical space is any more than the necessary medium through which we need to move because we are still embodied.

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Data and Power It is in the apportioning of access to data, and to the algorithms by which the data is processed, that asymmetrical knowledge relationships are maintained. Digital affordances give individuals access to the knowledge and technology to produce and analyze data and gain insight into the consequences of courses of action. However, inequalities in political leverage and economic resources persist, meaning that governmental and commercial actors still exercise hegemony in terms of the ability to act on this knowledge to put in place enduring, tangible interventions into public space. There is an accumulation of justifications for these power asymmetries. While public space may belong nominally to the people, governmental control is justified by the need to maintain security and order, corporations are afforded influence due to their ability to mobilize resources to provide for the needs and desires of the public, and algorithmic monitoring and controls are implemented because of their ability to sense and process data at a speed and level of complexity that transcends that of unaided humans. Besides enabling the provision of services, the flip side of ubiquitous computing is that it also allows for ubiquity of data collection. In discussing what makes information public, Tverdek (2008) writes that activities become public once we conduct them in a space that is public, that is where all have a right to be and to see, and that we have no right to expect that others do not observe these activities. The more aspects of our lives are mediated by this pervasive infrastructure, the more imprints are left on this universal medium. However, as any research primer will attest, the mere act of collecting data, regardless of its nature or quantity, does not lead to a better understanding of the situation being datafied. There are thus multiple layers of politicization of data: in the decision of what data to collect and how, the decision of who has access to the data, decisions as to what knowledge is being sought from the data and, accordingly, what types of analysis will be applied to it. Citizen data applies to all of these levels, in terms of citizens gathering data themselves that is not being gathered (or reported) by governments (as in the example of air quality monitoring and reporting in China), and in terms of applying different modes of analysis to existing data, to enable understanding or action not supported by the official modes of meaning-making applied to this data. Datafication in itself can be seen as a pivotal move towards domination and control. Haraway (1991 [1985]: 303) remarks on the military’s use of technology to gather C3I (command-control-communication-intelligence) information, seeing a common foundation for communications sciences (through “cybernetic” feedback-­ controlled systems) and “modern biologies” (through genetic coding) in “the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment and exchange.” Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology brings the possibility of attaching data to things and is one of the bases for ubiquitous computing and the internet of things (IoT). By extension, this technology also affords the surveillance and tracking of people as objects. RFID technology can be seen as a facilitator of social control, which can lead to “corrosive behavioral tactics, whether on the part of marketers, police, or interpersonal networks” (McCullough 2013: 128–129).

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Social media platforms “push” certain types of data on users based, for instance, on the habits or preferences of others in their network, reinforcing convergence of behavior among people sharing an “echo chamber” and using online behavior and patterns to form behavior in physical space (Leszczynski 2015). Applications also “pull” data from users, both by harvesting information on people’s location and behavior and by enticing them to submit information about their preferences and activities with the promise of the added functionality and targeted offerings that can be provided based on these preferences. Both of these are aspects of “dataveillance” (Van Dijck 2013; Clarke 1988, 1996), “the systematic use of personal data systems in the investigating and monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more persons.” It has been argued that people need to have the possibility to opt-out of ubiquitous systems (Greenfield 2006): in essence to establish a public-private distinction in data. But it is becoming more and more difficult to truly achieve this opting-out. One can be out of public space but still have one’s habits and actions being surveilled and recorded. Privacy is less achievable but also, it seems, less desirable to many people, when one’s personal data is the currency that allows one to get so much added functionality purportedly “for free.”

The Economics of Data Since the 1990s, with the transition from cash transactions to the exchange of credit and debt in the online economy and the rise of cryptocurrencies, transactional relationships and economic activity have become increasingly consolidated within the universal medium of digital technologies (Nissenbaum and Varnelis 2012: 18). Parallel to this development, data itself has become a primary generator of economic value, and “data monetization,” the buying and selling of data, has become a pillar of the contemporary global economy and one’s own personal data becomes increasingly recognized as an asset to be guarded, controlled and monetized.3 Data becomes an engine of the economy, such that social interaction is in itself a value-generating activity (by being data-generating), as in social media sites, in which social affordances are put at the disposal of members/users, because their participation in these platforms can generate data that can be monetized. A platform for social interaction becomes the bait to entice people to carry out the work to produce data that can then be turned into knowledge by others and commoditized. This does not disqualify these media from being designated as public spaces (nor does it automatically qualify them), as the data we choose to input has both a commodity value (when collected, analyzed to turn it into knowledge and then sold or applied to generate profit) and a use value (of which one facet is the establishing and maintaining of

3  As of this writing, current apps that allow individuals to monetize their data include Worldquant / Data Exchange (data.worldquant.com) and Measurable Data Token (mdt.io)

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social connections). This is inherent in data’s multivalent nature as the raw material of the digital realm. In this sense, the public and the commercial are intertwined through information in a way that may constitute the/a new public realm. At the basis of the data economy is the provision of “AI 2.0” knowledge as a service, based on the surrendering of one’s data to a platform provider in exchange for access to knowledge generated by the compositing of one’s own data with the data of other users and the application of analytical algorithms. Such an arrangement for example underpins the operational model of the wayfinding app Waze. Drivers allow their traffic data to be shared with and through this platform, and in exchange they received traffic information: an economy based on the exchange of individual data for composite knowledge. The calculation may be that the data that one is giving away on one’s own behavior is trivial compared to the value of the functionality of the system, which relies on other users coming to the same value-­ calculation conclusion.

Data Publics and Public Data In cases such as the wayfinding app example mentioned above, platforms facilitate the formation of “data publics” around the sharing of individual data in exchange for the real-time knowledge that can emerge from analysis of the collective dataset. While the above example relies on a profit-making business model, other data publics form around data made available by public sector entities or open source communities.4 Many of the databases assembled by ubiquitous sensor networks are open to access from citizens who can write their own programs to query them in real time, enabling “Citizen Data Scientists” (Tapadinhas and Idoine 2016) to understand the geography of big public issues like the coronavirus epidemic, opioid addiction and sea level rise, and apply this knowledge to mobilize public responses (CityLab 2020). The Open Source Movement is crucial to the idea of the openness of algorithms, just as the Open Data Movements are to the openness of data. Sloterdijk (1999) writes of “public knowledge,” the right to know how things work. He argues, for instance, that the discoveries made in the 25-year global Human Genome Project should by rights be made accessible to all humankind, as the control and m ­ anipulation of the human code that could be enacted has implications for the human race as a whole. Many cities are implementing “open data” frameworks to make data available to the public (Mossberger et al. 2013). Developers have created programs such

4  The International Open Data Charter, ratified by seventeen governments in 2015, has as its first principle that governmental data should be “Open by Default,” establishing access to data as a public right. These city, state and national governments primarily represent Latin American localities. The signatories are the municipal governments of Buenos Aires in Argentina; Minatitlán, Puebla, Veracruz and Reynosa in Mexico and Veracruz in Uruguay; the Mexican states of Morelos and Xalapa; and the countries of Chile, Guatemala, France, Italy, Mexico, Philippines, South Korea, the United Kingdom and Uruguay.

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as the SFpark app to track parking availability and prices in San Francisco, the Citizen Connect app to report graffiti, potholes and damaged signs in Boston, as well as the Streetbump app that does not require user action but detects bumps in streets by phone’s built-in accelerometer and GPS functions (Fountain 2014: 40–43). So, access to the public realm involves not just physical access, but also access to the knowledge of how urban systems work, and the potential of every citizen to act on such knowledge. There is a current trend towards citizens, community organizations and NGOs appropriating smart technologies (particularly in terms of access to data and digital social platforms) to advocate for urban change and to lead public debate on urban issues (Glasmeier and Christopherson 2015: 8–9). Citizen collaboration enabled by Geographical Information Systems (GIS) has opened up possibilities in what has come to be called Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) (Poorazizi et  al. 2015). Increased ease of access to a broad spectrum of data allows urban dwellers to become better able to perceive issues and negative conditions in the city (Glasmeier and Christopherson 2015: 8). The access to rich data afforded by applications such as GIS can be very efficacious in supporting urban decision-making processes (Klosterman 1995). Large cities throughout the world maintain “311” capacity (Fountain, 2015), for non-emergency government services. Originally referring to the dial-up code for reporting issues by telephone, 311 services have to a large extent migrated to digital platforms. The Open311 platform allows apps developed for one city to be used in other cities globally (currently over 20 cities), enabling developers to access data from other cities and build tools and apps that can be transferred from one city—one urban context—to any number of others. Applications like Compstat and Citistat are used by police departments to collect and analyze crime data to support police departments. Kansas City, Chicago and other cities use social media (Twitter) to report graffiti and potholes. Other applications in this vein include Usahidi (usahidi.com), SeeClickFix and the City Sounding Board project (Fountain 2014). The Open Data Movement evokes the promise of alternative policies of urban development, within which “new territorialized actors” would effectively appear on the local public scene. As the various chapters of this volume have demonstrated, urban sociabilities have been profoundly transformed by the use of social media, and economies of use of functionality, rather than ownership of property, become prioritized with the development of a sharing or peer-to-peer economy. Digital tools play an important part in the ability of populations to build commons, to reinvent means of protest and collaboration, to finance projects, to exchange knowhow, to get around, to find accommodation, to be entertained and lastly, to remake society.

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Conclusion

Chapter 12

Digital Technologies and the Future of Public Space

Abstract  This concluding chapter synthesizes the main themes of the book in a summary of the implications of digital technologies for the future of public space. Digital technologies are a central factor in the constitution of the current stage of evolution of public space. They bring affordances that support the social co-creation of a physical public realm, occupying a negotiated middle ground on the spectrum of the potential and actual uses of technologies in mediating between people, and between people and the world. These technologies are, at present, prominent tools brought to bear on the constant project of public space. Keywords  Digital technologies · Future of public space · Co-creation · Social production of space · Democracy

The Impact of Digital Technologies on Public Space In the chapters of Part II of this book, I used the concept of affordances to express the notion that technologies are not neutral, but rather that they imply and support certain uses, while at the same time allowing that it is human agency that activates these affordances in public spatial practice. The changes brought to public space by humans’ appropriation of the affordances of digital technologies are many and multifarious. Digital technologies can afford both the diffusion and the concentration of cities, can enable the spread of democratic ideals and of regimes of pervasive control, and can facilitate both the weakening of person-to-­person relationships and flows in physical space and their strengthening. Which of these potentials are actualized is determined in large part by how the various actors that make up a city choose to exercise agency in their use of these technologies. The possibility of citizens to exercise their rights of agency and inclusion that are fundamental to public spatial practice can be supported and afforded by the architectural and infrastructural “framing” of the space and the legal and regulatory environment to which actions in the space are subject; but neither of these factors, alone or in sum, determine the de facto publicness of a space. © The Author(s) 2021 T. Jachna, Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square, The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_12

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So, we are dealing with multiple dynamics simultaneously: the co-evolution of technological and societal forms and habits; the drift of what the public realm and public space is “for” at a particular historical juncture; the shifting roles in the mediation of publicness among different types of media, including spatial, print-based, broadcast and peer-to-peer; and the perpetually receding horizon of expectations formed by all of these factors. There are thus at least four kinds of economy at work in digitally mediated public space. The first is a further evolution of the use of public space as a place with a ready-made audience for advertisements and messages of all kinds. The second is the trade in applications and devices that augment the public experience, some of which are becoming quite fundamental to the standard equipment necessary for public life and navigation of the public spatial realm. The third is the use of public space as a metaphorical “farm” for the harvesting of data based on people’s behaviors in public life. The fourth is the emerging sharing economy of co-construction of value through collaborative production of space. Many of the effects of the integration of digital technologies into the practice of public life are less legible in terms of their concrete physical manifestations than by virtue of the processes and relationships that they support. Whereas the street network, for instance, has physically formed cities in ways that may never disappear, digital technologies have made no such pervasive lasting impression on the physical fabric of cities. The effects of use of these technologies on the human psyche, perceptions and behavior, though, is profound. In the words of Wachter (2012), “Rem Koolhaas was spot on when he declared that the ‘hypermodern’ metropolis is marked less by a transformation of places than by an escalation in the physical and virtual flows that connect these places.” Public space is thus to be understood in terms of the sustained processes by which people perform and actualize public life, and the exposition of this book has in part dealt with the ways in which digital technologies support these processes. This perspective frames public space not simply as something that is provided or occupied, that is given or taken, but as a common good that is continuously co-­ constructed. “Public space is not a natural consequence of human coexistence. It is artificial: created by a human ‘web of relations’ developed from continuous new beginnings” (Thuma 2011). This must be understood as pertaining both at the level of the construction of multiple publics by their members, and at the level of the construction of a greater public world (or web) through the interactions between these various publics. What constitutes public action is the pursuit of a desire to “keep a common world alive” (Greene 1982). This requires that public space be acknowledged as an ongoing and intentional process. This entails the acknowledgment of a common world between us, and of our investedness in contributing to its sustenance. It is therefore not just about a set of spaces in cities, but about our relationship with the world more generally. This book has sought to explore the implications on public space of the ways in which we use digital technologies to relate to each other and the world.

An Evolving Public Realm

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An Evolving Public Realm It must be recalled that the discourse on the public sphere, since its beginnings—and Habermas’ discussion of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere as the educated middle classes overtook the public realm from the exclusive purview of government—has posited that the definition of public space and its role in human societies is not fixed or static, but rather has taken on a succession of different forms, meanings and roles, driven by evolution in both society and in technologies. Likewise, the relationship between humans and technologies is also not fixed but rather is a narrative that is in a perpetual state of becoming and elaboration (Latour 2007 [2005]). The digitally mediated public space that is the project of the present is being constructed upon the strata of, and within the scaffolding of, the tangible manifestations of the public realm left by previous versions of publicness in the urban realm. As Martin (2016: 52) put it, “If another, common world is to be assembled outside these networks, it would necessarily include the richly textured ruins of the public, as a medium and as a message.” The ethos of “metrofitting” (Fry 2017) is based on the enacting of strategic interventions into existing urban systems to meet the social, cultural and environmental challenges faced by cities—and, by extension, global society—in the present era. Digital technologies have a particular role and relevance in metrofitting, for their ability to support the continuous reprogramming of the city without comprehensive physical retooling. As elements of a de facto commons of our time, digital networks and platforms are venues of public action that can enable the reconfiguring of physical public space as, for instance, “the return of market gardens in towns (permaculture, community gardens, etc.), short channels (CSAs, onfarm retail, etc.), soft modes of transport and participatory urban planning, are signs of a new approach to the town that can be reimagined within the context of the commons and in which digital technology plays a facilitating role” (Le Crosnier and Vidal 2010). Within this evolutionary process is embedded an ongoing process of negotiating the relationships between digital technologies and our appropriation of their affordances in public spatial practice. Coyne (2010) refers to the ongoing adjustive dialogue between a human and a digital artifact as a type of calibration, which means that design needs to be seen as an ongoing process that parallels and forms the life of the artifact in the world, rather than just the process by which the object comes to be in the world. The original conception of the cyborg, in the work that coined this term for human-machine chimeras (Haraway 1991 [1985]), envisioned this as a strategy for allowing humans to explore hostile terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments, that would be incapable of supporting human life unaugmented by technological prostheses. In the twenty-first century, the cyborg is the emblematic agent in the exploration, construction and mapping of uncharted geographies of all stripes, including the emerging, reconstituted form of public space. Public space has been crucial to the constitution of human societies and the survival of the species, yet is facing

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crisis because of the opposing tensions drawing humans simultaneously towards a desire for greater isolation and control and the possibility for ubiquitous, unstructured and unfiltered interface with a broader range of diversity than the unaugmented, bodily-bound biological human would ever have to face without augmented reach and attention. There is a need to see the very constitution of this cyborg public as a design problem that transcends and prefigures all of the others. Each of the affordances explored in the second section of this book play a role in facilitating this adventure.

Multiple Publics The examples and cases examined in this book are diverse, but two distinct directions—which can be seen as either mutually antagonistic or as complementary— can be discerned for the ways in which digital technologies are being appropriated in urban public life. The first is the direction of extreme individuation—the creation of “bubbles” that insulate individuals from public interaction in space.1 The other is the melding of public engagement in the digital realm and in the physical realm, to support networks of actors engaged in driving the ongoing evolution of the city in consultation and cooperation with heterogeneous others. For Hannah Arendt, two qualities characterize the human condition—natality and plurality. “Natality” refers to the potential of every human being to bring about a new beginning and is the root of freedom and agency. “Plurality” refers to the fact that one is always born into a world populated by diverse others, and that the exercise of agency in the world is always agency vis-à-vis others (Arendt 1998 [1958]). Plurality, as an essential fact of human existence, requires interaction with others and is the essence of public space. Freedom is realized only through action, and action in the world always requires cooperation and interaction with others. Much of the exposition of this book has had to do with the ways in which digital technologies afford and affect the modes by which such cooperation and interaction take place. The sustaining of multiple publics, perspectives and practices is essential for the sustainment of the public realm. Haraway (1991 [1985]: 310) acknowledges the different “dreams” at work in the search for a totality that would somehow provide a common “dream language” that would subsume all differences and resolve all contradictions. She goes on to acknowledge the impossibility, and likely undesirability, of such a universal language. This book has argued for the necessity of sustaining, not suppressing, variety in the constitution of publics, and has explored the ways in which digital networks and platforms can support this. 1  The accommodation of digital technologies into public space is having an effect similar to that of the intrusion into public space of the automobile a century earlier: another technology that abstracted individuals into private “bubbles” and had a jarring and reconfiguring effect on public spatial practice.

Whither Public Space in the Digital Era?

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In his “social theory of the media,” Thompson proposes an approach of “regulated pluralism,” defined by him as “the establishment of an institutional framework which would both accommodate and secure the existence of a plurality of independent media organizations” (Thompson 1995: 240). This aspect of regulation is currently underdeveloped in the current constitution of the digital dimension of public spatial practice. On the one hand, this implies that governmental regulation should take a more specific focus on providing regulatory frameworks that support the use of digital technologies in sustaining pluralism, whereas current regulatory frameworks focus more on social control and the economic and technological aspects of these technological infrastructures. More importantly, however, is the role of these networks in the mutual co-regulation of individuals and publics that is one of the hallmark functions of urban public spaces and the public sphere. In a society of animals that are at the same time fundamentally social and fiercely individualistic, co-regulatory behaviors become important, like the metaphor of the dance (LaMothe 2015) in which a performative balancing-act between individuality and coregulation is played-out.

Whither Public Space in the Digital Era? Is there a telos or a trajectory of the development of public space? In line with the distinction just made, one could continue with the hackneyed and stereotyped modernist/postmodernist dichotomy—the former naively utopian, the latter off-­handedly dystopian—towards implied future horizons. This would set the dream of a shared culture converging towards a shared global consciousness against a future of increasingly separated pseudo-publics, each increasingly perfectly tailored for its native social group and increasingly impenetrable to others. At both of these horizons, the public disappears. This raises the possibility, proposed explicitly or implicitly by a number of scholars, that public space as we have known it, or as we have idealized it but as which it may never have been known, is obsolete. “End of the city” discourses (i.e. Kotkin 2000; Nelson 1995; Venturi 1966) have often vaunted or at least accepted the attendant weakening of the shared physical public realm, and literature reviewed throughout this book has in equal parts lauded and lamented the role of digital technologies in facilitating this dissolution. Many of these scholars have pointed to the rationalization of urban morphology under modernism as a watershed in this crisis of the city and of urban public space. Two divergent paths of development from this nexus are indicated: the leaving-behind of much of what has characterized urban public life as a relic of past ways of living, or the reconstruction of a public realm using other means. And again, as explored at length in the preceding chapters, digital technologies offer affordances for the pursuit of both of these trajectories. Modern societies have developed in a way that calls into question co-presence as a requisite aspect of publicness that goes back to the romanticized Greek city-states and needs to be reinterpreted, because of the scale of modern societies and because

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of the reach of modern media. Thompson (1995: 236) remarked that broadcast media had ushered in a situation of “mediated publicness,” which does not involve coming together in a place but rather “it is a publicness of openness and visibility, of making available and making visible, and this visibility no longer involves the sharing of a common locale:” a shared experience without a shared place. As the span and effects of technological infrastructures become worldwide, enabling localized actions to have geographically wide-reaching consequences, we need to think of co-presence in a much more global way, also in considering non-­ human and greater-than-human others (Thompson 1995: 262). It could be that the body, in connecting us to a location and embedding us in geographically-defined communities, is no longer the sole, or primary, adequate mediator between each of us and the global, diffuse publics of the twenty-first century, no longer helpful in giving us phenomenological access to environments at the (no longer local or even national, but global) scope and scale of our social contacts and the effects of our actions upon the world. Our interface with this global public sphere extends beyond the body of flesh-and-bone to the augmented, diffuse cyborg body. The physical body will of course persist, and its simulacra may even become more common with its obsolescence. Perhaps, as in McLuhan and McLuhan (1988) horse-and-buggy example, the physical body has been obsolesced by the extended, multi-faced cyborg body, having carried our particular socio-technological construct as far as it can, to be replaced now by something else. The tenability of the notions of public space expounded in much of the prior scholarly literature has weakened, as cyborg publics and mediated publics of which I write replace, obviate or reconstruct many of the roles that collocated, embodied public life has played in society and for the individual. Thompson (1995: 259) raises the question of whether it makes sense at all to speak of a normative dimension to mediated publicness (in the late twentieth century in which he was writing), querying whether media enterprises’ profit motive had taken over the moral dimension of public space. Is public space still (if it ever was) the place where moral dimensions of human coexistence and commonality play themselves out? Media “events” can be fleeting and trivial and may be drained of any pretense of lofty themes or moral messages, indicating a relinquishment of Habermas’ aspiration to the “critical principle of publicity,” namely that private opinions could evolve into public ones through rational-critical debate constrained by none. With the global reach of communications networks, the range of potential proximal diversity with which we are confronted exceeds that of any historical public space, raising more questions about the need to edit, protect and bubble-off one’s public world. What are the “limits of community” (Haraway 1991 [1985]: 315) in the digital era? How are the boundaries that circumscribe communities delineated and how are they maintained? Drawing the boundaries tight and defending them well, or dissolving them and rushing outwards in experiments of inclusion are two possible approaches explored in the preceding chapters. This tension between boundary-solidifying and expeditionary inclusion have been explored in the discussion of cases and projects throughout this book.

Public and Anti-Public Uses of Digital Technologies

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Digital technologies are stretching our public reach and challenging the boundaries and resilience—and indeed the relevance or tenability—of the concept of the public in the contemporary world. We are compelled to think of increasing swathes of the world and its inhabitants as adjacent, local and relevant to ourselves. In this, we are forced into a much wider understanding of the ways of engaging heterogeneity at the global scale. Links within cities and between cities can no longer be clearly separated analytically, and rather than the city presenting a clear and common morphology of connectivity, each individual is the hub of their own network of relations. In many ways, mental geographies supersede physical geographies in defining the map of urban spatial practice (Crang 2000). Cities are an essential element of our culture and are only growing in importance and prevalence, and we are past any claims that digital venues will or could somehow replace cities. The social technology perspective allows for the perception of technologies as social by nature (and society as technological by nature), while also allowing for understanding of the special characteristics of this particular suite of technologies. Indeed, digital technologies are playing an important role in humankind’s creation of a more totally urbanized world, in facilitating the extended reach of urban culture, values, amenities and services to non-urban areas and overlaying erstwhile rural hinterlands with an invisible matrix of organization, sensing, control and freedom (Graham and Marvin 1996: 378).

Public and Anti-Public Uses of Digital Technologies To understand the public dimension and potential of technologies of connectivity and simulation as mediators between people, it is enlightening to make explicit the “antipublic” uses of the same technologies. The social construction of technologies does not always imply the use of technologies for social coherence. Technologies can afford social consequences across the range of ways in which people interact with, or avoid interacting with, one another, including the erecting of barriers and the facilitation of violence. Indeed, applications of technologies of all sorts have long been dominated by two pathological trends that are antithetical to the ethos of public life—the waging of war and the withdrawal into virtual spectacles. Indeed, the military and the entertainment industry are two of the primary drivers of innovation in digital technologies, and many of the technologies that have found their way into the governance and inhabitation of cities, as detailed in this book, have their origins in these two sectors. Additionally, technological innovations also cycle from the military to the entertainment industry and back again (as in the case of flight or battle simulation software). Digital technologies have been used to mediate combat, distancing the agents of destruction more and more from the battlefield so that war comes to imitate gaming and vice versa. Technologies create different “betweens,” that at the same time join us to others and separate us from them. Public technologies can be seen as those technologies that mediate between us and others in nonviolent and constructive ways that foster conversation (in the broadest, second-order cybernetic terms as an exchange through

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which all parties in the conversation change, grow and learn). In both digitally mediated war and digitally mediated entertainment, the actor is a cyborg, and the practice is also cyborgian. We augment our senses and our capabilities technologically and the actors with whom we interact are both mechanic and human, to such an extent that we start to draw equivalencies that at the same time mechanize our image other humans and anthropomorphize our image of machines. Virtual connections and clashes do not dissolve physical ones, but they do affect them. The affordances of digital technologies offer both the prospect of expanding one’s networks of interaction with others and the possibility of withdrawal from such interaction, such that scholars may, with equal validity, state that “digital networks claim to release social stakeholders from the constraints of space and time, while in fact locking them away in an individualistic bubble” (Wachter 2012), and that these networks create a situation in which “we will never be alone again, except by choice” (Varnelis and Friedberg 2008: 39). The technologies that underlie this investigation span a spectrum between affording isolation on the one hand and violent confrontation on the other: at the one extreme drawing attention from the world and other human beings towards virtual diversions, and at the other extreme facilitating strategies of violent domination over the same. This is the span of technological applications that defines the poles of current technological discourse and applications. The military and the entertainment industry have been two of the primary drivers of technological development, and spin-off products from both have permeated society and culture beyond the original areas and purposes of application. These paradigms can be seen as defining a field of potentialities within which the digital mediation of urban public spatial practice is constructed, with techno-publics unfolding in the space of technological affordances spun-off from these two sectors.2 The technologies of war and the technologies of diversion have in common that they are both driven by the perceived necessity for constant novelty. In the application of these technologies in urban public space, it is to some degree the physicality (and consequent sharedness) of this space that recontextualizes these technologies and should raise the challenge of using them for sustainment of a society: of a shared referent (Arendt 1998 [1958]). One detracting factor in this is the constant and accelerating development of communication technologies, such that new media and applications are constantly replacing the old. Individuals will see several such changeovers in their lifetime, obviating any chance of such infrastructures in themselves being seen as a common good across the generations. It is thus not the technological artifact itself that is continuous but rather the sustaining of ongoing processes of interaction, constantly remediated as the supporting technologies come and go. 2  Medicine is another area of concerted development of digital technologies that is a root of publicness in that it is grounded in the inescapability of the body and its embeddedness within networks. Networks of contagion, disease and epidemics are countered with networks of information sharing and management, and the tactical engagement of pathology with technology. War and medicine have in common the inextricability of geography as a datum of relations and the material world as a finite resource and contiguous territory.

Public Space as Project

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The project of co-producing public space plays out within the middle ground of the continuum of which war and withdrawal are the two pathological extremes. Just as the cyborg is the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” that is “exceeding unfaithful to [its] origins” (Haraway 1991 [1985]: 151), the technological assemblages that constitute cyborg publics take a distanced and irreverent position to the extreme versions of mediation manifested in war and entertainment, in which many of their enabling technologies are rooted. Affording public space through technologies involves messy ad hoc hybrids of the technological regimes developed with huge investment and urgency in the service of these two opposed-­ yet-­convergent extreme hyper-paranoid reactions to the need to share the world. And perhaps the provision of public space has always been enmeshed in the negotiation between these two extremes of violent conflict and fortified retreat. Citizens engage in leisure activities to co-create urban space, in a sociality as “pure togetherness.” This constitutes a “play-form of association,” in which play and socializing come together in the negotiation of ways of being together (Ejsing-­ Duun 2016). Easterling (2015) introduces the term interplay, in distinction to control, as the appropriate goal of urban software. Spatial software is applied, not in the interest of exercising control, but in the interest of sustaining interplay and the “politics of balance” that emerge from it. Indeed, the metaphor of play, and the concrete examples of the gamification of public agency presented throughout this book (such as location-based augmented reality games and the modelling of collaborative planning exercises such as the Brain Box on strategy games) delineate an alternative to the radical poles of violent confrontation and solipsistic withdrawal. If, as argued above, publicness is best understood as always a trajectory and not a fixed state of being—a chasing of receding aspirations, an ongoing process of experimentation—public space is then a platform that opens-up a space for these experimental pursuits. The negotiations of controls and the performative ways of working around those controls are part of the game. This raises the concept of gamification to a more overarching level, not just in terms of what is done in space, but at the base of how public space is produced in the digital era. Homo ludens becomes an important generator of public space and guarantor of a public life.

Public Space as Project Acknowledging the invented, artificial nature of public life brings a number of insights to the forefront. Firstly, public life only exists to the extent that we bring it into being. It is something that needs to be produced. Secondly, the form that public life takes is a matter of choice and design, not of necessity, and it is therefore malleable and subject to change over time as societies and cultures evolve. This realization also allows the question of whether public space should be seen as a necessary artifice, like shelter or language, or whether it is a convention that may have outlived its usefulness.

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For all of the shifts in understanding of public space over the last century, from Habermas (1989 [1962]) to Bauman (2000), one constant factor of these theories is that, if public space is to fulfil a role in society, it must be seen as a project and not as a provision. In this sense, public space as a project must be positioned among other strata of such projects, at the base of which is the formation of private micro-­ universes, then the formation of social networks of affinity, superimposed with the processes of formation of publics. The problem is that, in a society that puts a premium on the individual, while the projects of constructing an identity and forming a network carry intrinsic rewards for the hyper-individualized citizen and are amply facilitated by digital technologies, there is comparatively little incentivization for using the (also ample) affordances of digital technologies for the facilitation of work on the “public project.” Whereas the project of first, “heavy” modernity was to free the individual from the social constraints of the public sphere, the struggle of late or “liquid” modernity is in extricating the public sphere and public space from their fate as mere stages for individual expression that the rampant success of first modernity has brought. Consequently, Baumann sees the rescuing of public space from this privatization as the emancipation with which society must deal in this phase of modernity, what he refers to as “Recollectivizing the privatised utopias of ‘life politics’ so they can acquire once more the shape of the vision of the ‘good society’” (Bauman 2000: 51).

Between Mass Consumption and Social Production As “the manufacture and virtualization of experience pulls people out of the world and politics entirely” (Dewey 2004: 294), public action increasingly becomes characterized by choices between pre-formatted experiences that we absorb, not open possibilities that we actualize. The design of mediated public space often now takes the form of the design of an event as an experience. People are drawn into public space by a “happening,” a visceral type of experience that requires embodiment and locatedness. Such events are designed to make public space lively again. This is in many cases a charade, creating the outward appearance of public life when it is in fact just one more form of distraction among many. Public space competes with many other providers for the things that were formerly its primary purview, and it is also possible to elect to withdraw from public life altogether without penalty, in the service provision society in which we in developed societies live. This “incentivization” mentality needs to be interrogated more directly. It is based on the assumption that each of us has control over the expenditure of certain assets— our attention, our actions, our money—and that our empowerment in the world lies in being able to decide how to spend each of these within various implied markets. In this sense, one’s attention is also a commodity that can be given to the highest bidder in terms of who is giving me the most in return. “End-user,” “consumer,” “inhabitant…” most members of urban populations have tended to fall into the category of

Between Mass Consumption and Social Production

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those with little apparent say or influence in the development, application or regulation of technological infrastructure, but are those who are the ostensible end beneficiaries or users of these systems, put in place to serve their needs, meet their desires, and raise the quality of their lives. There emerges, in effect, a “public space market,” a “public space industry,” with “service level agreements” for public space. For many—urban technological systems providers, governmental bodies, commercial enterprises all to a certain extent—people are, in certain aspects, not the users, owners or even consumers of public space; they are the content. The end effects for which public space is optimized are often governmental control and corporate profit. If there is design going on, it is to a large extent the public itself that is being designed—just as every utopia, ostensibly a design of an ideal world, is at its root the design of an ideal citizen. However, it must be recalled that the ethos of the discourse on public space is grounded in a notion of members of the public not as consumers of public space design, nor as the objects of this design, but as designing agents, who drive the processes of development and sustainment of public space and a public realm. Le Dantec (2016: 5) proposes that design can draw people together in “designing publics” that “contend with or resist shared social issues” as a way of forming publics that are designed and that do design. Publics have issues that they organize around, attachments to those issues of the people and institutions, and infrastructures that are the social and technical capacities to deal with them (Star and Ruhleder 1996). An accumulation of private spheres does not in itself add up to a public, in the traditional sense. Should the trend towards communities, such as those proliferating on digital platforms, defined by loose links of person-to-person affinities—more so than durable adherence to communal identities, goals and values—be seen as the demise of communities in the traditional sense or as a test bed for new types of sociality? The hyper-individualization of contemporary life leads to speculation as to the viability of the concept of the public in articulating the shared realm of members of heterogeneous societies. Hardt and Negri (2004), for example, use the concept of the “common,” as distinct from the public, to refer to a shared realm that comes into being and is perpetuated not by virtue of being provided—set aside—as a space of exception to the norm of private ownership, but rather as emerging from collaboration and communication between many private individuals (singularities). Herein lies one of the distinctions between the public and the commons—public goods and spaces are provided and managed by governments as amenities for, and on behalf of, society, whereas common goods are collaboratively maintained by those who benefit from them. Spaces may also be seen as public (such as a municipal park) or as commons (such as a community garden), although for the purposes of this book it has been more useful to apply this distinction to practices rather than spaces, to understand the ways in which a given space plays host to public actions, acts of commoning and private actions concurrently. Two types of sharing are thus evident in the digitally mediated public realm: the sharing of an exhaustible, tangible set of resources (public space) and the sharing of an inexhaustible, intangible set of resources (ideas and data). Beyond a certain

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threshold, the former becomes more strained and depleted the more people share it,3 whereas the latter becomes more robust the more people share it. Beyond this, another aspect of the commons brought to the forefront by digital technologies is the dimension of co-creation, the sharing in a process of making something together, that connects people not as a shared entitlement provided by the state, nor as a network that connects people, but as a communal process. The “Hackable City” concept (Ampatzidou et al. 2015) brings the Open Source ethos to urban governance. With code or software, especially those that are open-­ source, there is no single author or locus of oversight, understanding, control, responsibility or accountability. Each piece of software is an accumulation of individual incursions, fixes and additions. Technologies are entangled in the repertoire of practices by which segments of society constitute and perform their everyday life or habitus (Bourdieu 1994). The collective involvement of users in developing and continuously providing content for software supporting navigation, spatial annotation, cultural heritage interpretation and other aspects of the digitally-­mediated superimposition of collectively-authored semiotic content on the physical fabric of the city can be seen as nascent aspects of engaging the broad public in authoring a shared database that informs the use and perception of public space. As expressed by McCullough (2013: 134), “to sense a cultural accumulation can be the first step toward recognizing a commons. The mature tagger can see the city as the cumulative state of many people presenting themselves to one another,” in which “new media become a training stimulator for very wide spectrum of social interactions. But if one hundred years ago media appealed only to citizen’s ability to perceive, nowadays they imply citizen’s participation, erasing the border between real and virtual” (Glazkov and Shmeleva 2015). The Open Source Movement, the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet, the distributed networks of nodes that constitute telecommunications networks, and all of the examples of the ways in spatial practice is performed in contemporary cities through different urban actors’ appropriation of the affordances of digital technologies, are all aspects of a broader program by which a cyborg public space of the twenty-first century is being co-constructed through the actions of human and technological agents. This ethos is reflected in Ratti and Claudel’s (2016) idea of “futurecraft,” the use of digital technologies to enable the melding of designers and the public in the participatory definition of plans for the city. The participatory ethos suffuses visions for design currently, as do the affordances of digital technology.

3  Of course, up to the carrying capacity of a particular space, in terms of the number of people that its resources, amenities and space can accommodate, an increase in the number of participants could be said to add to the value and sustainability of the space, rather than depleting it.

Aspirations

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Achieving Democratic Mediated Public Space To say that the prevalent discourse on public space in the past century is enmeshed in the rhetoric of democracy is not to imply that this rhetoric, or indeed nominally “public” spaces themselves, are by nature democratic. This rhetoric, and indeed these spaces, have not infrequently been used to justify, promote and support decidedly undemocratic policies and practices (Deutsche 2012). Each actor addresses this landscape of affordances as a terrain for tactics to achieve their own ends. In a way, the draining-out of publicness from public space, the lack of need or care for this space from the ostensible “public” leaves a vacuum into which commercial enterprises and government can step. What they do in public is not aimed at some greater program or societal intention, but is rather individual, and the exhaust of all of these activities fill the space as (Big) data. Public space becomes a very productive factory farm for the generation of the data that is the commodity on which the data industry runs. Both physical public space and the digital networks that enmesh it are designed in part to cultivate and harvest this data, or at the very least become unwitting contributors to this endeavor. Network space, and our practices within it, have conditioned us to take for granted that our every behavior is monitored, committed to memory and used to prod our future behavior. Indeed, this perception has been reinforced by the tailoring of platform behavior to our behavior (the platform adjusts its behavior to ours in a realization of what Archigram and other visionaries of the built environment had envisioned in physical space). There are other barriers to the development and sustaining of a democratic mediated public realm in cities. For instance, Graham (2004: 285–287) points out five dimensions of difficulty in seeking to achieve an equitable and democratic mediated urban public realm, including: the personal and invisible nature of much of the use of digital technologies, the prevalent use of these technologies by existing powers to perpetuate the status quo, the use of ICTs by transnational corporations in ways that exacerbate existing inequalities, the privileging of well-off groups with better access to these technical amenities able to transcend the constraints of the local, and the cultural bias brought by the hegemony of a shrinking number of increasingly large and comprehensive conglomerates that determine content.

Aspirations Graham and Marvin (1996: 234) saw the social construction of technology as a process of defining new social forms, but always against the backdrop of social polarization and commercialization of both the physical spaces of the city and elec-

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tronic networks, and that this poses a real threat to public spaces in cities.4 In one sense, the era of digital technologies can be seen as the most current chapter in the project of the co-construction of public space in modern times, involving ongoing negotiations between individual freedom and control, between the provision of a common good and reflection of a shared set of ideals and the preservation (support and celebration) of differences between different “publics.” However, as has been argued in the preceding chapters, in their ability to afford unprecedented capabilities to provide de-spatialized, non-collocated, distributed modes of interaction, community-building, and access to goods and services, the technologies that constitute this new layer of technological infrastructure also brings existential challenges to role of public space, both in day-to-day life and in the aspirational visions propounded by past scholars. “Cosmopolitics” refers to the building of our common world, seen as an ongoing process of negotiation (Stengers 2005). Simmel (1975 )1903]) referred to the assemblages in which the social and the material become entangled in a dance of co-­ definition as “socio-materialities.” This means that the role of the public, as it moves towards the commons, is the creation and sustaining of difference, not a striving for sameness. For Simmel (1975 [1903]), urban citizens are Unterschiedswesen, beings that exist to produce differences. This is what it means to belong to the world (Stengers 2005). Public spaces are characterized as “spaces in which to build alternative projects for the city” (Mela 2014). If pre-modern public space was about the establishment of rule and formation of communities under authority, and bourgeois public space was about the emergence of democracy and public discourse (Fraser 1990), then contemporary public space could be seen, in one sense, as the venue in which we rehearse and perform ways of living together in post-human ensembles, including human, technological and animal others—the realm in which we enact bodily ways of being together as a choice, not a necessity. The “literature of loss” that characterized public space discourse in the latter part of the twentieth century is rightly being supplemented by a literature of critical aspiration, which sees idealized, truly inclusive public space not as a lost past state (likely an idealized, imagined past state that never was), but as an ideal to be worked towards. As societal norms, cultural values, political contexts and technological possibilities evolve, so too do the forms and roles of public space. Likewise, the discourse on the use of digital technologies in cities is evolving from one centered on issues of technological advancement and the applications of these technologies to support government, enhance functionality, and open up new entrepreneurial markets; into a discussion on the social and cultural consequences and possibilities of the use of these technologies in all aspects of urban agency.

4  What has received less attention in their work of two decades ago is bottom-up mechanisms of public spatial practice using technologies, as well as the experience of non-Western and nondeveloped urban contexts.

References

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Index

A “A Breathtaking Journey” (game), 178 Absolute space, 65 Action frames, 195 Actor Network Theory, 87, 95 Actuators, 136 Adaptive environments, 190 Adjustive dialogue, 213 Affinity groups, 193 Affordances of digital technologies cognitive styles, 119 commodification, 123 complex, 113 data, digital networks, 122 design, 112 ecological, 113 environmental quality, 113 environments, 113 governance, 121, 122 government strategies, 122 hyper attention, 120 individual’s perception, 113 infrastructures, 122 interface, 113, 116–118 modernization, 120 motivational, 113 place-based governments, 122 public space, 119, 120 qualities of a thing, 113 re-grounded, 113 social, 114, 116, 117 social technologies, 119 urban citizenship, 123–125 Affording digital technologies, 173 African-American societies, 194

Agency definition, 7 dimensions, 15 practice, 5, 7 technological/human factors, 16 Agonism, 12 “A Hostile World” (game), 178 AI 2.0 knowledge, 203 Algorithmic computation, 200 Algorithmic monitoring and controls, 201 Alternative discursive spaces, 28 Ambient intelligence, 87 Anti-public uses, 217 a priori container, 58 Arab Spring protests, 194 Arab Spring revolutions, 192 Architectural and infrastructural framing, 211 “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics”, 14 Articulated moments, 190 Artificial intelligence (AI), 131, 159, 173 Asymmetrical coupling, 174 Asymmetrical power relations, 62 Attention economy, 140 Augmented realities, 199 Augmented reality, 144 Automatic and autonomous facilities, 173 Automatic habits, 174 Automatic process, 172 Automatic production of space, 172 Automatic society, 174 Automatic systems, 172 Automation, 171–173 Automatization, 171, 175, 177 Automatized surveillance systems, 133

© The Author(s) 2021 T. Jachna, Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square, The Urban Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9

227

228 Autonomic functionality, 172 Autonomic nervous system, 172 Autonomous capabilities, 172 Autonomous intersection control systems, 173 Autonomous systems, 172 B Bartlett Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis, 184 Bauhaus Kolleg project “Serve City”, 180 Big Data, 179, 183 data collection, 197 definition, 197 degree of incisiveness, 198 single analytical inquiry, 197 social phenomenon, 197 Black box, 64 Bodily-bound biological human, 214 Bottleneck engineering, 66 Bottom-up forces, 15 Brain Box project, 185 Bridging, 65 Broadband communications, 172 Broadcast media, 193 C Campaign planning, 185 Capitalism, 3 Capsularization, 42 Cartographical common, 184 Cartography, 181, 184 Cataloguing, 197 Catholic Church, 52 Central place, 14 China’s sexual revolution, 35 Circulation, 11 Cities, 103, 124 Cities as Service Platforms, 190 Citistat, 204 Citizen collaboration, 204 Citizen-data, 201 Citizen Data Scientists, 203 Citizen media, 192, 193 Citizen participatory GIS, 184 Citizen witnesses, 134, 135 City Sounding Board project, 204 Civic legibility, 97 Civilizing virtues, 7 Cloakroom communities, 41, 94 Cloud protesting, 195 Coded spaces, 199 Code of the Street, 194

Index Cognition amplifiers, 174 Cognitive styles, 119 Collaborative planning exercises, 219 Collaborative production of space, 212 Collective plot, 193 Collectivity, 195 Command-control-communication-­ intelligence (C3I), 201 Commercial enterprises, 221 Commercialization, 27, 58, 59, 223 Commercialized communications networks, 192 Commercial realm, 12 Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), 145 Commodification, 123, 124 Commodification of location, 162 Common good, 180 Common imaginary, 159 Commons culture, 35 definition, 32 digital, 33, 34 dimensions, 32 discourse, 34 human-made constructs, 32 ideas and knowledge, 35 nature, 34 open-source movement, 32 physical, 33 public goods, 221 shared realm, 221 tagging-based game, 178 tangible and intangible shared, 32 tragedy, 32, 33 Communal content creation, 10 Communal ideology, 196 Communication, 30, 62 Communication networks, 105, 216 Communicative affordances, 114 Communities cloakroom, 41 contemporary world, 40 default, 49 definition, 41 degrees of choice, 41 discussion and negotiation, 50 gated, 43 individuals retreat, 40 intermediaries, 43 membership, 40, 49 public dimension, 41 public realm, 52 publics, 50

Index role, 40 shared space, 45 socially detrimental characteristic, 45 territory, 43 values and beliefs, 40 “Communities through personalization and simulation”, 45 Community-building, 224 Community mapping, 59 Community organizations, 204 Community rituals, 14 Community, writ large, 53 Complex affordances, 113 “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture”, 13 Compstat, 204 Computational cloud, 195 Computational environments, 191 Computationalism, 121, 173 Computer automatized planning paradigms, 180 Computer control, 172 Computer games, 176 Computer intelligence, 87 Computer-mediated communication, 123 Computer speech recognition, 179 Connectedness, 43 Conscious attention/intention, 171 Conscious human agency, 171 Consensual hallucination, 70 Consumer-grade telepresence robots, 136 Consumption-oriented understanding, 59 Contact, 11 Contemporary risk society, 40 Contemporary societal shifts, 53 Contemporary society, 93, 94 Context-aware technologies, 161 Control and freedom technologies Acconci distinguishes, 61 constructed environment, 60 human centered technology, 61 space, 60 Conventional location-based games, 176 Coregulation, 215 Cosmopolitics, 224 Counterdiscourses, 30 Counterpublics, 31, 79 Crowdfunding, 51 Crowdsourcing, 51, 196 Cryptocurrencies, 202 Cultural cognition, 40 Cultural tribalism, 41, 45 Curatorship, 191 Cybernetic environments, 59

229 Cybernetician Gordon Pask, 59 Cybernetics, 75, 183 Cyberspace, 74, 78, 104 Cyber-utopian visions, 12 Cyborg anthropology, 85 Cyborg citizenship, 86, 87 Cyborg city, 83, 84 Cyborg consciousness, 83 Cyborgian, 64, 218 Cyborg paradigm, 200 Cyborg partnerships, 175 Cyborg politics, 88 Cyborg publics, 15, 81–83, 85, 87, 88, 131 collaborators, 179 constitution, 179 digital algorithms, 175 discourse, 174 Moore’s Law, 174 myriad, 171 public realm, 179 Cyborg society, 84 Cyborg world, 83 D Data, 197 abstraction, 198 aggregate, 200 digital networks, 199 economy, 133, 202, 203 monetization, 202 publics, 203 realm, 199 technologies, 199 Data-citizen, 199, 200 Datafication, 16, 196, 197, 200, 201 Datafying, 197 Dataveillance, 202 Decision-making processes, 184 de facto commons, 213 de facto publicness, 211 Degree of control, 44 Democratic mediated public realm, 223 Democratic mediated public space, 223 Depoliticization, 27 De-spatialization, 62 Dewey’s “great community”, 53 Digital affordances, 201 Digital agoras, 13 Digital algorithmic agents, 182 Digital and physical sites, 194 Digital applications and devices, 24 Digital commons, 33, 34, 36

230 Digital communications, 14, 77 links, 192 networks, 28, 34, 194 technologies, 6, 181, 194 Digital communities, 39, 50 Digital connections, 189 Digital connectivity, 101, 190 Digital construct, 181 Digital counterpublics, 165 Digital devices, 31, 200 Digital dimension, 76 Digital display screen, 140 Digital divide, 69 Digital enclaves, 42 Digital environments, 178 Digital forums, 47, 50 Digital games, 176 Digital inequality, 117 Digital infrastructure, 76, 173, 198 Digitalization, 94 Digitalized public space, 95 Digital labor, 123 Digitally-enabled crowd, 196 Digitally-enabled reconfiguration, 196 Digitally-mediated communities, 181 Digitally mediated entertainment, 218 Digitally mediated public engagement, 193 Digitally mediated public realm, 221 Digitally-mediated publics, 67 community-building, 49 contact via Facebook, 49 digital connectivity, 49 digital forums, 50 interaction, 50 platform applications, 49 platform society, 49 power relations, 50 premium services/ancillary functionality, 50 virtual venues, 49 Digitally mediated public space, 212, 213 Digitally mediated services, 180 Digitally-mediated superimposition, 222 Digitally-supported hyper-­ individualization, 46 Digital media, 62, 69, 141 Digital mediation, see Mediation Digital models, 183, 184 Digital networks, 14, 77, 78, 101, 114 contemporary life, 50 globe-spanning connectivity, 40 interaction and communication, 189 multitude, 51 physical spaces, 65

Index primarily economic, 45 shared appetites, 40 social platforms, 41 social stakeholders, 218 worldwide mesh, 69 Digital persuasive games, 177 Digital platforms, 52 Digital realm, 203 Digital scent technology, 136 Digital screens, 138–140, 143, 146 Digital sensorial networks, 190 Digital shadows, 199 Digital social platforms, 10, 28, 198 Digital software, 180 Digital space, 68 Digital technologies, 97, 98, 100 affordances, 6, 15, 29 (see also Affordances of digital technologies) appropriation, 16 definition, 4 economic dimension, 13 effects, 15 evolutionary process, 213 human experience and action, 14 Internet, 12 inventive use, 7 literature of loss, 26, 27 networks, 4 personalization and locative, 16 phatic, 10 possibilities and relations, 3 public life, 10, 24 public realm constitution, 39 public space, 4, 111, 112, 211 smart city, 5 social technologies, 9 technological applications, 23 transformative applications, 7 transformative potential, 11 universal medium, 24 urban actors, 16 urban citizens, 4 urban public spatial practice, 12–13, 15, 25 Digital technology-facilitated collocated events, 50 Digital technology interface design, 60 Digital technology solutions, 196 Digital technology system, 70 Digital tools, 204 Digital venues, 35, 44 control mechanisms, 67 equivalency, 67, 69 interpersonal interaction, 67 participation, 67

Index physical public space, 66 spatial metaphors, 67 spatial sense, 65 universal medium, 70 Digital-virtual medium, 63 Disembodying mechanisms, 97 Display technology, 141 Distributed sensory network, 200 DIY approach, 59 Doubly additive process, 68 Doubly extractive process, 68 Dream language, 214 Dual conceptualization of society, 59 E Echo chambers anti-public, 52 common space, 44 digital media platforms, 41 digital technologies, 42 hyper-individualization, 46 manifestation, 28 online behavior, 202 online communities, 45 online social networking sites, 46 Ecological, 113 Ecological approach to social interaction, 116 Economy of attention, 140 Egyptian computer engineer, 195 Egyptian revolution, 35 Electronic cottage, 14 Electronic gothic, 142 Electronic interfaces, 142 Electronic spaces, 97 Embodiment computational loop, 74 counterpublics, 79, 80 cyborg citizenship, 86, 87 cyborg city, 83, 84 cyborg publics, 81–83 digital dimension, 76 digital domain, 73 digital infrastructure, 76 digital technologies, 80, 81 emplacement, 81 human bodies, 81 human consciousness, 74 hybrid spaces, 76 information, 74, 75 input-output device, 74 intelligence, 87, 88 internet, 81 IRL, 75

231 mind-body dualism, 74 non-human socialities, 84–86 online activity, 76 physical properties, 75 physical public space, 76 physical/tangible interaction, 81 posthuman perspective, 74, 75 private property, 73 public space, 75, 79 tangible user interfaces, 80 ubiquitous computing, 80 urban space, 78, 79 virtuality, 76 worldedness, 77, 78 Emotional spaces, 193 Empathy, 178 Empire, 51 Encodedness, 199 End of the city discourses, 215 Entertainment industry, 218 Entrepreneurial markets, 224 Environmental factors, 179 Environment sensors, 190 Exhibitionism, 130 Extractive models, 182 Extraterrestrial environments, 213 F Facebook Arabic page “We Are All Khaled Said”, 195 Facial recognition software, 179 Facial recognition technology, 132 Fight/flight reflex, 172 Filtering, 191 Flat organizations, 6 Foursquare, 192 Fragmentation, 52 Free culture, 59 Freedom, 171, 214 Functional provisions, 31 Futurecraft, 222 G Games, 163, 166 Gathering and community formation spaces, 32 Generic “hardware”, 180 Geocoded Internet data, 160 Geographically-defined communities, 216 Geographic information systems (GIS), 159, 184, 192 Glanville’s concept, 64

232 Global datasphere, 70 Global positioning systems (GPS), 159 Global Risk Society, 181 Global telecommunications, 3 Globe-spanning venue, 26 Google Maps, 154, 192 Governance, 121, 122 Governmental bodies, 221 GPS-enabled collaborative mapping, 182 GPS technology, 196 Graham and Marvin’s digital enclaves, 43 Greek polis, 27 Guardian angels, 174 H Habitus, 222 Hackable City concept, 222 Hackneyed/stereotyped modernist/ postmodernist dichotomy, 215 Hand-held devices, 156 Heavy modernity, 220 Heidegger’s instrumental mode, 183 Heterogeneous cyborg publics, 88 Heterogeneous engineering, 96 Heterogeneous network, 95 Heterogeneous publics, 41 Human agency, 57, 211 Human attention, 140 Human-computer interaction (HCI), 112–114 Human consciousness, 74 Human-machine chimeras, 213 Human-machine distinction, 88 Human-made networks, 96 Human-made societal distinctions, 57 Human nervous system, 172 Human societies, 213 Human technological capabilities, 69 Human-to-human interaction, 64, 118 Human-to-technology, 64, 118 Hybrid spaces, 76 Hyper attention, 120 Hyper-individualization, 6, 173 Hyper-individualized citizen, 220 Hyperlocal information, 196 I Iconic’ models, 184 Idealized “universal” public space, 50 Identity Management (IdM), 95 Identity politics, 50 “if-then” logic, 175 Immersion, 185

Index Imperialism, 181 Incentivization, 220 Incommensurability, 41, 52 Incommensurable discourses, 52 Individualistic bubble, 218 Individuals communities, 152 cyberspace, 152 digital technologies, 152, 154 identity, 153 public life, 152, 154 public space, 152, 154 reporter/public sensor, 158 society, 151 Industrial revolution, 10 Infiltration, 23 Informatics of domination, 121 Information age, 3 “The Informational City”, 3 Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), 34, 223 Information technologies, 6 Infosphere, 33 Infrastructure space, 121 In real life (IRL), 75 Instagrammabilty, 154 Institutional public spaces, 60 Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), 69 Intelligence, 87, 88 Interaction/communication dimensions, 16 Interactive displays, 146 Interface, 113, 116–118 action-and-reaction view, 64 amenity, 64 between-ness, 65 definition, 63 digitally-mediated interactions, 67 digital technology, 64, 70 Glanville’s concept, 64 mental model, 64 piggybacking, 65 technological configuration, 65 user’s interaction, 63 International Open Data Charter, 203 Internet, 4, 7, 28, 39, 58, 78, 81, 105, 111, 119, 121, 155 Internet-based connections, 189 Internet-based services, 200 Internet of Everything, 197 Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT), 24 Internet of Things (IoT), 24, 69, 85, 102, 160, 190, 201 Internet protocol (IP), 69, 98

Index Interpersonal communication, 41 Investedness, 212 Invited vs. invented spaces, 60 Isomorphism/one-directional determinism, 58 J January 25 Revolution, 195 Jolts, 29 K Knowledge industries, 14 L Labor vs. work, 58 Language, 60 Lefebvre’s conceptualization, 70 Legibility, 31 Lifeworld, 59, 61 Limits of community, 216 Liquid modernity, 120, 220 Liquid society, 40 “Literature of loss”, 27, 224 Locatedness, 220 Location-based advertising (LBA), 162 Location-based content, 163 Location-based games, 28, 44, 160, 163, 165, 166 Location-based mobile games (LBMGs), 161, 165, 191 Location-based services (LBS), 162 Location-based social networks (LBSN), 160, 165, 192 Locative media, 159, 164 Locative technologies commodification of location, 162 context-aware technologies, 161 digital counterpublics, 165 digital media, 160 digital networks, 164 empowerment, public space, 161 exclusion, 165, 166 flânerie, 166, 167 geocoded Internet data, 160 information level, 161 instagrammable moment, 164 Internet of Things, 160 LBMGs, 161, 165 location-based content, 163 location-based games, 160, 163, 164 locative media, 159 media events, 164

233 net localities, 161 NML, 163 portals, 163 public spaces, 160 semacode barcodes, 163 society, 160 roman global infrastructure, 159 M Machinic networks, 86 Machinic others, 172 Made public, 61 Massively multi-player online, 28 Massive Multiplayer Online Forecasting Games, 184 Mass media, 34 Mass society, 51 Meaning-making, 57, 193 Mechanized mass-production, 177 Media, 60 Media events, 216 Media facades, 140 Mediated publicness, 62, 216 Mediated publics, 216 Mediation definition, 62 digital technologies, 63 enmediation, 63 spatial experience, 63 technological, 62 Mediatization, 63 Memory space, 66 Mental geographies, 217 Messy ad hoc hybrids, 219 Metacity, 4 Metapolis, 4 Meta-politan, 30 Metrofitting, 213 Metropolis, 4 Microenvironment, 99 Micro-universe, 77 Mobile communications, 194 Mobile media, 115 Mobile networks, 39 Mobile phone, 116, 157 Mobile smartphone, 4 Mobile spaces, 161 Mobile web, 200 Modelling, 16 Modern biologies, 201 Modernization, 120 Modern metropolitan society, 30 Modern societies, 215

234 Monumentalized public spaces, 62 Moore’s Law, 174 Motivational affordances, 113 Multi-medial constitution, 25 Multiplayer online role-playing games, 185 Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO), 66 Multiple publics, 214 Multitude, 51 N Nanorevolutions, 194 Natality, 214 Navigability, 182 Neighborhood Markup Language (NML), 163 Net localities, 161 Network culture, 94, 98 Networked activism, 193 Networked collective action, 195 Networked individualism, 114, 123, 153 Networked individuals, 193 Networked publics, 93, 98 Networked society city, 93, 99 conscription, 95, 96 contemporary society, 93, 94 digitalization, 94 digitalized public space, 95 digital network culture, 95 digital technologies, 98, 100 individuals, 94, 95 integrated circuit, 100 internet protocol, 98 “loosening” of the connections, 95 networked publics, 98 personalization, 95 physical entities, 95 physical environment, 100 physical public space, 99 planetary public, 102–104 public space, 93 real-virtual, 100–102 space, 96–98 spatiality of networks, 104–106 time and space, 99 virtual distance and separation, 99 web-based socialization, 95 New Geography, 14 New York-based non-profit advocacy organization OpenPlans (1999–2015), 196 New York planner Robert Moses’ strategic placement, 61 NGOs appropriating smart technologies, 204

Index Non-emergency government services, 204 Non-human socialities, 84–86 Non-public territory, 57 Normalization, 30 Novelty, 218 O Occupation, 61 Occupy movement’s appropriation, 61 Official broadcast media channels, 195 Online forums, 194 Online social platforms, 41 Ontogenetic modulation, 172 Open by Default, 203 Open data frameworks, 203 Open Data movement, 203, 204 Open-ended forms, 177 Open Source ethos, 222 Open source movement, 10, 59, 183, 203, 222 P Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS), 59 Pathological extremes, 219 Path-optimization algorithms, 49 Pay-per-public, 172 People’s GIS, 192 Performance, 11 Personal digital devices, 138 Personal interest, 44 Personalization, 16 gadgetopolis, 156, 157 individuals, 151–155, 158 information, 158, 159 public presence, 157 tuning of space, 153 Web, 155, 156 Personalized digital devices, 123 Person-to-person (P2P) affinities, 221 Person-to-person (P2P) networks, 195 Person-to-person (P2P) relationships, 211 Persuasive games, 176–178 Persuasive locative games, 176, 184 Persuasive technologies, 176 Pervasive digital artifact, 34 Pervasive infrastructure, 201 Phenomenological spatiality, 53 Photographic/video documentation, 177 Physical commons, 33 Physical manifestations, 212 Physical media rest, 69 Physical public spaces, 13, 52, 76, 99, 137

Index digital technologies, 66 extraction/exemption of zones, 67 instances/fragments, 70 participation, 67 principle, 34 Physical spaces, 97 Piggybacking, 65 Planetary public, 102–104 Planetary-scale social systems, 103 Platform applications, 49 Platonic forehand, 182 Playtime Antiboredom, 177 Plurality, 214 Pokémon Go location-based game, 49 Political efficacy, 193 Politics of balance, 219 Pop-psychology attitude, 173 Portals, 163 Post-Cartesian Tactics, 182 Post-digital era, 23 Posthuman perspective, 82 Predecessor technologies, 23 Pre-digital era, 41 Pre-digital technologies, 10 Pre-modern public space, 224 Private individuals emerge, 44 Private matters, 48 Private realm, 47, 51 Private screens, 138, 139, 144 Privatization, 52, 220 Procedurality, 178 Producing cities vs. consuming cities, 58 Production of space conceptualization, 65 literal spatial sense, 65 simultaneous and complementary mechanisms, 59 Projective modelling, 182 Projective vs. extractive models, 181, 182 Prostheses, 70 Prosumer, 12 Protest artifacts, 194 Pseudo-public realm, 52 Public access, 62 Public amenities, 27 Public and anti-public uses, 217–219 Public communication, 30 Public consciousness, 5 Public de jure/de facto, 24 Public digital platforms, 48 Public displays, 146 Public engagement, 214 Public interest, 44 Publicity, 48, 52

235 Public knowledge, 203 Public life, 129, 130, 217, 219 Publicness, 130, 219 Public participatory GIS (PPGIS), 204 Public/private distinction a priori, 48 divisions maintaining, 48 feeding and supporting, 48 human actions, 49 public spaces, 47 spatial practice and psychology, 48 superimposition, 49 urban space, 49 viability, 47 Public realm, 5, 12 agonistic perspective, 30 commons, 32 communication and interaction, 30 democratic society, 29 emptying, 40 heterogeneity, 28 incommensurability, 33 intermediary role, 27 “literature of loss”, 26 material aspect, 26 multiple publics, 30–31 official, 35 reading public, 27 socially variegated and fractured, 52 Public robotics, 88 Public safety, 173 Public screens, 139, 140, 143–146 Public social networks, 49 Public space, 75 appropriation, 15 a priori, 6 definition, 11 design, 221 designed constructed artifacts, 14 digital technologies (see Digital technologies) discourse, 15 engagement, 8 functional facilities, 12 intentions and approaches, 16 modernity, 13 multifaceted and layered, 11 physical, 13 public realm, 5 qualities, 26 rational-critical debate, 8 spatial category, 35 success, 12 symbolic affordances, 8

236 Public space (cont.) urban culture, 4 visibility, 8 Public space design, 141 Public space industry, 221 Public space market, 221 Public sphere, 6, 8 comprehensive, 31 definition, 25 discourse, 213 formation, 25 idealized bourgeois, 27 normative sense, 51 official economy, 25 public space and media, 29 structure and influence, 30 structured setting, 30 subaltern publics, 28 venues, 25 Public technologies, 217 R Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), 132, 159 Rare earth metals, 68 Rationality triumph, 30 Real world, 49 Re-commoning, 33 Reflexive modernity, 6 Regulated pluralism, 215 Relational aesthetics, 145 Remediation, 63 Rhetorical device, 48 Rhizomatic digital mesh, 24 “The Rise of Network Society”, 1 Robocop (Film), 175 Russian social networking platform VKontakte, 194 S Safety, 131 Schismogenesis, 51 Screens consumer electronics, 146 digital, 138 private spaces, 138 public, 139, 140 public life, 136 public spaces, 145 Second-generation networks, 66 Security-related sensors, 130 Self-reliance, 156

Index Semi-public “third spaces”, 27 Sensorial networks, 174 Sensors actuators, 136 augmented city, 133 cyborg publics, 132 manifestation, 137, 138 public, 130 public space, 134 recording and urban imaginaries, 135 seeing-and-being seen covenant, public space, 131 telepresence, 135–137 weather data-collection, 133 witnesses, 134, 135 Sensory environment, 174 Serve City, 181 Service level agreements, 221 SFpark app, 204 SFZero, 177 Shared physical public realm, 215 Shared referent, 218 Shared virtualities, 31 Shared world, 34 Sharing practices, 34 Signals, 129 SimCity, 176 Similarity breeds connection, 45 Simplistic dualisms, 34 Smart city, 7 Smart city initiatives, 10, 11 Smart infrastructures, 11 Smart mobs, 194 Smartness, 11 Smart Net, 24 Smart traffic control systems, 173 Smart/wired city, 5 Snapchat’s “Snap Map” function, 192 Social affordances digital communications networks, 115 digital inequality, 117 digital networks, 114 digital technologies, 115, 117 evolution of needs, 116 HCI, 114 individual, 116 interaction design, 116 mobile media, 115 networked individualism, 114 online social platforms, 114 pervasive awareness, 117 predictability, 117 public dimensions, 114 social action, 116

Index social networks, 114 social practices, 115, 116 society, 115 society formation, 114 Social capital, 192 Social computing, 9 Social construction of technology (SCOT), 9 Social dynamic, 58 Social endosmosis, 28 Social exclusion, 159 Social interactions, 7, 8, 202, 222 Sociality, 219 Social media, 194, 202 Social negotiation, 35 Social polarization, 223 Social processes, 60 Social relations, 59 Social robotics, 87 Social software, 9 Social space, 65, 116 Social technologies, 9, 119 Social technology perspectives, 217 Social theory of the media, 215 Social web, 26 Societal and technological networks, 102 Societal networks, 93 Society, 151 Society of individuals adversarial relationship, 43 connectedness, 43 de-materialized contact, 42 echo chambers, 42 neighborhoods, 43 non-collocated social interaction, 43 outside world, 43 privacy, 42 pull factor, 42 shared public space, 42 socially monocultural clusters, 43 urban communities, 42 Socio-economic and ethnic groups, 27 Sociologist Anthony Giddens, 60 Socio-materialities, 224 Sociotechnical theory of action, 10 Socio-technological construct, 216 Socio-technological systems, 9 Software, 172 Software model’s logic, 178 Software-sorted geographies, 182 Space and time, 105 Space between-ness, 65 Space providers, 180 Spatial and societal manifestations, 36

237 Spatial commons, 36 Spatial data collection, 198 Spatiality, 70 Spatiality of networks, 104–106 Spatialization demographic, 185 Spatial-material medium, 63 Spatial metaphor, 67 Spatial software, 219 Stages of intensity, 98 Steering media, 60 Streetbump app, 204 Street life, 194 Street photography, 174 Street protests, 193 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (book), 25 Structuration, 60 Subaltern counterpublics, 28, 30 Subaltern publics, 28 Surveillance algorithmic authoring, 135 artificial intelligences, 131 cyborg publics, 132 facial recognition technology, 132 and governance regimes, 44 individuals, 131 safety, 131 social control, public space, 131 spatial geography, security, 130, 131 urban public spaces, 132 volunteering, 132 Sustaining pluralism, 215 Suyin Looui’s “Transition Algorithm”, 178 System-centered technology, 61 System vantage, 61 T Tabula rasa, 180 Tangible user interfaces, 80 Technological artifacts, 6 Technological infrastructures, 11, 191, 216, 221 Technological innovations, 217 Technological paradigm, 4 Technological systems, 61 Technology-supported connectivity, 4 Technoscience, 183 Technosocial situations, 157 Techno-utopian proclamations, 10 Tele-cocooning, 157 Telecommunications, 104, 222 Telephony systems, 66

Index

238 Telepresence, 142 consumer-grade telepresence robots, 136 digital technologies, 135 hiring of human agents, 136 physical public space, 136 public space, 136 sensory and expressive apparatus, 136–137 telerobotics, 136 videoconferencing, 135 Telerobotics, 136 Terrains vagues, 62 Theory of Communicative Action, 59 3G technology, 44 Three-dimensional continuum, 66 Thrownness, 41 Time-space compression, 103, 106 Top-down forces, 15 Tradable entity, 162 Tragic narratives, 33 Trojan horses, 189 “The true cyberspace”, 64 “Tragedy of the commons”, 32 “Tragedy of the digital commons”, 33 Trust, 121 Tuning of space, 153 Tunisian revolution, 195 U Ubiquitous computing, 80, 191, 201 Ukko, 176 United Visual Artists (UVA), 144 Universal digital technosphere, 71 Universality, 69 Universalization, 69 Universal medium, 69 Unrelated urban systems, 197 Untenableness, 53 Unterschiedswesen, 224 Urban analytics, 197 Urban built environment, 185 Urban citizenship, 123–125 Urban communities, 42 Urban environment, 163 Urban exergames, 177 Urban food systems, 78–79 Urbanisation of real space, 104 Urbanisation of real time, 104 Urbanism, 13, 58, 180 Urban nomad, 180 Urban planning, 61

Urban public space, 101, 130 communication media, 25 definition, 24 design, 4 digital dimension, 11 framing, 5 human-made world, 34 network-centered perspective, 5 smart city, 6 urbanized territory, 68 Urban societies, 131 Urban socio-spatial practice, 105 Urban space, 78, 79 Urban technological systems providers, 221 V Value system, 31 Virtual co-emplacement, 76 Virtual connections, 218 Virtuality, 76, 78, 100 Virtual realm, 184 Virtual venues, 49 Visibility, 8, 16, 130, 131, 133, 134, 142–144 Voice sensors, 132 Volunteer geography, 184 Voyeurism, 130 W Wayfinding app Waze, 203 Web and telephony systems, 101 Web-based services, 199 Web-based socialization, 95 Web-based social platforms, 28 Web logs (blogs), 195 Web of communities, 155 Whole Earth Catalog, 59 Wicked problems, 10 Wikileaks phenomenon, 45 Withdrawal, 44 Witnesses, 134, 135 “World as such”, 32–34 Worldlessness, 77, 78 World Wide Web, 26, 69, 155 Worldly attachment, 8, 16, 49 X Xerox PARC, 191