Competing Logics of Emerging Sentient Urban Spaces

Copenhagen.
The final keynote at AoIR 2008 is by Steve Graham. His interest is in the politics of urban space in the context of ubiquitous computing. He begins by noting utopian projections of the future, where everything is mediated profoundly through digital technologies - what Dana Cuff has called 'enacted environments'.

This includes visions of augmented reality (involving the delivery of location-specific information), and builds on ideas such as the 'Internet of Things', the use of RFIDs, biometrics, tracking systems, computerised surveillance, security discourses about e-borders, geolocation, GPS tracking, etc. This relies also on machine-readable entities, with sensors linked to databases that recognise and track individual objects of interest.

Architectural and urban spaces are continually animated, brought into being, and performed through such ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence. We are confronting the technologically unconscious, a calculated background.

There are four ways of understanding the key issues here. For one, there is no real vs. virtual binary here, no 'cyberspace' outside of perceivable reality, but a process of urban remediation. Electricity itself is remediated, in fact. Second, cities are fluid machines which continuously combine distant proximity and proximate distance in a variety of ways. This combines electronic data and services with physical environments and the people which move through them. Third, paradoxically these systems become most important when they are rendered invisible - they are now indistinguishable from the city, become part of its infrastructural framework, are 'blackboxed'. Finally, this produces a new politics which is a remediation of old politics - a new urban-technological politics of sentient cities.

There are three parallel and competing trajectories for this ambient intelligence in the city: a trajectory of consumerisation and neoliberalisation; a trajectory of militarisation and securitisation; and a trajectory of urban activism and democratisation. Each of these is struggling to become fixed. The first of these is related to a vision of 'friction-free' capitalism - a new control revolution that allows services to become individualised and is driven by data-driven mass customisation. This is often used to unbundle and recommodify public urban infrastructure.

RFIDs are seen to allow such processes by enabling ubiquitous tracking; this links to GPS and other sensor systems and now extends right into everyday domestic life. This builds up a code space which enables software-sorted mobilities, which in turn paves the way for the just-in-time commodification of public spaces (one example here is a highway whose toll cost changes dynamically based on current congestion). Dana Cuff describes this as the 'malling' of the public sphere - shopping malls and stores detect customers as they approach the mall area; shopping zones are extended across the entire urban space.

A second trajectory is related to securitisation and militarisation: the trend to locate and target people and objects in specific spaces, in the first place to combat security threats. This can be used for a form of targetted exclusion of undesirables, and Steve describes this as a securocratic approach. The same approach can also lead to a broader form of passage-point urbanism, in which the city itself becomes a restricted space where everything must be justified in advance of its presence. From a military perspective, this turns battlefields into 'battlespaces', and war becomes a constant background situation of life itself, rather than a temporary, exceptional period disrupting the peace.

Here, too, tracking becomes an anticipatory form of seeing, and this is a gradual colonisation of the now, a now always slightly ahead of itself - a form of anticipatory risk management. This is aided further by the securitisation of already embedded systems (such as ticket machines); cities are seen as a form of camouflage in which threats lurk in hiding, and such securitisation aims to combad these perceived threats. U.S. sources even call for a new Manhattan Project to address such urban threats. Biometric identification is a first step towards such aims.

Augmented reality ideas are closely related to such ideas, as they draw on military-style head-up displays, and at the end of this stands a dream of omniscience. In the U.S., we now see the development of 'data fusion centres' which engage in an integrated data mining of government data sources. One form of threat assessment is to compare the available data to what is considered to be a 'normal' profile (for personal data, crowd movements, etc.) - which immediately raises significant questions of what characteristics are considered to be 'normal' in any one population, of course. A final dream here is that of sentient cities as war machines - of pre-embedding war technology in cities in order to be able to address perceived threats immediately.

A final trajectory takes a very different view, and directly challenges visions of both corporatised and militarised sentient urban spaces. Instead, it focusses on the reappropriation of such technologies from the bottom up; this requires users of hybrid, sentient urban spaces to become more aware of the role of technologies in their environments, and to develop the abilities to use such technologies to their own ends.

This is played out in projects of grassroots worker surveillance (that is, by, not of workers), location-specific digital art, Grafedia, Yellow Arrow, and other semacoding projects, RFID art, excavations of the collective memory of cities, animations of the real-time use of urban spaces (one such project is a 'communal arousal service' and maps users' self-reported emotions as they move through the space, identifying emotional attachment to specific locations), location-based gaming (or 'asphalt games'), and so one. Some of this, like You Are Not Here, is explicityly counter-geopolitical: it connects the street maps of Manhattan and Baghdad, allowing users moving through Manhattan to access information about Baghdad that is mapped onto the geography of Manhattan. Some groups engage in counter-reconnaisance by appropriating military technology; one group has even built its own unmanned drones.

Overall, then, these three logics clearly struggle against one another for a chance to become fixed into infrastructure. The present is an important moment of dreaming, of experimentation, of struggle, then, and this moment may not last particularly long as specific structures of urban sentience are becoming fixed. New spatio-temporalities (focussed on the now immediately ahead of us) are emerging, driven by technophiliac dreams, and open up important challenges for research and activism: challenges to un-blackbox by rendering these new, largely invisible technological politics visible and democratically accountable, thereby opening up the code; and challenges to prevent the complete dominance and normalisation of militarised and consumerised logics based on software-sorting, targetting, and militarisation.

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