Digital Creativity, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2015.1090454
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Spatial-technological experiments in the environment: eliciting and representing experiences of urban space Corelia Baibaraca,b a
Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, Trinity College Dublin; bDepartment of Geography, Trinity College Dublin
[email protected]
Abstract
1 Introduction
Building on an experimental study carried out in Dublin, Ireland, this paper discusses the potential of locative technology to mediate the communication of city inhabitants’ everyday life experiences of urban space. The study was designed as a spatial-technological experiment and focused on eliciting and representing experiences embedded in everyday life practices, generated by people’s daily movement through the city. The paper highlights the importance of first ‘provoking’ an enhanced awareness of one’s everyday environments before such experiences can come to the surface and be expressed. Moreover, inspired by the open source movement, it illustrates possibilities for expanding the role of ordinary city inhabitants from data-generators to co-producers of knowledge for, and about, the city, through the use of locative technology. In doing so, the paper advances knowledge regarding the use of Global Position Systems technology in citizen-sensing initiatives.
The significant challenges posed by the rapid urbanisation trend—more than half of the world’s population currently lives in cities (DESA 2011)—have given rise to an increased interest in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Some of these challenges include power and water supply, traffic management and waste disposal, and ICT companies have taken a central role in developing ways of improving the efficiency of such services, as illustrated for example by the concept of ‘smart cities’ (Caragliu, Del Bo, and Nijkamp 2009). An important part of such approaches, and also linked to calls for improving civic participation in urban management and planning, has been an encouragement for citizens to act as ‘sensors’ (Goodchild 2007)—that is to report, for example, on issues such as traffic congestion, pollution levels or flooding. The increased availability of Global Position Systems (GPS) at affordable prices, through a wide range of consumer products such as smartphones, has played a central role in such initiatives. Coupled with greater access to the Internet and the more participative forms of interaction offered by web 2.0, GPS technology have enabled vast numbers of individuals to create
Keywords: Dublin, GPS, everyday life experience, movement, urban space
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and share geographic information. And indeed, there is the potential of up to six billion human sensors to monitor the state of the environment (Goodchild 2007). At the same time, a city is more than just ‘hardware’ (Sassen 2011) or efficient services; it is also made up of people’s spatial, emotional and sensory experiences of their urban environments. Embedded in everyday life practices such as daily mobility, these experiences contribute to how people use the city and add meaning to urban space through their movements. In many instances creating environmental problems (e.g. CO2 emissions caused by car traffic), mobility is also shaped by mundane experiences, which tend to go unnoticed because of their take-forgranted-ness (Sweetman 2009), slipping expression and many times also academic and professional attention (Jensen 2011). As well as the kinds of observable and rational considerations typically ‘crowd-sourced’ in citizen-sensing initiatives, it is also important to explore ways of accessing such habitual, everyday and un-consciously recognised practices, feelings and sensations, which also contribute to shaping the city. This because at a local level, ‘governing takes place through the everyday and the material practices of urbanism’ (Bulkeley and Casta´n Broto 2012, 5), urban space being transformed not only through urban planning or policy interventions, but also through the everyday practices of city inhabitants. This paper addresses these considerations and presents an experimental study, which aimed to elicit and ‘represent’ city inhabitants’ everyday life experience of urban space. The study was carried out in Dublin, Ireland, and built on a creative and collaborative planning approach, developed in the 1960s in the USA, by Lawrence and Anna Halprin (Halprin and Burns 1974). Using GPS technology and gaining inspiration from locative media art practices, the study aimed to explore how contemporary pervasive technologies may be used to make ‘visible’—or see-able (Deleuze 1988)—those embodied and sensory experiences of moving through the city, which many times go beyond verbal representation
(Jensen 2011). The paper focuses on the experimental process that enabled access to such experiences, discussing the potential of location-aware technologies to facilitate their communication. In taking this experimental approach, the paper makes two main contributions. First, it highlights the importance of ‘provoking’ an enhanced awareness of one’s everyday environments, in order for those urban experiences embedded in everyday practice (and sometimes taken for granted) to come to the surface and be expressed. Indeed, things must become ‘visible’ to the mind and body before they can be conceived (Deleuze 1988; Jensen 2011). Second, and in response to current uses of technology in citizen-sensing initiatives, the paper illustrates possibilities for expanding the role of ordinary city inhabitants from data-generators to co-producers of knowledge for, and about, the city. Inspired by the open source movement, which places an emphasis on collaborative forms of knowledge production rather than consumption (Haque 2007), the study shows how technology could enhance the important process of local knowledge production about urban spaces and their future development. The paper starts by outlining the theoretical and methodological influences that shaped this experimental study. It then presents the methodology that was adopted and a spatial-technological experiment conducted in an area of Dublin City. The paper concludes with a discussion of the main contributions and implications of the study, highlighting areas for future research.
2 Theoretical and methodological background The starting point of this work—to understand people’s experiences of their local urban environments—is not new, as illustrated for example by the work of Kevin Lynch, particularly his influential book, The Image of the City (1960). Aiming to understand how people perceived their environments and how design professionals could respond to the deepest human needs, Lynch put forward the concept of ‘city image’. Since then, most of the theorisation and empirical research 2
‘score’, which indicated the route, mode (usually foot), stops along the way, time between places and activities to be performed. The aim was to stimulate direct interaction with the environment and enhanced awareness, through isolating the senses (e.g. smells, textures and sounds), observing surrounding movement, noting encounters with others and paying attention to one’s feelings. Ultimately, the method was aimed at grasping nonrepresentational features of the urban environment (Merriman 2010). Besides enhancing awareness of space, the ‘take part’ processes were also aimed at developing a ‘common language’ among the participants, which was seen to be necessary in order to make collaborative decisions about the future of their communities (Halprin and Burns 1974). Halprin’s senses-focused process was employed in the experiments discussed in this paper as a way to enhance and bring to the surface what may already be experienced, but in an unconscious way, in movement through (and interactions with) space. Inspiration was also drawn from situationist practices, for examples, de´rive (Debord 1958; Sadler 1998) as ways to interrupt the ‘usual’—slow down, and provoke new experiences of space. This was intended at enhancing awareness of how the city area selected for the experiment was used and open up opportunities for a better understanding of its qualities, deficiencies and potential. This approach also reflects the links between situationists and locative media art practices (McGarrigle 2010), on which this experimental study draws in terms of representational techniques—an aspect discussed later in this section. Besides these theoretical and methodological consideration, the study also aimed to explore, empirically, the potential of locative technologies to facilitate the process of communicating everyday experiences of movement through, and of, urban space. Indeed, relatively recent developments in ICT practices, such as location-aware technologies, arguably have made everything and everyone potentially locatable (Gordon and Silva 2011). This implies that the city’s dynamics can now be fruitfully explored by using GPS
on mental maps has been outside the planning field (Mondschein, Blumenberg, and Taylor 2010), with some exceptions. The most notable examples include recent developments in the area of e-planning, involving the uses of web-based GIS technologies to facilitate the collection of locationbased experiential knowledge (Kahila and Kytta¨ 2006; Kahila and Kytta¨ 2009; Kytta¨ et al. 2013). However, everyday experience, particularly that of space, is multi-sensory and emotional (Bijoux and Myers 2006) and, at the same time, rarely consciously rationalised because of its ceaseless occurrence (Brown and Spinney 2010). This can be associated with what some psychologists have called the irrational, intuitive and ‘autopilot’ thinking system, which parallels the rational, deliberative system (Kahneman 2012). In relation to everyday experiences of space, this highlights an important difference between rational considerations such as way-finding and cognitive perceptions of one’s surroundings (e.g. mental maps) and those aspects of everyday movement, which are habitually repeated and contribute to ‘autopilot’ forms of interaction with the city. Included by some scholars under the ‘non-representational’ heading (Thrift 2008), such features of everyday environments that tend to escape conscious observation were an important part of Lawrence (and Anna1) Halprin’s participatory and collaborative Take Part planning process (Halprin and Burns 1974). This planning approach developed in the USA in the 1960s came about as a method of involving citizens in creative and collaborative decisions about the future of their communities. It aimed to facilitate citizen-formulated decisions for a more egalitarian design process, by enhancing people’s creativity and awareness of their environment (Merriman 2010). Of particular interest for the experiment presented here, and which aimed to elicit experiential aspects of everyday movement and urban space, was Halprin’s City Map. This method was prototyped during the interdisciplinary ‘Experiments in the Environment’ workshops of 1966 and 1968, which laid the foundation for the Take Part process. The participants to Halprin’s experiments were given a printed map, designed as a choreographic 3
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technology as a valuable tool to track people’s interactions with the city through movement (Calabrese and Ratti 2007). For example, GPS technology can be helpful in understanding the spatial representations of everyday movement, by making participants’ movement visible (e.g. on a map)—not to ‘substitute the practice by portraying the trace being left behind’ (de Certeau 1984, 97), but as a way of making ‘visible’ mundane aspects of everyday practice. Moreover, the rapid expansion of social media and web 2.0 applications has introduced a paradigmatic shift in relation to civic participation and the ways in which geographic data are produced. It is now difficult to differentiate data ‘producers’ and ‘users’ in an environment where many participants function in both capacities. Platforms such as Google Maps and OpenStreetMaps encourage individuals to develop interesting applications using their own data, while the increased availability of GPS technology and websites such as Flickr allow users to upload and locate photographs on the Earth’s surface by latitude and longitude (Goodchild 2007). Such developments have opened up additional opportunities for people to be involved in planning their environments, through the uses of seemingly everyday, mundane technologies and outside formal planning processes (Horelli 2013). In order to investigate the potential benefits of GPS technology for tracing movements through space and its experiences, it was considered useful to gain inspiration from fields with traditions in GPS-linked mapping. One such field is the locative art domain, in which GPS technology have been used for over a decade as a way to explore movement and the environment, and their relationships. The emerging art forms are typically collaborative (between artist and the audience) and participatory (requiring participation in order to take place). Their representations and aesthetics can be employed as a way to affect discourse (e.g. Amsterdam RealTime, noted in Polak, Kee, and WaagSociety 2002), or can become part of interventionist approaches in which the explicit intention is not to produce more data but instead to intervene in provocative
and creative ways that may lead to change (e.g. Traverse Me, noted in Wood 2010). As briefly noted earlier, locative media art shares and builds on some of the practices of the Situationist International movement (Debord 1958; Sadler 1998), which were aimed at re-appropriating the city for its inhabitants so that they would become active (and reflective) participants rather than passively consuming the situations in which they found themselves (McGarrigle 2010). However, while the de´rive has seen a revival through locative art practice, it is also argued that ‘contemporary locative de´rives sometimes lack the political and cultural views that motivated situationist practices’ (Gemeinboeck and Saunders 2011, 164). The concept of construction of situations remains though an important link between situationists and locative media artists (McGarrigle 2010), together with the political-aesthetic questionings of the typical ways of experiencing the everyday. GPS tracking has also been more recently explored in urban planning, brought about by the ‘mobilities turn’ (Sheller and Urry 2006) that migrated from the social sciences into urban studies. In this context, GPS tracking can be employed as a way to understand the use of urban space and as a participatory medium in planning initiatives. An example is Instant Master Planning, a project developed at the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Studies, Aalborg, Denmark (Knudsen, Madsen, and Andersson 2012). The project explored the use of GPS tracking as a participatory planning tool in the development of a new master plan for an existing social housing neighbourhood. In this case, it was applied to the daily movements of a group of young residents throughout the city, with the aim to identify current and potential uses of space. The experimental study presented in this paper brings together some of the features contained in these examples. Thus, it used GPS as a collaborative, participatory and creative medium, which could make visible the relationship movementspace, while representing an interventionist form of raising awareness of how urban space is 4
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awareness walks was to encourage direct interaction with space, to enhance an awareness of how the area was being used and to open up opportunities for a better understanding of its qualities, deficiencies and potential. The walks were conducted both individually and in groups (i.e. workshop participants and volunteers from among the exhibition visitors), and ranged from very open, exploratory de´rives (individual, Figure 1), to guided, stimulus-overloaded and pre-determined routes (group, Figure 2). Both types of walks were aimed at encouraging new ways of experiencing the area by re-engaging participants with space, and also at facilitating the expression of those features of the surrounding environment that usually go unnoticed. For example, the stimulus-overloaded walk3 included a sequence of choreographed movement and pauses, poetry readings and olfactory stimuli—all aimed at enhancing the sensorial experience of space and potentially allowing the participants to pay more attention to non-visual aspects. In order to explore the potentials of technology to mediate the expression of movement experiences, the participants were asked to track their routes using a free GPS tracking app (i.e. EveryTrail4), take photographs of features of interest encountered along the way and make notes (written or voice recorded) of their experiences. A further ‘score’ involved the use of vinyl stickers—a concept inspired by the virtual ‘dropped pins’, which indicate places of interest on online maps5 (Figure 3). The participants were given stickers to place around the selected area, in those places they identified to be of interest or with potential (e.g. the fence of a derelict site that could become a garden, in turn attracting more people in that area). They were asked to photograph the sticker as placed by using the tracking app, which allowed it to be geo-tagged, and to add a comment to briefly explain their choice. Together with the GPS tracks, these photographs and comments were added to the digital prototype that was developed later in the workshop.
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3 Urban awareness walks Space is to design what movement is to dance or sound is to music. Like movement space is something that we use every day in all our activities . . . walking down the street, opening a door, laying down, sitting up etc. Our task ( . . . ) is to first become consciously aware of space so that we may experiment with ways of controlling it. (Anna Halprin 1943) The experiment described here was undertaken in June/July 2012 and consisted in a collaborative three-week workshop that took place in Dublin.2 Building on Halprin’s City Map (Halprin and Burns 1974) and the situationist de´rive (Sadler 1998), the methodology for this experiment included a series of ‘urban awareness walks’, which took place in a designated central area of Dublin, Ireland. The test-bed area was centred on the workshop venue and was sufficiently large to allow for different routes to emerge, but also relatively small so that the area could be covered on foot (approximately 1.7 × 0.75 km). Exploring one’s surroundings on foot was considered to offer an increased level of interaction with space, while also allowing spontaneous pauses and changes in direction or route. Moreover, walking represents a basic form of experiencing the city—it is a significant practice for the atmosphere and feel of the city, where ‘atmosphere . . . is something sensed often through movement and experienced in a tactile kind of way, what Thrift terms “nonrepresentational” practices’ (Jensen 2011). In this experiment, the aim of the 5
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designed, used and governed. In addition to GPS tracking, it also employed photographs and text as further ways of raising awareness and also for opening up questions and conversations about current and potential uses of space. The methodology used to achieve this is outlined in the following section.
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Figure 1. Illustration of individual explorations (source: workshop participants).
Figure 2. Illustration of group walks (source: workshop participants).
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Figure 3. Sticker used by the participants to mark places of interest.
4 Experiments in the spatialtechnological environment
unsafe to people who may not know them. In turn, this process of re-casting ‘shadows’ (de Certeau 1984) onto places that may remain unknown to those who do not use them in their everyday life (or who might not pay attention to them), could add new meaning to the city and to the ways in which inhabitants experience it. Moreover, an intentional emphasis on senses (e.g. visual, auditory, olfactory) and awareness of oneself in space, showed the limitations of our usual (and often hurried) interactions with the city, at the same time opening up new dimensions of how space could be thought, experienced and, indeed, mapped (e.g. sensescapes or sensory maps). For example, raising awareness of the participant’s sense of smell during one of the choreographed walks by using essential oils employed in meditation practices, resulted in some of the participants observing and discussing possibilities for a community garden on a derelict site. Although hidden behind a fence, the smell of the vegetations that had begun to take over the site drew the participants’ interest while walking by (Figure 7). At the same time, although the urban awareness walks took place in a ‘real’, physical area of
While the individual walks were more passive in terms of participant engagement (i.e. individual route mapping), the group walks had the important characteristic of concluding with collective discussions of the individual experiences (i.e. individual reflection and collective brainstorming sessions; Figures 4 and 5). These discussions indicated that, although experienced (and reflected upon) individually, the walks offered a common basis for discussing the area. In turn, this first-hand and enhanced experience of space allowed the identification of shared views on its challenges and potential, beyond initial preconceptions. Besides an increased awareness of space, walking also offered possibilities for interactions with others (e.g. residents or people working in the area; Figure 6). This brought up the importance of opening up communication among various communities and users of an area—for example, communities ‘on the move’ and not only ‘of place’. Sharing personal experience and knowledge with others has the potential to add energy to places that may appear uninteresting or even 7
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Figure 4. Illustration of individual reflection sessions (source: workshop participants).
the city, they were also explored as de-constructions of potential features (e.g. experiential elements) that could be transposed into a digital platform (e.g. technological elements). The purpose of this was to investigate the potentials
of technology to mediate the communication of everyday experiences of space. One of the main features transposed into the digital prototype developed during the workshop6—an online map—was the absence of a ‘base-map’. In this
Figure 5. Group brainstorming sessions (source: workshop participants).
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Figure 6. Conversations with a local resident during a group walk (source: workshop participants).
conceptualisation, the ‘real’ city was envisaged as ‘drawn’ by inhabitants’ movement (i.e. GPS traces) and ‘coloured’ by how each person experienced it (i.e. photographs and notes of experiences of routes) (Figure 8). This reminds one of Kevin Lynch’s concept of image of the city (1960), which suggests that each person holds a different mental map of the city based on how it is experienced. The prototype is conceptualised as a re-drawing of the city based on inhabitants’ movement, and it encourages sharing and discussing individual experiences and knowledge of the city. By offering a space where individually created maps can be shared and visualised together, a digital platform offers opportunities for enriching and expanding individual city images through added knowledge. In turn, not being limited any more by one’s own experience through a process of learning from each other might increase individual awareness of how the city is used and experienced, and open up alternative (and potentially more sustainable) possibilities. Among these emerges the possibility of exploring the city unconditioned
by the cartographic conventions (traditionally authoritarian) of static interpretations of space— and with it, a city not defined by Cartesian coordinates but rather by how it is (or could be) experienced by its inhabitants. This concept of map allows experiencing the city beyond those obvious or ‘proper’ parts of it (de Certeau 1984), while opening up the door to a less-known (and sometimes avoided) ‘back-door’ city that tends to emerge from biases and preconceptions. To this aim, tools now pervasive in contemporary society (e.g. locative technology and online mapping tools, which allow collaboration among users) could facilitate the emergence of a ‘space’ where urban knowledge and experiences are creatively and collectively ‘mobilised’. Rather than just passing through the city, new conversations with it could be started, while the act of passing through and its experience can be ‘remembered’ by using these technologies. Then, ‘in our encounters with space, we might find more than our way’—‘alternative spatialities’ (Dourish 2006, 305– 306), but also temporalities offering the opportunity ‘to experience the urban landscape 9
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Figure 7. ‘Secret’ potential garden as suggested by some of the participants (source: workshop participants).
Figure 8. Prototype concept developed during the workshop; the content includes participants’ GPS traces and photographs.
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with the city, through first-hand being in and moving through space. This was seen to offer opportunities for creating a ‘common language’—a common basis from which shared objectives (or vision) for spaces in the city can be developed collectively. By being part of the process, individuals can bring some of their own dreams and poetry to this collective vision (Sarkissian, Hurford, and Wenman 2010). Moreover, the process of contributing to the creation of alternative maps of the city (e.g. experiential and usergenerated) is seen to empower the inhabitants to take ownership of the city—for example, of those areas they move through in their everyday lives or that are valuable to them and may be neglected by city planners. Such map representations can become artefacts, with the potential to challenge the status quo about how the city is designed, used and governed. As opposed to the ‘smart cities’ approach, technology was employed in this study only as a mediator, part of a process, and not as main actor. Indeed, the process of re-engaging the citizens with the city, its environment and others, remains essential. Mobile technologies and locative media can have a significant role in this. It has been argued that location-aware technologies, for example, smartphone, have made everything locatable (Gordon and Silva 2011), opening up opportunities for new ways of perceiving and interacting with the urban environment (Paay, Dave, and Howard 2007). In turn, such technologies can facilitate an enhanced awareness of space, by creating an ‘augmented space’ (Manovich 2006), understood as the physical space over-layered with various mediated technologies (Thomsen and Jensen 2008). Moreover, the experiment highlighted an important element in this re-engagement process—specifically, the need to complement technology with more reflective approaches, in order to bring to the surface those elements of practice that may otherwise go unnoticed. Incorporating opportunities for individual reflection has an important role in collaborative processes, so that a participant’s own thoughts can be formulated (Sarkissian, Hurford, and Wenman 2010)—an aspect which
in new ways’ (Sant 2006, 6). Rather than losing individuality, such experiments could maximise diversity (Hirsch 2011) and offer opportunities for enhancing individual experience and awareness of the city. Although the short timeframe of the workshop allowed only a basic development of the concepts outlined above, the prototype illustrates the potential of technology to enhance the participation of urban inhabitants in planning their environments, beyond the prevalent citizen-sensing initiatives. In particular, it offers opportunities for initiating a two-way communication process among inhabitants and city planner. First, its visual characteristics can facilitate the creation of communities of city inhabitants, other than ‘of place’—for example, those who enjoy walking or wish to improve the city for the pedestrian. Through the online map users can identify, annotate and discuss routes and urban spaces that they consider interesting or with unused potential. Second, such spaces, which may be neglected by formal planning and policy-making procedures but are important for how people move through and experience the city, can be identified (i.e. made visible) and brought to the attention of the city council.7 This possibility of achieving two-way communication between those who inhabit and those who plan a city reflects what Lawrence Halprin termed ‘a common language’. This was seen to be necessary in order to allow city planners and local residents to make collaborative decisions about the future of their communities (Halprin and Burns 1974). The concept of ‘common language’, as related to the experience of the workshop presented here, is discussed in the next section.
5 The need for a ‘common language’ Although the experiment presented in this paper was initially aimed at investigating the potential of technology to mediate the communication of everyday experience of space, the urban awareness walks indicated some broader implications of the study. In particular, the walks emerged as valuable ways of re-engaging city inhabitants 11
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was also noted during the workshop group sessions. At a broader scale, nurturing capabilities for reflection among urban communities through meaningful interaction in ‘public domains’ can facilitate pluralism, thus moving ‘beyond the boundaries of standard democratic formality’ (Calabrese, 2003, cited in Jensen 2009, 150). In this context, locative technology can be explored as a way of bringing together such public domains—or the multiple mobile and electronic agoras that we engage with while moving through the city (Jensen 2009)— and connecting them to the physical space of the city. This is important not only for empowering city inhabitants, but also for engaging civic leaders in creative and reflective ways of thinking about the city, which can open up new avenues of thought beyond established models of planning that do not acknowledge the increasingly blurred boundaries between physical and digital spaces.
everyday life experiences of city spaces, the study combined spatial and technological aspects with qualitative and reflective methods. The alternation between physical and virtual features during the urban awareness walks highlighted the need to complement technology (e.g. GPS tracking) with reflective methods and/or spaces for reflection (e.g. collective maps). This allowed individual experiences to be expressed and digitally shared among the participants—a process that could potentially be extended to communication between city inhabitants and city planners. Through the aim of accessing aspects of everyday movement through space, which may already be experienced but in an unconscious way, the research advances Halprin’s City Map method. This was developed as a way to stimulate people’s direct interaction with, and enhanced awareness of, the environment in order to access its non-representational features (Merriman 2010). This study explored a similar approach by using contemporary technology (i.e. GPS tracking). However, rather than being provided with a map as in Halprin’s ‘Experiments in the Environment’, the participants could draw their own maps of the area of the experiment, by using a tracking app. An important aspect of this methodological advance is the alternation between spatial/ physical and technological/virtual features of the digital prototype, developed during the experiment. The walks were investigated in this experiment as a way to provoke, access and represent experiential data, and also as de-constructions of experiential aspects that could be transposed into digital features by employing locative media. The study illustrated therefore how everyday experiences of urban space might be elicited and communicated using technology. At a conceptual level, it used mobility (here, walking) as a ‘conversation starter’—an important aspect of everyday life that can bring inhabitants together in discussing the city. Besides allowing a common starting point for expressing and sharing experiences of the city and movement through it, mobility can facilitate a ‘re-drawing’ of the city from the perspective of its inhabitants, through the medium of technology; by using GPS tracking technology,
6 Discussion and conclusion This paper has discussed an experimental process carried out in Dublin, Ireland, which focused on how everyday life experiences of urban space may be accessed and communicated using locative technologies. The experiment has highlighted the importance of ‘provoking’ an enhanced awareness of one’s everyday environments, in order for those urban experiences embedded in everyday practice (and sometimes taken for granted) to come to the surface and be expressed. In doing so, the experimental process advances knowledge regarding the use of GPS technology in citizen-sensing initiatives. Moreover, it arguably represents a potentially innovative addition to recent endeavours to expand the role and means for participation of ordinary inhabitants in the planning and development of their everyday urban environments. While the aims of understating people’s experiences of their environments and collecting location-based experiential knowledge are not new (Lynch 1960; Kahila and Kytta¨ 2006), this study extended these aims to everyday experiences of space, sometimes considered ‘non-representational’ (Jensen 2011). In order to access 12
inhabitants can produce new, user-generated maps of the city. While GPS technology has already been used in tracing city maps with the help of inhabitants, for example, in the collaborative OpenStreetMaps project, this paper suggests a new purpose for its use. Sharing mobility experiences and drawing city maps can become part of a process of engagement between ordinary city inhabitants and city planners, aimed at rebalancing power relations and at placing inhabitants in a co-productive capacity. Rather than using ICT only to gather or count data, technology can become a tool for a collaborative production of knowledge for, and about, the city. Beyond the present role of data-generators, the experiment discussed in this paper indicates opportunities for technology to facilitate the (inter)active involvement of ordinary inhabitants in the important process of knowledge production about urban spaces and their future development. From this perspective, city inhabitants are seen as co-producers of the city together with city decision-makers, and not as mere consumers (e.g. of services, resources). Inhabitants can become active participants in the development of the city, by sharing the city’s quintessential (yet very little known) aspects—what city living is about and how it is experienced in daily life. A city map ‘drawn’ by people’s movement and ‘coloured’ with their everyday life experiences can indeed offer a very different image of the city and of inhabitants’ needs than those drawn up by city planners. Moreover, expanding on the notion of GPS drawing (Wood 2010), such digital maps can become a way of critically engaging inhabitants in the development of the city. For example, its visual qualities with concentrations of traces and ‘energy/activity points’ clusters can be employed to draw attention to those spaces that have been neglected and raise awareness of potential solutions, as envisaged and needed by their inhabitants and users. Related to this, the paper brought back into focus Lawrence Halprin’s concept of a ‘common language’ between city inhabitants and city planners. The experiment illustrated how the emergences of a ‘common language’ may be
mediated by locative technology. Rather than being consensus-focused or conflict-oriented, the relationship between city inhabitants and city planners could be re-conceptualised as dynamic, networked and spatial-experiential (i.e. experiences of spatial interactions with the city). This conceptualisation is inspired by contemporary forms of social networking; the enhanced interaction between people and their environments offered by location-aware technologies; and the visual and dynamic GPS data representations with tradition in the locative media art field. In light of these considerations, the paper puts forward the notion of ‘collaborative production’ as a useful concept for further investigating the potential of GPS technology to enhance the processes of transforming urban environments into much smarter and more sustainable spaces. This advances the discussion from inhabitants as consumers of resources to inhabitants as (co)producers of resources (e.g. experiential data). While the term ‘consumption’ implies a negative form of contribution (i.e. by detracting from existing and limited resources), the emphasis on ‘production’ places city inhabitants in a positive role (i.e. by adding to collective resources, such as experiential urban knowledge). Acknowledging the limitations and sometimes negative connotations of GPS technology, such as surveillance (Crang and Graham 2007), this paper emphasises the need to also explore its potential, beyond current citizen-sensing initiatives. Among these are the opportunities such technology may offer for ‘opening up’ the city (Sassen 2011)—its spaces and infrastructures—so that inhabitants can re-engage with it and become active (and reflective) co-producers in its development, together with the decision-makers.
Acknowledgements Infinite thanks to the Interactivos?’12 workshop collaborators: Gabriela Avram (University of Limerick), Alessio Chierico (University of Art and Industrial Design Linz), Christine Gates (independent artist), Eula`lia Guiu (University of Girona) and Kathryn Maguire (independent artist); and 13
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References
advisors: Teresa Dillon (lead curator, Dublin Hack the City), Tim Redfern (independent artist), Max Kazemzadeh (Gallaudet University). I would also like to thank Dr Niamh Harty and Professor Anna Davies (Trinity College Dublin) for their invaluable support in my work.
Baibarac, Corelia. 2014. “The ‘Urban Spacebook’ Experimental Process: Co-Designing a Platform for Participation.” The Journal of Community Informatics (Special Edition on ‘Urban Planning and Community Informatics’) 10 (3). http://ci-journal. net/index.php/ciej/article/view/1129/1119 Bijoux, Denise, and Jason Myers. 2006. “Interviews, Solicited Diaries and Photography: ‘New’ Ways of Accessing Everyday Experiences of Place.” Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies 4 (1): 44 –64.
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Anna, a dancer who significantly contributed to the experimental art form of postmodern dance, was Lawrence Halprin’s wife and co-creator of the RSVP Cycles – a methodology that informed the Take Part process. The experiment was conducted during a workshop entitled Interactivos?’12, part of Dublin Hack the City. The workshop was organized as an open call by Science Gallery, Dublin, together with MediaLab Prado, Madrid (http://sciencegallery.com/ interactivos). The stimulus-overloaded walk was developed with artist Kathryn Maguire. EveryTrail is a free iPhone and Android app, which allows tracing one’s route on a map, geo-tagging photographs and uploading the GPS files on the user’s webpage. Users can comment and vote on others’ trips and photos, create groups and share their trips via Facebook and Twitter (http://www. everytrail.com/). The image became the logo for the workshop prototype and the symbol inspired its name – InfiniteCity. The digital prototype was developed by digital media artist Tim Redfern using open source code – OpenStreetMap and Leaflet, among others (http:// eclectronics.org/infinitecity/). The workshop was one of the three spatialtechnological experiments which informed a prototype ICT platform, entitled Urban Spacebook. The features and potential uses of the platform, consisting of a map-based website and a mobile application, were also informed by feedback from the participants to the experiments and Dublin City Council planners. The platform is discussed in Baibarac (2014). At the time of writing, an implementation of the platform prototype is under consideration by London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, as part of the informal consultation stage included in the Council’s Village Planning Process.
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Corelia Baibarac is a Marie Curie Fellow at Sheffield School of Architecture researching collaborative platforms for urban resilience. She has a background in Architecture and a PhD in Sustainable Development.
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