Aurigi, A., & De Cindio, F. (2008). Augmented urban spaces: articulating the physical and electronic city. Aldershot: Ashgate.
(The introduction is a free read from the website).

This book from 2008 had been on my desk for quite some time but finally I got around to do a review. It is listed in a recent overview of a decade of writing about digital cities. Three years earlier, one of the editors Alessandro Aurigi wrote the monograph “Making the Digital City: The Early Shaping of Urban Internet Space”.

The main question of this edited book is how enriched media environments, ubiquitous computing, mobile and wireless communication technologies, and the internet are modifying city living and the fruition of urban spaces. A familiar stance by now, the editors argue against a clear boundary between the digital and the physical:

“in the augmented city, ‘virtual’ and ‘physical’ spaces are no longer two separate dimensions, but just parts of a continuum, of a whole. The physical and the digital environment have come to define each other and concepts such as public space and “third place”, identity and knowledge, citizenship and public participation are all inevitably affected by the shaping of the reconfigured, augmented urban space” (p. 1).

The stated aim to strive for an interdisciplinary “contamination of perspectives” is attested to by the fact that Aurigi is an architect/urban planner and De Cindio a computer scientist. The contributing authors are a mixed bunch in both disciplinary and cultural background, although most have an academic affiliation. Architects, urbanists and geographers go side by side with new media and information- and communication researchers. Contributors hail from (or work in) Italy, USA, Canada, Brazil, Australia, South Korea, UK, and South Africa.

The book is structured in three main sections: Augmented Spaces, Augmenting Communities, and Planning Challenges in the Augmented City. I will not discuss all contributions but pick out those that I found most interesting.

Part I: augmented spaces

In his introduction to part I, Alessandro Aurigi points out that urban ICTs can be very visible, like urban screens, or partially hidden, like mobile phones, or largely invisible as geo-references in databases. Further, the ‘everyday character’ of the physical-digital intersection exists on the global level but also on a very local scale. Another tension is between a positive connotation of digitally enhanced space, as enabling connections and a sense of belonging to place, versus a negative view, as becoming controlled by the network and increasing uncertainty, disorientation and displacement. This intertwining of spaces and information is not something radically new. Cities have always been inscribed with layers of information. The question then is: how does ‘augmentation’ as a quantitative property (more, faster, better) also become a qualitative change of urban life (and perhaps even results in ‘less’ of other things) (p.6)? Despite their separation for analysis’ sake in the book, Aurigi stresses that space, community and design are deeply connected issues. At the same time he argues for a bit of modesty in addressing augmented urbanism. Maybe it is less a question of finding completely new rules and theories than reframing existing ones.

In her chapter “Places, Situations and Connections”, Katharine Willis questions how citizens experience and occupy urban public spaces through invisible mobile and wireless technologies. Her paper is split in two: a theoretical section, and a case study of how the presence of Wi-Fi nodes in London affects the use and perception of public space. Willis observes that visual presence is a requirement for authenticating our experience of the environment and social life. This visual preoccupation may explain the present attention for data-visualizations in this age of invisible telecommunications. Drawing on Kevin Lynch’s notion of ‘imageability’, and Lakoff and Johnson’s work on spatial metaphors in organizing interactions, Willis argues that place and space are fundamental elements for meaningful social life. Willis distinguishes between metric Euclidean space and place, and social space and place (what Erving Goffman has called “social situations”). To this I would add the experience of space/place, following John Agnew’s tripartite definition of place as geometrical location, social locale, and mental sense of place [¹].

According to Willis, technologies are (implicitly) designed around this relationship between environment and activities that take place there. In Euclidean terms a building is an enclosed space with a particular function. But in social terms it consists of links and nodes in a social network. For example, churches or classrooms are designed to support a radial topology of communication, while cafés are designed to support interconnected clusters of interaction. New media modify the conditions for communication, Willis says. They “reconfigure Euclidian spatial frameworks framed around spatial proximity and bounded-ness, in a manner which is fundamentally different from the PC internet” (p.15). Frames that are reconfigured are: separation, bounded-ness, presence, linkage, and temporality. Separation (either being displaced or sharing the same space for communication) is now partly defined by varying ranges of wireless media protocols like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Bounded-ness (collectively defining boundaries) becomes part of mobile communication, for instance through the typical practice of establishing location on the mobile phone by asking “where are you?”. Presence is no longer merely defined in physical terms but can also mean co-location in a shared media space, although “flesh meets” do take on a high level of importance. Linkage and the potential for collective action is intensified and multi-layered. Temporality and synchronicity become matters of (inter)personal evaluation rather than depending on clock time (p.15-16). Wi-Fi networks in public space for instance are not visible structures, and therefore not perceived as a visuo-spatial mental image. Instead, they exist in a manner similar to our concepts of social networks: as possible relations separated only by a switch to a network connection, as structures not defined by physical distance but by limits of access and usability (p.23).

In my view Willis offers an interesting perspective of the built environment in informational/communicative terms. How does architecture enable or constrain certain social interactions? Her two topologies of church and café fit snugly with John Durham Peters’ two communicative ideal-types: one-way dissemination and two-way dialogue [²]. It also counters monolithic conceptions of public space as either a neutral homogenous meeting ground or a mosaic of differences. A network perspective of space made up of ‘nodes’, ‘connections’ and ‘borders’ opens up a situational and multi-layered view of urban publicness as spaces of friction between sameness and selfhood, similarity and difference.

Heesang Lee draws on a large body of (mobile) media literature to make a similar argument, namely that under the influence of mobile technologies (public) space can no longer be defined by spatial and temporal coordinates. Instead, mobile networks produce relative and relational networks between bodies and spaces (p.45). They create a “micro-network society” in which ordinary bodies themselves become nodes (p. 44). With the mobile phone the Cartesian unity of the human body becomes extensible and divisible, as people can now exist in multiple places at once. And the spaces around the body become multiple and eversible. A simple phone call between two people traveling knots together multiple spaces: the physical transit space between the two places they move between, the space of the other person, the cloud space where their phone numbers are stored. In spite of the idea that mobility and multiplicity cause people to become detached from their original territories, mobile phones are highly bound to local places, Lee argues. His survey shows that people use the mobile phone for communication with those they frequently meet in their everyday lives, while reserving e-mail for those they did not meet often.

Like his keynote talk at the first The Mobile City event in 2008, Malcolm McCullough is as interested in continuities and parallels as in the usual emphasis on rupture and change in the present media city (in fact, his approach is to look for familiar themes in the history of urbanism in order to highlight current differences). Starting from the observation that cities have always been inscribed or ‘augmented’ with information, he asks who has the right to mark up the city? Participatory web 2.0 culture has spilled over to urban markup: the tagging, mapping, linking, and sharing of one’s environments with the aid of locative and mobile media. Still, in the city not everything can be personalized. You cannot go around and place your own street signs and road markings. An intriguing question McCullough poses is whether the augmented city, aside from information pollution, will leave valuable archeological traces for posterity? The place par excellence where mechanisms of selection and information architecture occur is the library. When more and more people are now editing and publishing themselves, information access, collection and preservation become particularly urgent matters. The library has to find a renewed balance between the ‘mob rule’ of the most popular productions and focusing on quality control and educating the public. Our present age of media urbanism requires new mechanisms of selecting and preserving our cultural commons.

Marcus Foth and Paul Sanders study how ‘publicness’ in neighborhoods and local communities can be designed, by comparing three urban renewal projects in Australian inner-city residential architecture. They observe that approaches towards neighborhood development are based on utopian objectives to revive a collective community spirit (p. 84). This ignores the tendency for “urban tribes” to gather in peer-to-peer and private ways, partly physical and partly virtual (p.83). So how can this behavior be accommodated in urban design? The authors suggest three pathways. First, one may try to elicit serendipitous encounters. Second, one may attempt to strengthen socio-cultural animation by allowing residents to initiate and organize collective actions. Third, conditions can be created for digital augmentation by allowing residents to develop community networks that complement physical public spaces. For this, cross-disciplinary exchanges between urban designers, computer scientists, and urban sociologists need to be established.

David Murakami Wood presents a thoughtful discussion of work about privacy issues in the “pervasive surveillance society”. He pays particular attention to “spatial protocols”, the new codes and rules that govern our society that is increasingly dependent on technology-mediated forms of surveillance. This focus on ‘code’ has to be taken quite literally (he calls computer programmers “a new priesthood for the digital age” (p. 101)). Murakami Wood argues that social scientists have tended to neglect the codes embedded and politics involved in standardizing protocols like TCP/IP networking, XML data formatting, and MPEG multimedia content encoding. Drawing on the work of Agustin Arraya, he identifies several problems with the idea of pervasive computing. First, when computerized surveillance recedes into the ‘background’, as Weiser famously envisioned, a loss of the ‘otherness’ of things occurs. We can no longer see he mechanisms of surveillance. Second, when our environments become responsive and even anticipatory, the world turns into a manipulable artifact. This allows for military precision surveillance in which nothing is ever forgotten. Third, pervasive computing simplifies agency to rational choice and reduces human need to the objectives of corporate capitalism and the neo-liberal economic agenda. In the new ‘spatial protocol’ there is still territoriality. Yet it is not merely the ‘outside’ of physical public space but also the ‘inside’ of databases and networks. Similar to Willis’ argument, Murakami Wood proposes it would be better to talk about topologies than about space. In computer science topology refers to the physical patterning of connectivity of elements in networks determined by protocols.

Part II: Augmenting communities

In her introduction to the second section, Fiorella De Cindio raises the question whether augmented space enriches networks of local social relationships or annihilates them. The very nature of the city as “an impulse toward community” by transforming an urbe into a civitas is challenged (p.107). Digital technologies make the walled city with its concentrated populations permeable, she writes. Of course we should doubt the validity of this typical container view of the traditional city De Cindio assumes here. Was the city indeed such a closed and local entity? Weren’t there always multiple relations to ‘elsewhere’: with the rural hinterland that provided food and raw resources (and labor in the industrial age), with other cities in trade relations and migrations, and even as a virtual ‘imaginary elsewhere’ with the power to represent and/or identify with (Babel, Atlantis, Jerusalem)? This takes some of the sting out of this question. Nevertheless the issue remains: can new media contribute to lively ‘hybrid communities’? The continuous present verb in Augmenting Communities suggests that, unlike with perfect present ‘already-there’ of Augmented Spaces, the authors themselves feel there is still some way to go.

And indeed, the contributions in this section tend to be less solid than in the previous section, and more speculative. For instance, Gary Gumpert and Susan Drucker somewhat ease their way through with the notion of a “permeable walled city” (p. 120). As media technologies make city boundaries more porous, communication and identifying with communities become matters of choice rather than based on physical proximity. Trust and authentication in media practices are the reincarnations of the old city walls, they suggest. Personally I found it a bit disappointing that this section contains so many articles about how community network websites help to sustain a local or interest-based sense of community and civic participation. This is a well-trodden area of research done years earlier (notably by Wellman & Hampton in a series of publications about ‘Netville’), and therefore does not shed new light on the interplay between technology and the city in the age of mobile media. And when authors indeed do study the use of mobile media, as Mark Gaved and Paul Mulholland do with OpenStreetMaps as a case of grassroots activism, it unfortunately remains too short and sketchy to add much insights.

One paper in this section did offer me new insights. Natalie Pang, Tom Denison, Kirsty Williamson, Graeme Johanson and Don Schauder explore the idea of a “knowledge commons” as an essential resource for community building and participation in the information age (p.186). They make an interesting distinction between three notions of ‘ownership’ (a theme we will be focussing on in the near future with The Mobile City). Res privatae refers to the right of individuals, families, or institutions to own private property. Res publicae refers to the services for which responsibility has been transferred to a legitimate authority (usually the state). Res communes – the English ‘commons’ – refers to the governance of resources free (as in speech) and common to all, such as natural resources [³]. The latter two are usually conflated. But the authors assert a difference between these notions. A res publica is not the same as common property. As an example, we may think of McCullough’s remark about not being allowed to place you own street signs (luckily we have given the state a monopoly on that!). A further link with McCullough’s contribution is the attention these author pay to the public library as a center for sustaining this knowledge commons locally.

The conceptual distinction between three notions of ownership connects to present developments in the field of open data/open gov (although not touched upon in the article). See for instance the Rotterdam Open Data initiative. To what extent should the information that public institutions and we ourselves are willingly or unwillingly generating and scattering be considered a ‘data commons’ over which we should be allowed a measure of ownership? (This is something my colleague Martijn de Waal is working on in his dissertation). Another reason why this tripartite distinction is important in my view is that it offers a potential solution to a recently voiced concern by the Institute For The Future in their roadmap “a Planet of Civic Laboratories: the future of cities, information, and inclusion”. The IFTF observes that governments and public sector institutions are happily tapping into the pool of engaged citizens under the moniker of a more collaborative and participatory approach to the delivery of public services (p.4). But this ‘crowdsourcing’ also means that the public sector is “offloading” its formal responsibilities. The distinction between res publica and res communis helps to redefine the boundaries of what our governments should do and what citizens themselves may take up. Likewise, we can use it to ask the question why so many res publicae in our cities – like public safety and security – have been turned into res privatae: outsourced to private companies that often are not subjected to the same mechanisms of supervision and accountability (and those are res communes in a democratic civil society).

Part III: Planning Challenges in the Augmented City

In the last section, Aurigi notes that, perhaps paradoxically, computing technologies are complicating rather than simplifying place-making jobs. Formal planning is complemented with all sort of informal urban ICT uses. Aurigi asserts that up-to-date knowledge of changes in city life and a clear planning strategy are prerequisites, and at the same time he calls for a dose of modesty in developing radically new theories. “[W]e might not need new theories for planning the city at all, but we should ‘augment’ the ones we already know…. ‘Augmented’ planning will have to operate within a yet more strongly interdisciplinary and multi-actor arena…” (p. 218).

Anthony Townsend provides a culturally sensitive view of Seoul as a networked city. He flips around the usual question about the influence of mobile media on public space, and instead asks “what about public space has changed that led to the rise of these technologies?” (p. 219). (Still, this presupposes a division between the two that may no longer be tenable). Two trends underlie the integration of virtual and physical spaces: ubiquitous mobile communications with their ‘functional telepathic capabilities’ that allow people to choreograph activities in urban space, and the deployment of material sensing in urban space, “driving a whole new set of feedback loops that govern the management and operation of public space” (p. 220). From the second World War on Seoul has know rapid economic growth. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis Korea set its stakes on broadband as a new platform for development. Powerful drivers for its expansion were cybercafes, wireless networks, and urban cyberculture. Local internet cafes (bang) became de facto public spaces (p. 225). Wireless networking allowed people to access services outside of fixed locations like home or office. The synergy between an always-on lifestyle and a well-managed transportation infrastructure led to an unprecedented mobile culture among young people, allowing them to coordinate their movements between the many public and private rooms that make up modern life in the Korean metropolis. The integration of broadband in public space has strengthened Korean identity, Townsend holds. Its specific shape reflects deeply held values and norms. For example, the density of neon-glow visual information of Seoul’s streets has spilled over into the design aesthetic of Korean webservices. Korean ‘urban visual literacy’ thus underlies the rapid adoption of new technologies. However there are also challenges to the urban public domain, he notes. People may either retreat into virtual cocoons: games or web portals that allow them to escape unpleasant environments. Or they cope with anxiety in public space by contacting their familiar social network, rather than striking up a conversation with strangers. Combined, this may lead to reduced interest to improve badly designed public spaces.

Annalisa Pelizza offers an urgent take on issues of urban fear, security and (dis)order. Pelizza begins with a quote from Latour, in which “politics is defined as the progressive composition of collective life…” (p. 235). She notes two opposing attitudes towards physical public space: the demand for security and ‘civility’ versus (artist) initiatives to reclaim the streets for heterogeneous purposes. The former feeds a “state of perpetual emergency” and the imposition of a “logic of warfare” on otherwise non-criminal social behavior (p. 236). New geographical, social and cultural borders are erected inside the city. We have come to accept the privatization of public spaces. The latter is visible in the many installations, video works and performances by artists and media-activists in contested public spaces, as attempts to counter the politics of fear. Urban ICTs are deployed in both directions. They are used to erect borders and increase security by sorting people according to singular definitions of identity and risk. But they are also used to open up urban life as a meeting space. In the latter category Pelizza further identifies two different regeneration strategies for cities and communities. The first attempts to reinforce the traditional idea of community as a small-scale local Gemeinschaft (the contribution by Foth & Sanders points to the same phenomenon). The second departs from “instable communities where the use of ICT is not supposed to help identify pre-built subjects, but creates them through the same process of communication” (p. 237). The remainder of the chapter discusses examples of defensive (e.g. crime-mapping) and provocative uses of ICTs (e.g. urban markup projects). She concludes that any planning attempt that uses ICTs as mere tools to analyze and solve spatial problems is founded on a reactive control attitude that holds citizens as passive subjects who are classifiable into singular categories. Instead of “planning with lines” we should plan “with borderlands”, thick open zones that create the conditions for communication (p. 251). Although obviously still a (deliberately) vague design imperative, I found this a thought-provoking image. Many, many others have stated similar guidelines (from the formal “less is more” to the functional “under-specify”). To see this conclusion once more being reached with sound conceptual underpinnings is a good thing.

Nancy Odendaal’s chapter about informal urbanism in Durban, South Africa, and the use of ICTs reaches a somewhat similar conclusion. Informal cities are characterized by housing and land-use outside government-sanctioned parameters, unregulated micro-enterprises, and unregistered labor and informal networks (p. 258, 260). Mobile phones support informal African urbanism on all these levels. By contrast, web-based community networks – featuring prominently in Euro-American ‘community informatics’ literature – tend to enhance more formally organized associations. Odendaal makes a useful dual distinction between explicit and implicit manifestations of digital technologies in physical space. On the one hand there are explicit translations of digital technologies into physical spaces, such as internet kiosks, phone shops, and so on. On the other hand there are implicit interfaces between physical and digital space, as in the information-sharing between informal workers about good places to work, police raids, etc., networking between multiple trading parties, negotiation and bargaining, and advocacy for common causes. Planning the informal city is hampered by the difficulty of identifying actors and tying them to territories. But it will have to take the implicit and informal relationships into account.

The last two contributions are more practical. Romano Fistola presents his use of GIS mapping as an aid in planning digital urbanism developments in Naples, Italy. Rodrigo J. Firmino explores how William Mitchell’s idea of a “recombinant architecture”, in which technologies are an integral part of the construction of space, is translated in the planning strategies of medium-sized Brazilian cities. He follows the work of Thomas Horan (2000), who tried to ground Mitchell’s theory by emphasizing the need to improve “social actor’s awareness of the symbiosis between dataspace and physical spaces as well as the direct and indirect consequences for every aspect of their normal everyday lives” (p. 318). From the results of a survey, Firmino sadly concludes that planners in five of Brazil’s medium-sized cities have hardly taken notice of ICTs. Some initiatives exist, such as municipal portals, electronic government, public internet access, the use of GIS in planning, and public space surveillance. But there are little or no strategic views of urban-technological developments (p. 322). Some structural limitations are: lack of knowledge, lack of interest, lack of actual debate in municipal administration, lack of ability, and lack of proximity between the spheres of planning and ICT development (p. 327).

In his epilogue, Aurigi notes that urban spaces can get augmented in spontaneous or in planned ways, quantitatively or qualitatively (although ‘augmentation’ is of course a quantitative term). When we make the city more digital are we really improving its augmented spaces, he asks (p. 338)? He too observes that the use of ICTs in urban design often is merely an add-on instead of part of a holistic strategy. He concludes with two reflections. First, the importance of place-making in urban design: ICTs need to contribute to the “humanisation of the environment” (p. 341). But this cannot be planned in deterministic ways. Second, urban design needs to critically engage with urban ICTs in order to ground projects in place-making debates and practices, and contribute to the design of such projects in a “place-wise” way (p. 344). We must neither see ICTs as fragmenting and de-localizing cities, nor try to use it to strengthen some authentic sense of place. Aurigi suggests that ICTs may be used to make urban space more ‘permeable’: to improve people’s awareness of the choices available. He is optimistic that ICTs can ‘augment’ the four key attributes of successful public spaces: comfort and image, access and linkage, uses and activity, and sociability (p. 345-6).

Conclusions
Finally, a few brief and more critical thoughts to conclude this review. Notwithstanding the many interesting individual contributions, which I have tried to highlight in this review, as a whole I felt a little disappointed with this book. While we should acknowledge that this volume is from 2008, that the process of editing takes a long time, and that developments in this field go extremely rapidly, I feel that this book is a little boring as a ‘state of the art’ overview, and that it lacks a strong conceptual approach. Many articles get stuck in older discussions about neighborhood ICT networks. With a few exceptions, scant attention is given to the exploration of new techno-urban territories that surely existed already years ago, like mobile communication, location-based technologies, city sensing, pervasive gaming. Moreover, in my view the editors haven’t put enough efforts into knitting various contributions together into a coherent whole. The book is a collection of ‘articulations’, as the subtitle promises. But it lacks a coherent framework for addressing the ‘augmented city’. Most attention goes out to urban public space, while other urban spaces receive little consideration (home, work, leisure, travel). The point of departure is still a physical ‘container-view’ definition of the city and public space that is consequently ‘augmented’ by ICTs (or threatened, as is repeatedly noted). If the issue is the changing city, then why not look at other domains too? If the issue is urban publicness, why stick to a spatial concept of ‘public space’?

I believe they have picked an unfortunate title. The whole collection of papers inevitably points to the uselessness of a strict separation between the city and technology. But the chosen title prevents the discussion to move beyond binary concepts (and of course their refutations; but what else?): city – technology; physical – digital; local/proximate/community – global/placeless/disorientation; walled – permeable; space as empty void – place as lived; changes that are quantitative (more – less) or qualitative (better – worse); design that is top-down or bottom-up. Oh well, it takes some searching to come up with ‘hybrid city’.. :).

Further, nowhere do the editors explicate if and how an ‘augmented city’ can become a better city. When Aurigi suggests that public space must be made more permeable to improve people’s awareness of the choices available in the augmented city, he does not wonder for instance about information overload, the ‘tyranny of choice’ (PDF), and what it means to be constantly addressed as a (rational) choice consumer in urban public spaces.

It is partly a language issue that makes this book not exactly an exiting page-turner. The book is littered with inelegant formulations (“Local space is the locus from where transnational and global frameworks are tapped into for enhancing opportunity in the local”, p. 262), and grammatical errors (“Arraya identified many of these problems with the pervasive computing”, p. 97).

But not all can be attributed to saving on a corrector. Authors who begin their chapter with Pierre Levy’s assertion that the virtual is not opposed to the real but to the actual, and on the very same page write about the “interplay between actual (or ‘offline’) and virtual (or ‘online’) worlds”, seriously need to think twice about what they are actually claiming (p. 139). The sum of little annoyances, which frequently center on fuzzy, erroneous or lacking specifications of concepts, make reading the book a less then enjoyable experience. So would I recommend this book? What I appreciate is that contributions in this book are more culturally and professionally diverse than, say, Graham’s Cybercities Reader (2004). But if you are looking for a book that enters this field with a stronger and more coherent conceptual basis, leave this one on the shelf.

Read more book reviews at The Mobile City >>

Notes

1. Agnew, J. A. (1987). Place and politics: the geographical mediation of state and society. Boston: Allen & Unwin. (p. 28)

2. Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: a history of the idea of communication. Chicago, Ill. ; London: University of Chicago Press. (pp. 33-62)

3. The authors purport to base this distinction on an article by Elizabeth Depalma Digeser (alas, not a ‘knowledge commons’…). However, Digeser nowhere explicitly mentions this tripartite distinction (at least not in that paper). Their description is actually an almost literal (but unreferenced) citation from this (free!) 2005 article by David Berry, “The Commons as an Idea—Ideas as a Commons”.