The Mobile City

Category: Blog

  • Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: a matter of ‘U-City’ or ‘U-Citizens?’

    I just finished reading Marcus Foth’s Handbook of research on Urban Informatics. It’s an edited volume as thick as a fist, packed with essays that when taken altogether give a great overview of this exciting new interdisciplinary field of research and design practices. So what exactly is urban informatics? Roughly said, the field includes a…

  • The map as metaphor

    John Markoff wrote an article in the NY Times “The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives”. He calls the cellphone “the world’s most ubiquitous computer”, since the 4 billion subscriber mark has been reached recently – or even a while ago according to another research agency. Although it is a fact that most of these 4 billion…

  • Streetview NL is almost here

    With the coming addition of the Dutch part of Google Streetview, my street won’t be the same. Well, that’s not true. Here in Holland these pictures-of-streets services have been in use for some time. But those pay-services were focused on official use, often being used by government agencies and businesses. But now, with Streetview, these…

  • On the design of geographic interfaces: verisimilitude -vs- subjective experiences

    Last night I attended Michael Naimark’s interesting lecture at the Rotterdam Film festival. This year’s edition of the festival wants to broaden the discussion on ‘screen culture’, and Naimark took up on this theme by focusing on maps and globes as important elements of our contemporary screen culture. Naimark talked about two different directions that…

  • Film festival Rotterdam: What content makes Urban Screens interesting? Let’s move beyond the cinematic.

    This week I visited the international filmfestival in Rotterdam. For this year’s edition the festival left the confinement of the city’s film theatres and expanded onto three urban screens erected in the city’s public space. During the festival three specially commissioned films are projected on landmark skyscrapers in the centre of Rotterdam to address the…

  • Review: “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities” by Mimi Ito et al.

      Mimi Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Ken Anderson have an interesting chapter in the edited volume by Rich Ling & Scott Campbell (2009) “The reconstruction of space and time: mobile communication practices” which recently came out. The chapter is called “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places”. The authors explore how…

  • Esther Polak’s Nomadic Milk: Is GPS-tracking like ‘photography with a very long shuttertime?’

    A GPS recorder is like a camera in the sky with a very long shutter time. That at least was what Cassion Harrison, the director from Britain from Above claimed at the AnyMedia workshop at the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam last November. It’s a metaphor that I’ve been playing with ever since, and especially now…

  • BBC radio: computer generated building design

    The BBC has a 5-minute radio item about computer generated architecture. Architect Thomas Witzke (?) at Zaha Hadid‘s office talks about paralel computer modeling in building design. He says computer programs originally used for the animation industry and car design and ship building are now used by architects. So projects are now entirely conceived in…

  • Mobile media ‘optimizing’ physical mobility

    (image source: Vabellon) Clearly, the mobile phone is used to ‘optimize time’ – at least, this idea of “making the most of NOW” is one of the strong rhetorics about mobile media: to do something useful with in-between moments that is ‘lost time’ otherwise. Increasingly, is seems mobile media are being deployed to optimize spatial…

  • Towards a Myspace urbanism?

    In 1938 Chicago School Scholar Louis Wirth wrote the now famous article ‘Urbanism as a way of Life’. According to Wirth, the modern metropolises that had emerged in the preceding half-century or so, weren’t only striking for their until then unparalleled sizes and shapes. The social and economic clusterings of the industrial city had also…

  • Locative media and the situationists

    During the last museumnight in Amsterdam the Amsterdam architecture institute Arcam decided to have an evening about the situationists. Apparently the Dutch situationist Constant had (co-)written a pamphlet fifty years earlier about his ideal city. The pamphet, it was revealed, could just as easily be interpreted as a joke instead of as an actual serious…

  • Urban Play: designing the urban landscape

    Saturday November 1 2008 I attended the closing debate of the Urban Play project that took place during ExperimentaDesign 2008 themed “Space and Place: design for the urban landscape”. The event explored the role of designers in shaping the urban landscape, and the Urban Play project – organized by Droog Design – specifically focused on…