-
Review: Paul Dourish & Genevieve Bell – Divining a digital future (2011)
In Divining a Digital Future (2011), computer scientist Paul Dourish (Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine) and cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell (Intel Interaction and Experience Research Lab) again team up in an attempt to marry ethnography with ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) research. The book heavily builds on some of their previous collaborative work.…
-
Review: Aurigi & De Cindio (2008) – Augmented urban spaces
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…
-
review: Stephen Graham – The Cybercities Reader (2004)
In The Cybercities Reader (2004) Stephen Graham – at that time Professor of Urban Technology in Newcastle – bundles a great number of seminal texts about the intersections of digital media technologies and urban life. Some articles were written especially for this reader. Others were previously published. The book departs from the premisse that “[t]he…
-
review: Kevin Lynch – The Image of the City
As part of a new effort of The Mobile City to compile an ever-expanding overview of literature relevant to our themes, I will review this oldie-goldie published in 1960: Kevin Lynch – The Image of the City. I particularly assess its enduring relevance for understanding the current relation between mobile & locative media and the…
-
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…
-
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…
-
The Big Sort, The Uses of Disorder and mobile media
I just read two books – written almost 40 years apart – that signal the same urban problem: cities and towns in the United States are becoming increasingly segregated into monocultural lifestyle enclaves – like flocks to like. This made me wonder what role locative and mobile media might play in this process. In his…
-
Scott McQuire’s The Media City
I just finished reading the highly interesting book The Media City by Scott McQuire. It is a philosophical approach to the role of media in the experience of the city. I found two insights worth sharing here. The first is that McQuire sees media not as a means of representation, but rather as a technology…