"Walking around a city will never be the same"

December 16, 2014 10:20 PM

We want our tools to sing of not just productivity but of our love of curiosity, the joy of wonderment, and the freshness of the unknown. —Eric Paulos, “Manifesto of Open Disruption and Participation”

In his essay “Walking in the City,” the French scholar Michel de Certeau talks about the “invisible identities of the visible.” He is talking specifically about the memories and personal narratives associated with a location. Until recently, this information was only accessible one-to-one—that is, by talking to people who had knowledge of a place. But what if that data became one-to-many, or even many-to-many, and easily accessible via some sort of street-level interface that could be accessed manually, or wirelessly using a smartphone?

The Too-Smart City

Behind the alluring vision, they argue, lurk a number of troubling questions. A city tracking its citizens, even for helpful reasons, encroaches on the personal liberty we count on in public spaces. The crucial software systems and networks that underlie city services will likely lie in private hands. And the more successful smart-city programs become, the more they risk diverting resources into the problems that can be solved with technology, rather than grappling with difficult issues that can’t be easily fixed with an app.

City Smart - "Data technology is transforming urban governance."

Watch Dogs is the first videogame to provide a widely explorable simulation of an urban environment that is itself, within the fiction, extensively computer-controlled, and so can be taken over by a tech wiz with a customized smartphone.

Smart city thinking, from Seattle to New York

posted by the man of twists and turns (28 comments total)

MeFi's own Charles Stross writes On the subject of ubiquitous computing devices and urban architecture
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:22 PM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

They're not ubiquitous for everyone.
posted by bradbane at 10:24 PM on December 16, 2014 [10 favorites]

bradbane:

THANK YOU!!!!

Seriously. This is something important to realize.
posted by daq at 11:19 PM on December 16, 2014

This reminds me of that kindle feature where you can see other people's highlights, only for places.
posted by betweenthebars at 11:31 PM on December 16, 2014

I think the fundamental concept of being able to stand in front of a given building and know the location's history, including personal remembrances of people who worked or lived or shopped there, would be awesome, and it's something I do for local businesses (without the app). It's an arduous manual process but I'm building a bit of a database, and it would be fun to tie a bunch of disparate sources together to automate it.

I'm not sure I want to have the app "mark" that I was there last week, though. It just reeks of privacy issues to go that route...but then, it deprives future app users of knowing that date in history and of my impression on that place in that time. Add to that the vultures from the ad and marketing demographic companies, and it becomes a really snarly issue.

So it's tricky. And I can relate.
posted by disclaimer at 11:34 PM on December 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

This is a shameless plug so Im not sure if this is mefi kosher, but for a college course a couple friends and I created a GPS photo sharing app pretty much for exactly the stuff this thread is talking about. We wanted to create a sort of localized guest book of the world using our android phones. We just posted this to the store a couple days ago, and its very much a student project, but check us out!

Each image can only be seen in about a 1 block area, and you can leave comments and vote and junk and stuff. We dont store any image metadata besides the pseudo-anonymous user name of the poster and the timestamp. We also dont store any data about our users, so dont forget your password!
posted by KeSetAffinityThread at 11:55 PM on December 16, 2014 [3 favorites]

I’ve been messing around with Ingress lately, which is a gamified version of “Urban Computing.” Two factions battle over control of “portals,” which when created have to be approved by some official to prevent businesses spamming it with their own locations, or individuals gaining competitive advantage by creating portals in their own bathrooms.

The portals are usually landmarks or public artworks; it encourages wandering around and finding interesting stuff as well as interacting with strangers from your faction. At the moment it’s a relatively simplistic GPS ARG with a fictional backstory, but there’s definitely food for thought to be had as to how it could be extended to augment rather than pollute the walking-around experience.
posted by El Mariachi at 1:18 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Until recently, this information was only accessible one-to-one—that is, by talking to people who had knowledge of a place

Those poor saps.
posted by headnsouth at 4:35 AM on December 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

This reminds me of that kindle feature where you can see other people's highlights, only for places.

Yes, and I don't like that, either.

Are there not enough terminally uninteresting selfies and tweets and meal pictures already? Do they have to be plastered all over the landscape as well? Just because you call it the 'invisible identities of the visible' doesn't make it worth having.

I reckon the means of delivery are great already, it's the content that needs more work.
posted by Segundus at 4:36 AM on December 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

> They're not ubiquitous for everyone.

That's becoming a has/has not divide. Not only in terms of status, wealth, and technical acumen, but even the will to change to this new mode of interaction. I can already make an informed guess, when driving local roads, when the driver ahead of me is getting navigation instructions for someone over the phone and when they're driving by their GPS. The former is usually driving more hesitantly, with sudden stops, lurches across lanes, and so on. The latter is not necessarily a better driver (I've noticed many people don't know how to drive to turn-by-turn directions either) but they're less alarming to other drivers.

The affects of people with and without smartphones is going to bifurcate in other ways. It's reflexive now to pull out the phone to look things up, whether that thing is the name of Hammurabi's drinking buddy or the competing prices for something when I'm shopping. When I'm out with a group and we split up, we don't bother to arrange rendezvous any more. We just text each other with where we are and where we plan to eat. And now we (some of the collective 'we' anyway) are becoming able to pay with our phones at the store, and get discounts on things that non-smartphone owners can't get. With health apps we'll be able to optimize our activities. We'll increasingly be able to navigate through cities and buildings with assistance and advantages that were previously impossible.

I'm leery of the idea of smartphones becoming mandatory and indispensable. But when I think about what is simple for me now that used to be complicated or simply require a lot more preparation (navigating in a new city, arranging a meeting, being an informed shopper) I'm not sure that the alternative is better.
posted by ardgedee at 4:43 AM on December 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

They're not ubiquitous for everyone.

I'm a little confused-could you clarify what this means with regards to the last link, the one that says "ubiquitous"? I'm not sure how to understand your statement in the context of municipal millimeter-square passive monitoring and computing devices.

Or did you not RTFA?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:51 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Adam Greenfield would like you to know about his Against The Smart City. (Discussed here.) I am not Adam Greenfield, but I agree with him.

It's complicated. Easy access to mapping and location can be used in clever ways, sometimes in emergent ways. Citymapper opens up routes around London that you wouldn't usually take. There are still points of resistance (underground, still, in three-dimensional cities). It doesn't have to be push-push-push, but the capacity to produce data-noise favours those with the money.
posted by holgate at 4:55 AM on December 17, 2014

For me the idea of an annotated landscape began when I first started
Geocaching 10 years ago. I have wondered how my perceptions might escape the small band of participants and become more than an inside joke (there's a container in that tree, etc.). I've also played Ingress. Both of those experiences are user-centric. There is no environment radiating a shared commentary. Or the environment is unaware of the commentary. That's what I want.
posted by grimjeer at 5:03 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

. . . get discounts on things that non-smartphone owners can't get.

These aren't discounts - they're small incentives to encourage you to provide more data about yourself to marketers.

With health apps we'll be able to optimize our activities.

Those, too: Here's Looking at You: How Personal Health Information Is Being Tracked and Used [California Health Care Foundation]

The "smart city" - as the Globe article linked to in the FPP indicates - is, before anything else, a panopticon.
posted by ryanshepard at 5:03 AM on December 17, 2014 [4 favorites]

Yeah, there's a lot going on with regards to how others watch you through your devices, but that's also been discussed a lot in previous posts and, basically, typing long comments on this smartphone is a nuisance... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by ardgedee at 5:12 AM on December 17, 2014

There are a lot of really fascinating applications of the ability to geotag and geolocate using computing devices (stationary and mobile), but it's worth taking a step back to historicize this process, because the impulse certainly isn't new. . Before there was geocaching, of course, there was letterboxing. And long before there was letterboxing, there were historical markers and annotated guides, and long before there were those, there was cartography, which is essentially the same idea - a map or chart being a portable device rendering the unseeable (what's around that corner? What's beyond that line of longitude? What kinds of animals and plants are there? What people will I encounter?) seeable. Public history is all about uncovering layers in the landscape; I always feel haunted by history in a city, or really anywhereThe desire to inscribe memory and fantasy on the landscape is as old as humanity - we just have some shiny new ways of doing it. Not that those ways aren't wonderful, but I believe we lose a lot of useful know-how and potential evaluation data by only looking at post-personal-computing developments in this field.
posted by Miko at 5:21 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ingress looks awesome, by the way. I'm super interested in how it's built around public art and sharing with museum peeps today. Downloaded, and going to play!
posted by Miko at 5:34 AM on December 17, 2014

The "smart city" - as the Globe article linked to in the FPP indicates - is, before anything else, a panopticon.

Personally I am completely in support of cities using pervasive computing to make traffic flow smarter or to create efficiencies in utility provision. But it's clear that the first and main use for this is always for the modern police state, which uses technology to maintain a light touch and yet see everything (there's no need to ask to see your papers when the cameras have been tracking automatically). There was a recent article in the New Yorker about some doofuses who got in trouble for base jumping off of the under-construction Trade Center building in NYC -- they got caught so easily because of course the police are tracking and recording every vehicle license plate across large swaths of the city.

That is ubiquitous computing, more than a geotagging option for people to talk about buildings.

The has/has not gap for smart phones is shrinking quickly, and will continue to do so as cheaper devices become available. The gap in knowledge will probably be much more persistent than the gap in technology, as you can see everyday at the public library where people are struggling to figure out how to access all of the services (job applications, social service forms, etc) that are now only online.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:36 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Until recently, this information was only accessible one-to-one—that is, by talking to people who had knowledge of a place

Yes, we used to call this app "Grandpa."
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:09 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

i've bookmarked this for later reading, but from a light parsing i can't help butt think of Paul Virilio, Guy Debord and Black Mirror.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 6:14 AM on December 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

They're not ubiquitous for everyone.

Look to Estonia for your digital future, where the poor are left out of the exciting future-world.

Kalinin's problems are not unique, says Mati Sinisaar, an Estonian pastor who works with the unemployed man's sons and other needy Russian children.

"I was asking these young people why they are out of school. I asked what is the main reason you feel you are more poor than your friends in school?" he recalled. "I was waiting that maybe they say because of bad shoes, maybe bad clothes, maybe not enough food. They say that they drop out of society because they don't have Internet connection at home."

When everything is done via the internet, one way or another, being without an internet-connected device will truly leave you in the dark. The "ubiquitous" smart devices aren't truly ubiquitous (yet).
posted by filthy light thief at 6:19 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

I don't really need a smart phone to do this. I've lived almost my entire adult life in the same city and have mostly spent my time in one quadrant of that city so I constantly feel like I'm surrounded by ghosts of what used to be there. Everywhere I go, I feel surrounded by earlier versions of myself who were going into that same store or walking down that same street when it was something totally different. When I'm in the Trader Joe's, I get images in my head my much younger self working as a painting contractor and shopping at Wheeler's Paint Store that was where TJs is now. Everywhere I walk or drive around the city, I can see flashes of what was there before gentrification started changing the city radically.
posted by octothorpe at 6:29 AM on December 17, 2014 [5 favorites]

And now we (some of the collective 'we' anyway) are becoming able to pay with our phones at the store, and get discounts on things that non-smartphone owners can't get. With health apps we'll be able to optimize our activities. We'll increasingly be able to navigate through cities and buildings with assistance and advantages that were previously impossible.

Yes, I can't wait to get a smartphone and get my additional "discounts" and "optimize" my activities. Seriously, if this were some kind of Samuel-Delany-Stars-In-My-Pocket-style utopian system lodged firmly in an Iain Banksian post-scarcity society, yes, it would be really neat. But this is just more neoliberalization of our interior lives, plus more social control - we are responsible for "optimizing" (or failing to optimize) our every single decision, and our insurance, access to care, moral standing in society, believability, etc, are starting to ride more and more on how we have "optimized" our choices and built our brands*.

I mean, I have an aesthetic distaste for the whole thing - being "plugged in" to a stream of advertising, marketing and cultural propaganda every minute of every day and modulating my daily activities accordingly, never getting a break from sending and receiving messages, having to take great effort just to get uninterrupted time alone to think or read, making sure to perform a slightly transgressive but basically compliant online "self" that is attractive to employers, potential romantic partners, friends, advertisers, etc....And having this track me every step I take, so that I am never, even for a moment, alone...."And the lights must never go off, and the music must always play/ Lest we should see where we are, lost in a haunted wood/Children afraid of the dark/Who have never been happy or good", to quote a bad but haunting little bit of doggerel by George Orwell.

There's this assumption that more information without more time to think about it or understand it is neccessarily a good, and this accompanying assumption that being able to track everything all the time is also a good. The further I get into accounting, the more I see that a central philosophical problem of the age is knowing when tracking actually hurts the system itself.

*Consider not only how insurance/healthcare are getting more and more intrusive - surely they'll soon be even nosier about our every workout and kale chip - but how much you need to preserve your credibility online if you plan to have any kind of public life. What happens when we can not only track rando Facebook stuff about everyone, but actually where they go and how they spend their time. "Oh, you are complaining about unequal access to medical care, but look who went to McDonalds six times last month!!!"
posted by Frowner at 6:36 AM on December 17, 2014 [8 favorites]

but then, it deprives future app users of knowing that date in history and of my impression on that place in that time.

Oh no! How will mankind survive?
posted by Sangermaine at 6:43 AM on December 17, 2014

There's this assumption that more information without more time to think about it or understand it is neccessarily a good, and this accompanying assumption that being able to track everything all the time is also a good. The further I get into accounting, the more I see that a central philosophical problem of the age is knowing when tracking actually hurts the system itself.

Filters are the future.

Unfortunately the current app model and recent moves by the social media titans are all about destroying the ability of the user to effectively filter.

I love information. I love the possibility of diving deep on information about my current physical location. I'm even okay about discovering deals and offers close by. WHEN I WANT TO.
posted by srboisvert at 7:43 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

but then, it deprives future app users of knowing that date in history and of my impression on that place in that time.

Oh no! How will mankind survive?
posted by Sangermaine at 9:43 AM on December 17 [+] [!]


We'll be fine, Sangermaine. I wouldn't worry about it too much. No need to get all worked up. I was ruminating on a trivial philosophical point; I didn't mean to scare you.
posted by disclaimer at 8:07 AM on December 17, 2014

I thought of this right away: The death of the cyberflaneur.

Walking around a city accompanied by only my own thoughts is a privilege, not a disadvantage. Long story short, I'd prefer to design my own sandwich board.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 8:55 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Can't wait to read through all this tonight, great post.

I am ever more convinced that we are still barely beginning to see the social changes that will come from full mainstreaming of virtual spaces. There is still a radical lack of agreement or understanding around how pervasive computing, networking and information feeds maps onto social life. It's heartening though to see people considering more how the dynamics of social life change as their physically-defined internal logics and limitations get translated onto the very differently delimited terrain of virtual worlds.
posted by MetropolisOfMentalLife at 11:44 AM on December 17, 2014