Stephen Graham - Sentient Cities

Sentient Cities: Ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space Steve Graham and Mike Crang Department of Geography University of Durham

Towards “Enacted Environments”: (Cuff, 2003)
RFIDs and the “Internet of things”: Also biometrics, algorithmic CCTV, tagging, new bordering technologies, ‘smart’ infrastructures, geodemographics, GPS etc.
Machine readable entities--sensors---databases to recognise and track individual ‘objects of interest’’
Ubiquitous computing and the promise of the always-on, everywhere network
Architectural and urban spaces continually animated, brought into being, and continually performed through ubicomp or ambient intelligence
’ Technological unconscious’ or ‘calculative background’ within which computers inhabit the most ordinary things

3 KEY STARTING POINTS ONE: Best understood not as a real/virtual binary of ‘real city’ & ‘virtual cyberspace.’ Rather, simply the latest process in long history of urban ‘ remediation’
‘ Cyberspace’ "is very much a part of our contemporary world. It is constituted through a series of remediations. As a digital network, cyberspace remediates the electric communications networks of the past 150 years, the telegraph and the telephone; as virtual reality, it remediates the visual space of painting, film, and television ; and as social space, it remediates such historical places as cities and parks and such 'nonplaces' as theme parks and shopping malls. Like other contemporary telemediated spaces, cyberspace refashions and extends earlier media, which are themselves embedded in material and social environments".
Bolter, J. and Grusin, R. (1999) Remediation : Understanding New Media, MIT Press.

TWO: Cities can be seen to emerge as
'fluid machines” -- places which
continuously combine ‘ distant proximity’
& ‘ proximate distance’ in all sorts of ways:
” There is a continual fluctuation of people, goods, data, and services as moving entities, together forming a society where the whole structure is in movement. This dynamic is supported by thousands of signs indicating both movement and intensity of urban flows. Each flow individually forms its complex horizontal network, further linked vertically through different transportation systems. Both new infrastructures and the hyper-concentration of facilities [in cities] create a strategic terrain for a network of international corporate cultures (international finance, telecommunications, information technology). These networks are open systems capable of absorbing new centres without causing instability"
Gutierrez and Portefaix (2000)

THREE: Paradoxically, ambient, ubiquitous or locative media, like all new technological systems, tend to become hidden and ‘disappear’ at precisely the moment that they become most important:
“ The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”
(Mark Weiser, 1991)

Socially ‘Black boxed’ to become the ‘engineer’s stuff’: ‘Infrastructure’
‘ Infrastructure’ is:
Embedded (i.e. “sunk into other structures);
Transparent (“it does not need to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task”);
Offers temporal or spatial reach or scope;
Is learned by its users;
Is linked to conventions of practice (e.g. routines of electricity use);
Embodies standards;
Is built on an installed base of sunk capital;
Is fixed in modular increments, not built all at once or globally; and
Tends to become visible when it fails (Susan Leigh-Star, 1999)

Multiple, Simultaneous, Trajectories
Currently, several, trajectories of ubiquitous computing development are emerging simultaneously
Each struggling to become ‘fixed’, normalised and standardised into technological systems as ‘infrastructure’
Need to maintain a perspective across and between :
1. Consumerisation
2. Militarisation/ securitisation
3. Urban activism and democratisation

1. Consumerisation; ‘Friction-Free’ Capitalism?
New ‘control revolution’ through persistent, pervasive & inter-operable surveillance and tracking
‘ Data-driven mass customization based on continuous, real-time monitoring of consumers’ (Andrejevic 2003)
‘ Bricks’n’clicks’ assemblages of electronic and material provision in this augmented landscape
Often used to ‘unbundle’ and recommodify public urban infrastructure into neoliberal mobility marketplaces
Reanimate long-standing utopian tropes of perfect flow, complete efficiency, seamless interconnection, annihilation of space through time

RFIDs: Smooth Flow, Just in Time Management, Ubiquitous Tracking

E.g. “Advanced User Resource Annotation “
Windows Mobile application AURA launched in December 2006. Aims to ‘connect shoppers on the go to a world of information about products’ (MS press release).
It depends upon objects being ‘coded’ in this case with a bar code. With an AURA-enabled device, you use a digital camera to snap the bar code on a product, which it will relate to the database held by Microsoft and will return links and search results about the item to the handheld device.

‘ Software-Sorting’ techniques often used to ‘unbundle’ and recommodify public urban infrastructure into neoliberal mobility marketplaces

Road Pricing: Unbundling Public Roadspace Monopolies:

The Internet: ‘Squelching the Scavenger Class’
Cisco (2002): "The Scavenger class [categorisation] is intended to provide differential services, or ‘less-than-Best-Effort"’ services, to certain applications", the document suggests. "Applications assigned to this class have little or no contribution to the organizational objectives of the enterprize. Assigning a minimal bandwidth queue to Scavenger traffic forces it to be squelched to virtually nothing during periods of congestion" .

Call Centres: The Politics of Speed-Up and Slow-Down
Avaya Corporation (2000):
"One of your best customers dials the national customer service number for your company. The ANI [Automatic Number Identification] database reveals the customer to be among the top 5% of your customers. [Our system] routes the customer at high priority. When the agent picks up the call, he hears a whispered announcement that this caller is ‘Top 5’"
This process increasingly automated…

“ The public sphere malled”? Kang and Cuff
Automatic detection of individuals
Dress code enforcement by reading clothing types of those entering
Detection and removal of ‘groups’
Radically unbundled pricing/ special offers e.g. ‘bookmarked’ stored in Japan
Electronic lists of excluded and ‘socially undesirable’
‘ Flatten’ public qualities of mall space

Code Place: Software-Sorted Cities
Online Geographic Information Systems (GISs) used to offer different services to different neighbourhoods

II Securitisation and Militarisation: Towards Passage-Point Urbanism?

Targeting
‘ War on terror’ securitisation practices cast urban anonymity a problem requiring, data-mining, profiling, anticipation and tracking to identify ‘targets;’ within urban and infrastructural ‘clutter’
Face-recognition CCTV: automated visual tracking infrastructures?
Gait-recognition
Telecoms/Net surveillance
ANPR tracking/ road pricing systems
Biometric borders/ RFID passports/ profiling algorithms
Call centre queuing

Code Space: Software-Sorted Mobilities

Code Face: Toward Software-Sorted Streets?

Surveillance Creep: Embedded Systems Become Securitised

The ‘New Manhattan Project’: Surveillance Systems for ‘Unconventional War Targets’
Defense Science Board (2004) US forces need another “Manhattan Project” for tracking and locating targets in ‘assymetric’ urban warfare to “locate, identify and track people, things and activities in an environment of one in a million”

DARPA’s Combat Zones That See: Persistent Urban Surveillance
Observing ‘change’ rather than ‘scenery’
Identify purported notions of urban ‘normality’ against the ‘abnormal’ behaviours and patterns that can then be assessed as targets.
CTS “explores concepts, develops algorithms, and delivers systems for utilising large numbers (1000s) of algorithmic video cameras to provide the close-in sensing demanded for military operations in urban terrain.”
“ Will produce video understanding algorithms embedded in surveillance systems for automatically monitoring video feeds to generate, for the first time, the reconnaissance, surveillance, and targeting information needed to provide close-in, continuous, always-on support for military operations in urban terrain”

“ Behind the fighters, military police and intelligence personnel process the inhabitants, electronically reading their attitudes toward the intervention and cataloguing them into a database immediately recoverable by every fire team in the city (even individual weapons might be able to read personal signatures, firing immediately upon cueing. Smart munitions track enemy systems and profiled individuals. Drones track inhabitants who have been ‘read’ as potentially hostile and ‘tagged’”
Defense Watch, 2004

Jordan Crandall: a militarisation through ‘Armed Vision’: “Tracking is an anticipatory form of seeing”
” Identifying targets becomes the role of statistical algorithms which sift the mass and flux of registered and sensed data searching for [Mark Seltzer’s]”‘statistical persons’”
“ A gradual colonization of the now, a now always slightly ahead of itself”
“ While civilian images are embedded in processes of identification based on reflection, militarised perspectives collapse identification processes into “Id-ing” - a one-way channel of identification in which a conduit, a database, and a body are aligned and calibrated” (Crandall 1999).
Tracking, ‘Security’ and Militarisation

III Art and Activism: Reenchanting, Reanimating, Repoliticising the City?
Calls to realise and reclaim the potentials of augmented spaces through art and activism. Direct challenge to visions of both sanitized and transparent corporate and commercial spaces and militarised and securitised spaces .
Technological reappropriation: ‘The new hybrid space also calls for new forms of public action. These can only be created and facilitated if the users of hybrid space learn to see the influence of relatively invisible digital structures and appropriate their technology where possible for alternative use.’ (Kraan 2006).
New social performances; address alienated experience; strive for (digital) reenchantment of world; opening out authorial empow-erment; build collective community and participatory endeavour; struggle against hegemonic commercialisation &/or securitisation

Locative Media and the ‘Viscosity’ of Space
‘ When information can actively find you on the street, there is a viscosity of space that forms between strangers with locative media, creating landscapes charged with traces of others that have inhabited the same space. In this early stage of location-based media, a greater connectivity and interaction between people who share a common interest, is thought to hold the promise of invigorating the public sphere to create an awareness and, therefore, a vitality of activity and public dialogue in spaces that might otherwise remain stagnant. This density and cohesion is more or less explicitly opposed to notions of disorientation and distractedness in contemporary urbanity” (Shirvanee 2006).

Hyperlinking the City e.g. Grafedia
Clickable environment
Grafedia written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content
Viewers "click" on these grafedia hyperlinks with cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net"
‘ every surface becomes potentially a web page, and the entire physical world can be joined with the Internet’
Tagging

Digital Collective Memory e.g. 34N118W:

Revealing Bodily Mobilities e.g. Urban Tapestries
Attempt to document the world as people experience it at street level and add a sense of bodily motion moving through and between sites
Accessed via handheld devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.
Allows people to author their own virtual annotations of the city
Enabling communities’ collective memories to grow organically
Allowing users to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city.
People can add new locations, location content and the ‘threads’ which link individual locations to local contexts.

Opening out authorial empowerment e.g. Yellow Arrow Guerrilla Mapping, Innsbruck
Massively Authored Artistic Publication
Arrows point to object – text in – poems politics and adverts

Participatory urban visualisations: e.g. Christian Nold’s Greenwich emotion map:
Instead of security technologies that are designed to control and surveill behavior, envisages new tools that allow people to selectively share and interpret their own bio data. Biomapping
Pooling data as people move
‘ Communal arousal surface’

Opening Out City as Gamespace e.g. Asphalt Games

‘ Relational Architecture’: Rafael Lozano Hemmer

Urban Screens: Making Things Public

Contesting Urban Data Politics e.g. Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles (NKLA)

Conclusions
Multiple visions of sentient urbanism: commercialisation, securitisation, art/activism. Each struggling to become fixed into infrastructure whilst striving to remediate urban life in various ways:
Relations between these important but poorly understood
An emerging urban and technological politics as each offers possibilities for new urban spatialities and temporalities. Relational politics linking ‘proximate distance’ with ‘distant proximity’.
Profoundly different treatment of social relationships.
Temporalities especially interesting: Environments are now being saturated with anticipatory technologies which delegate agency to invisible and sentient systems. These blur into local, urban environments, whilst enacting and organising transnational flows.
But may also contain memories and link to the past just as much as to anticipation of the future . May offer the possibility of enriched community formation -- sense of destabilising spaces or haunting them with absent others

Dreams of perfect transparency and omniscience are long-standing. But the linking technology within ambient technology is generally a ‘kludge’, as software designers call it.
Result, crucially, is a multitude of ‘Little Brothers’ not one ‘Big Brother’; a pan-urban ‘oligopticon’ with many gaps and spaces, failures and unintended effects, rather than an all-seeing , omniscient, and all-controlling urban ‘panopticon’.
‘ Mobile networks have to negotiate the architecture of spaces that they attempt to inhabit. The supposedly flat space of the network is in fact not flat, pulled into troughs and peaks by the gravity of architecture and the users themselves.’ (Manovich 2006)

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Stephen Graham - Sentient Cities

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