Urban Communications: making things public
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This document contains excerpts from various sources on the topics of communication, public spaces, and communities. It discusses how new communication technologies have changed interactions both in physical and virtual spaces. Specifically, it mentions how writing ended oral traditions and gave rise to towns, and how modern media like newspapers and magazines allow people to avoid social contact in public. The document also examines local storytelling, social networks, and sense of community in geographical neighborhoods.
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Urban Communications: making things public
- 2. “The new urban design task is not one of configuring buildings, streets, and public spaces to meet the needs and aspirations of the civitas, but one of writing computer code and deploying software objects to create virtual places” CITY OF BITS
- 5. THE BIAS OF COMMUNICATION BABYLONIAN TABLET britishmuseum.org EGYPTIAN PAPYRUS britishmuseum.org
- 6. "Until writing was invented, men lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless... The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns" THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE
- 7. “Merchants outgrew the confining framework of the towns and in the form of companies linked themselves directly with the state" THE PUBLIC SPHERE
- 9. THE DEATH OF THE REAL?
- 10. THE DEATH OF THE REAL?
- 11. Civil inattention: “the slightest of interpersonal rituals, yet one that constantly regulates the social intercourse of persons in our society” Newspapers and magazines "[allow] us to carry around a screen that can be raised at any time to give ourselves and others an excuse for not initiating contact" BEHAVIOUR IN PUBLIC PLACES
- 12. Civil inattention: “the slightest of interpersonal rituals, yet one that constantly regulates the social intercourse of persons in our society” Newspapers and magazines "[allow] us to carry around a screen that can be raised at any time to give ourselves and others an excuse for not initiating contact" BEHAVIOUR IN PUBLIC PLACES
- 16. STAGED COMMUNICATIONS SPACES LOCAL STORYTELLING “The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves” Hannah Arendt (1958) The key element is that the neighbourhood is the referent. They are stories about ‘us’ in ‘this geographical space’. Such stories are the building blocks of the ability to ‘imagine’ an area as a community Yong-Chan Kim and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach (2006)
- 17. LOCAL NETWORKS Twitter discussion of #Brockley LOCAL NETWORKS
- 18. LOCAL NETWORKS @BrockleyCentral followers Stephen Law & John Bingham-Hall
- 19. LOCAL NETWORKS
- 20. LOCAL NETWORKS
- 21. BIBLIOGRAPHY Arendt, H., 1987. The Public Realm: The Common, in: Lilla, M., Glazer, N. (Eds.), The Public Face of Architecture. The Free Press, London & New York, pp. 4–12. Cairncross, F., 2001. The Death of Distance 2.0: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives. Texere, London & New York. Converse, P.E., 1967. The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics, in: Apter, D.E. (Ed.), Ideology and Discontent. Free Press, New York, pp. 206–261. Cooper, D., 2006. “ Sometimes a community and sometimes a battlefield”: from the comedic public sphere to the commons of Speakers’ Corner. Environ. Plan. D 24, 753. Couldry, N., 2002. Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. Routledge, Abingdon. De Sola Pool, I., 1977. The Social impact of the telephone. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Glaeser, E., Scheinkman, J., 2000. The Future of Urban Economics: Non-Market Interactions. Brook.-Whart. Pap. Urban Aff. 101–150. Goffman, E., 1966. Behavior in Public Places. Simon and Schuster, New York City. Habermas, J., 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. MIT Press. Hillier, B., 1997. Cities as movement economies. Intell. Environ. Spat. Asp. Inf. Revolut. North Holl. Amst. Neth. 295–342. Innis, H.A., 1951. The Bias of Communication, 2nd ed. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Law, J., Williams, K., Sukhdev, J., 2014. From Publics to Congregations (No. 138), CRESC Working Papers. CRESC, Manchester & Milton Keynes. McLuhan, M., Fiore, Q., 1967. The Medium is the Massage: an inventory of effects. Penguin, London. Mitchell, W.J., 1996. City of bits : space, place, and the infobahn. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA & London. Pearlman, N., 2010. Downloading and Uploading: the foundations of public space, in: Boullet, V. (Ed.), The Sound of Downloading Makes Me Want to Upload. Lauren Monchar. Zook, M., 2005. The Geography of the Internet. Blackwell, Oxford. Zukin, S., 1996. The Cultures of Cities. Wiley.
Editor's Notes
- It was popular in academic commentary in the late 1990s to suggest that communication technology and particularly the internet would dramatically reformulate urban materiality by removing the need for the city to create physical proximity in order for information to be produced and shared. In the most extreme version of this, William Mitchell argued that the new urban design task is not one of configuring buildings, streets, and public spaces to meet the needs and aspirations of the civitas, but one of writing computer code and deploying software objects to create virtual places. The specter of this viewpoint regularly rears its head in the popular media in various forms. We are constantly reminded that the mobile phone is destroying “real” life, and therefore either implicitly or explicitly the “real” city. Academic approaches have largely moved on from here, and more usually now treat communication technologies with various strains of optimism. These range from the more cautious, in which new communication forms like social media could re-invigorate democratic and community-building processes, to the fetishistic – in which every aspect of the city is predicted to become smart through the constant collection and communication of data. In my view, though, there is something missing in both of these lines of thinking, and that is the understanding that communication in cities is by no means something new. I wish to argue for a greater appreciation of the inextricable relationship between urban form and communication throughout history. People in this room have rightly shown that we can better understand the future development of urban form by looking at its past. I would say the same is true for communication, that by understanding better the past relationship between place, community and changing forms of communication we might have a more grounded approach to the current and future effects of technology on cities. This isn’t by any means a fully formed argument, and its something I’m developing as part of the background to my research into hyperlocal blogging and social media in Brockley in London. So I want to share with you some theories and examples that illustrate what I mean in the hope that this kind of research can find more of a natural home within the school and lab.
- The development of urban concentration has always been closely bound up with communication infrastructure. The city, as a concentration of conflicting demands, is a generator of public and civic law that requires codification and storage in media. Information also flows alongside trade. Knowledge of paper production spread west from China along the silk roads and trading nodes at their intersections, like Baghdad, became early centres for the production of paper in the 8th Century. The famous Library of Ancient Alexandria arguably became the first undertaking to gather together the world’s knowledge in the 3rd Century BCE, and it was able to do so because of the city’s position as a hub for trading routes across the Mediterranean. Still now, when a large portion of our economy is generated by the flow of information and money both in the form of data, cities are the spatial nodes in this network of exchange. Matthew Zook showed that most of the content of the Worldwide Web is produced in cities,
- and they also contain the key physical junctures of the Internet in the form of giant cable interchanges known in the USA as telecom carrier hotels. So urban conurbations have long held control over the means of communication. But the relationship is also more nuanced.
- Harold Innis has described a history of communication in relation to the spatial form of societies, showing how dominant modes of communication shape socio-spatial relations. In the most abstract terms, the oral tradition perpetuates small, local societies that are stable throughout time, whereas the introduction of conquest through armed force necessitated the development of writing to support the expansion of society across space. Innis also gives more specific examples. The Egyptian and Roman empires encoded written law on papyrus and scroll, meaning urban centres of power flourished and held sway over a large and changing empire through a flexible and constantly updated code of law. Ancient Babylonia, on the other hand, communicated using cuneiform script engraved in stone requiring huge skill and physical effort to be produced. Consequently, power was decentralized and focused around monastery communities across the empire where cuneiform engraving was practiced, and the laws they literally set in stone became stable and deified.
- Innis was a senior colleague of the young Marshall MacLuhan and his ideas were formative for the popular text The Medium is the Massage, in which MacLuhan re-asserted that writing itself brought architecture and towns and popularized the idea that the structure of communication has greater implication than its content.
- Jurgen Habermas credits communication not only with shaping society but with the emergence of the nation as a spatial unit. In the 17th century, great merchants "outgrew the confining framework of the towns and in the form of companies linked themselves directly with the state". National communication infrastructure such as the establishment of a postal service in the 16th century, supported these changes. Burghers, or individual traders whose status was linked to a specific town saw downwards social mobility while the social stratum of a bourgeoisie concerned with state regulation of trade emerged as a national public. In this newly mediated public realm of letters, taste, opinion and politics were diffused in written, linguistic forms. In the 17th century the press was beginning to establish itself as the natural vehicle for this national public opinion. For the first time the private royal court had to legitimize itself as a public institutions before this media voice. In Habermas’ telling the public is not itself something spatial but at its very core created by mediated communication. The revered 17th century coffee houses, for example, were not actually places of unstructured and unmediated encounter, but where this new “reading public” as Habermas calls it, came together to pore over and discuss the latest national or foreign issues framed by newspapers.
- The next great technological shift in communication came loosely with the invention of the telegraph and telephone, meaning messages could be communicated using light and electricity, allowing the separation of the infrastructure of travel and communication, and for symbols to move independently of geography as James Carey has put it. But history has shown that the overcoming of geography through communication did not lead inexorably to deconcentration but was in fact simultaneous with the birth of the super-dense highrise downtown. As Ithiel de Sola Pool put it “being up there on the 20th floor without a telephone would be an intolerable burden to communication”. Modern economist Ed Glaeser has noticed that the paradox of the modern metropolis is that as communication technology makes it easy for workers and companies to operate anywhere, the concentrate in large conurbations. In 2001 Frances Cairncross heralded modern communication as the death of distance, but rather than predicting the dissolution of cities rightly suggested that the spatial flexibility of work would in fact allow once again the use of the home as a workshop and the re-invigoration of local centres and communities as a result.
- So why, then, is it so often felt that the newest forms of communication technology are some kind of affront to the public? We will all have seen headlines heralding the death of the public and the real in the face of smart phones or social media, for example. And whilst urban designers are now often working with communication technologies, the aim is so often to increase “interaction” in public space, as if this is the only home that a legitimate public life has in our cities.
- In fact, older images suggest that phones are not the first form of media to come between people in public spaces. The relationship between ummediated interpersonal interaction in public space and participation in a wider public sphere through media should be much better understood within urbanism if we are to really appreciate the source of social vitality in our cities. Sociologist Nick Couldry sees media as a shared reality through which we imagine social collectivities and learn how to structure everyday life. Something like the “description retrieval” described in the social logic of space as the learning of society by reading the built environment. Media enable communications, human society exists in communications. As Ricouer has said, substituting signs for things is the essence of the social. John Law explains this further. Publics do not exist a priori, but comes into being when a particular issue is framed by media. Publics then are as multiple and overlapping as issues. Issues help perform geographical entities as coherent territories. For example, he says, "GDP projections coincidentally help to perform that patch of territory we call the UK as a social and economic reality. Rolled into a narrative ‘the UK’ becomes something that we can relate to and retell" (Law, Williams, and Sukhdev 2014). This works too, of course, at more local scales and as I will touch upon later the city or neighbourhood can also be imagined as a coherent reality through issue framing in media. So mediated communications can also be the place that a public comes into being. And their work to frame issues and connect is in fact explicitly not something that public space does. This is something we can probably relate to more clearly by stepping out of our roles as theorists and designers of the urban and reflecting on our day-to-day use of public space. Myself, on the underground very recently I heard a lone man quite calmly but audibly verbalizing some pretty eloquent views on the British monarchy, pointing out to everyone and no-one in particular that he was a citizen and not a subject who had not voted for a Queen and therefore refused to recognize her authority. A fair point well made I thought. But I also asked myself why this spectacle was causing such discomfort to me and everyone else on the train, as far as I could tell by their uncomfortable shifting and averted eyes?
- Because, perhaps, the framing and constructing of a specified setting for communication is essential in preparing us to encounter opinions or issues. Erving Goffman describes this in detail in Behaviour in Public Places. For him, all social relations are communicative actions, including the entirely unfocused and non-verbal forms of communication that are required for the physical navigation of bodies in public space. He goes so far as to suggest that the mutually agreed avoidance of verbal communication, or “civil inattention”, is an essential communicative ritual that regulates public space and allows the smooth co-existence of the crowd in public space. Hannah Arendt acknowledges a similar effect when she say that public space should “relate and separate” – it does not work as a direct communicative medium but is instead something we are mutually aware of witnessing. We engage in public life by using space rather than by communicating in it. In order to transgress this separation and inattention, we create communication settings. Goffman describes many ways this can be achieved, through spatial delineation or bodily strategies, temporarily and permanently. Public furniture can often create a temporary communication setting – it is not untoward to talk to someone sharing a park bench or café table for example. People wearing certain kinds of uniform or in “exposed positions” such as being lost or injured are also endowed with the right to engage with the unacquainted, as Goffman puts it. His examples assume the fairly normative behavioural codes of civil society, but they do serve to highlight the fact that communication in public space is an exception rather than a norm and must be set up spatially or behaviourally. In fact, writing in the 1960s, Goffman celebrated newspapers and mahazines for allowing us to “carry around a screen that can be raised at any time to give ourselves and others an excuse for not initiating contact", in difficult situations where civil inattention is hard to maintain, like on public transport. I wonder whether Goffman would have seen the mobile phone as an inevitable extension of this. And just like forms of media, that have their limitations and affordances, communication settings do too. Architecturally-defined settings are perhaps the clearest. This seminar room, for example, contains a set of actors who have knowingly entered into semi-private co-presence within an architectural enclosure allowing unmediated interpersonal verbal and non-verbal communication, but also contain devices for mediated forms of communication. The language is to a degree specified by the institutional setting and the limitations on access that implies. In this setting I have been handed a license to be the main producer of information, for now at least, but structurally we are all equally able to be both transmitters and receivers. So thinking again about my pro-Republican fellow traveller on the tube, what did he fail to understand about communication settings? His partisan stance on a national political issue would fit more comfortably in the comment section of a broadsheet newspaper, as an issue framing. But a newspaper produces an asymmetric, one-directional relationship between participants in which only those professionally qualified and paid by the newspaper are allowed to produce information. The readers, on the receiving end of this one-directional flow of information, are physically disconnected from one another. However they do have a mediated connection with one another through membership of the virtual community of an “issue public”, gaining a transpatial label as pro- or op-ponents of the issue of de-monarchisation in the UK.
- Nina Pearlman has put this another way, using the terminology of digital technology to suggest that when a common material is put into the public realm by an uploader a potential set of partakers – downloaders - are linked and form into what we could call a public over the shared experience of the common material available in that mediated setting (Pearlman 2010). Of course the implications of the newspaper’s structure as a setting is that it reinforces the communicative privilege of the educated middle classes over those with weaker positions in society, and because we pre-filter the incoming signal through our choices of media product. Hence we have more recent additions to the spectrum of communication settings including social media, forums and blogs, which are lauded for allowing the de-professionalization and democratization of opinion-production and a media landscape that more closely resembles the unstructured and unfiltered encounters of public space. But there is a key distinction. Public space is not a setting in which we will easily accept the verbalization of political opinion. Whether professionalized and asymmetrical or de-professionalized and more even, public opinion, or issue framing, seems to belong comfortably in the mediated realm of the image and the written word where opinions do not have to be attached to bodies. So the verbal framing of issues in public, even if those issues may be of public concern, disrupts the essential and delicate regulation of public space and therefore is to be avoided, at the cost of becoming a pariah. Members of issue publics may be co-present in space but their connection remains virtual because the discourse of public opinion is, within that space and that communication setting, subservient to the upkeep of public order. Because we do not carry our transpatial identities as issue publics visibly the negotiation of other kinds of transpatial difference that are often visible on the body or through physical performance – ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality – becomes easier. As we learn from the social logic of space, interiors are highly enculturated containers of identity with strong constraints on entry and create the patterns of socio-spatial distribution that make social structure, whilst public space brings these identities back together in an unstructured realm of generic use. We could extend this distinction, though, to describe our communicative behaviours as well as our spatial ones. Through mediated communication settings that are specific to the types of content we use them for we can verbalize and specify issues that define us. Public space, on the other hand, supports generic functions such as movement from one location to another (Hillier 1997). By suppressing our communicative subjectivity in service of the successful performance of these functions along with many diverse others, the categorical divides that are framed through the making explicit of issues in media are overcome by the successful co-negotiation of public space. Therefore what we speak of as the “public” in the urban discourse, usually thought of as the crowd of bodies moving through and occupying urban spaces, is too limited a concept… In fact, I would say, the city is a machine for creating the kind of mediated public I’ve described. As a dense web of overlapping and conflicting claims on space and resources it constantly generates issues, and as a byproduct becomes a concentration of media sources that frame and disseminate these issues. Without issues that bring publics into being, the populations of space would simply be crowds, furrowed in individualized pursuits without awareness of the network of effects and the capacity for knowing others categorically. And without public space, we would not encounter the others that bring physical reality to the virtual communities of issue publics. Communication technologies are an absolutely intrinsic part of the conversion of crowds to publics.
- Sometimes though, these virtual publics do come together in time and space, in what John Law calls a congregation. In special forms of ritual we mark out events and places in the city to stage issue framing in discursive communication. Protest – not just a physical gathering but an opportunity for opinions to be voiced in public space. A form of what John Law would call a congregation – the coming together in space and time of an issue public.
- Speaker’s Corner – a place legally marked out for the expressing of opinion and in which criticism of the state is protected. Regularly occupied though by the mentally ill, who can take refuge in this specialized form of public space. So how could we look syntactically at how and where communication happens?
- My current research investigates the use of communication technology in a London neighbourhood. I don’t want to go into full depth on this here, but highlight a couple of aspects that potentially show interesting relationships between communication patterns and space. I spoke to readers of a local news blog. Respondents didn’t report coming into direct contact with one another, but simply reading stories about their own locality enabled them to imagine it as a place. Communications weren’t instrumental – for example political organization – but as important simply because they were specific to place. I asked them to draw out their locality, and rather than having a defined outline it was a concentration of placeness around the locations that the blog frames as issues.
- It didn’t matter whether they came into direct communication. The important thing was to know that other people in the area were witnessing the same stories. Sandra Ball-Rokeach has described this perfectly. "The key element is that the neighbourhood is the referent. They are stories about ‘us’ in ‘this geographical space’. Such stories are the building blocks of the ability to ‘imagine’ an area as a community".
- Local businesses though had a different kind of connection. They are visible in space and embedded in location. They regularly engage with one another in discussion about Brockley, becoming sources of local information for their customers, as much as they are providers of local services. For them, location was important in community-forming at a highly granular level, following patterns in the built environment.
- This is the network of following relationships between followers of the blog’s Twitter feed. Network analysis software groups people into sub-communities according to concentrations of following relationships.
- When these are mapped onto space, they turn out also to be spatial communities. An idea that I haven’t followed up in full yet is how these links might relate to the network of space.
- When these are mapped onto space, they turn out also to be spatial communities. An idea that I haven’t followed up in full yet is how these links might relate to the network of space.
- Sharon Zukin says public culture is “produced by the many social encounters that make up daily life in the streets, shops, and parks – the spaces in which we experience public life in cities” (Zukin, 1996, p. 11). But I would argue this is too limited a view. Public life is only partially, and arguably minimally, produced by the unfocused encounters of the crowded public space. Even before media became the platform for a large proportion of our public debate it was institutions – guilds, societies and trading corporations – that were the loci of public life. The peasant in the street was excluded from these publics and limited to purely spatial forms of society. So whilst Castells defines the information era as one in which the disadvantaged are trapped in space whilst the global communication elite engage in transnational flows of culture and commerce, this is only an expansion of the spatial scale of privilege. Power has always meant access to institutions that span space through control over the means of communication, be it the medieval guild that created value by acting as gatekeeper to a citywide network of tradesman or the stock exchange that now creates value by controlling global economic communication routes. We do not yet know fully what power will be held by the owners of communication media like Facebook and Twitter, who are currently in a process of negotiating their relationship to public law through such legal issues as freedom of information and eavesdropping. Essentially, though, the important thing to recognize is that communication is not inherently anti-urban, as has become implicit in the rhetoric that would suggest that media erode the quality of the “true” public life of the streets. Cities are where both the gatekeepers and the participants of communication networks are located, and they are the sources from which the content of communications are derived. They are intense and successful generators of transactions – economic, informational, physical and social. Using the framework of communication settings, we can describe the limitations and affordances of places and media in comparable terms, and no longer need to see public space and public communication as antithetical and in competition with one another.