Urbane-ing The City: Examining and Refining The Assumptions Behind Urban Informatics

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Urbane-ing The City: Examining and Refining The Assumptions Behind Urban Informatics

Amanda Williams1, Erica Robles2, and Paul Dourish1 1University of California, Irvine, USA 2Stanford University, USA ABSTRACT

This chapter critically examines the notion of “the city” within urban informatics. Arguing that there is an overarching tendency to construe the city as an economically and spatially distinct social form, we review a series of system designs manifesting this assumption. Systematically characterizing the city as a dense ecology of impersonal social interactions occurring within recognizably public places, this construction can be traced to turn-of-the-century scholarship about the metropolis. The idealized dweller of these spaces, the flâneur, functions as the prototypical user for urban computing technologies. This assumption constrains the domain of application for emergent technologies by narrowing our conception of the urban experience. Drawing on contemporary urban scholarship, we advocate an alternative perspective which foregrounds the experience rather than the form of the metropolis. Users become actors embedded in global networks of mobile people, goods, and information, positioned in a fundamentally heterogeneous and splintered milieu. Grounding this approach in a preliminary study of mobility practices in Bangkok, Thailand, we illustrate how urban informatics might refine its subject, accounting for local particularities between cities as well as the broader global networks of connection between these sites. INTRODUCTION

Over the past several years, “urban informatics” has emerged as a significant research area, drawing together researchers from various disciplines to focus on problems and opportunities at the intersection of computer science, design, urban studies, and new media art. This volume, for example, attests to the richness and diversity of this program.

Relying on the city as a unique and important context for investigation and design, the endeavor remains, in many ways, marked by contradictions. On the one hand, a city can be a specific setting for technologies that might otherwise be dubbed “ubiquitous” and, in their ubiquity, be located nowhere in particular. On the other hand, “the city” is a highly generalized site; to speak of “the city” is to strip away the specificities of particular cities. Indeed, urban informatics is marked by a focus on world cities at once globally similar but locally specific: New York rather than Boise, Paris rather than Arles, Sydney rather than Wagga Wagga. Similarly, while the city is a social and cultural phenomenon that speaks to complex ensembles of economic, technological, spatial, and social production, it also allows itself to be reduced to problems of scale and navigation.

As a focus for the development of ubiquitous computing technologies, the city is framed as a source of problems to be resolved: problems of location, resource identification, and access. Wayfinding applications, which might operate in terms of cartographic navigation (e.g. Sohn et

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al., 2005), or particular forms of commodity or cultural consumption (e.g. Axup et al., 2006; Brown & Chalmers, 2003), instead draw upon research in mobile and positioning technologies. The urban environment becomes no more than an appealing design resource. Providing rich and familiar social settings, they are environments already thick with information technologies and infrastructures, full of mobile people using mobile technologies.

We have three goals in this chapter. The first is to critically examine a series of assumptions about the nature of “the city” underlying many efforts in urban informatics. Locating the specific historical, geographical and cultural circumstances of early 20th century urban scholarship that still color our design efforts, we begin to understand the characteristic perspective of urban computing systems. Scrutinizing the types of user experiences favored by this paradigm, we then question designers’ role in their construction.

Second, we advocate a perspective shift, replacing emphasis on the urban form with emphasis on the urban experience. Focusing on what it is like to move through and live in contemporary cities brings the multitude of experiences co-existing within even the same urban space into plain view; this heterogeneity is critical to our approach. A focus on experience informs both analysis and design.

Third, we ground our perspective through ongoing ethnographic work in Bangkok, Thailand. This choice of globally connected non-Western city not only expands the corpus of field engagements in urban informatics, but more importantly, provides a specific standpoint from which we can critically examine assumptions about “world cities” as generic, usually (culturally) Western, and indistinguishable from one another. The ethnographic treatment strongly counteracts any elision of the designer’s subjectivity as part of fieldwork. Engagement with Bangkok speaks simultaneously about the places we are studying and the places from which we come (Marcus & Fischer, 1986).

Across these three goals, then, we advocate a reconstruction of urban informatics that emphasizes how cities operate in more particular, divergent relations. We hope our work usefully complements more technically oriented scholarship on urban informatics, rendering contemporary discourse on the topic not just more urban but also more urbane.

THE CITY AND ITS DWELLERS: THEMES IN URBAN INFORMATICS

There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon so unconditionally reserved to the city as the blasé outlook. It is at first the consequence of those rapidly shifting stimulations of the nerves which are thrown together in all their contrasts and from which it seems to us the intensification of metropolitan intellectuality seems to be derived... The essence of the blasé attitude is an indifference toward the distinctions between things.

Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903 Design efforts in urban informatics might best be understood as technological responses to

the conditions of city life. Focused on enabling connections between mobile individuals within public spaces, the role of urban technologies is to help individuals, isolated within the teeming crowds, successfully locate and engage opportunities for expression and interaction. These design values systematically favor an interpretation of the city that, consciously or unconsciously, constrains how we think about both the urban experience and the urban inhabitant.

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By tracing the notion of “the city” to its origins in modernization, we can critique its capacity to account for social life in a networked world. In contemporary use, it tends to uncritically favor users that are mobile, young, affluent, cosmopolitan and technologically savvy. By constructing users as latter-day flâneurs, this strategy seriously under-represents the diversity of social practices endemic to the city. Ultimately, opportunities for technological engagement within the urban sphere remain circumscribed.

The City is A Place Full of Strangers From the earliest writings on urbanism, the city has been understood as a dense ecology of

strangers. A social condition both liberating and alienating, metropolitan life offers countless opportunities for personal exploration, reinvention, and encounter, while simultaneously threatening to overwhelm the individual with a sense of isolation.

Writing at the turn of the century, sociologist Georg Simmel described the city-dweller’s psyche as shaped in response to conditions of contrasting sensory impressions, mobility, a dense built environment, and constant encounters with diverse crowds of people. Urbanites negotiate these demands by affecting an attitude of indifference, or a blasé outlook. Simmel’s contemporary, Émile Durkheim, characterized social interactions in the city as impersonal, individualistic, and formalized (Durkheim, 1933). Paradoxically, it is proximity to others that produces a lack of personal connection and shared sentiment (Durkheim, 1933; Riesman & Glazer, 1950; Simmel, 1971).

Both Simmel and Durkheim wrote in the context of modernization. A widespread shift from agrarian to industrial modes of production – from traditional to modern society – was reconfiguring spatial practices within Europe and the United States. “The city” referred to the ensemble of technological, economic, spatial and political practices whereby centers of rationalistic production coordinated the flow of goods and information (Harvey, 1989; Lefebvre, 1974). Durkheim’s and Simmel’s writings provide insight about how individuals, enmeshed within an emergent cultural form, negotiated its consequences.

The dominance of this economic-spatial organization endured well into mid 20th century, ensuring that these early theorizations migrated into subsequent scholarship. Acquiring an empirical dimension, the social conditions of city life became a favorite bugbear for theorists and social critics. Chicago School sociologists Robert Park and Louis Wirth used the ideas of social distance to explicate why people might feel psychically far from each other despite their spatial proximity (Park, 1924; Wirth, 1938). Similarly, sociologist Erving Goffman (1963) quoted Simmel at length in describing the practice of civil inattention, in which people in close proximity (as in elevators or subway cars) nonetheless politely pretend that others are not there.

Inheriting this conceptualization of city life as simultaneously dense and isolating, designers produce systems with a certain characteristic logic: a focus on connection. For example, the LoveGety (Yukari, 1998), popular in Tokyo during the late 1990’s, promotes meetings between proximate strangers. The devices search within five meters for LoveGety holders of the opposite sex. By allowing the pair to find one another, the technology implies that love can be “gotten” on the streets of Tokyo, and that the city is full of strangers who might become friends, if only you had an introduction.

Dodgeball, a service available to residents of many United States metropolitan areas, promotes introductions by exploiting local social networks. Users identify or invite friends on the

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Dodgeball website. The service then “introduces” friends of friends located within ten blocks of one another. The “buddy finder” is often the first application, and certainly one of the most familiar tropes, associated with location-based technologies.

Mobile urban friend-finders presume that the chief design problem posed by the city is how to connect to people in a landscape teeming with impersonal others; the city is a static social condition requiring technological solutions in response. Articulating the city as a dense ecology of strangers, veined throughout with invisible networks of friendship and acquaintance, urban computing takes on the function of “curing” anomie. Not necessarily turning every stranger into a friend, these systems emphasize latent social networks against a backdrop of anonymous public space, while recognizing the boundaries through which identity is enacted (Satchell, 2006; Satchell et al., 2006).

An exception to the tradition of highlighting the dichotomy of friends and strangers, Eric Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman (2004) conduct a nuanced examination of the concept of the urban stranger. Based on the notion of the familiar stranger (Milgram, 1977), they are persons repeatedly encountered in public but not interacted with; for example, fellow commuters on your daily bus route. Paulos and Goodman explore the contribution of these recognizable, but unknown, figures to a sense of place, and even a sense of safety. Designing a system called Jabberwocky, they play with relationships of mobility, legibility, and relation to the city’s inhabitants. Hinting at positive aspects of urban anonymity, they highlight how the indifference of strangers might foster unprecedented autonomy. City dwellers are free to move about, developing and presenting identities in public urban spaces.

Turning now towards an explicit examination of what urban computing makes of public space, we point to a characterization weighted towards anonymous individuals’ presentation and imagination in urban publics.

The City is a Space for Public Interaction Concomitant with the dichotomization of friends and strangers is the tendency for urban

computing systems to presume the city as a place of public (rather than domestic) and anonymous interactions. Augmenting the pleasure of being ‘out and about’, designers promote a particular historical imagination about lifestyle in the modern city.

Mobile and embedded social software services employ the trope of ubiquity, “reminding” users that in a networked world, they are “more connected than ever”. Information technologies constitute the infrastructure for mutual visibility; networked communications are the architectures of public interaction. Eagle and Pentland (2004) point towards this shift, discussing the contrast between personal computers and mobile phones as application platforms:

Today's social software is not very social. From standard CRM systems to Friendster.com, these services require users to be in front of a computer in order to make new acquaintances. Serendipity embeds these applications directly into everyday social settings: on the bus, around the water cooler, in a bar, at a conference.

Systems like Serendipity (Eagle & Pentland, 2004) and Digidress (Persson et al., 2005) enable personal profile sharing via Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones. Profile sharing functions not only as a way to make friends, but also as a way of being peripherally aware of people

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sharing a space. These personal representations are springboards for imagination about otherwise anonymous individuals.

Similarly, mobile music-sharing applications like tunA and BluetunA (Bassoli et al., 2004; Baumann et al., 2007; Håkansson et al., 2007) allow users to push songs to one another or to find that a stranger’s song has spontaneously migrated onto their player. Listeners tune in to each other, participating in a shared but distinct listening experience without necessarily breaching anonymity.

In each of these cases, computing serves as an analogue to public space. Personal digital devices, networked together, create an information space as public as the physical space in which they appear. Supporting fleeting, low-obligation interactions, these mobile social applications invite users to participate in collective and imaginative experience of a “public” setting. Twinning the public plaza or boulevard in digital space, they enable the sort of malleable identity work that echoes a dream of the Paris Arcades (Benjamin, 2001).1 The City Presents Mobile Opportunities

Echoing Wirth’s (1938) assertion that the heterogeneity and anonymity of urban populations is fundamentally related to mobility, urban computing systems are preoccupied with mapping the bodies of their users. Location information provides new opportunities for interaction, place-based content, or openings in the journey itself. Urban games (Benford et al., 2004) and pervasive location-based entertainment systems, like Mogi Mogi (Joffe, 2005), take advantage of a convergence of mobile and positioning technologies. Layered on top of the “real” world, participants engage in opportunistic gameplay while sitting at home, waiting for a train, or otherwise going about their daily lives.

Grafting new opportunities for interaction on pre-existing urban infrastructures, Undersound is a music-sharing system through which tracks may be downloaded in London Underground stations. These download points gather metadata on the movement of songs throughout the Underground, fueling public displays of the music’s migration. Undersound treats urban mobility not merely as a way to get from origin to destination, but as an aesthetic experience rich with memory, imagination, and brief encounters, one of the “aspects of daily life that can make the urban experience a pleasurable one” (Bassoli et al., 2007).

Systems like Undersound inhabit complex design tensions. Situating unique movements within larger flows, they must simultaneously represent individual experiences and the collective structuring of urban space. The resulting approach is well aware of the complex spatialities of city-life while nevertheless remaining tied to a particular category of urban experience, and a particular class of mobile users.

1 In his posthumously published Arcades Project (2001) Walter Benjamin examines the emergence of spaces for leisurely consumption in 19th century Paris. Using these sites as a lens, he magnifies the nexus of social, technological, aesthetic, and architectural practices involved in modernization. His work prefigures the contemporary interest in relationships between visual culture, consumption, and the spatial ordering of everyday life, as discussed by Lefebvre (1984), de Certeau (1984), and Vaneigem (1983).

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These systems are situated within the mobile practices of middle and upper-middle class consumers, existing within a space of flows and a rhythm of travel, commute, work, and leisure (Castells, 2000). By attending to one sort of discretionary mobility (versus the sort practiced by migrant populations), urban computing constructs the user as a latter-day flâneur. It is to this construction of the user (and ultimately, the designer) that we now turn. Intersecting Themes: The Urbanite as Mediated Flâneur

At the intersection of mobility, imagination, and urban visual culture stands the flâneur. Literally translated as “stroller”, the term “mall rat” might better capture the spirit of the word. Native to modern commercial spaces such as arcades, the flâneur emerged on the wide boulevards and sidewalks of Paris after Baron von Haussmann’s “modernization” of the city during the 1850’s (Berman, 1988). These reforms replaced many of the mazelike streets of Paris’s poorer neighborhoods with wider roads, facilitating the movement of both traffic and troops, and connecting the city as a whole entity rather than a collection of individual (and unnavigable) neighborhoods. The new boulevards, offering mutual visibility and space to stroll, along with electric lighting and glass storefronts, transformed the city into a space of movement and spectacle. The flâneur moves through space (slowly and aimlessly, yet still moving), looks (the space may be saturated with commodities on view), and imagines.

While the built environment is a significant part of the urban spectacle, it is the crowds that provide fodder for the flâneur’s imagination. Where Simmel discusses with shock the multitudes of personal impressions, Baudelaire (1988), a prototypical flâneur, turns the experience into enriched imaginings that about everyday life in the city:

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion… He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

This sentiment is echoed over a century later in the urban computing literature: More than just problem solvers, we are creatures of boundless curiosity. Mixed within our moments of productivity are brief instances of daydreaming. We find ourselves astonished and in awe of not just the extraordinary, but the ordinary. We marvel at mundane everyday experiences and objects that evoke mystery, doubt, and uncertainty. How many newspapers has that person sold today? When was that bus last repaired? How far have I walked today? How many people have ever sat on that bench? Does that woman own a cat? Did a child or adult spit that gum onto the sidewalk? … How can we design technology to support such wonderment? (Paulos & Beckmann, 2006)

Authors, designers, and users alike are positioned as flâneurs. While the imagination surely plays an important role in good design, the fleeting nature of these interactions raises questions. Do these experiences of imagination, wonderment, or flânerie involve a deep understanding of strangers, or are they merely voyeuristic? For whom are we designing, and for what sorts of engagements with the city? Susan Buck-Morss (1986) points out that native to the regulated, relatively sanitized commercial spaces of the covered arcade:

…the flâneur, now jostled by crowds and in full view of the urban poverty which inhabited public streets, could maintain a rhapsodic view of modern existence only with the aid of illusion… If at the beginning, the flâneur as a private subject dreamed himself

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out into the world, at the end, flânerie was an ideological attempt to reprivatize social space, and to give assurance that the individual’s passive observation was adequate for knowledge of social reality.

Exemplifying contemporary flânerie, magazine articles from the early 1980’s describe the “poverty, punk rock, drugs and arson” of New York’s Lower East Side as “ambience” even as gentrification drove out the original inhabitants of the neighborhood (Smith, 1992).

Our concern is that these descriptions, equating serious social ills and human suffering with “ambience” or “local color”, echo in urban computing design techniques. Paulos and Jenkins (2005) describe their use of urban probes to inspire the design of public interfaces. They record people’s interactions with a public trashcan for an afternoon, and notice an “interesting” anecdote:

…a single bottle of Sprite soda was first observed being dropped vertically into the can, almost full, only minutes later to be picked out, finished and thrown back. The bottle resurfaced only a few minutes later in the same stalking as it was collected for recycling by a third individual. The resulting design object was an “augmented trashcan” that displayed its “archeological

layers” of trash as a sidewalk projection. Designed to be engaging and fun for passers-by, it may even assist those populations who rely on trashcans as a source of food or income (but who were not part of the evaluation or design scenarios). The product itself is not the object of our critique so much as certain aspects of the design process that exhibits a tendency to favor a particular brand of engagement with the city, that of flânerie, implicating users and designer alike.

The flâneur is a problematic figure. Produced by unique historic and economic circumstances, his practices are enabled by particular (commercial, public, inhabited, safe, visible) spaces. As Susan Buck-Morss (1986) argues, flânerie is “a form of perception… preserved in the characteristic fungibility of people and things in mass society”. The flâneur has become more than a specific character; rather it is a privileged subject position manifesting in “a myriad of forms” that “continue to bear his traces” and replicate the conditions of his existence (see Friedberg, 2006 on the migration of the flâneur into the digital era).

A mobile consumer moving effortlessly through spaces of flow (Castells, 2000), the contemporary flâneur can afford to elide the distinctions between charismatic “world cities” (Dourish and Bell, 2007). A relatively empowered subject position, the flâneur is easy and profitable to design for. His habitats – covered walkways and commercial spaces like shopping centers – are widely replicated. Thus certain areas in distinct cities – New York, Tokyo, London – take on similar character, as though materializing an abstract entity called “the city” (Lefebvre, 1974).

As designers, we often enable flânerie and, more alarmingly, design with it as our methodology. As a mode of engagement, flânerie is diametrically opposed to “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) and deep understanding of others’ lived experiences. Instead we privilege passive voyeurism and imagination tending towards illusion. The alternate mobilities, inhabitations, and appropriations alive in the city (homelessness and immigration, among other things) are left for examination by someone else.

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The figure of the flâneur as contemporary user blithely ignores the arrangement of social, cultural, and economic conditions enabling his existence. Designing by and for flânerie involves reifying these conditions through new technological forms. Thus, despite our best intentions, we replicate anachronistic patterns that are best undone.

Design practices need not be generalized for universality, nor need they incorporate all “other” populations. Rather, by attending to positionality, we can explicitly account for the ways in which the imagined user relates to the complex urban environment. These relationships, encountered, constitute the essence of the urban experience. This perspective distinguishes technologies that take the urban seriously from those that merely consider the city as a place where technologies are used.

REFINING URBAN INFORMATICS: NETWORKS, CONTINGENCIES, SPLINTERINGS AND SITUATIONS

The “city” dominating urban informatics is based on early 20th century responses to modernization in Europe and North America (Harvey, 1985; Jacobs, 1961). Characteristically distinct from the suburban or rural, it is considered uniquely suited to mobile computing applications. The concept itself, however, often fails to reflect many 21st century urban practices, worldwide. Refining this idea requires considering the relationship between urban informatics and what geographer Saskia Sassen (2001) calls “global cities.” Global cities, advantageously positioned within networks of people, ideas, goods and capital, transcend their geographical specificity and regional role. It is perhaps not surprising that when urban informatics reaches beyond culturally Western cities, it looks towards other global cities, only to discover that they offer more of the same (e.g. Mainwaring et al., 2005).

By instead accounting for the post-modern cultural conditions of a networked global economy (Castells, 2000; Harvey, 1989), urban informatics can embrace opportunities to blend technology, art, activism, and design. In this section we discuss qualities of the postmodern city. Moving from “the city” to networks of particular cities, we describe social actors positioned within flows of capital that structure these spaces, negotiating their circumstances via independent processes of mobility. We then consider how technologies mediate relationships between residents and their cities, pointing towards the diversity of lived experiences that results from these interactions. Finally, we move to questions of methodology. By situating the actions and expressions of particular people within their particular cities, we advocate a view of the local connected to the global rather than mere flânerie. From “The City” To A Network of Particular Cities

By dismantling a series of presuppositions about the urban space, informatics gains an opportunity to participate in the ensemble of connections, distinctions, and spatial logics composing the contemporary metropolis. Leaving behind “the city” we enter the “networked world”.

Cities are not isolated entities. Though generally framed as bounded entities (Wirth, 1938), cities are fundamentally interconnected [keep italics]. Their networks of other cities and surrounding hinterlands plays a key dialectical role in crafting a sense of the city's distinctiveness. Moreover, contemporary cities participate in a global economy driven by the flow of capital, information, goods and services (Castells, 2000; Harvey, 1989). As such, they

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are embedded in, subject to, and sometimes excluded from widespread networks that shape everyday urban and technological experiences (Mainwaring et al., 2005).

Cities are not identical. Each city possesses its own unique cultural heritage. Even when spatial or architectural forms do resemble one another, they “mean” differently. For example, grids exist in both American and Japanese cities but their origins and meanings are entirely distinct (LeFebvre, 1974). A preoccupation with urban forms – grids, piazzas, malls, parks, downtowns – risks collapsing the distinctions to a universal, but thin, set of commonalities.

Cities are more than “centers”. “The city” has taken on a quality of hyper-specification, referring to the public spaces of a certain type of democratic industrial population center in dialectical relationship with suburban and rural surroundings (LeFebvre, 1974; Weber, 1969). This model fails to account for the exurban expanses of Orange County, the massive apartment blocks of Seoul, or the rapidly growing “desakota” regions of Southeast Asia (McGee, 1995).

In networked urban spaces, individual experience becomes a powerful analytical tool. The movements, actions, practices, and experiences of the urban inhabitant represent a series of tactics that negotiate between global regimes of production and particular local conditions (de Certeau, 1984). Where individual agencies meet social and technological infrastructures, the characters of the modern city are revealed. Flows and Contingent Mobilities

Contemporary social life and its accompanying spatial forms can be described in terms of post-modern practices and networks of production. Social theorists like Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Henri Lefebvre argue that the spatial and economic conditions are mutually constitutive. For example, the flows enabled by information technologies (of capital, technology, information, symbols, goods, people, etc.) simultaneously shape the physical and social world. Flows give rise to and rely upon spaces that function as nodes within networks. Position within these networks enables privileged access, allowing hubs to develop that, in turn, shape the network. Powerfully accounting for certain aspects of “global cities” like New York or Tokyo, as well as cities prominent within specialized global networks like Milan for fashion or Austin for indie rock, this model provides a viable starting point for theorizing within urban informatics.

Just as nodes acquire relative weight, so too flow favors certain social actors and institutions. Power tends to be maintained by elites possessing organizational capacity. The resulting spaces reproduce social conditions in which populations that are numerically superior, but segmented and disorganized, remain politically and economically disempowered:

Space plays a fundamental role in this mechanism. In short: elites are cosmopolitan, people are local. The space of power and wealth is projected throughout the world, while people’s life and experience is rooted in places, in their culture, in their history. (Castells, 2000)

If flow describes the formation of cities and the production of space systematically favoring elites, then interrogating power and social class is necessary to examining the role informatics plays in shaping the urban milieu.

Castells’ assertion, however, is perhaps overly simplistic. Local residents are not powerless to modify their circumstances, nor are they uniformly pinned in place. Mobile labor plays a critical role within global networks of production. Doreen Massey (1993) describes the relationship between spatial manifestations of power and mobility as power geometry:

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…different social groups and different individuals are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. The point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway-differentiated mobility: some are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.

Social actors, embedded within spaces of flow, negotiate their conditions using experience and heritage as resources. So too, technologies and infrastructures provide key materials for mediating individual response.

Infrastructures and Splintering A central concern for both technologists and social theorists, infrastructures configure social

interactions in material, spatial, and institutional ways (Bowker & Star, 1999). Technological systems depend on existing infrastructures – electricity, wireless Internet, cellular positioning, etc. – that may prove unreliable or problematic (Benford et al., 2004). These properties shape subsequent adoption, design, and use (Kline, 2000).

Given the expense of constructing infrastructures, we can expect that they generally reflect entrenched social interests. “Premium” (read profitable) spaces receive better and cheaper infrastructural services. Less profitable areas receive poorer, more expensive service, or none at all (Graham & Marvin, 2001). Premium spaces connect globally to each other. Underserved regions are systematically cut off from accessing privileged spaces nearby (Castells, 2000; Harvey, 1989). More recently, digital technologies enable finely targeted provision of services, what Graham has called “software-sorted geographies” (Graham, 2005).

Privileged connection is certainly present in “Western” cities. Overhead walkways in Minneapolis and Calgary connect downtown businesses, allowing (certain) people to move between them without encountering the street, homeless people, or bad weather. Selectively connecting downtown Los Angeles to the highway while disconnecting it from walkways and bus routes creates de facto spatial segregation between those who can and cannot afford to own cars, proof that infrastructures do, in fact, have politics (Bowker & Star, 1999; Winner, 1986). Cities do not correspond to the Modernist ideal of a unified, coherent public infrastructure. Rather, many inhabitants experience the fractured and disconnected infrastructures that Graham and Marvin (2001) call “splintering urbanism.”

Turning to non-Western examples, these splintering urbanisms become glaringly apparent, highlighting the tenacity of historical relationships between infrastructure and power. Many cities have inherited colonialist histories of artificially slowed expansion prior to World War II followed by explosive growth atop inadequate infrastructures. Apartheid pass laws and “homelands” are stark examples of elitist attempts to advantageously deploy infrastructures in order to circumscribe the movements of native populations (Mbembe & Nuttall, 2004). Further reinforcing the politics of spaces, urban in-migration laws against encroachment were often coupled with refusals to provide basic services to native populations. This infrastructural assertion precluded the disenfranchised from belonging in or owning their cities:

In India, Burma, and Ceylon, their [British] refusal to improve sanitation or provide even the most minimal infrastructure to native neighborhoods ensured huge death tolls

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from early-twentieth-century epidemics (plague, cholera, influenza) and created immense problems of urban squalor that were inherited by national elites after independence. (Davis, 2006) In such a context, the German proverb “Stadtluft macht frei” – “city air makes you free” –

takes on a bitter irony. Situated Urbanisms

We cannot assume that cities offer a uniform brand of social life, mobility, public space, or lived experience. Breaking down this essentialist notion is crucial to the evolution of urban computing research and design.

Increasingly, scholars in anthropology, urban studies, geography, and development studies problematize “mobility”, “identity” and “space”. Favoring instead situated analyses of the urban experience, their studies, generally ethnographic, articulate relationships between local and global mobilities, information technologies, and everyday practice.

Le Marcis (2004), studying AIDS patients in Johannesburg, highlights the extent to which concepts of urban practice are predicated on healthy, unproblematic bodies. Mobility for the “suffering body” requires moving, despite ill health, through an ever-expanding network of clinics, hospitals, support groups and hospices, resting finally in the graveyard. Local social, political and cultural conditions further mediate travel; hospital location and quality reflect remnants of Apartheid, social stigma prompts people to travel several hours to support groups rather than risking recognition in their own neighborhood. One wonders what latent networks a mobile social system might reveal for these patients.

These experiences connect to international flows of capital and technology. The expense of conventional treatments prompts many AIDS sufferers to turn to alternatives like Ayurvedic medicine or natural products. Alternatively, patients may seek treatment through drug trials both from international drug companies and local searches for a specifically “African” solution.

The issue of Public Culture in which le Marcis’ ethnography appears demonstrates the necessity of writing both Africa and the world from a local point of view (Mbembe & Nuttall, 2004). The emerging spatial structures of São Paulo – fortified and surveilled private enclaves coupled to the disappearance of democratic public spaces – are tied to individual choices rooted in stories of violent crime and experiences of fear (Caldeira, 2000). “Intimate economies” in Bangkok (Wilson, 2004) based in local traditions of work, commerce, gender, and social support, intersect with the larger global economy. The urban landscape takes shape from an ensemble of individual knowledge workers, tomboys, bargirls, and telecom tycoons opportunistically exploring intersections. Many studies of these sites come not from Western anthropologists working abroad but from local scholars. Local scholarship and “halfie ethnographies” (Abu-Lughod, 1991) inherently question constructions of the less powerful as “other” and of the authority presumed in speaking for them (Sittirak, 1996).

GROUNDING THE DISCUSSION: BANGKOK, THAILAND Urban ethnographies examine individual experiences within larger configurations of power,

contingent mobilities, and globalized and localized configurations of space. They may reveal valuable opportunities for designers concerned with experiences of technology. At this time one

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author (Williams) is conducting an investigation of mobility and technology use in and around Bangkok. The city, chosen for its role as a central focus for rural hinterlands and as a node in a transnational network, provides a context for exploring how local meanings mediate the use of global technologies. Moreover, Bangkok contains a complex cast of identities, residents that locate themselves within global assemblages of mobile goods and differential infrastructures. Finally, the setting demands consideration of the urban experience through a historical lens.

Bangkok’s role as a center for government, culture and commerce predates significant European colonial presence in Southeast Asia. The city operated as a port well before becoming the capital in 1782. Its cultural and economic centrality derives largely from its position within a trans-national network. Many residents of Bangkok practice oscillating mobilities, with residences in multiple locales both within and outside of Thailand. So too, neighborhood sois challenge dichotomies of private and public, formal and informal, global and local. Oscillating Mobilities and Temporality

Participant-observation over the course of several months in Bangkok highlights the “oscillating mobilities” (Askew, 2002) composing the city. Workers in the informal sector, including construction workers, sex workers, food vendors, domestic help, and even higher-paid professional positions, are crucial participants in city life. Not easily classified as permanent residents or temporary migrants, they periodically leave jobs and return to rural villages to visit family, help with important harvests, or when they have sufficient money to stop working for a while. This pattern, observed by ethnographers (Askew, 2002), and informants themselves, during interviews (Williams et al., 2008), is formally acknowledged by the government with national holidays allowing migrant workers to vote in their home provinces during elections (Bangkok Post, 2007).

Oscillation also occurs at the trans-national scale. Interviews and home stays with twenty-three Thai-American retirees in New York, Seattle, St. Louis, Bangkok, and the agricultural province of Chantaburi indicated oscillations varying in amplitude and frequency (Williams et al., 2008). Participants lived both in Thailand (mostly Bangkok) and metropolitan areas in the United States, traveling between cities once or twice a year. One family also migrated between Bangkok and Chantaburi to accommodate the needs of aging siblings and to maintain their home and orchard. Participants’ rhythmic mobilities provided a counterpoint to the linear life phase transitions that modulated their participation in the social life of their cities, communities and families.

The networked city is typically portrayed as a recent phenomenon, a city emerging with post-industrial production practices (Castells, 2000; Graham & Marvin, 2001). However, cities like Bangkok were never unified modern cities and thus did not become post-modern with the rise of the information economy. Historically, Thailand’s capital has long been where the nation encounters and appropriates the rest of the world. The oscillating mobilities of Bangkok’s residents continue economic and spatial practices that have always characterized that city; to invoke Bruno Latour, we have never been modern. Soi Ecologies and Urban Public Spaces

Near Petchaburi Road, December 9, 2007: We cut off the main street into some smaller sois.. which just get smaller and smaller and narrower… you really feel you are walking through someone’s yard or across their porch (though not as pronounced as in Khlong

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Toei, where I felt like I was in people’s living rooms)… A few places we can see right into someone’s open kitchen or laundry room.2 A soi can range from a full two-way street to an alleyway in which a restaurant has placed its

tables, to an intimate walkway appropriated by families as a place to set up washing machines or kitchen tables.

Tracing the paths of waterways that once subdivided local, privately owned rice-fields, Bangkok’s sois and the social and economic activities that take place in them form a vital part of the city’s character. While informal economic activities and food vending occur across many cities, Bangkok is arguably unique in the extraordinarily high rate at which people rely on informal food vending systems (with more than half the food expenditures in the metropolitan area spent on food prepared outside the home), and the particular prominence of women both as vendors and customers (Yasmeen, 2006). Informants, asked to describe their journeys through the city, reported foraging for breakfast in their soi during their commutes, and consistently articulated the transition from soi to main thoroughfare as a notable point in their journeys, a place where the pace and sensory or emotional experience of travel would change noticeably. In comparison to main thoroughfares, sois are not merely smaller, quieter streets; rather histories of property ownership often mean that they are loosely regulated and flexibly defined in ways that impact commerce and local entrepreneurship, and ultimately social life on the street level. Vendors in sois typically must acquire the landowner’s permission to sell, or may set up in front of their own residence. Living and working space blur together, though customers and foot traffic through a busy soi might give it a “public” feel. In dealings with local police and municipal inspectors, however, vendors can question their authority by appealing to the fact that they are on “private” property (ibid). In her study of Bangkok food vendors, Yasmeen notes that “similar leeway is not granted to those on the city’s major arteries”, and informal interviews with vendors confirm that there are significant financial barriers to vending on a main road:

Silom Rd., November 22, 2007: Quality fake watches in Patpong, K’s friend. Has 3 spots. Each is 5000 baht [about 165 U.S. dollars] per night. Who does she pay rent to? – the landlord. The one who owns the building that she’s in front of? – no no different person. So someone else owns the sidewalk? – yeah kind of. Officially? – no more like the mafia. Also bribes to the police which are variable, but may sometimes be even more than the “rent”. Though soi entrepreneurship is often part of the informal economy, growth in the

neighborhood's formal economy does not necessarily displace or curtail its activities (Askew, 2002). Commuting office workers support food vendors and motorcycle taxi drivers. Formal storefront establishments rent space and electricity to street vendors. Privileged spaces such as shopping centers and high-rise condominiums anchor transient informal commerce. These observations are not meant to dismiss the power differential between more and less privileged residents of cities, rather they emphasize the blurrings between private and public spaces and the bridges between formal and informal economies. The local residents of Bangkok’s sois actively engage with and appropriate the proliferating urban forms of Bangkok the global city.

2 Excerpted from field notes.

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Figure 1: Commerce in a soi in downtown Bangkok near Ploenchit Rd., literally in the shadows of high-rise condominiums. Designing for a Networked City

Bangkok’s particular spatial practices raise considerations about the kinds of mobile and urban applications that might be deployed there.

First, Bangkok’s oscillating mobilities challenge binary ideas of stability and mobility. On the one hand ubicomp researchers have typically taken "home" to represent an absolute stability. We have often treated built structures as fixed settings into which sensing and computational technology might be deployed (Beckmann et al., 2004) rather than changeable environments (Brand, 1994) through which people might move or linger in ways relevant to technology design (Crabtree et al., 2003). On the other hand, an assumption of anywhere-anytime mobility underlies the design of mobile technologies ranging from urban games to international SIM cards. Oscillation, between Bangkok and either a rural village or a metropolitan area in another country troubles assumptions about users who are either at rest or roving unpredictably. This form of urban (and inter-urban) mobility may also provide different challenges and opportunities for the design of new sorts of systems. For example:

• Currently, delay-tolerant networking applications currently might depend on social as well as communications networks, taking advantage of the fact that people who know each other meet and pass information between each other. Imagine, also, an approach based on the fact that people return to the same few places over and over.

• Cell phone contact lists could have different capabilities supporting two or more home locations.

• Urban games could be designed for networks of cities, rather than a single metropolis.

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Second, Bangkok’s sois, as spaces that are typically defined flexibly and situationally, trouble dichotomies of private and public. While ubicomp research currently treats “the home” and “the city” as separate domains for investigation and design, one might instead envision technologies that allow users to claim a flexible, or manifold, space as their own, or to invite others into it.

More broadly, these considerations point to ways in which Bangkok itself oscillates. The character of a space changes drastically over the course of hours, days, and seasons, or according to various conflicting needs of its occupants. Food vendors descend on a spot near a shrine and shopping center for a few hours around 5pm, leaving the space calm for the rest of the day; a market at noon transfigures into the parking lot of an expensive Italian restaurant at 7pm. Residents understand the city as a place in flux, changing rhythmically and linearly; not surprisingly, maps are not typically considered useful representations of the space. Designing technologies to engage with such a city opens opportunities to explore alternative representations, oriented towards temporal, kinetic, auditory, olfactory, embodied or performative experiences of cities.

While situating practice in Bangkok facilitates designing systems targeted to Bangkok, these design considerations provide the broader benefit of de-familiarizing and reframing the cities we think we already know. In the process, we accumulate insights, surface themes, and articulate diverse responses to related conditions. In short, changing frameworks means changing methods and re-imagining what it means to design systems for urban use.

CONCLUSIONS: IMPLICATIONS FOR DESIGNERS

If we accept that the domain of urban informatics is not “the city” but rather some complex of more-and-less connected cities and parts of cities, then we must re-examine our own methodologies and theoretical frameworks. Multi-sited ethnographies, for example, take on increased importance (Marcus, 1995). Entailing more than visits to multiple research locations, multi-sited ethnography acknowledges that ethnographic informants already consider their relationships to global structures. These considerations are important forms of local knowledge. Tracing the lived experiences of specific social actors enables patterns of negotiation between the local and global to emerge.

Particularly where local individual experience meets global structures, urban computing offers a valuable lens by foregrounding ways in which users understand their interactions with technological and material infrastructures (Bowker & Star, 1999; Dourish & Bell, 2007). A focus on infrastructure can allow a flexible understanding of cities both as centers of regional hinterlands (Harvey, 1985; Harvey, 1987), and nodes in a network of flows. Layered infrastructure density might differentiate urban from non-urban areas even as it constitutes the factor connecting rather than differentiating these regions. By examining these differences and discontinuities, we can expose local particularity as well as global exchange (Graham & Marvin, 2001).

Working with an unquestioned notion of the global city may bias our urban designs in certain ways, emphasizing, for example, discretionary mobility, visual representations and maps, or making friends out of strangers. But while it is true that different places are different, and that different people might use technology in different ways, a taxonomic understanding of urban

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difference does not capture the full picture. Rather, a generative understanding of cities and urban practices as produced by people living within particular cultural and historical contexts opens up new opportunities for analysis and design. While we are not typically historians, cities are temporal entities, and “historical context” is an ongoing process, evident in the rhythms and transformations that characterize urban experiences.

Finally, implicit in our discussion is the belief that urban informatics not only responds to but also shapes the conditions for social life. Information technologies – from systems of addressing (Smail, 1999) to those of representation (Scott, 1988) – constitute the infrastructures for urban growth, and thus play critical roles in organizing urban experience (Philips & Curry, 2003; Goss, 1995). Urban informatics, by conceiving the city, creates it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Support for this research has been provided by Intel Corp. and by the U.S. National Science Foundation under a Graduate Research Fellowship and grant awards 0133749, 0205724, 0527729, 0524033, and 0712890.

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Smail, D. (1999). Imaginary cartographies: Possession and identity in late medieval Marseille. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Smith, N. (1992). New city, new frontier: The lower east side as wild, wild west. In M. Sorkin (Ed.), Variations on a theme park: The new American city and the end of public space. New York, NY: Noonday Press. Sohn, T., Li, K., Lee, G., Smith, I., Scott, J., & Griswold, W. (2005). Place-its: A study of location-based reminders on mobile phones. Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), 232-250. Vaneigem, R. (1983). The revolution of everyday life. London: Aldgate Press. Weber, M. (1921) The nature of the city. In R. Sennett (Ed.), Classic essays on the culture of cities. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Williams, A., Anderson, K., & Dourish, P. (2008). Anchored mobilities: Mobile technology and transnational migration. Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS). Wilson, A. (2004). The intimate economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, tycoons, and Avon ladies in the global city. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. The American Journal of Sociology 44 (1),1-24. Winner, L. (1986). Do artifacts have politics? In The whale and the reactor: A search for limits in an age of high technology (pp. 19-39). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Yasmeen, G. (2006). Bangkok’s foodscape: Public eating, gender relations, and urban change. Bangkok, Thailand: White Lotus. Yukari, I. (1998, June). Love: Japanese style [Electronic Version]. Wired Magazine. Aug 20 Declared a Public Holiday. (2007, August 8) Bangkok Post, p. A1. KEY TERMS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS Anomie: Emile Durkheim used the term "anomie" to refer to the experience of an absence of shared social norms. Various writers have employed it to characterise the social isolation and

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alienation from communitarian life and social ties associated with the scale and anonymity of urban environments. Civil inattention: Sociologist Erving Goffman coined the term "civil inattention" to refer to the ways in which people maintain a comfortable social order in public spaces by explicitly disattending to one another and their actions (for instance, the minimal social interaction amongst people packed into an elevator). Flâneur: Critical theorist Walter Benjamin draws the term "flâneur" from the writings of French poet Charles Baudelaire. To Baudelaire, the flâneur is a figure unique to the city, one who wanders through urban space in order to consume and revel in the images that it offers. Flânerie, then, is an experience of urban space. Benjamin notes the historical and economic specificities of the flâneur, arguing that the kinds of narrative afforded by flânerie depend upon forms of leisure and mobility associated with wealth and power. Critically, the flâneur may be in the crowd, but is not of the crowd. Positionality: In cultural accounts of experience, positionality refers to both the fact of and the specific conditions of a given social situation. So, where one might talk about the "position" of an individual in a social structure, "positionality" draws attention to the conditions under which such a position arises, the factors that stabilize that position, and the particular implications of that position with reference to the forces that maintain it.In urban informatics, positionality is relevant in the ways in which information systems create and sustain particular networks of positions, spatially and socially. Power geometry: Feminist geographer Doreen Massey introduced the term "power geometry" to point to the ways in which spatiality and mobility are both shaped by and reproduce power differentials in society. Examples might include the control over distribution of goods and services, or the different circuits enabled by transportation systems. Situationism: The Situationists were a group of avant-garde artists, radicals, and intellectuals active in Europe particularly in the late 1950s and 1960s. Situationism argued that the conditions of contemporary capitalism had rendered people passive subjects whose relationship to their own experience was one of the consumption of daily life as spectacle. Urban life was a particular example of a domain in which they sought to revolutionize the experience of everyday life by encouraging people to become conscious, active participants in the reality that their everyday actions produced. Space of flows: Urban sociologist Manuel Castells uses the term "space of flows" to reimagine urban space as a nexus of flows of people, capital, goods, and information. This helps us understand the city as a component in broader social and economic processes, and draws attention to the dynamics of those processes.

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Splintering urbanism: A term coined by geographers Steven Graham and Simon Marvin to refer to the ways in which infrastructures, including information and communication technologies, can fragment the experience of the city. BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENTS Amanda Williams is a Ph.D. Candidate at UC Irvine's Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences and a member of the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction. Her research interests include urban computing, mobility, and tangible interfaces. She is currently doing ethnographic field work and system design in Bangkok, focusing on urban mobilities and mobile technology. Erica Robles is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. Her research focuses on intersections between media technologies and the built environment. Posing research questions through diverse methodologies, from controlled laboratory experiments to archival work, interviews, and ethnographic observation she articulates both psychological and cultural components at play within contemporary mediaspaces. She is currently completing a dissertation about the Crystal Cathedral, a pioneering and influential megachurch and media ministry renown for its use of technologies and transparent architectures in the worship space. Paul Dourish is Professor of Informatics at University of California, Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and in Anthropology. His research interests lie at the intersection of computer science and social science, with particular emphasis on human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing. His empirical and conceptual investigations focus on information and communication technologies as sites of social and cultural production.