Dashboard, Commons, or Logbook?
Toward the Smart City
As outlined above, several different types of urban mapping are in existence today. The first gives an account of the environment, and what is happening within infrastructures, streets, and buildings, in much the same way an observatory or dashboard would. In the years ahead, this type of map may also allow the actions of city residents, their state of health, and even their moods to be monitored more closely. This is likely to raise tough questions about respect for personal privacy. This type of map is inextricably linked to the desire to manage cities better, as if the management process were somehow only a matter of steering. By the same token, the development of new tools for visualization (or simulation) of the urban realm is often linked to a powerful temptation to control. This could be described as neocybernetic, in the sense in which MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener first developed cybernetics in the 1950s and 1960s: a multidisciplinary approach to achieve better steering of complex systems.4 As a counterpoint to top-down oriented dashboard maps, a very different type of map has also gained in popularity. These maps intend to resist technocratic power and to promote more collaborative urban life. Some examples include activist maps, like the iSee mapping app that allows users to evade the surveillance video cameras installed in Manhattan, and others with similarly reflective purposes.5 Within this varied group, it is worth highlighting the particular importance that maps assume as common property based on the collaborative accumulation of data or information exchange between people living in the same city. Today, maps may also serve the purpose of gathering suggestions regarding the future of the city. Implemented in a series of French cities, the Carticipe platform represents a new generation of participatory maps which are intended to foster citizen engagement and solicit public opinion. Of course, participation is dependent upon platform design and management techniques that may be more conducive to new forms of top-down government instead of enabling grassroots expression. But this risk is inherent to any form of collective mediation. Beyond dashboards and commons, there are plenty of other uses for maps. For instance, maps can pinpoint individual or collective experiences, in the manner of a navigational logbook that mingles urban space with life experiences. Artists like Christian Nold or Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers have explored this new type of use for maps, plotting the emotional content of certain urban locations, after the manner of the Situationists’ psychogeographical investigations.6 From dashboards to commons to navigational logbooks, contemporary uses for cartography reflect diverse approaches to cities, favoring the construction of a shared information resource over a desire for rationalization or purely subjective experience of the urban realm.
4 On the cybernetic approach, see Steve Joshua Heims, Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946–1953 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
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To date, the physical form of cities—the arrangement of streets and squares—has only been marginally affected by the development of information and communications technology. Urban mapping, on the other hand, has undergone a genuine revolution. This reflects the real content of the transformations of the urban realm that are under way—the hybridization of atoms and bits, in the form of the smart city, represents a qualitative leap. This leap will manifest in our understanding of the city as a set of elementary occurrences, events, and scenarios, since it will soon be possible to monitor what is happening in real time, at every scale, and therefore to predict the trajectories most likely to ensue. For a very long time, cities were perceived as a collection of physical objects: a fortified enclosure with houses, civic buildings, basic infrastructure, and monuments. During the period of the First Industrial Revolution, cities were also assessed in terms of circulation and flow. Smart cities will continue to accommodate flows and networks, nested within a much wider scheme of events: billions of occurrences and overlapping situations that development scenarios will serve to regulate.7 Digital mapping appears as a preferred expression of the dynamics of the smart city’s emergence, and as the medium through which some of its characteristics are firmly established. It reflects the real transformations of digital culture: a world populated by occurrences and events more than objects, and a mode of communication defined by the sending and receiving of messages more than any semantic configurations set in stone.
Changing Urban Experience and Subjectivity
The rise of the smart city is inseparable from new forms of urban experience that merge geolocated data with the perception of a surrounding physical reality. Both tethered to a smartphone and immersed in city life, the new digitally augmented subject may be considered a cyborg, if one considers the vital character of its technological extensions, or prostheses. But the figure of the cyborg presents a crude simplification of the way we relate to our environment through technological extensions. Following the intuition of cyberneticists like Gregory Bateson, we might instead conceive the contemporary digitally augmented subject as part of an ecology, as an entity almost inseparable from its physical environment.8 Aren’t we all, in a certain way, disseminated through various channels of the hybrid digital-physical world in which we live? This continuity is periodically challenged by the desire of the contemporary urban subject to regroup, or recoup force; to express his or her irreducible individuality. As an expression of this dual regime of dissemination and concentration, the
5 Laura Kurgan and Eric Cadora, “Million Dollar Blocks,” Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (2006), http://spatialinformationdesignlab.org/projects/ million-dollar-blocks.
6 “The Drawing of Our Lives,” http://planbperformance.net/works/lifedrawing/; http://www.christiannold.com/. On Situationist maps, see Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 7 Picon, Smart Cities.
Mapping the Future of Cities